*Cyborg* and the bionic hand
The images show a modern i-limb prosthesis and a historical artificial arm from around 1904. These are documentary images of devices from different periods, not devices from the novel or photographs of patients in the clinical study.
In Martin Caidin’s 1972 novel *Cyborg*, a crash severely injures pilot Steve Austin, and surgeons replace his lost limbs with mechanical ones; the story also includes an artificial eye with a camera. Nearly four decades later, doctors in Vienna reported the first successful operations fitting bionic hands for people with nonfunctional hands. This was not a donor-hand transplant: the described method combined preparation of nerve and muscle signals, amputation of the nonfunctional hand, and a controllable mechanical prosthesis.