“GENTLEMEN. We can rebuild him. We have the technology.” Yet when Lee Majors played the Six Million Dollar Man in the 1970s, prosthetic limb technology had barely improved on the fictional appendages of Long John Silver and Captain Hook.

For centuries science had little more to offer amputees than peg legs and hooks. All it was possible to do was to strap on a relatively crude limb extension, restoring only a fraction of the mobility or dexterity.

Though small advances had been made in materials and design, the concept was largely unchanged since the first known artificial limbs of ancient Greek and Roman times.

Around 500BC, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote of a prisoner who escaped by cutting off his chained foot, and later used a wooden leg.

During the Middle Ages, as amputation was more widely introduced to save lives otherwise lost to infection, the science of prosthetics became a little more sophisticated. Ambroise Paré (1510-1590), a French army barber-surgeon, developed an artificial leg with a locking knee joint, and “Le Petit Lorrain”, an artificial hand operated by springs and catches.

However, all these devices were bulky, heavy and were barely functional. More improvements came in the 19th century, particularly with the development of the “Anglesey leg”, designed by James Potts and named after the Marquess of Anglesey, who used one after losing his leg at the battle of Waterloo. This wooden prosthesis had a steel knee joint and an articulated foot.

The next significant improvements came with the American Civil War, in which 30,000 soldiers lost a limb in the Union Army alone. In 1863 Dubois Parmelee designed a leg that could be attached to the stump with a suction cup, while rubber and aluminium were increasingly used as materials.

More recently, Ysidro Martinez, himself an amputee, revolutionised artificial leg design in 1975, with the invention of a lightweight prosthesis without the articulated joints of the human leg.

Progress with artificial arms has been slower still. Though Luke Skywalker sported a robotic replacement after losing an arm in a lightsabre duel with Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, the difficulty of engineering a functional, prehensile hand means that many amputees still rely on a hook.

Science is finally starting to catch up with science fiction. At the American Association of Anatomists’ conference in April, a symposium on “The Six Billion Dollar Human” revealed some of the most promising advances.

One of the most exciting is the Dextra artificial hand, developed by William Craelius of Rutgers University in New Jersey. A sleeve with sensors encloses the amputee’s limb arm below the elbow and picks up signals from the remaining muscles, which in turn move the fingers. Users have been able to type and play the piano.

The next generation of artificial hands may even be able to feel. Scientists at the University of Nebraska have developed a robot with a sense of touch comparable to that of a human finger: it can make out Abraham Lincoln’s face on the reverse of a one cent coin.

Another research team, led by Daniel Palanker of Stanford University, is working on an artificial eye, similar in concept to the device that allows the blind Geordie La Forge to see in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Goggles with a miniature video camera feed images to a light-sensing chip the size of a grain of rice implanted in the retina. Human trials are expected to begin within two years.

Artificial leg technology has improved to the point at which Chris Moon, who lost an arm and a leg in a landmine explosion, has been able to complete several ultra-marathons. The Paralympic 100 metres world record is 12.51 seconds.

Several groups are also developing robotic legs that allow users to carry extremely heavy loads with a minimum of effort. One of the most exciting prospects is the idea of harnessing signals from the brain to drive artificial arms and legs, which could ultimately enable paraplegics and quadriplegics to recover the use of their limbs.

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