Then we fit her with a prosthesis.

A vascular surgeon removed most of the first rib on both sides of my body.

Mary has a prosthetic arm.

Tom has a prosthetic leg.

I see you're wearing a bit of ivory yourself, sir.

The state of the art is what we call myoelectric prostheses.

Sheila Nirenberg A prosthetic eye to treat blindness

This is a really basic, basic prosthetic limb under here.

So, I decided we've got to do this.

So it's intuitive, and it works pretty well.

Shortly after the operation, he was fitted for a prosthesis.

I'm still using that old technology with a bicycle cable on his right side.

Here's a new one.

Okay, so after your amputation, you healed up. And you've got one of these conventional arms.

And it's going to be completely self contained including all its power.

He's had that arm for about 20 months, so he's pretty good with it.

That's Claudia, and that was the first time she got to feel sensation through her prosthetic.

I want to say Thanks for the trip to Afghanistan and for my prosthesis!

So this is what we've been working on, and this is what our prosthetic does.

And in fact, it feels even heavier, because it's not glued on the same.

I then thought it would be years before we'd be able to make it really, really useful.

I had to hook it up to a computer, so I couldn't just train it anywhere.

There's a limb prosthetic up here, similar actually one on the soldier that's come back from Iraq.

Also one of the physical therapists reported that Mahmoud could be provided with a leg, but not immediately.

You see him with his original device on the left there after eight months of use, and on the right, it is two months.

I was talking to one of them, and he was really liking this arm it's way, way, way better than a plastic stick with a hook on it but there's nobody in this room that would rather have that than the one you got.

Though Yoshimitsu loses his arm during the operation, Bosconovitch helps him escape and fits him with a mechanical prosthetic replacement.

Now, people like Scott here is flying back his F 16, although he is amputated above the knee and has a leg from Germany called C Leg.

Now we've got F18s and F22s, and if somebody loses an arm, we give them a plastic stick with a hook on it.

So starting from a three dimensional ping sound system, a vibrating vest, a click wheel with voice commands, a leg strip, even a shoe that applies pressure to the foot.

I told them it would probably take five years to get through the FDA, and probably 10 years to be reasonably functional.

There's a limb prosthetic up here, similar actually one on the soldier that's come back from Iraq. There are 370 soldiers that have come back from Iraq that have lost limbs.

We're probably going to have to give them support, encouragement. But we've got to extract from them enough information to make sure we're doing the right thing.

It's going to fit on a 50th percentile female frame namely 32 inches from the long finger and weigh less than nine pounds.

And then the surgeon pointed out, with a lot of anger, he said, Why is it? If somebody lost an arm, we gave them a wooden stick with a hook on it.

So as you can see, the firing patterns from the blind animal treated with the encoder transducer really do very closely match the normal firing patterns and it's not perfect, but it's pretty good and the blind animal treated with the standard prosthetic, the responses really don't.

On the right side, two months after we fit him with his targeted reinnervation prosthesis which, by the way, is the same physical arm, just programmed a little different you can see that he's much faster and much smoother as he moves these little blocks.

Sasha Baron Cohen is a very clever, very smart guy, comedian, wanted to basically do an homage to the kind of the Buster Keaton sort of slapstick things, and he wanted his leg brace to get caught on a moving train.