How To Build A Bionic Man

Grierson Award Winner

Can modern technology turn Mary Shelley’s fiction into fact? Are we nearing a point where mankind can out-engineer nature? And if we can, should we? These questions have captured our imaginations throughout history.

Today, advanced prosthetics and bioengineered tissue can now replace or support many parts of the human body, transforming thousands of lives blighted by disease or trauma.

In this programme Dr. Bertolt Meyer will embark on a journey, meeting many of the world’s leading experts in a quest to build an artificial body using only prosthetic or bio-engineered equivalents of each major part of the human body. Just how close can we get to an entirely manmade human and what are the ethical questions that this raises? For Bertolt this is a personal journey of discovery. He has lived his whole life with a prosthetic lower arm.

Format:
Series
Genre:
Factual
Year of production:
2013
Commissioning broadcasters:
Channel 4, Smithsonian
Executive producers:
Julian Ware
Cast:
Dr. Bertolt Meyer
Director:
Tom Coveney