This Bionic Man, With Working Machine Organs, Is Pretty Much the Creepiest Thing Ever

With artificial limbs and organs, Rex is a vision of a bionic future

By Colin Schultz

smithsonian.com
February 7, 2013

Meet Rex. Rex is a terrifying (yet somehow optimistic) vision of the future. Rex is a humanoid robot, as close as we’ve come to a bionic man—a composite of all the advances medical engineers have made in creating functional artificial human organs.

“Rex has a heart that beats with the help of a battery,” says Discover Magazine, “Rex’s fist-sized dialysis unit works like a real kidney, and his mock spleen can filter infections from his ‘blood.’” The Independent:

Dubbed the Million-Dollar Man (that’s how much he cost to make), he consists of a prosthetic face, hips, knees, feet and hands, all of which are commercially available. Other off-the-shelf items include an artificial retina, cochlea and heart.

The bionic humanoid, says Discover, was build by a robot company known as “Shadow.” (Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.)

“There are some vital organs missing, like the stomach, but 60 to 70 per cent of a human has effectively been rebuilt,” said Shadow’s managing director, Rich Walker, to The Independent.

Rex is not meant to be a full recreation of a human, but a tech demo. “This is a showcase for prosthetic parts, it shows exactly where we’ve got to in being able to replace parts of a human.”