In the 1987 American action film RoboCop, protagonist Alex Murphy is a police officer in a dystopian 21st-century Detroit when he is mortally wounded and rebuilt by cybernetic enhancements so that he can keep fighting crime.
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Nearly 40 years on, a Chinese policeman and a team of doctors at Jilin University have turned what once seemed a highly futuristic treatment into an encouraging new reality.
Recently, state broadcaster CCTV reported that the Second Hospital of Jilin University earlier this year performed the world’s first spinal interface surgery for quadriplegia – paralysis that affects all four limbs and the torso from the neck down.
Nine months after the surgery, the patient was able to stand and walk again with the aid of an exoskeleton robot. He also regained significant upper limb strength.
Like the fictional Murphy, the patient, Liu Boqi, is a police officer, working as a traffic officer in Changchun, Jilin province, at the time of his brush with death.
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