Nearly a decade of research had brought them here: Doctors would, on this day last week, insert a chip into the brain of a man four days shy of his 23rd birthday. The chip would connect by wire to a port screwed into the man’s skull. A cable would link the port to a computer.
The computer was programmed to decode messages from the brain and beam their instructions to strips of electrodes strapped around the man’s forearm. The electrodes were designed to pulse and stimulate muscle fibers so that the muscles could pull on tendons in his hand.
If it all worked, a man who was paralyzed from the chest down would think about wiggling his finger, and in less than one-tenth of a second, his finger would move.