At the urgent request of the Pentagon, scientists and engineers are rushing to create a bionic arm that moves, feels and looks like the real thing for the growing number of soldiers losing their limbs in Iraq. The challenge is to make the artificial arm deft enough to handle small objects. If it works as hoped, the arm will deliver sensory feedback to the patient's brain and amputees will feel like they're actually using their own hands.

Greg Clark, a bioengineer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City adds, It’s a challenging and daunting responsibility. Today’s artificial arm is so much trouble, so cumbersome, that people put it on the closet shelf and don’t use it. The new arm will be different. It can make many types of movements all at once. It can reach out in space, the elbow bends, the wrist rotates, and the hand takes on the shape of the object it’s going to pick up. This will mean a lot to an amputee. People who lost limbs want to feel whole again.

Advances in armor and medical care have decreased the incidence of death in the battlefield, but more soldiers are returning home gravely wounded, creating a need for a more realistic prosthetic device.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has earmarked $55 million for the project and has assigned its management to Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which in turn subcontracted 28 government, university and private organizations to design and construct sample arms. One or two winners will be selected for clinical testing on patients in 2009.