How to transform your arm into a wing
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00:01 01 April 2008
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NewScientist.com news service
- Jeff Hecht
Daedalus used feathers and wax – and we
all know what happened to his son when he flew too close to the sun.
Instead, you could try surgery, says Samuel Poore,
a reconstructive surgeon at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who
has now described the steps that would be needed to transform human
arms into wings.
It sounds like an idea that might come from the underground world of body-modders,
who go in for filing teeth to points, implanting horns – and even more
extreme modifications. But Poore studied the mechanisms of bird flight
under Ted Goslow of Brown University, Rhode Island, before he began medical school and became interested in hand surgery.
A
colleague remarked that Poore would never be able to apply his
knowledge of bird anatomy to plastic surgery – and that set him
thinking.
A functional wing is, sadly, out of the
question. Humans lack the shoulder joint and massive muscles that
millions of years of evolution gave modern birds. Wing loading is
another killer requirement. Modern birds need at least a square
centimetre of wing area for every 4 grams of body mass, so an
80-kilogram human would need two square metres of wing.
But an arm might be converted to a decorative wing. Poore suggests modelling it on the wing of Archaeopteryx, the earliest bird, which had a shoulder much closer to humans than the shoulders of better-flying modern birds.
Getting hands-on
First,
fuse the outer set of wrist bones and the hand bones to create a
bird-like carpometacarpus, the third bone in a chicken wing. The thumb
remains free, like the alula that helps guide bird flight, but other
fingers would be fused together.
Next, rearrange the muscle and skin to allow articulation of the new bone arrangement.
Things
get tricky when it comes to feathering the wings. Hair grows in
different skin layers to feathers and the two consist of different
types of keratin. No one knows how to convert one to the other.
In
case you were looking forward to getting all Birdy, it all adds up to
more trouble than it's worth, Poore concludes. If you want angel wings,
go rent a costume.
"Humans should remain human," Poore says, "while letting birds be birds and angels be angels."
Journal ref: Journal of Hand Surgery, vol 33A, p 277
You walk around like you're oh so debonair
You pull 'em down and there's really nothing there
I wish you would just be real with me