- The Observer,
- Sunday March 10 2002
Burke and Hare would turn in their graves. The Edinburgh grave-robbers and murderers who sold bodies to trainee surgeons have been supplanted by an artificial human body, anatomically correct from the beating heart to the bile in the gall bladder. Primacorps, developed by scientists across Europe, will mean surgeons no longer have to train on live patients, animals or corpses.
'With this, a surgeon can "kill" the patient as many times as they like until they learn to get it right,' said Nick Gerolemu of the British company Limbs and Things, which is making the dummy.
Engineers at Cardiff University conducted a scan of a healthy man and woman in their early thirties and fed the results into a computer to create a virtual model. The body was then crafted using a technique known as synthetic laser sintering, with materials including silicones and foam latex. The artificial skin, bones, liver, heart and other organs, and fluids such as simulated blood and simulated bile, are virtually indistinguishable from the real ones.
The need for artificial bodies to train on has grown because of the rise of keyhole surgery. When the operation is done through a tiny hole in the skin, it is impossible for a trainee to see what the experienced surgeon is doing.
It is also too risky to let trainees loose on live patients, since the trainer can't see when the trainee is going wrong.
Surgeons have often practised on human corpses, but in Britain after the Alder Hey organ scandal, fewer people are leaving their bodies to medicine. Also, the increasingly precise nature of surgery means that unless the body is only a few hours old it is no longer sufficiently similar to a living one to be worth practising on.
'With Primacorps, the blood is very red, the fat is yellow - it is more accurate than a real body.' said Gerolemu.
