I [just] finished reading Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains by Annie Cheney (great companion book to Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death). It was fascinating. In it, Cheney mentions bone retooling machines called FADAL, and describes them as sort-of CNC/VNC machines without stating as much. My self-educated guess was that they are CNC milling machines, but for human bone.

So I go on a Google tangent looking for milling machines used in bone harvesting and shaping, because I'm really curious about what they look like and stuff, and I come across this research project for a haptic/vr temporal bone surgery simulator. The reward is in the scrolldown. "The simulator can also be used for free form design." Yikes! Next, I hit paydirt -- a page with an actual photo of leg-on-a-lathe (milling machine). It proves to me that CAD can indeed be used against humans.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:19:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments