Dollar Man Research Articles

The Million Dollar Man: Reflections on Life Sentences by a Canadian Lifer

The Million Dollar Man: Reflections on Life Sentences by a Canadian Lifer

The $100-Million Dollar Man: Michael Phelps, the Olympic System, and USA Swimming’s Shifts in “Eligibility”

This article focuses on the structures of elite-performance swimming in order to explore the interdependent relationships among the processes of commodification, commercialization, and modern sport...

Redefining Biology via Enzyme Engineering

A TV series from the 1970s, “The Six Million Dollar Man,” imagines a former astronaut with bionic implants and superhuman strength acting as a secret agent for the government. Such enhancement of human abilities with artificial components (all at a reasonable price tag) might resonate with some of today’s scientists who are working on a more modest goal of augmenting the properties of cells and biological systems. Their aim is to design new synthetic routes for compounds and even create completely new molecules that may not exist in nature by exploiting the versatility of the life’s systems. Take the current work on silicon. Silicon is a ubiquitous element that sits next to carbon in the periodic table and shares some of its properties. The similarities in the ways silicon and carbon bond with other atoms have led to the idea that silicon might give rise to an alternative, silicon-based life with unique properties. Yet, silicon does not readily partake in biochemical couplings unless nudged to bind carbon via chemical synthesis. Organosilicon compounds that are thus created are highly valued for their ability to bind organic and inorganic substrates and are used as adhesives, sealants, and caulks. Their industrial synthesis is laborious, and thus the interest in bringing silicon into the fold of nature’s biochemistry persists. Now, advances in enzyme engineering have made it possible to incorporate silicon into organic compounds through bacterial biosynthetic pathways. Frances Arnold and her team (Kan et al., 2016Kan S.B.J. Lewis R.D. Chen K. Arnold F.H. Science. 2016; 354: 1048-1051Crossref PubMed Scopus (361) Google Scholar) have discovered that a cytochrome c protein from the thermophilic bacterium Rhodothermus marinus can, under the right conditions, catalyze the formation of a carbon-silicon bond to create short organosilicon compounds. The examination of the enzyme’s structure yields clues to the motifs driving this process, allowing the rapid directed evolution of an enzyme with high activity for making such products. Strikingly, this altered cytochrome c churns out silicon-containing compounds inside of bacteria, suggesting that relatively few tweaks are sufficient to bring silicon into the realm of in vivo synthesis, albeit under highly engineered conditions, and creating compounds that are not yet industrially relevant. Retooling an enzyme for a new production line may, however, require a more comprehensive overhaul of its properties. In a recent work from John Hartwig’s lab (Dydio et al., 2016Dydio P. Key H.M. Nazarenko A. Rha J.Y.-E. Seyedkazemi V. Clark D.S. Hartwig J.F. Science. 2016; 354: 102-106Crossref PubMed Scopus (231) Google Scholar, Key et al., 2016Key H.M. Dydio P. Clark D.S. Hartwig J.F. Nature. 2016; 534: 534-537Crossref PubMed Scopus (268) Google Scholar), myoglobins and cytochrome P450s, heme proteins that transport and react with oxygen, are fitted with iridium, a noble metal not found in biological molecules, to yield an artificial metalloenzyme with new capabilities, promoting reactions not catalyzed by native hemes or other metalloenzymes and with kinetics, productivity, and selectivity that are comparable with those of native enzymes. The widening of the biochemical space achieved with such manipulations is tantalizing, and the next frontier is making such artificial enzymes work inside of a cell, a challenging task, given the complex intracellular environment. Thomas Ward and colleagues (Jeschek et al., 2016Jeschek M. Reuter R. Heinisch T. Trindler C. Klehr J. Panke S. Ward T.R. Nature. 2016; 537: 661-665Crossref PubMed Scopus (264) Google Scholar) tackle this problem by developing a process through which an artificial metathase can be assembled and put to work in the periplasm of a bacterium, bringing new, non-natural metabolic pathways inside cells. On a different spatial scale, other recent studies have endeavored to create large artificial structures within cells. Neil King, Wesley Sundquist, and colleagues (Votteler et al., 2016Votteler J. Ogohara C. Yi S. Hsia Y. Nattermann U. Belnap D.M. King N.P. Sundquist W.I. Nature. 2016; 540: 292-295Crossref PubMed Scopus (75) Google Scholar) designed self-organizing protein nanocages nested inside of membrane vesicles. Such structures can be released from their host eukaryotic cells and taken up by other cells, allowing the transfer of encapsulated cargo and representing a prototype hybrid biological material that can be used to perform complex tasks, such as exchange of metabolites or information, in a controlled and tailored manner. These examples of repurposing natural solutions are still at their proof-of-principle stage; however, they support the idea that biochemical reactions and cellular functions can be augmented to bring new elements to life and create unexpected biological products.

Body and Enhancement Technology: An Introduction

In the 1970s US television series The Six Million Dollar Man, the lead character, Steve Austin, was rebuilt to be “better, stronger, and faster” with the help of the latest technology, after a near...

We Can Rebuild Him and Her: Bionic Irony, Hysteria, and Post-Fordism’s Technological Fix in The Six Million Dollar Man

THE WORKING MAN'S CRASH LANDING Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis have observed that, when it comes to utopian visions regarding the societal benefits of space travel, it is not so much the alleged reasons for making a journey to Mars that matter but what they can do to you on Mars when they get you there (58). Programs such as the Apollo missions or even current speculation about manned missions to Mars, whatever scientific benefits might be expected, simultaneously generate a host of less obvious outcomes that are nonetheless useful from the point of view of social control, nation building, and ideological reinforcement. Collecting moon rocks might have added to the storehouse of knowledge, but the Apollo missions were also immensely useful to the U.S. government for providing a unifying goal by which to capture the national imagination in the midst of such legitimation crises as those related to Vietnam, the Cold War, and environmental destruction. We might go further, with Caffentzis and Federici, and discern in the asceticism and other-worldliness required by space exploration a way of disciplining the terrestrial labour force: launch of today's high-tech industry a technological leap in the machine--a big evolutionary leap in creating a new type of worker to match capital's investment needs (61). Just as a space program that trains only a handful of actual astronauts might have a much larger effect on the national imaginary, creating the utopian fascination needed to implement new disciplinary structures, so too can popular culture about science and technology provide the fantasy scenarios that help generalize new modes of control even while entertaining and stimulating our imaginations. (1) The popular 1970s television show The Six Million Dollar Man (hereafter Six) is a case in point. Celebrating technological aspiration in the face of sensational failure, the show's opening montage uses historic footage of the 1967 crash of nasa's experimental M2-F2 lifting body aircraft, in which test pilot Bruce Peterson was almost killed when his plane hit the ground at over 400 km/hr. The M2-F2 was part of a series of experimental aircraft that led to the development of the U.S. Space Shuttle program in the 1980s. In Six, Peterson's crash is used as the background for an opening sequence detailing the reconstruction of the fictional astronaut Steve Austin, a man literally reduced to human scrap, in the words of the government agent who oversees Austin's transformation into a cyborg super-soldier. Using digital sound effects with computerized graphics superimposed on images of Austin receiving his robotic implants, the opening sequence famously proclaims in voiceover: gentlemen, we can rebuild him ... we have the capacity to create the world's first bionic man. The show's dramatic juxtaposition of high and low, of human with $6 million of high-tech machinery, offers insights into the tensions faced by a largely white male American workforce confronting the contradictions of capital in the 1970s, a decade that saw the fraying of postWorld War II Keynesianism and the initial stirrings of the more turbulent and unruly neoliberal market that would replace it. With the escalation of Cold War tensions, labour unrest, energy prices, economic and environmental crises, and an increasingly unpopular military entanglement in Vietnam, the value of American lives seemed under question in a more nebulously unsettling manner than the century's two horrific but spatially and temporally circumscribed world wars (and the economic depression in between) had managed to do. The white male factory worker privileged by postwar Fordism was further confronted with threats of deskilling and obsolescence through technological innovations and shutdowns ferociously pursued by industrialists as a means of both streamlining the workplace and disciplining the workforce. In the midst of these tensions, like the fallen astronaut from the opening of Six, hegemonic American masculinity might have keenly felt the proximity of the human scrap heap confronted by Austin. …

The ABC Movie of the Week: Big Movies for the Small Screen MichaelMcKenna. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013.

The ABC Movie of the Week: Big Movies for the Small Screen Michael McKenna. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013.American television networks began producing and airing made-for-television films in 1962, but the ABC Movie of the Week made them a fixture of American broadcasting. The offered viewers a new ninety-minute film each week in its first two seasons (1969-1971) and two different films each in its next four (1971-1975): a total of 243 films by the time it left the airwaves. Movie of the Week productions resembled the B features produced by Hollywood to fill the bottom halves of double bills: genre-bound films with compact running times, small casts, low budgets, and limited ambitions. Most were little more than formula entertainment, designed to be enjoyed once and quickly forgotten, but a surprising number resonated beyond their initial airings. A few-including Duel (1971), The Night Stalker (1972), and Bad Ronald (1974)-were hailed as genre classics. Others served as pilots for successful ABC television series, such as Alias Smith and Jones, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Starsky and Hutch. A third group dramatized the divisive social and cultural issues of the day: the counterculture in The Ballad of Andy Crocker (1969), the Vietnam War in Tribes (1970), race relations in Carter's Army (1971), homosexuality in That Certain Summer (1971), drug abuse in Go Ask Alice (1973), and gun violence in The Gun (1974).Michael McKenna's book breaks important scholarly ground by treating the series in both breadth and depth. The first half offers an interpretive history of the series in roughly 180 pages: a chapter per season, and a page or two of text apiece for the films that McKenna judges to be the most significant of that season. The second half uses another 180 pages to provide a chronological listing and alphabetical filmography of all 243 films aired in the series. The two pieces of the book reinforce one another: the second providing an authoritative guide to the series and the first making a case for its social and aesthetic significance. The illustrations, reproductions of period newspaper advertisements for the films, are an unexpected bonus. They suggest the surprising frequency with which ABC relied on visual promises of sex, mayhem, and seamy realism to draw viewers to the films.The book's comprehensive, detail-oriented approach comes, inevitably, at a price. There is, for example, no discussion of the advertisements' use of exploitation-film techniques or of the parallels in subject matter and production techniques that united the ABC productions with the B features of an earlier era. …

“We Can Rebuild Him!”: The essentialisation of the human/cyborg interface in the twenty-first century, or whatever happened to The Six Million Dollar Man?

This paper aims to show how recent cinematic representations reveal a far more pessimistic and essentialised vision of Human/Cyborg hybridity in comparison with the more enunciative and optimistic ones seen at the end of the twentieth century. Donna Haraway’s still influential 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” saw the combination of the organic and the technological as offering new and exciting ways beyond the normalised culturally constructed categories of gender and identity formation. However, more recently critics see her later writings as embodying a Faustian deal between the individual and hegemony, where technology does not enhance but merely returns the subject to a level of normalisation. As such cybernetics is only configured as a form of prosthetic rehabilitation, to ‘re’-able the ‘dis’-abled, that ultimately re-establishes earlier essentialised subject positions through that same evolutionary process. The Six Million Dollar Man, which ran from 1974 to 1978, exampled a symbiosis between the organic and the technological where the broken human body is not just re-made via mechanical prosthesis but through a process of Cyborg hybridity which actually makes it better, faster, stronger than before. In contrast, contemporary films such as Avatar (Cameron 2009), Transformers II: Revenge of the Fallen (Bay 2009) and Iron Man II (Faveraeu 2010) portray an inherent anxiety toward the cyborg body disavowing of any human/cyborg interaction beyond re-establishing their own discrete and separate subject positions. Although human/cyborg symbiosis constructs the possibility for potentialised bodies beyond those previously imagined, contemporary, popular, film represents them as separated and essentialised. This article looks at what cultural anxieties might produce such an about turn in such representations how this positions human identity in a time of increasing technology and, as a result, asks “whatever happened to The Six Million Dollar Man?”

Vision of beauty

My childhood hero from the 1970s was the Six Million Dollar Man.

Nationalism and Gender: The 1970s, The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Bionic Woman

Nationalism and Gender: The 1970s, The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Bionic Woman

Parens Patriae Litigation to Redress Societal Damages from the BP Oil Spill: The Latest Stage in the Evolution of Crimtorts

ABSTRACT * The BP oil spill has led to some of the most complex legal dilemmas in Anglo-American history. This Article explores four mechanisms that claimants are using to seek compensation for damages caused by this unprecedented environmental disaster: (1) Torts; (2) Class Actions; (3) the Gulf Coast Claims Facility; and (4) Environmental Patens Patriae Actions. We argue that the government-initiated parens patriae actions are necessary to supplement, but not to supplant, the other three mechanisms in order to vindicate the larger societal injury. The patens patriae litigation may enable the Gulf States to recoup larger societal losses to their habitat, ecosystems, tax revenues, and tourism. This mechanism can potentially resolve the problem of aggregating valid claims by plaintiffs who cannot be certified as classes or who do not qualify under the Gulf Coast Claims Tribunal Guidelines. We classify environmental patens patriae as public crimtorts because government attorneys deploy private tort law to redress societal injuries. By contrast, in private crimtorts, trial lawyers receive punitive damages as a bounty for uncovering and prosecuting dangerous conditions and practices. Both public and private crimtorts require intermediate procedural protections to ensure that corporate defendants are treated fairly. Courts or legislatures will need to determine which intermediate protections best balance defendants' rights versus society's interests. I. INTRODUCTION: THE BP OIL CATASTROPHE II. PART I: CIVIL JUSTICE ALTERNATIVES FOR COMPENSATING THE BP OIL SPILL VICTIMS A. One-on-One Torts 1. The Case for Individualized Environmental Justice 2. Difficulties in Proving Causation in Environmental Torts 3. David v. Goliath Imbalance in Legal Resources a. The BP Corporate Family b. The Transocean Corporate Family c. The Halliburton Corporate Family d. The Andarko Corporate Family e. The Moex Offshore Corporate Family f. Cameron International Corporation g. Miscellaneous Additional Defendants 4. Environmental Torts Will Overwhelm the Civil Justice System B. The Gulf Coast Claims Facility (GCCF) 1. The Formation of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility 2. Advantages of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility 3. Concerns About the Gulf Coast Claims Facility a. Kenneth Feinberg: The $20 Billion Dollar Man b. The GCCF's Legitimacy and Transparency Limitations c. Controversial GCCF Proximate Cause Delimiters d. Exclusion of Noneconomic Damages as Tort Reform in Disguise e. The Abolition of the Collateral Source Rule f. The GCCF Does Not Compensate Societal Damages C. Class Actions Against Oil Industry Defendants 1. Advantages of Class Actions III. PART II: THE RESURRECTION OF PARENS PATRIAE FOR COLLECTIVE INJURIES A. The Gulf States' Parens Patriae Environmental Actions B. History of Parens Patriae 1. The Equitable Roots of Parens Patriae 2. Parens Patriae Exported to America 3. Injunctive Relief in Early Parens Patriae Environmental Cases C. The Modern Expansion of Parens Patriae D. The Metamorphosis of Public Nuisance 1. Public Nuisance in Tobacco Parens Patriae Actions 2. Public Nuisance in Environmental Parens Patriae Actions a. Show Me the Money: Parens Patriae Actions b. The Rise of Public Crimtorts 3. Alabama's Pioneering Environmental Parens Patriae Action 4. Louisiana's Declaratory Judgment Action 5. …

P04.01 ‘The 6 Million Dollar Man’: An unusual case of adaptative commensalism with multidrug resistant bacteria in a surgical patient treated for 18 months

s, 7th International Conference of the Hospital Infection Society, 10–13 October 2010, Liverpool, UK / Journal of Hospital Infection 76S1 (2010) S1–S90 S15 Methods: 350 peripheral IV cannula insertions were studied in three NHS organisations. Equipment problems during cannulation were recorded and staff interviewed to identify causes. Results: Out of the 350 cannulation procedures, 47 incidents of equipment problems (Table 1) were recorded during 46 cannulation procedures. This equates to a reliability of 87% across the three organisations. Interviews revealed a variety of causes including problems with supply of the right size of cannula, lack of tourniquets and a lack of sharps bins to dispose of the needles. Often staff found work-arounds to deal with these problems. Table 1: Summary of non-availability of equipment across the whole study

Defining nanomaterial interactions using biological systems

Materials between 1 and 100nm in size behave differently than largermaterials of the same composition. They exhibit intriguing new properties that have the potential to radically improve human health through targeted drug delivery, bionic and prosthetic development, improved imaging and diagnostics systems, and novel therapeutics and regenerative medicines. According to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies,1 803 consumer products already exploit nanoscale materials in merchandise ranging from cosmetics to children’s plush toys. But amid the excitement surrounding the revolutionary potential of nanotechnology, such as electronics integrated into organisms featured in the 1970s television show ‘The Six Million Dollar Man,’ how do we ensure these new materials do not inadvertently harm or even destroy parts of our world? Several major challenges must be overcome to ensure the safety of new nanomaterials. First, studies on how and why nanoparticles interact with the environment and organisms are lacking. It is impossible to assess potential exposure risks without this information. Second, we do not currently have the tools to measure all nanomaterial characteristics that may be important. Moreover, we may not fully comprehend what we need to measure. Finally, with every element in the periodic table as fair game—and the countless ways in which materials can be mixed and matched—the sheer diversity of potential nanomaterials is mind-boggling. At the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI), a collaborative group of scientists are confronting concerns through the Safer Nanomaterials and Nanomanufacturing Initiative.2 As part of an international research community, we are building well-characterized nanomaterial libraries, Figure 1. Light micrographs of zebrafish development 8 (bottom right), 24 (bottom left), and 120h (top) after fertilization.

Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (review)

Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, by Michael Chorost (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005, 232 pp., Hardcover, $24. ISBN 0-618-37829-4)* thine own self be true. William Shakespeare, Hamlet BEGINNING A REVIEW of Michael Chorost's fascinating discussion of his cochlear implant metamorphosis, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, with this quote is apropos on several levels. First and foremost, this book is one man's personal narrative of growth after, at mid-life, he loses his remaining hearing and then receives a variation of it back with an implant. A self-described nerd with a limited social network and a new Ph.D., Chorost tells how the remaining hair cells in his ear suddenly and rapidly died while on a business trip (he was hard of hearing since birth before becoming deaf). His subsequent journey, from investigating to receiving and ultimately adjusting to his implant, is detailed in this book in both human and technical terms. Michael Chorost is a writer and a researcher, having studied literature, including Shakespeare, in graduate school. But he is also a computer ace: his doctorate is in English and educational technology. All of these attributes shine through as we learn how machines that control aspects of people's physiology have been portrayed in fiction over time, and how they actually do so today in the form of cochlear implants. To illustrate his perspective about his implant experience, Chorost begins each chapter with a quote or two, and liberally cites the literature, both non-fiction and fantasy, throughout the text. Among his favorite sources is Martin Caidin's novel, Cyborg, better known on television by the title The Six Million Dollar Man. In this novel, the main character, Steve Austin, receives sophisticated new limbs and struggles to control them and their electronic instructions. Chorost's take on such cyborgs is that they are people who have one or more physical attributes controlled by a computer, and the computer's programmed code actually imposes decisions on the user. In a cochlear implant, for example, the code - or in this case competing and upgradable versions of code - dictate exacdy what one can hear. It is this computer technology that forms the basis for Chorost's own efforts to rebuild and grow with his new bionic ear. But there is more to life than technology, of course; hence the subtide of Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human. Chorost openly deals with his human struggles. In doing so, he provides analogies between the various goals he wants to achieve as a person and the goals that must be met adjusting to his mechanical cochlear implant. For example, one chapter discusses his coping with a software upgrade for his implant, and parallels that with his growth in dealing with the women he dates. About the technology he says, Within an hour or two, I'd gotten an approximate fix on the software. It was creamy, which was good, and subdued, which was bad. 'Creamy' in that the world sounded smoother and finer-grained. 'Subdued' in that the world felt quieter and more remote. . . . [My audiologist] . . . warned me it might take weeks, even months, for me to fully adjust. (112) At the same time, still struggling to find that perfect personal relationship, he notes, after one failed, As the months went by, I cautiously felt around the edges of my consciousness, anticipating the return ofthat black gloom. But it didn't return. My equilibrium bounced back after each unsuccessful date. ... I was more in control of my body, and that allowed me to be more patient. An upgrade, in a certain (116) Along the way toward achieving the mechanical and human goals Chorost establishes for himself, he introduces us to many interesting people, often with great humor. We meet his surgeon and audiologist, who tirelessly answer his long list of questions. We are introduced to individuals from the cochlear implant's manufacturer, who discuss their view of the future, and to his coworkers at the research firm he is working with at the time, who provide patience and support through the adjustment process. …

An Update on Imaging of Joint Reconstructions

As a teenager in the 1970s I enjoyed watching the television show “The Six Million Dollar Man,” with Lee Majors, about a NASA test pilot who had survived a crash and had been “rebuilt” with special joints and limbs. Although it seemed far-fetched at the time, the replacement of joints and now even intervertebral discs, like so many other things that were once science fiction, has become reality.

Ramping Up Rehabilitation Research Urged as a “Public Health Imperative”

CHICAGO—Three years ago, the journal Science featured a series of articles describing the wonders of bioengineering and bionics and the promise they hold for mending bodies broken by spinal cord injuries, stroke, and diseased joints and organs. But even as many of these wonders are being put to the test in clinical trials, clinicians and basic scientists in the field of disability rehabilitation are facing challenges that even the Six Million Dollar Man might find difficult to overcome. During the joint conference of the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine and the American Society of Neurorehabilitation here in late September, experts debated not only sophisticated techniques such as the use of cortical stimulation to aid stroke recovery but also some fundamental issues concerning current research capacity in rehabilitation medicine. Rory Cooper, PhD, professor and chair of rehabilitation science and technology in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, told his colleagues that the field currently lacks many of the resources needed to achieve the objectives described in Science’s February 8, 2002, issue on “The Bionic Human.” He said resources that are in short supply include federal funding, an ample pool of well-trained investigators, mentors for young investigators entering the field, and new tools to measure rehabilitation outcomes. “This is a public health imperative,” Cooper said, noting that in the next 25 years an estimated 20% of the US population will be aged 65 years or older. “Disability rehabilitation research is a quality of life issue, as well as a technology issue and a medical care issue.”

Digital people: from bionic humans to androids

Robots, androids, and bionic people pervade popular culture, from classics like Frankenstein and R.U.R. to modern tales such as The Six Million Dollar Man, The Terminator, and A.I. Our fascination is obvious a and the technology is quickly moving from books and films to real life. In a lab at MIT, scientists and technicians have created an artificial being named COG. To watch COG interact with the environment a to recognize that this machine has actual body language a is to experience a hair-raising, gut-level reaction. Because just as we connect to artificial people in fiction, the merest hint of human-like action or appearance invariably engages us. Digital People examines the ways in which technology is inexorably driving us to a new and different level of humanity. As scientists draw on nanotechnology, molecular biology, artificial intelligence, and materials science, they are learning how to create beings that move, think, and look like people. Others are routinely using sophisticated surgical techniques to implant computer chips and drug-dispensing devices into our bodies, designing fully functional man-made body parts, and linking human brains with computers to make people healthier, smarter, and stronger. In short, we are going beyond what was once only science fiction to create bionic people with fully integrated artificial components a and it will not be long before we reach the ultimate goal of constructing a completely synthetic human-like being. It seems quintessentially human to look beyond our natural limitations. Science has long been the lens through which we squint to discern our future. Although we are rightfully fearful about manipulating the boundaries between animate and inanimate, the benefits are too great to ignore. This thoughtful and provocative book shows us just where technology is taking us, in directions both wonderful and terrible, to ponder what it means to be human.

Recreating Prometheus

Recreating Prometheus

Will a chip every day keep the doctor away?

“We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first Bionic man.” So began each episode of 1970s TV show Six Million Dollar Man, as surgeons attempted to rebuild aeroplane crash victim Steve Austin by fitting him with bionic limbs and eagle-eye vision. As the popularity of the show proved, the concept of integrating man and machine has long fuelled our imagination. It has also been the subject of many other science-fiction movies and shows, including Bionic Woman, Robocop and Inspector Gadget.

Children's long‐term memory for information that is incongruous with their prior knowledge

Seven‐ and 10‐year‐olds listened to a tape‐recorded story. In one version, familiar television characters were described as having attributes that were incongruous with those that the children thought them to have. For example, Six Million Dollar Man was said to be too weak to carry a can of paint. Immediately after hearing the story, half of the children were asked to rate the characters on the basis of their descriptions and behaviour in the story. At this stage there was no evidence of systematic distortions in remembering. However, children who were asked to rate the incongruous characters in the story three weeks later displayed considerable shifts in memory in the direction of their pre‐experimental knowledge of the character's attributes. Long‐term memory for unfamiliar characters in a parallel version of the story showed no such shift, indicating that memory distortion for the incongruous information was influenced by children's prior knowledge and was not the result of random forgetting.

Return of the Six Million Dollar Man

Return of the Six Million Dollar Man