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FDA Consumer
magazine
November-December 2003 Issue
By Carol Rados
After
three decades on the road teaching kids and adults about artificial body parts,
the Food and Drug Administration's "skeleton-about-town" is being moved into
retirement. Yorick, aptly named for the exhumed skull in Shakespeare's Hamlet,
is a "bionic" skeleton. When he's left to his own devices in November 2003,
his remains will hang in the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, D.C., for the rest of his days.
Bionic means that electronic devices and mechanical parts (called medical devices or implants) are used to replace or help maintain the function of body parts that are damaged or that no longer work. These devices can help people perform normal, everyday tasks.
Ed Mueller, a retired FDA employee, has been dubbed Yorick's "birth father." Mueller and his colleagues at the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) came up with the idea of the teaching aid in the mid-1970s, and helped answer the question of what to do with the growing pile of medical devices submitted as part of the FDA's evaluation. Mueller, who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University, says, "It was a simple matter of where to put them." Devices, he says, "kept coming in from all the FDA field offices." On a whim, Mueller purchased a medical school
skeleton and alas, Yorick was born.
Outfitted in the latest metal, plastic and rubber gear, Yorick has appeared at medical conventions, universities, training courses, and health fairs nationwide since that time. He's even attended a Cub Scout meeting or two. His job on all occasions was to demonstrate how implanted devices, such as a hip joint, a rubber chin, a heart pacemaker, silicone joints, and bone growth stimulators, appear and function inside the body.
It's true that Yorick's glass eye couldn't see farther or with more precision than the human eye, nor could he detect infrared light. His legs weren't made to outrun an automobile or propel him higher and farther than a real person. And he hasn't got the strength to lift incredible weights. But Yorick could talk--with the help of a tape recorder and a speaker implanted in his skull. And he moved, when students at a university attached fishing line to his appendages. Yorick's greatest asset, perhaps, was that in 30 years his immune system never rejected any of his bionics.
That said, Yorick will move out of the spotlight and into a glass case for a final showing called "Inventing Ourselves" at the Smithsonian in mid-November. Arthur A. Ciarkowski, an associate director in CDRH, says that Yorick's retirement came about because of Project Bionics--a collaboration among the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs, the Smithsonian, and the National Library of Medicine. The project will illustrate the Total Product Life Cycle of medical devices that CDRH uses as a cornerstone of its operations.
"Our mission is to capture and preserve the history of artificial organs," Ciarkowski says, "and Yorick certainly is an object illustrating artificial organs."