And the idea of now creating implants, scanning data, an MRI scan of somebody can now be converted into 3D data and we can create very specific implants for them.

Maybe 100,000 people have Cochlear implants, which allow them to hear.

And at some point of its life, it implants on a rock.

With 3D printing, we're seeing today that we can create much better implants.

The representative recalled the NGOs recent humanitarian mission to Cambodia where reconstructive surgical procedures and rehabilitation expertise was provided to acid burn victims.

You would think that because these implants are optimized for speech, they were designed for speech.

We're going to have all kinds of implants, drugs that force us to stay awake all the time.

And now you have cochlear implants that go into people's heads and allow the deaf to begin to hear.

And in fact, because we can create bespoke products en masse, one offs, we can create implants that are specific to individuals.

When the devil bites another devil, it actually physically implants living cancer cells into the next devil, so the tumor continues to grow.

And then taking this idea of creating a very detailed structure, we can apply it to honeycomb structures and use them within implants.

And for Parkinson's disease, Cochlear implants, these have indeed been able to bring some kind of remedy to people with certain kinds of disorder.

Here you can see the plate holding it, and you can see the implants being put in so that in one operation we achieve this and this.

One that is obviously happening all around us now, is that the temes turn us into teme machines, with these implants, with the drugs, with us merging with the technology.

Targeted drugs, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, perhaps even implants into our brains, may change human beings themselves. And human beings, their physique and character, has not changed for thousands of years.

I've been very lucky to work with Dr. David Ryugo where I've been working on deaf cats that are white and trying to figure out what happens when we give them cochlear implants.

And you can see, they're ranging from shoes, rings that were made out of stainless steal, phone covers out of plastic, all the way through to spinal implants, for example, that were created out of medical grade titanium, and engine parts.

And patients with end stage Parkinson s disease can be treated with deep brain stimulation (DBS). Current experiments on neural prosthetics point to the enormous future potential of similar interventions, whether retinal or brain stem implants for the blind or brain recording devices for controlling prostheses.

Nevertheless, the availability of such technologies has already begun to cause friction. For example, many in the deaf community have rejected cochlear implants, because they do not regard deafness as a disability that needs to be corrected, but as a part of their life and cultural identity.

This is not a life saving transplant like a heart, or liver, or lung transplant it is a quality of life transplant, and as a result, are the patients going to say, if they get a malignant cancer 10 or 15 years on, I wish I'd had conventional reconstructive techniques rather than this because I'm now dying of a malignant cancer ? We don't know yet.

From this perspective, cochlear implants seem ethically unproblematic. Nevertheless, Anita Silvers, a philosopher at San Francisco State University and a disability scholar and activist, has described such treatments as tyranny of the normal, aimed at adjusting the deaf to a world designed by the hearing, ultimately implying the inferiority of deafness.

Charles Limb performs cochlear implantation, a surgery that treats hearing loss and can restore the ability to hear speech. But as a musician too, Limb thinks about what the implants lack They don't let you fully experience music yet. At TEDMED, Limb reviews the state of the art and the way forward.

Ed Boyden shows how, by inserting genes for light sensitive proteins into brain cells, he can selectively activate or de activate specific neurons with fiber optic implants. With this unprecedented level of control, he's managed to cure mice of analogs of PTSD and certain forms of blindness. On the horizon neural prosthetics. Session host Juan Enriquez leads a brief post talk Q A.