Barbie Breaks Into Medicine
Barbie, the doll with the drop-dead figure and more lives than a whole family of cats, is now doing her part for medical science.
In her 40 years, Barbie has had more than 75 careers, ranging from astronaut to paleontologist. Now, she's entering the medical field, after a fashion. As CBS News' Mark McEwen reports, it turns out the plastic knee joints in Barbie's long legs make good knuckles in prosthetic fingers.
Jane Bahor, who makes lifelike body parts for amputees at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., has used knees from Barbie dolls to make new fingers for about a dozen patients.
"I've been making artificial fingers for a long time. And of course the thing that makes fingers work the best is movement," Bahor says.
"In brainstorming one day with a patient, we said, 'How could we make a finger move? Most of our artificial digits are just stable….If we could make them move like a Barbie leg.' And then the light bulb went off."
Bahor and a patient, Jennifer Jordan, then a North Carolina State University engineering student, came up with the idea three years ago while discussing how to make Jordan's prosthetic finger more realistic and useful.
Last fall when Bahor thought the idea was really going to work, she called Mattel and asked to buy some knee joints. Mattel was so impressed that it sent Bahor a bag full of parts for free.
"Once you free the joint out of the Barbie doll, you can insert it into the prosthetic device. And then the patient can manually manipulate that joint, bring it up and down to change the positions of the finger and function," Bahor explains.
Wearers of the artificial fingers bend them in the same way they would bend Barbie's leg. They can use their other hand to bend the joint, as if cracking the knuckle. Just like Barbie's legs, the fingers stay bent until the owner straightens them.
Being able to bend prosthetic fingers makes it easier for an amputee to hold a pen, pick up a cup or grip the steering wheel.
"What we used to get was a rather stiff and unsightly device. There was a little filler in it but it had a wire that was really really hard to manipulate," says Bahor.
"Working with these patients and seeing what their needs were, their need to be able to hold a pin - very simple functions that you and I don't have any difficulty with - we really wanted to try to make these nice-looking prosthetics more functional for people," Bahor adds.