Science fiction has warned us, repeatedly and enthusiastically, about men like Shoji Takeuchi. A well-meaning genius creates an innocent-looking invention one minute; cue a genocidal cyborg apocalypse the next.
In his lab on Tokyo university’s Komaba campus, Professor Takeuchi, director of the Centre for Integrative Biomedical Systems, plays the part to cinematic perfection. He delivers a short but complex technical pre-amble before dramatically sliding a small bottle across the table.
Suspended in solution inside is a genuinely important breakthrough in biohybrid robotics — the emerging scientific field that seeks to combine living tissue with the metals and plastics normally used in robots.