Frederic Moll was warmed by the enthusiasm of the onlookers, who were watching a surgical robot called da Vinci do its stuff. It's too big. It's too expensive. It doesn't have all the tools surgeons need. But he vows to eliminate these drawbacks.
Patients can only hope.
Robotic surgery has been tried on a relative handful of people for a few types of procedures. Da Vinci does not perform operations unaided. Once inside, the tools need little room to maneuver, flexing and grasping like fingers and hands. That deftness is the work of Intuitive cofounder Rob Younge, trained as an electrical engineer and intrigued by robotics as a Hewlett-Packard manager. At Intuitive, he assembled a team that gave da Vinci the same manipulative skill, or degrees of freedom, as the human hand and wrist.