In the state-of-the-art hospital operating room, 67-year-old Eugene Bem lies anesthetized, pierced through the chest by three narrow, stainless-steel rods held by aluminum and plastic mechanical arms draped in translucent vinyl. Under way in the operating room is a critical portion of a heart bypass operation, but missing is the customary crowd of surgeons around the patient. Instead, in a corner across the room, a cardiac surgeon sits alone at a computer, his back to the operating table. Hunched over an enveloping, streamlined console, his feet tapping at pedal switches and fingers rapidly manipulating sensitive handheld controllers, the doctor in surgical scrubs could pass for some silent-movie mad scientist at his mighty Wurlitzer organ.

In fact, it's a day this past summer at New York's Beth Israel Medical Center, and cardiac surgeon Hani Shennib is offering a preview into the future of robotically assisted heart operations. Peering remotely into his patient's chest cavity via a tiny video camera mounted at the end of one of the three steel rods, the surgeon performs the delicate task of harvesting a chest artery to be used in a heart bypass graft. Still at the console, Shennib grasps, cuts and cauterizes using surgical instruments on the tips of the other two rods; the instruments, deep in the patient's chest, respond precisely to the physician's hand movements, which are relayed via a computer to the electromechanical arms.