Another arm snips at the base of the fleshy organ with a steel claw while a third manipulates a tiny camera that sends gorgeous images of glistening innards onto video screens all around the darkened room. The eerily precise and silent surgeon hovering over the Madison patient last month in a UW Hospital operating room was a robot named da Vinci, after Leonardo da Vinci, the 15th century Italian genius who made sketches and then a wooden model of the world’s first human robot. Robotic surgery offers other distinct advantages over the standard “open” surgeries of the past, they say, and even over other forms of minimally invasive surgery, or laparoscopy, which surgeons perform with long instruments through punctures in the human body. Once the robot dissected the bladder and pulled it out like a deflated balloon through one of the small access holes, Gee swung into action — the old-fashioned way. A California company headed by Frederic Moll, one of the founders of da Vinci’s parent company, is marketing a robot that can pluck and transplant 1,000 individual hair follicles per hour from one part of the scalp to another to treat baldness. And the military, whose research into remote-control technology helped inspire the da Vinci not long ago, is exploring the concept of a trauma pod for the battlefield.

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