Nonetheless, he described the project to a gathering of eye surgeons in Houston last October and concluded: 'Gentlemen, I submit we may be on the brink of a New Stone Age.' The obsidian study is in its early stages, and Hardenbergh has reached no conclusions about the glass' usefulness in human surgery. 'The incision looks pretty good right now,' Dahlin says. He was impressed, in part, by reports that the sharper obsidian causes less scarring. Now the two men are trying to determine whether the glass blades might safely and effectively replace steel for some surgical procedures.ĭahlin, an archeologist at Catholic University here, became intrigued by the research and asked Sheets to make obsidian blades for his surgeon to use for the first cut through his skin. Indeed, obsidian shatters to form edges only 10 molecules thick. Sheets, an archeologist at the University of Colorado, have found that obsidian can be made at least 100 times sharper than most steel scalpels. Hardenbergh, an eye surgeon in Boulder, Colo., and Payson D. When Bruce Dahlin underwent lung surgery here in early December, the operation, while under the most modern conditions, contained an echo from the age of the ancient Aztecs.Īt Dahlin's request, the surgeon made his first cut with a scalpel fashioned from obsidian, a rocky glass from volcanoes that the Aztecs used to make knives and razors.ĭahlin is the first human operated on as the result of an unusual research project that weds modern medicine with archeology and its study of the distant past.įirmon E.

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