Saved By Dr. Robot

The new guy in the operating room didn’t go to med school and skipped out on residency, but outperforms doctors and saves lives, like tiny Gianna Hope’s. Discover how robots are becoming surgical superstars.

- Magdalena Puniewska

Gina Neri lay on an operating table as a robot’s tweezer-like “hands” neatly cut her open and stitched her back together. The bot’s precise, calculated movements left little room for error—a crucial advantage since there were two lives on the line.

Just a couple of weeks earlier, the 39-year-old lawyer from Ossining, NY, was having a typical week, but she’d noticed some rectal bleeding and made an appointment with her doctor. She assumed it was related to the delivery of her second child 18 months earlier, but her doc took a blood test to check for other possible causes, such as colitis or gallbladder inflammation. Negative. The blood work, however, did reveal something surprising: Neri was seven weeks pregnant. “It was a shock, since I’d had difficulty conceiving my second child, but my husband and I quickly became excited about adding one more to our family,” she says.

The bleeding was still a mystery, though, so her doctor referred her for a colon exam to rule out additional conditions, including cancer—just to be safe. Neri wasn’t worried. She didn’t have any other symptoms or family history of the disease, and she was young, at the height of her career.