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Kevin Warwick is Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading and is famous around the world for becoming the world's first Cyborg.

This even inspired The X Files' Gillian Anderson to describe him as 'Britain's leading prophet of the robot age'.

A befuddled Henry Kelly finds out that what he previously could only comprehend as Jules Verne-style  fanciful science fiction is actually science 'fact'. And that these facts can have colossal positive implications for people suffering from paralysis and other afflictions.

Listen to the full interview here or read extracts below:

What work have you been doing? I heard that at one stage you connected your own body to the Internet?

"As far as I'm aware I'm still the only person to have had my nervous system actually plugged live into the Internet by directional neural brain signals."

What did you have to do to your own body to do that?

"Up in Oxford at the John Radcliffe hospital I had an implant put into my nervous system on my arm into  the median nerves - the main bunch of nerves from your brain to your hand.

When we got back to the lab at the Cybernetics department at Reading University we linked me into the computer."

How did you do that?

"Either literally plug me in through a simple interface unit or I had this quite funky radio transmitter receiver unit - it looked a bit 'Star Trekky' - that sent radio signals from my nervous system into the computer and back the other way."

This really is Jules Verne country here. What was being transmitted and was an ordinary member of the human race able to go on and do www.kevin.warwick.reading. university.com...!

"If I move my hand my brain signals brought about that hand movement.

"These electrical signals that go down your nervous system, we sent them off to the computer to do things like move a robot hand around or for example I drove a wheel chair directly from my brain signals.

"So part of what we were doing was asking: could somebody who was paralysed for example or have a spinal injury use this type of implant in their brain to control things around them?"

So all a person would have to do is sit in a wheelchair, paralysed, and 'think'?

"Think about 'moving' in actual fact. The signals don't get through to their arms or legs because of their paralysis - but if they had an implant like this then those signals would be used to drive them around.

"To all intents and purposes the technology is there for a paralysed individual to drive themselves around in a car."