Tomorrowland (4 page)

6.

After completing work on the Rheo, Herr set his sights on a much more ambitious challenge: to create an artificial ankle that perfectly mimicked the fluidity of the normal human gait. A lot was at stake. Most amputees walk with a limp. Over time, even the smallest deviations in motion can compound into enormous problems. The constant chafing destroys flesh, nerve, and bone, often requiring surgeries to repair.

Around 2002, Herr went to work on a radically new bionic body part. It would be far smarter than anything ever designed. The Rheo’s one computer became five in the new device. He also added a battery pack, more sensors, and Bluetooth. Robotics were used to replicate the action of the foot, Achilles tendon, and calf muscle — creating what Herr calls “powered plantar flexion.”

Herr also started rethinking the design. As a climber, especially after his accident, Herr had a flamboyant style. In a sport
then dominated by earth tones, he favored dyed red hair, dangling feather earrings, and neon blue tights. Add to that his customized climbing prosthetics — essentially daggers protruding from his legs — and the effect was startling. Herr wanted something similar from his prosthetics. “People kept making devices that were ugly, that screamed disabled. I wanted to make devices that were sexy and scary and powerful, man-machine hybrids that replace the notion of disabled with the healthy reverence we feel for the Terminator.”

In 2005 word started leaking out that Hugh Herr was building the world’s first bionic ankle. By then, Rozelle was back from his second tour in Iraq, living in Washington, D.C., and helping Walter Reed build a better center for amputees. He definitely heard about Herr’s work. “Cyborg limb replacement,” he says. “Oh yeah, I knew all about Herr’s dream. We all did.”

The following year, in June 2006, at a No Limits Foundation event in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, Rozelle met Herr for the first time. They hit it off, sitting poolside, drinking beer. “I gave him a rash of shit about progress on the ankle,” recounts Rozelle. “I wanted one. He kept saying it wasn’t ready.”

Fabricating a bionic body part for a guy like Rozelle was no small matter. Between 2005 and 2007, mostly wearing a carbon-fiber running leg that operated at a 30 percent energy deficit, Rozelle finished more than a dozen sprint- and Olympic-distance triathlons, five marathons, seven half-Ironman events, and his first full-scale Ironman triathlon (2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and 26.2-mile run) with a time was fast enough to qualify for the world championships in Kona, Hawaii. There, Rozelle covered the fabled Ironman course in 12 hours and 46 minutes. He saluted as he crossed the finish line, placing in the bottom third of the field but still ahead of dozens of able-bodied competitors. “It’s pretty strange to see guys with two legs looking at me with jealousy,” says Rozelle, “but that’s what happened.”

Meanwhile, with all the wounded soldiers returning from
battle, the military continued to fund bionic research. In 2006, DARPA contracted inventor Dean Kamen, who specializes in revolutionary medical devices, to develop a new kind of arm.

As Kamen put it, “DARPA wanted me to build an arm-hand combo that could pick up a grape without breaking it, which requires very fine haptic sensing; lift a raisin without dropping it, which requires fine motor control and wrist, elbow, and shoulder flexibility; be entirely self-contained, including the power supply; weigh less than nine pounds; and fit on a 50th-percentile female frame, 32 inches from the long finger to the shoulder. And even better, I had to finish the job in two years. So, you know, I told them they were completely nuts.”

But Kamen’s conscience got the better of him, and he took the job. He completed the beta version right on schedule, naming the device the Luke Arm after that fabled
Star Wars
amputee, Luke Skywalker. (The Luke Arm is now undergoing clinical trials.)

“It was an exciting time,” says Rozelle. “There was finally some hope for real progress.”

7.

In 2007, Herr finished the beta version of the BiOM, as his bionic ankle is now known. Five computers and twelve sensors give the BiOM sufficient intelligence to read and react to differences in terrain and slope — meaning it’s the first robotic foot that can be used to walk uphill. Unlike traditional prosthetic devices, to which a person must adapt his walking style, the BiOM gathers gait data to attune itself to the wearer. This is what the Bluetooth is for: The world’s first true bionic limb is programmable by means of an Android phone.

Time
named the BiOM one of the best inventions of 2007. Other accolades followed, but there was significantly more work to be done before the device was ready for the general public. “The dominant challenge was durability,” says Herr. “I was building
a prosthetic leg. It’s a transportation device. It can’t fail. But if it’s going to last five years, then it has to be capable of taking six million steps — because that’s how many the average person takes in that period. Look, there’s nothing like the human body. There are versions that can walk without failure for eighty years. I was trying for just five — but this was not a trivial problem in robotics.”

By late 2010 Herr felt the BiOM was durable enough for human trials. Because the military was funding much of the work, soldiers were the obvious crash-test dummies. Plus, Rozelle had challenged Herr to build a device for guys like him — so who better to try it out?

In January 2011 he got his shot. Rozelle became the world’s second official bionic man (one other soldier had been fitted before him). As soon as the BiOM was attached, Rozelle went in search of the toughest terrain he could find. “The prosthetists were so happy,” he says. “They were used to seeing guys just walk up and down the hallway. I went outside and found a hill to walk up and down at an angle. It was pretty amazing. I immediately felt I had my real foot back.”

Over the next year, Rozelle and a couple dozen other veteran amputees put the BiOM through its paces. “It was an incredible process,” recalls Tim McCarthy, the CEO of iWalk, the company that builds the BiOM. “Over the past twenty years I’ve introduced dozens of new products — none like this. People put on the BiOM and burst into tears.” Herr had seen it too: “Grizzled truck drivers, guys who haven’t shed a tear in twenty years, just sobbing.”

But the biggest deal — what many think the BiOM’s real legacy will be — is a massive reduction in health care costs. With less pain and exhaustion, amputees don’t stop moving around. They lose weight (tens of pounds), reduce their pain meds (some by up to two-thirds), and return to work (for the first time in years). The real proof is that the device costs about $60,000, yet workers’ compensation agents are requesting it, feeling that the savings in medical costs later will more than cover the high price tag. “Beyond
changing lives,” says McCarthy, “this has a huge economic benefit. Over time, it’s going to save millions of dollars.”

Herr, meanwhile, isn’t close to being done. He’s beginning to work on an above-the-knee version of the BiOM and is finishing work on the world’s first true bionic exoskeleton, a revolutionary kind of knee brace for able-bodied people that he hopes will be commercially available by 2015. “Right now,” he says, “one of the worst parts of growing old is losing the ability to move around. So imagine taking the bionics in the BiOM and turning it into a strap-on device, something that can restore strength and function to the elderly or anyone with a bum knee.”

Over the past thirty years, Hugh Herr became the first disabled athlete to outperform able-bodied ones at an expert level. He then helped bring prosthetics into the modern age; next he became the first to forge ahead into the bionic era. Already he has bettered thousands of lives. In light of all this, the assumption might be that his debt to Albert Dow — the rescuer who perished so many years ago on Mount Washington — would be paid. But Herr would disagree.

“If you ask me if I’ve done great things in my life, well, I’m very self-critical, so the answer is, ‘Not yet,’ ” he says. “But that’s almost beside the point. Has that debt been paid? I would say no, never. That debt can never be repaid.”

8.

On a rainy day in February 2012, David Rozelle and a couple of friends approach the curb of a busy three-lane street in Denver. Rozelle, wearing his BiOM, is lost in conversation, not really thinking about what he’s doing. There’s a momentary break in traffic, and he decides to make a run for it. Leaving his friends behind, he bounces off the curb and darts across the first lane, freezes midstride to let an oncoming car pass, then dashes across the next lane, pausing to make sure he’s still clear, and across the
final lane, even jumping over a puddle as he hops back onto the sidewalk. Rozelle didn’t even realize that he’d jaywalked until it was pointed out later.

Herr smiles when he hears this story. “Everything I’ve done has been to copy nature. That’s the true definition of bionics — using technology for the emulation or extension of natural biological function. And we humans are spinal animals. To hear that David could pull off this kind of ballet without thinking about it — that’s exactly a spinal animal phenomenon. It worked. Somehow we captured lightning in a bottle.”

“Yeah,” says Rozelle, “but the mad scientists who designed the jet pack, they’re never remembered. The crazy son of a bitch who flew it? He’ll be celebrated forever.”

The Genius Who Sticks Around Forever

THE SCIENCE OF MIND UPLOADING

In his novel
Terra Nostra
, author Carlos Fuentes writes: “Incredible the first animal that dreamed of another animal.” Quite an idea, right? Both the origin story for dreaming and the initial step up the ladder that scientists describe with the phrase “theory of mind”: our ability to attribute mental states — beliefs, intents, desires — to oneself and others. It is, without question, an extraordinary ability.

Now consider the opposite end of the spectrum, the farthest rung up the theory-of-mind ladder: the ability to share the mind of another. This is the frontier known as mind uploading, and it is a truly wild frontier. In the previous chapter, we explored using technology to battle back decrepitude. In this chapter, we’re using technology to battle death itself. Where will this lead? A place we’ve never ever been before. Descartes told us: “I think, therefore I am.” But what happens when someone else thinks you? Seriously, who are you now?

1.

They say that wisdom accumulates, that perhaps it is not subject to the same tick-tock corrosion that renders bones frail and hair thin. They say it is our one real treasure, this thing to be passed on, generation to generation, to grant us a stay against a dark, dim future. And so we have Greek lectures transcribed by diligent pupils, sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, a collection of Gertrude Stein’s writings, the fireside scratch of a chatty F.D.R., a cinematic tour of Stephen Hawking’s universe, and, of course, Timothy Leary’s Internet broadcast of his last days on earth.

But what we don’t have is the people themselves; we don’t have their consciousness, and that, many feel, is the real loss. And, if you believe the believers, that is about to change.

They’re calling it the Soul Catcher, a pet name really, as if the soul were something that could be caught like a fish. It’s the brainchild of Dr. Peter Cochrane, chief technical officer for British Telecommunications: a micromemory chip implanted in the human brain, implanted for the whole of a lifetime, meant to record the whole of that lifetime.

As future-forward as this chip may sound, the first step — integrating it with the body — already shows great promise. And has for some time. Back in the late 1990s, researchers at Stanford University found a way to splice nerves and, using a chip, grow them back together. A few years later, in a Georgia hospital, electrodes were successfully embedded in the brain of a completely paralyzed man, translating thoughts into cursor movement. This was also when we learned that, unlike the rest of the body, which tends to reject foreign implants, the nervous system is incorporative — meaning that the act of placing a chunk of metal
into the brain is more like rewiring a light switch than reinventing the wheel.

The technical name for this first step is “brain-computer interface,” or BCI. There are now hundreds of researchers pioneering BCI science, with the aforementioned efforts being merely the initial drops in what has since become a much larger ocean. Many of them share Cochrane’s interest in memory. Theodore Berger, for example, a neural engineer at the University of Southern California, is working on an artificial hippocampus, one of the core neuronal structures implicated in this process. Berger’s device records the electrical activity that arises whenever we encode short-term memories — for example, learning to play scales — then translates them into digital signals. These signals are sent to a computer, transformed once again, and then re-fed into the brain, where they’re then stored as long-term memories. While the device is far from done, Berger has run successful tests with monkeys and rats and is now working with humans.

Cochrane also has to invent new gear to pioneer the Soul Catcher, but it’s based on older gizmos. By using variations of existing technologies — the silicon retina, artificial cochlea, artificial tongue — scientists have successfully documented the activity of each of the five senses. Each time we have a sensory experience, a chemical reaction is triggered in the brain, which we interpret as emotion. Thus Cochrane’s next goal — which he thinks will take about five years to achieve — is the creation of microneurochemical sensors capable of measuring, tracking, and recording these reactions, eventually creating a record of a lifetime’s worth of experience and feeling.

Now that would be quite a record.

Throughout the typical seventy-year human life span, the brain processes something akin to 50 terabytes of memory, a data accumulation equivalent to millions of books. In about ten years, Cochrane says, computers will be so advanced that they will be capable of reassembling millions of bits of recorded experience into a facsimile of individual perspective. Think, for instance, of
a chip that could record everything that a person ever ate — a lifetime of fast food and gourmet snacks and all the rest. Now add to that a record of the chemical reactions set in motion by eating these meals. A computer powerful enough to synthesize this data could end up with a pretty good idea of that person’s taste. Multiply this by all sensory experiences, and you have a machine capable of reproducing all experience, over and over again. Certainly, it’s not quite immortality, but it is, most definitely, as the saying now goes: “an interim solution.”