>>Hugh Herr:
Bionics seeks to advance electromechanical
devices that attach to the body, or are implanted
inside the body, that emulate or even extend
human physiological function.
I first became interested in bionics when
I suffered frostbite to my biological legs
in 1982.
I got frostbite, I was out mountain climbing,
but I wanted to jump back on the horse because
I'm passionate about climbing.
The question was how might this be possible?
So here you see, I hope, first slide, please.
Um ... I hope that I have the right clicker.
So what I -- what I did in fact, while this
is teeing up, I hope, is -- there we go.
Wonderful.
One more time.
One more time.
Not yet.
If someone could progress the slide, that
would be fantastic.
So what I did is I took a -- an approach to
getting back to the vertical world of just
designing lots and lots of different gadgets.
My closets are just filled with legs.
I had some feet that would wedge into rock
fissures where the human foot cannot even
get into.
I have feet that can penetrate ice and a vertical
ice wall.
And I could, you know, with these feet I could
climb thousands of feet and never experience
calf fatigue like my poor colleagues with
biological legs.
[ Laughter ]
>>Hugh Herr: It's really sad.
So through this technological advancement,
I was actually able to climb better with artificial
limbs than I achieved with normal biological
limbs.
In fact, I was the first person in history
to go back to my chosen sport, after losing
a major part of my body.
There we go.
Great.
Let's go forward now.
So there you see the spiked foot.
So I was the first person to go back to elite
levels in a sport after losing a major part
of my body and naturally my climbing colleagues,
some of them, got really peeved and competitive
with me.
[ Laughter ]
>>Hugh Herr: One person actually said, "I'm
going to cut my legs off."
[ Laughter ]
>>Hugh Herr: Well, turns out he never did
amputate his legs.
In fact, maybe he was a little uncertain about
his claims of cheating.
So there's another person in recent times
that has been accused of cheating, you may
have heard of this guy, Oscar Pistorius, he
was born in South Africa without fibula bones.
His family had to make the very difficult
decision to allow doctors to amputate their
10-month-old baby boy's legs for a dream of
a better life using prostheses.
Now, as many of you know, Oscar Pistorius
was banned for the Beijing Olympics.
The IWF claimed, the governing body claimed
that his Cheetah prosthesis actually gave
him an unfair competitive advantage in sprinting.
And this naturally -- this provocative claim
got the attention of the legal and scientific
communities of the world.
It was appealed to a higher court, the court
of arbitration for sport.
I was an expert witness, along with my colleague
Roger Kram.
Now, the science behind these Cheetah prostheses
is very immature.
There's only about five papers, peer-reviewed
papers on the topic.
Five, not hundreds, not thousands.
There's major portions of the race that have
never been studied.
The acceleration portion of the race, there's
not a single data point published in a peer
review journal.
Running around a curve with these Cheetah
prostheses, never studied.
Until there's a comprehensive, global, generally
accepted scientific understanding of whether
it's an advantage to run with these things,
it's neutral effect or a disadvantage, we
can't discriminate against people.
It was the -- the agreement among all of the
arbitrators in this hearing that they should
let Oscar run, that there's insufficient evidence
to support an overall advantage in the 400-meter
sprint race.
So that's just what happened.
Last summer in the Olympics, Oscar ran, making
history.
>>Hugh Herr: Extraordinary, huh?
So the case of Pistorius puts forth a critical
dilemma.
Clearly we should architect a society without
discrimination, a society of inclusion.
Whether you have colored skin or your sex
or your religion, your creed or your body
type in the case of Pistorius, we should allow
people to participate in events such as the
Olympics, if a person qualifies athletically.
But in this age where prosthetic technology
is accelerating, it's getting better and better
we have to ensure fairness of sport.
The solution to this dilemma is more technology,
better technology, not less technology.
Imagine a future in which we had the capability
of designing and fabricating a bionic limb
that closely emulates the biological counterpart.
In that future that limb would be the Olympic-sanctioned
limb because after all the Olympics is a celebration
of biologically derived performance limits,
but the Paralympics has no such constraint.
The Paralympics is a celebration of the human
machine performance limits that will soon,
I predict, exceed that capability of what
normal biological bodies can achieve.
I predict there will be a day in this century
where the jumping heights and running times
within the Paralympics all exceed those in
the Olympics.
So perhaps in the Olympics of 2050 spectators
will be completely bored by watching dull,
normal biological bodies perform and they'll
all rush to the Paralympics to see this extraordinary
might of human machine capability.
So Pistorius is a watershed individual because
he's forcing us to ask critical questions
about what it means to be human.
Should we view Oscar's legs as separate devices
from his body or should we view them as part
of his body?
If there's a medical device that attaches
to the body or is implanted inside the body,
should we view that device as foreign or separate
or unnatural or should we view it as part
of the body just like the heart is part of
the body?
As we march into this century, the mergence
of machines with our bodies and minds will
become extraordinarily intimate.
We will experience a technological embodiment.
And through that technological embodiment
our capacity to differentiate between our
biological bodies and our technological cells
will diminish.
Critical to such a technological embodiment
is the advances of what I call extreme interfaces
between the human body and devices.
Today I want to talk about two extreme interfaces,
dynamic and electrical, and then I'll give
two examples of how even today bionic technology
is affecting people.
So starting off, extreme interface dynamic.
How can we build a bionic limb that embedded
in it has what it means to be human in terms
of how we move?
How can we do that?
Years ago in collaboration with engineer Robert
Dennis we built a hybrid robot that was powered
by living muscle tissue and under microprocessor
control we stimulated the muscles to elicit
a movement of the tail.
We were so inspired by the resulting natural
dynamics of this robot.
But it's hard to use living muscle tissue.
It's hard to keep it alive.
So years later we asked can we really do the
science and fundamentally understand how humans
work and then embed that intelligence into
synthetic structures?
So synthetic structures will move as if they're
made of flesh and bone.
So here we've mathematically modeled the muscles
and tendons and how the muscles are controlled
neurally and we embed that into devices.
So I'm wearing bionic limbs.
This limb has several computers, sensors.
Its structure is biomedic.
It has muscle-like actuation.
There's a spring in there that represents
the Achilles' spring and it's controlled in
a reflexive manner.
We've captured the essence of how the calf
muscle, your calf muscle is controlled by
the spinal cord.
So when I walk slowly it's spring-like as
it should be, as the biological ankle is,
but as I speed it up gives me more and more
energy, just as an emergent behavior.
And I can do things now that I never could
before like play tennis.
I'm no longer disabled with bionics.
Another extreme interface --
[ Applause ]
>>Hugh Herr: Thank you.
Another extreme interface is electrical.
So you see in this image, T is a muscle, V
is a nerve, and you see sprouting coming out
of the nerve and attaching to the muscle.
This tissue engineering strategy is now being
used by researchers to try to build an interface
with a nerve that's been cut or transected.
So you see cells that have been put in, skin
cells and muscle cells, and that coaxes the
nerve to grow again attached to the cells.
We can then put electrodes in the muscle cell
which amplifies the nerve signal, the descending
signal, and we can take sensory information
from the bionic limb and stimulate through
the cutaneous axons and close the loop between
the human and the machine.
One day when this is fully advanced, probably
two decades from now, it will enable amputees
to not only walk across sand, but to feel
sand against the prosthetic foot.
Other researchers are working on an implant
that goes into residual muscles that measure
the electrical pulse of the muscle and sending
it out wirelessly to machines, like these
bionic limbs.
Recently in my lab we hooked my calf muscle
to these bionic limbs so I could fire my muscle
that was measured and then that directly controlled
the bionic limb.
When I walked down steps I didn't fire my
calf muscle.
Why?
Because I didn't want that power as I was
walking down steps.
When I was walking up steps, however, I fired
my calf muscle and it powered me up the steps.
I became very emotional.
I felt a deep connectedness to the bionic
limb that I had never felt before.
It was the first time that I wasn't in the
back seat of the car, I was in the front seat,
my hands were on the steering wheel and I
was driving.
I thought the descending signal went down
and it affected bionic limb.
I felt a deep connectedness.
Being bionic means having the experience of
technological embodiment.
These are not tools to me like a hammer is
a tool.
These are part of my body.
They have defined my physicality, they have
extended myself, my identity.
When I walk they sense my postures and reflect
their posture.
When I push on them they push back.
When I move they store energy and catapult
me forward.
It's a symbolic relationship between flesh
and machine extending well beyond the digital
age in terms of connectedness and embodiment
between humans and machines.
I would like to introduce you to two individuals,
Ed Lostowski.
Ed was a Vietnam vet and this is his story
as told by CNN after being fit with a bionic
limb.
[ Video ]
>>> I broke my femur, severed my artery.
>>Hugh Herr: 39 reconstruction operations.
[ Video ]
>>> I feel more like a human being.
Complete.
I can watch people in the eyes.
I walk down the street instead of watching
the ground and where I'm stepping.
It's being a normal person.
>>Hugh Herr: I'll conclude my talk with another
story.
Stephen Hendrick.
Stephen is also a Vietnam vet and you are
about to see this video where he becomes emotional
after receiving a bionic limb for the first
time.
This underscores the extraordinary impact
technological embodiment will have on the
individual.
We're getting a glimpse now of a new age where
we will carefully integrate technology with
our very nature.
An age in which you can't differentiate from
our biology and the device.
An age in which you can't differentiate between
what is human and not human and what is nature
and what is not nature.
It will be completely blurred, the boundaries.
So I finish with Stephen's video.
[ Video ]
>>> How was that?
Good.
[ Video ]
>>Hugh Herr: Thank you.
[ Applause ]
