I can see him in his glass-fronted Cambridge office from the foosball table in the light-filled central atrium. He's standing there talking to a visitor and seems to be finishing up. This entire side of the third floor in MIT's new Media Labbuilding is partitioned with glass, and professor Hugh Herr and his colleagues and whatever madness they're up to in their offices and the open, gadget-filled, lower-floor lab are on display. Several people, myself included, are peering down, hoping to see a bit of magic.
Months ago, when I e-mailed Herr to propose writing an article about him, I told him about my rare bone cancer and resulting partial paralysis below the waist as a way to explain my interest in his work. Though I didn't tell him this, I also harbored a secret wish that he could help me. People write to Herr, a 52-year-old engineer and biophysicist, daily about his inspiring example. They've heard him promise an end to disability. They have conditions that medicine can't fix and futures they can't stand to consider. They're wishing for his intervention, wanting of hope. Crossing his threshold, I'm the lucky one. I'm here.
Herr welcomes me into his office, a clean, well-ordered space. There's a round glass table with a laptop on it, a handful of hard office chairs, and a pair of prosthetic legs Herr designed that are arranged like statuary behind us, one in either corner. Above us on a wall looms a large mounted photograph of another pair of prosthetics. These are hand-carved from solid ash, with vines and flowers and six-inch heels. The real-life legs were famously worn by a friend of Herr's, the amputee track-and-field athlete and actress Aimee Mullins.
I have hobbled into Herr's office with a dented $20 stock metal cane on one side and a foot-lifting Blue Rocker brace on the other. (The dent is from my recently firing the cane at the wall.) I had imagined Herr noticing the cane and asking more about my story to see how he could fix me, like he has fixed so many others. The moment I realize that the meeting I'd imagined isn't the meeting we're going to have—I'm here as a reporter, not a friend or patient, after all—I start to stammer. Herr deftly resets the conversation by suggesting we look at his computer.
On it are the PowerPoint slides of his next big project, a breathtaking $100 million, five-year proposal focused on paralysis, depression, amputation, epilepsy, and Parkinson's disease. Herr is still trying to raise the money, and the work will be funneled through his new brainchild, MIT's Center for Extreme Bionics, a team of faculty and researchers assembled in 2014 that he codirects. After exploring various interventions for each condition, Herr and his colleagues will apply to the FDA to conduct human trials. One to-be-explored intervention in the brain might, with the right molecular knobs turned, augment empathy. "If we increase human empathy by 30 percent, would we still have war?" Herr asks. "We may not."
As he continues with the presentation he's been giving to technologists, engineers, health researchers, and potential donors—last December alone, he keynoted in Dubai, Istanbul, and Las Vegas—each revolutionary intervention he mentions yields a boyish grin and a look that affirms: Yes, you heard that right. In a talk I hear him give a few weeks later, he'll dare to characterize incurable paralysis as "low-hanging fruit." In his outspoken willingness to fix everything, even things that some argue should be left alone, he knows how he sounds. "If half the audience is frightened and the other half is intrigued, I know I've done a good job," he says.
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https://www.outsideonline.com/2238401/biomechatronic-man?
