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HEALTH SCIENCES & TECHNOLOGYHST Symposium Shows Look, Feel of Biotech FutureLabs often promise hands-on experience, but the term falls short when applied to Hugh Herr's demonstration of the prosthetic Otto Bock C-Leg at the recent Health Sciences and Technology symposium at HMS. Judging by the participants' faces as Herr, who lost both legs below the knee in a mountain-climbing accident, strode around in the prosthesis that he and colleagues invented, the workshop was both inspiring and stirring.
"If we can apply greater energy flow and control it intelligently, the physically disabled person will really benefit," said Hugh Herr (right). He demonstrates the Otto Bock C-Leg at the Health Sciences and Technology symposium. (Photo by Liza Green, HMS Media Services) One of the lessons that emerged from the symposium, "Experiencing the Frontiers of Biomedical Technology," held on March 10 and 11, is that this technocentric Harvard-MIT division is driven by a passion to help patients and that its work is central to their needs. Giving people a feel for HST's mission was part of the more general symposium goal to help people understand how biotechnological advances actually occur. "There is a method, a paradigm that cannot be taught in a classroom or read in a book--it needs to be taught by doing," said Elazar Edelman, HMS associate professor of medicine at MIT and Brigham and Women's Hospital. "You cannot give people an appreciation for technology without doing technology." Working on the model of the high school physics class, Edelman had the idea to launch a series of symposia in which people could first see how scientists approach biomedical problems, and then try it for themselves. The first symposium was held last year. This year's workshop by Herr, HMS instructor in physical medicine and rehabilitation at MIT, was part of a larger session on "The Human Hybrid: Human-Machine Systems." Symposium attendees, who included venture capitalists, CEOs, lawyers, and graduate students, also had the opportunity to attend sessions on drug delivery systems, tissue engineering, hybrid biological microdevices, and informatics--topics that, according to Edelman, are "on the tips of people's tongues." What made Herr's leg demonstration even more powerful was the recognition, driven home earlier in the session by Steve Massaquoi, HMS instructor in neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, that lifelike mechanical devices begin as two-dimensional conceptual models. Massaquoi, whose own interest is in neuromuscular prosthetic devices--artificial cochleas, retinas, and vestibular systems, as well as brain stimulation for people with movement disorders--had students work on a simple computer model for understanding how the brain controls their own arm movements. Herr, who worked on the Otto Bock C-Leg, particularly the knee joint, for five years, also began with simpler models and worked his way up to robots. "Making robots work sometimes shows us how we work," he said. "If we can build a robotic leg, we might build a prosthetic leg." The knee owes its lifelike motion to microprocessors that monitor and anticipate the user's actual movements. But it is a passive device. Herr hopes eventually to power the knee not with mechanical motors but instead with muscle. He has already developed a tiny fishlike robot that swims by means of impulses generated by an attached slice of lab-grown muscle. "One can imagine a future in which artificial appendages may be hybrid or cyborg--though I hate to use that word--devices," Herr said. "This may sound like science fiction, but everything is here today to do what I am describing." --Misia Landau |
