The scientist who built his own bionic legs
After losing his legs to frostbite at 17, Hugh Herr invented his own high-tech prosthetic limbs, writes James Langton
I am not disabled. Because of bionics, I celebrate the fact that I have an amputation HUGH HERR Biophysicist
At 188 centimetres tall, Prof Hugh Herr cuts a commanding figure as he strides across the hotel lobby of Jumeirah at Etihad Towers in Abu Dhabi.
At family gatherings at home in the US, he towers several inches above his brothers in what must be the ultimate act of sibling one-upmanship.
His height, though, is not the main reason Prof Herr turns heads wherever he goes. Dressed in a dark suit, his trousers end just below the knees … as do his legs.
Below is a complex amalgam of metal, sensors, batteries and microcomputers that mean the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor is wearing the ultimate prosthetics.
They allow him to walk and run as if his legs were real flesh and bone. They also mean, within limits, that Prof Herr can make himself as tall as he wants to be.
It is more than 30 years since he lost his legs to frostbite. He was 17 and climbing with a friend in New Hampshire’s White Mountains when a blizzard struck. On the verge of death, he was found by a mountain rescue team. Doctors had no choice but to amputate the legs.
“When my limbs were amputated, society projected on to me this notion that I was broken, crippled, that my life had ended,” Prof Herr recalls. “A sense of pity was projected on to me.”
He was fitted with his first artificial legs in 1982. They were heavy plastic prosthetics that emphasised appearance above function.
“They were rigid, without computation intelligence, without sensing, without muscle-like actuation,” Prof Herr says. “Dead. Inert. Pieces of sticks.”
All of the negatives from those early days have been eliminated in the limbs he wears today.
He has turned the terrible loss he experienced as a teenager into a life’s work in biomechanics, a field that develops robotic systems to augment the human body and rehabilitate those who have suffered similar losses.
It is something he is passionate about. He arrived in the UAE for a flying visit during which he enthralled the audience with a talk at the Ramadan Majlis of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.
The event, Prof Herr later tells
The National, “went very well. It was well-received”.
He has hopes of further discussions at his institute this year, with plans to set up a centre of excellence in the UAE.
Two hours after speaking at the majlis and with a 7am flight to Madrid looming, Prof Herr retains his enthusiasm for his work, despite jet lag. The eagerness is something he developed at an early age.
Most people believed he would never climb again. Instead, he developed prosthetics designed for use on rock faces that could also make him taller or shorter, depending on conditions. It made him a better climber than he had been before – better even than many climbers with real legs.
The legs Prof Herr wears now, ending that evening in a pair of well-polished boots, each feature a computerised ankle and foot that exactly replicates the function of a real limb as he moves. He calls them “wearable robots”.
He makes no attempt to disguise them, wearing rolled-up trousers most of the time, even in public. There has, he says, been a shift in public perception that sees the technology available to amputees as cool. Does this bother him?
“No, I think it’s cool as well,” Prof Herr says.
Society’s attitude “changes very precipitously when the technology becomes adequately powerful to eliminate the disability”, he says.
“Because I walk normally, because I can run, I am not disabled. Because of bionics, I celebrate the fact that I have an amputation.”
He tells a story from this April, when he was flying out of Boston a day after the city’s marathon.
“I was going through Logan airport like this, with my pants rolled up, and three different people came up to me and said: ‘Did you run the marathon?’” Prof Herr says.
“And they had a twinkle in their eyes that suggested not only did they believe that I ran the marathon, but that I won the marathon. Because to them I was a superhero; I was bionic.”
There is another Boston Marathon story, of a young dancer named Adrianne Haslet-Davis who lost a leg when a terrorist detonated a bomb in 2013.
A year later, wearing a bionic leg, she was brought on stage during a Ted talk by Prof Herr, pirouetting effortlessly in front of the audience in a performance that reduced everyone to tears.
He upgrades his own legs every month as the technology improves. He expects the next breakthrough in a new generation of micro-motors, and batteries with charges that will be measured in days rather than hours.
All of this also underlines that this is an expensive business. So how can it be made available to an orphan maimed by bomb in Syria or an Afghan peasant who has lost a leg to a landmine? This is the story of all technology, Prof Herr says, picking up his iPhone.
“The fact that something as technologically advanced as this is appearing all over the world, in many, many communities, is a clear example that humanity is capable of disseminating advanced technology,” he says.
He admits that the technology he has developed is so far available to only 15 per cent of the US market, let alone the developing world, although he is working with insurance companies to expand this in the US.
“But as we scale and more people use it in greater volume, the prices will be reduced, and also by local communities fabricating devices,” Prof Herr says.
His view of the next generation of bionic limbs is equally optimistic.
“I think with funding, we can solve limb amputation in 20 years, meaning we will have the capability of rebuilding a limb out of bionics with the same functionality – perhaps even greater functionality – as the physiological limb.”
Is this a vision that we caught a glimpse of in Star Wars, where Luke Skywalker loses his hand in lightsaber fight with Darth Vader, only to have a perfect bionic replica fitted in the next scene?
“Absolutely. You will feel, you will touch, you will move,” Prof Herr says. It is a concept he calls neurological embodiment.
“[It is] true integration of design technology with the nervous system,” he says. “If you ask a person what is their body, they actually include the designed part.”
It is technology that offers potential beyond amputees.
“If you wake up and your hand is stiff and painful, and we live in a world where technology is sufficient that we can rebuild your arm and hand to be as good as it was when you were 18, the rational decision is to upgrade.”
It will also usher in an age of super-humans – real bionic men and women.
“The Olympics is a celebration of what innate physiologies can do at the extremes of performance,” Prof Herr says. “The Paralympics is a celebration of human-machine interaction, like racing car driving or sailing.
“So if the Paralympics doesn’t limit technology, the running times, the jumping heights will all be superior to the Olympics. When that happens, the Olympics will be absolutely boring, when augmented bodies can jump higher and run faster.
“It will be a fun century for sports. We are going to invent power swimming, bionic climbing, bionic running, and that will lead to all new sports.”