Walking on sunshine

After climber Hugh Herr lost his legs, he created new limbs that helped him move mountains

When Hugh Herr lost both of his legs — from just below the knees on down — in a rock-climbing accident at age 17, he feared he’d never walk again.

Thirty-five years later, he’s able to walk, run, dance, swim and, yes, climb mountains — and he has multiple sets of customized “legs” to make it possible.

Herr heads the biomechatronics group at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass., designing such futuristic wearables as exoskeleton suits that feed energy into healthy limbs and computerdriven legs for fellow amputees.

The lab’s innovations have changed his life as well as the lives of many others. In fact, author Adam Piore is inclined to think Herr, along with a handful of other forward-thinkers from around the world, could bring an end to disability as we know it today.

“The amazing thing I found is that we finally have the power to reverse-engineer how humans work,” Piore told The Post. “Computers and medical technology have caught up to the point that we can look at things on the molecular level and hack the body.”

In his new book “The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human” (Ecco, out Tuesday), Piore explores things that, he admitted, “seem too implausible to be real.”

There’s the blind woman who learned to see with her ears, experimental science that can regrow fingertips, and even early stages of technology for deaf-mutes to communicate through a form of telepathy.

At the forefront of this movement is Herr, who was driven to get a masters in engineering from MIT and a PhD in biophysics from Harvard after his accident. Now, he proudly wears the self-designed high-tech prostheses. “Hugh likes to dress in a tuxedo [with] pants cut off at the knees, so he can show off his prosthetic legs,” Piore said. Herr refers to his mechanical limbs — which help him out-climb people with flesh-and-blood body parts — as “wearable robots.”

“Someday soon, these kinds of devices will be no more unusual than a pair of glasses,” he says in “The Body Builders.”

Here is an up-close and detailed look at Herr’s amazing, self-designed prosthetic legs — dubbed EmPOWER.