"A boom in sophisticated prostheses has created a most unlikely by-product: envy", wrote Paul Hochman, the gear and tech editor for Today on NBC and host of msn.com's GearDaddy. There are many advantages to having a leg amputated. Pedicure costs drop 50 per cent overnight. A pair of socks lasts twice as long. But Hugh Herr, the director of the Biomechatronics Group at the Michigan Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, goes a step further. "It's actually unfair," he says about amputees' advantages over the able-bodied. "As tech advancements in prosthetics come along, amputees can exploit those improvements. They can get upgrades, he explains. A person with a natural body can't." Herr lost both his legs below the knee in a Mount Washington climbing accident when he was 17, but says that should not inspire pity. Instead, by donning whirring, whispering, shiny supermachines – the robotic ankles that can propel him across the room in 400-watt bursts – Herr has been given: Power. "When the prosthetic technology does not work," Herr says, "and the amputee is limping and he cannot run and he is hurting, then nobody feels threatened, because that person is labeled as ‘cute' and ‘courageous'. He leans forward in his office and crosses his aluminum shins with an audible clink. "But when the technology works, when it can make you stronger or faster than you were, it overnight becomes sexy and powerful and threatening. Overnight." Anybody who hears ‘prosthetic' and thinks ‘peg leg' might wonder about Herr's sunny hubris. The thought that an artificial limb could make anybody stronger or faster, or confer social advantage, is an opinion ripe for skepticism. Wearing one is inconvenient at best. It often hurts. It can break. It is obvious proof of loss. It seems by its very nature to announce a lack of health or vitality, Hochman explained. Yet much of the dissonance in Herr's ‘prosthetics as progress' thesis stems from the fact that for years, prostheses were irredeemably ugly, off-putting, scary. Who would call a disembodied limb a ‘design object' to be lusted after, like an Audi or an iPhone? Who would consider herself better, or more beautiful, than a person without one? "When I first got this job," says Stuart Mead, Chief Executive Officer of Touch Bionics, a prosthetics and robotics firm based in Scotland, "it struck me how depressing it all was. Prosthetics were at the back of the hospital, the downstairs office, the back room. The look of most of these devices was horrible – half-human, half-plastic. This frightening pink colour." Dear Egyptian Mail readers, Your comments and/or contributions are welcome. We promise to publish whatever is deemed publishable at the end of each series of articles. [email protected]
