Tomorrowland (3 page)

When nightfall came and they hadn’t returned, a search-and-rescue effort was mounted. Over the next three days dozens of people fanned out over Mount Washington. Some went on foot,
others by snowmobile. Helicopters canvassed the area. It was a brutal effort. An avalanche caught two members of the North Conway Mountain Rescue Service, Michael Hartrick and Albert Dow. Hartrick walked away from the incident. Dow wasn’t so lucky. The slide swept him into a tree: his back snapped, his chest crushed, his death nearly instantaneous. He was twenty-eight years old.

Herr and Batzer, meanwhile, were still lost in the wilderness.

They spent three long days wandering through the Great Gulf, three longer nights huddled in prayer. The temperatures stayed below freezing. In the beginning, they hugged each other for warmth. Later, when they could no longer stand it, they let go of their embrace, wanting the cold, the frozen relief of a quicker death.

On the fourth day, with a turn of fortune that in other times would have been called divine providence, a snowshoer found them hidden beneath a boulder, barely alive. They were medevaced to a hospital that specialized in frostbite and hypothermia, then transferred farther afield. But the gangrene was too severe. Two weeks later, Batzer’s doctor amputated his right thumb and four fingers down to the first joint; three days after that they came back and took his left foot and the toes from his right. Herr was in worse shape. Both his feet were black, the skin ragged, his toes fused together. In just over a month’s time, he had seven surgeries. None did much good. His feet could not be saved. For his last surgery, doctors performed a pair of standard below-knee amputations — six inches below the knee, to be exact, long considered the right length for plugging stumps into prosthetics.

Herr woke from surgery screaming — his physical pain otherworldly, his psychological torment even worse. He had been an awkward child, shy, not very good at school; his self-worth, his self-image, his entire being was tied to stone. Herr needed rock climbing like most people need air.

Yet, while Herr’s fear of never climbing again was overwhelming, even worse was his remorse over Albert Dow’s death. Mountaineers
live by a strict code: Never endanger another’s life. Herr had violated this rule. The guilt was crushing.

3.

The last time an American soldier with injuries as extensive as David Rozelle’s returned to active combat duty was during the Civil War. But the army was Rozelle’s life.

He was born in Dallas in 1972 and grew up as the child of patriots. His father served with the Air Force, raising him on stories of duty, honor, and the importance of American freedom. But as with so many other Americans, it wasn’t only these values that drove Rozelle into the military — it was also the need for a paycheck.

Rozelle went to Davidson College in North Carolina on a football scholarship. Unfortunately, he was also working three jobs and barely making ends meet. A good friend, meanwhile, was in ROTC and having no such trouble. So Rozelle went to talk to the recruiter, who sent him to Fort Benning’s Airborne School. “This guy knew his job,” says Rozelle. “Sending a nineteen-year-old to go jump out of airplanes? Of course I fell in love with the army.”

After graduation, Rozelle went to Fort Knox to train as a tank commander, spent the early years of his career working at Fort Hood, and saw his first operational deployment in 1999, in Kuwait. Afterward, it was on to Korea for top-secret war planning and a second life playing semipro rugby. Finally, he made it back home to a dream job at Fort Carson in Colorado, close to the mountains and the skiing he so loved.

On 9/11 that dream ended. Rozelle reported for duty. And then, after more than a decade in the military, he killed his first man. “As a Christian,” he says, “killing went against everything I believed. But this was war and it was either him or me. It was like living a nightmare.”

There would be other nightmares. Morphine is just about the only workable shield against the pain of amputation, but opiate addiction is a frequent side effect. After eight excruciating surgeries, a quarantine at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and phantom pains as severe as those he experienced when he’d first been blown up, Rozelle kicked a morphine habit cold turkey. Now that was a fucking nightmare.

He replaced the habit with another: physical therapy. Rozelle had deployed for Iraq weighing 220. Now he was down to 175. The mirror was not his friend. He wanted his body back, his life back. His wife was about to give birth to their first child; he needed to set an example. Plus, President Bush had told Rozelle that he could come down to the Crawford ranch for a run whenever he was ready.

Rozelle decided to get ready. Half an hour after being fitted with his first pair of prosthetics, with his stumps still raw, Rozelle was outside: running, jumping, doing push-ups. Still, reality was settling in. “Ever since my injury, I was waiting for this magic prosthesis that would make me feel healed. I was ready to be healed. But then I got my first leg and realized how wrong I had been. There was no quick fix. The prosthesis sucked. I had lost my foot and was going to be like this forever.”

And herein lies the rub. While prosthetic devices are among mankind’s earliest inventions (they date back to Egypt circa 1069 BCE), progress has been exceedingly slow. “At the time I got hurt,” says Rozelle, “there was no major difference between the prosthetic limb I was using and the ones soldiers got coming back from Vietnam.”

All this, though, was starting to change. “For the first time in history,” says Rozelle, smiling and quoting the opening monologue of
The Six Million Dollar Man
, “we can rebuild him. We have the technology.”

And the reason we can rebuild him?

There are several. One is the more than 1,400 men and women who have lost limbs in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: a sad
parade that reinvigorated our national conscience and sent research dollars flooding back into the field. Additionally, over the past decade, revolutionary breakthroughs in a bevy of whizbang technologies — robotics, nanotechnology, tissue engineering, machine-brain interfaces, to name but a few — have begun leaking into the medical arts. But money and technology alone did not close this gap. To understand how this really came together, you need to start some twenty-one years ago, with a seventeen-year-old boy named Hugh Herr and his very big debt to pay.

4.

Ten days after surgery, Herr couldn’t wait any longer: He had to know if he could climb. Herr began sneaking out of his hospital bed, dragging himself over to the window, trying to do pull-ups on the ledge. A letter arrived from President Reagan. “I know you are a young man with a very brave heart,” it read. The president didn’t know the half of it.

Five weeks after surgery, Herr got his first set of legs. Called pylons, they were made of plaster and attached by straps above the knee. The first two times Herr left the hospital, his doctors refused to let him take the pylons along — for fear he would try to climb. The third time, less than ten weeks after Herr had lost his legs, his brother and frequent climbing partner, Tony, drove him to a Pennsylvania crag called Safe Harbor.

Herr had come to attempt a 60-foot intermediate route that, before the accident, he could have done blindfolded. Maybe he could do so again, but first he had to make it up the long hikers’ trail that led to the bottom of the cliff. Herr stumbled along on his canes. Then his brother carried him piggyback. When the ground steepened further, Herr got down on all fours and dragged himself up the path.

At the base of the climb, Tony scampered off to set a top rope,
leaving Herr alone at the bottom, staring upward. Here, at last, was the stone test he was desperate to pass. He had no idea what would happen next; he only knew that his whole life depended on it.

Herr made his first move. One good hold led to another and then another, and his legs didn’t cause much trouble. He rose higher. Getting to that climb had kicked his ass, but as soon as he made his initial moves, he came to a startling realization: He could climb better than he could walk.

It was the first of a series of startling revelations. Herr still had to finish his senior year of high school. He spent much of that time climbing, much of it working in a machine shop at school — building his own prosthetic legs. Lifelike aesthetics play a role in normal prosthetics, but Herr had a different goal in mind. “I realized that I didn’t need human feet,” he says. “I needed climbing tools. If I could build the right kind of appendage, one customized for a vertical world, I could erase my disability with technology.”

Herr built a huge assortment of vertically customized prosthetics: climbing legs with crampons for feet, short legs for certain routes, longer ones for others. One early masterpiece was a pair of bladed, beveled feet, narrow at the toe, wider at the heel, perfect for fitting into cracks.

With these tools, Herr earned himself a new nickname: Mechanical Boy. It wasn’t long before he was climbing at his previous level. Pretty soon, he was better than before. In August 1983, in conjunction with a trio of other professional climbers, Herr helped establish one of America’s first legitimate 5.13+ climbs — there’s no easy translation, but 5.13+ essentially means “very, very expert,” or what was then among the toughest grades anyone had yet climbed — on homemade prosthetic limbs.

In the history of the world, no other disabled athlete had ever performed at this level. Herr’s success on the rock was merely a proof of concept: “It’s where I learned that people aren’t disabled,” he says. “Technology is disabled.” So Herr decided to improve
the technology, to devote his life to building better bionic limbs. He had finally figured out a way to pay his debt.

“Climbing taught me to focus,” recounts Herr, “to distill problems down to critical components and stick with them until they were solved. So while I wasn’t the brightest student, I had a good toolbox and could learn hard subjects.”

He excelled at physics at Millersville University in Pennsylvania and displayed genius as an inventor, earning his first patent — for a much more comfortable limb-socket interface built around inflatable bladders — before the end of his senior year. He went on to earn a master’s in mechanical engineering from MIT and a doctorate in biophysics from Harvard. Somewhere in between, he stumbled upon the puzzle that would occupy his next fifteen years: human motion.

“Human motion doesn’t seem like it should be a puzzle,” says Herr. “We’ve been studying it for a very long time, but it’s really a black hole. We can’t even give sophisticated answers to simple questions. What does a muscle do? Well, we’re not exactly sure.”

First as a graduate student and later, in his current role as head of the biomechatronics research group at MIT’s Media Lab, Herr decided the best approach was to mimic nature’s designs. He started with “embodied intelligence.” Amputees had been making do with dumb prosthetics, but our natural limbs are incredibly smart. When your leg moves, all your nervous system needs to do is increase or decrease muscle stiffness, because every other decision is made automatically by the limb’s internal design. Herr decided it was time to apply similar principles to prosthetics.

In the late 1990s he began working on a smarter knee. He packed it with microsensors capable of measuring joint angle and load at a rate of a thousand times per second. The data were then fed into a computer chip that regulated a magnetic field that impacted iron particles floating in an oil mixture surrounding the knee joint. The result was the world’s first artificially intelligent prosthetic — a knee able to adjust dampening on the fly.
Even better, the knee could learn, so performance improved over time.

The prosthesis was brought to market as the Rheo Knee by the Icelandic firm Ossur.
Time
named it one of 2004’s best inventions, and
Fortune
called it one of the best products of the year. “Using artificial intelligence to control the Rheo Knee was a major step forward for the industry,” says Dr. Richard Satava, professor of surgery at the University of Washington Medical Center and former program manager for advanced biomedical technology at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). But Herr was only getting started.

5.

In the fall of 2003, Rozelle started swimming and began to excel in the weight room. Pretty soon he was bench-pressing 300 pounds. In February, Rozelle did two minutes each of push-ups and sit-ups and swam for 800 yards — passing the army physical training test in the top 19th percentile for his age group. He took the next step at Vail. Skiing turned out to be no problem; neither did snowboarding. By the end of a week in Vail, Rozelle had taken to heart the motto of Disabled Sports USA — “If I can do this, I can do anything.”

Top among the things Rozelle was interested in doing was finding a way to provide better support for returning wounded soldiers. At the start of the second Gulf War, there was little in the way of follow-up psychological care. He started visiting wounded soldiers at Walter Reed, began to work with the US Olympic Committee military and veteran programs, and became a representative for Disabled Sports USA. But, as a national spokesman for disabled soldiers, Rozelle knew the best way he could help was to set a great example. Maybe it really was time to take Kievenaar up on his offer.

This was the army, so of course there was paperwork. With the forms and the letters and the meetings, the process to get cleared by the medical evaluation board took time. But Rozelle pushed, and on March 4, 2004, he was declared fit for duty.

Rozelle spent the next few months working at Fort Carson and was given a new command on June 17, 2004, four days before the first anniversary of his injury. Two weeks later, Rozelle was back in Iraq, commanding troops on the same field of battle where he’d sustained his injury.

During his first tour back, Rozelle broke three prosthetic feet. His life was never seriously endangered, but that was mostly a matter of luck. Rozelle was frustrated. In the coming years he wrote dozens of articles about this issue, all of them containing the line “We can send an astronaut into space, but we can’t build a better prosthetic device?”