Dean Kamen is both notoriously shy and uninterested when it comes to media appearances, but Stephen Colbert was able to lure him in with his earnest, unrelenting, right-wing agenda. And Kamen even brought his DARPA-funded bionic Luke Arm. Full video:
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If you haven’t heard Kamen’s “stick and a hook” lamentations before (and even if you have), the speech is remarkably poignant. Aimee Mullins (and many others since) may have turned heads sprinting on carbon fiber cheetah legs, but arm amputees (of any sort) don’t have access to any sort of upper end performance spectrum—the wrist and hand are just too intricate.
I guess my point is, no amputee is quite the same and no amputee can say their prosthesis approaches the real thing, so pardon my generalizations. But Kamen is right—the current technology out there for arms/wrists/hands is flat-out shameful. [The Colbert Report via Engadget]
UPDATE: I forgot that Kamen’s TEDMED talk was uploadeded to YouTube. Here’s more on the topic:
