On pleas, politics, pathology, wonder drugs, deforestation, evolution, Black Death, Russian Anti Plague program, butterfly effect, amazing bat biology, repeating mistakes and why environmental scientists should be put in charge of public health and we all need to follow Norway’s lead

Only one of those two statements is correct and it is not the one by the government agency charged with protecting the public’s health. While it is true that the health infrastructure in the US makes it unlikely that an Ebola epidemic could catch hold here, even a small cluster of cases could be enough to spark panic. A few weeks ago, when two American patients under tight biosecurity were flown back to the US from West Africa for treatment, there were complaints (see Donald Trump). Ebola may not easily be turned into a bioweapon, but it is still on the CDC’s list of such potential threats. It is that kind of scary. 

For now, direct costs to the US are limited to troops and supplies being sent to three countries—Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia—reeling from the outbreak. Stories of unimaginable horror are matched only by dire predictions that the number of cases could spike to as high as 1.4 million by January. American efforts alone won’t be enough to turn things around, and even those are being hampered by, of all things, the weather. It is the rainy season, which means that some roads—including five leading to sites where the US plans to set up treatment centers—are currently impassable.

Ebola’s collateral damage is as insidious as it is extensive. Were the virus to be stopped in its tracks immediately, it would still rank as the largest outbreak by far since Ebola was first identified nearly 40 years ago. The death count has now passed 3,000, which is roughly twice the combined tally of all 25 previous outbreaks. Deaths are just the tip of the iceberg. With schools closed, layoffs rampant, crops left unharvested and a health system so shredded that people are dying of otherwise treatable diseases such as malaria, Ebola has blighted families and futures for years to come.

That is the best case scenario.

The worst case—1.4 million victims by January—is just too terrible to imagine. Even 10% of the worst case would leave a generation of orphans in its wake because women, as primary caregivers, have been particularly hard hit.

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT GONE VIRAL

The ramifications, President Obama points out, are global. A tiny virus with just a handful of genes can kill a person, fracture families, shred communities, destroy economies, undermine political status quos, topple countries and destabilize whole regions with ever-escalating consequences, all in a matter of months. 

To keep the lid on Pandora’s microbial box, funds that until recently have been tied up in bureaucratic bows have been quickly untied to fast-track research and the manufacture of vaccines, antiviral drugs and novel therapies such as ZMapp, an “antibody cocktail.” 

Ebola, it turns out, does not kill directly, but rather co-opts its victims’ defenses so they effectively kill themselves. The virus stealthily evades the immune system while it spreads through the body (a process that can take weeks). By the time the immune system kicks into gear, the response is both too late and too much: a “cytokine storm" destroys everything in its path. Those few that manage to survive the onslaught at least have immunity against a repeat attack (at least by the same viral strain), so theoretically a vaccine should work.  

The challenges are both scientific and logistic. Even if there were an effective vaccine existed stockpiled in adequate quantity, distribution presents yet another hurdle, especially if the vaccine needs to be kept at a specific temperature.

The efforts to use cutting edge research and technology to outmaneuver an enemy with such a substantial head start and a home court advantage have been impressive, but a lot of things will need to start going right fast in order to make a difference. The tragedy of the tragedy is that there were plenty of early warning signs. Yet just as the virus manages to escape detection in the early days of an infection, these kinds of warnings seem beyond the ken of most public health departments.

HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

Imagine an aerial time-lapse video of the last decade in West Africa and the first clue pops out right away: deforestation on a truly epic scale. Guinea’s rainforests have been reduced by over 80%, while Liberia has sold logging rights to over half its forests since 2005. Sierra Leone, with a meager 4% of its forests left, is on track to be completely deforested within a few years.

This is key because fruit bats, Ebola’s reservoir host (they carry the virus but generally don’t die from it), live in forests. Their home is literally being cut down around them, forcing them to look for alternatives. Meanwhile, mining has become big business, employing thousands of workers who travel into the forest to get to the mines. Bottom line: bats and people  increasingly coming into contact.

Bats, along other animals susceptible to Ebola, have long been on the menu in West Africa, but there are other transmission routes besides bushmeat. Nipah, a related virus also carried by bats, first appeared in Malaysian pigs who fell ill eating fruit that had fallen into their pens after first being nibbled by bats. The fruit was contaminated by virus in the bats’ saliva. It is entirely possible, then, that the two year-old boy identified as the first human victim in the West African outbreak picked up Ebola in a similar manner: eating bat-contaminated fruit.

This is the same way West Nile virus managed to spread across North America in a matter of just a few years (though with an insect vector added to  the mix). Migrating birds infected by mosquitoes became reservoir hosts. Mosquitoes could now both pick up virus from birds as well as spread it to other birds. Direct bird to bird transmission also played a role. Mingling among flocks en route between North and South America during spring and fall migrations spread it between species, who then flew it home to their respective nesting grounds.

AN OLD STORY

Officially identified in 1976 after an outbreak in Zaire and named after a nearby river, Ebola has actually been around for millions of years. In fact, researchers have evidence that filoviruses, the family to which Ebola belongs, may go back as far as 10 million years.

The virus’ relationship with bats is a tale of nested evolution. Bats live in dense colonies where illness can quickly spread. Ebola may initially have caused a great deal of bat mortality, but the genes of the fittest—those for whom the virus wasn’t as serious—eventually prevailed.

Bats also have an extraordinary ability to repair damaged DNA, which evolved as a result of flight. It takes so much energy to fly that a bat’s temperature increases several degrees in the process, which can wreak havoc on genetic material. In effect, bats have a fever every time they fly. This means that only viruses that are also able withstand the heat survive. The result: a migrating mammalian reservoir of germs for which the human body is ill-prepared.

Nevertheless, some humans have developed a natural immunity to Ebola without getting sick. In 2010, the French Institute for Research and Development (IRD) reported the results of a three-year study in Gabon testing over 4,000 blood samples for Ebola antibodies: 

These people were infected by the virus, but never showed clinical symptoms. The rates were highest in forest zones likely because that is where the bats live.

This helps explain why previous outbreaks in rural areas were limited to a few dozen, though sometimes a few hundred, fatalities. The epidemic in West Africa, however, is a whole new ballgame involving a large, dense urban population with no native immunity. To the list of extremely bad news, add one more: the virus is rapidly mutating with potential implications for the development of vaccines and treatments.

THE BLACK DEATH REVISITED?

In 2001, two researchers from the University of Liverpool—Dr. Susan Scott, a demographer, and Dr. Christopher J. Duncan, a zoologist—published a book calledThe Biology of Plagues in which they argued that the Black Death, which was responsible for killing tens of millions of people in Europe in the mid-14th century, was not caused by bubonic plague as generally thought, but instead by an Ebola-like filovirus. (Their research is also available as a paper published by the Postgraduate Medical Journal in 2004: What Caused Black Death?)

While the story seems to surface every few years in the press, the theory remains on the scientific fringes with serious questions raised about the rigor of the research. Still, given recent events, Scott and Duncan’s ideas are interesting. Among the evidence:

• The Black Death moved at a rate of 4 km per day, traveling from Sicily to the Arctic circle in just three years. Bubonic plague, which is transmitted by fleas, travels at the speed of the infected rats that carry them. Minus a ride on a boat or wagon, rats generally don’t stray far.
• Italian doctors quickly figured out that patients and those close to them needed to be quarantined for 40 days to stop transmission. That fits the profile of a filovirus, but not bubonic plague, which cycles much faster: about a week from infection to death.
• The Black Death struck in areas where there were no rats

It wasn’t until 2005 that scientists became reasonably certain that bats were, in fact, the reservoir hosts of Ebola. In 2011, researchers discovered a related filovirus in European bats (though one that seems to pose more of a threat to bats than people). Perhaps there were overlapping epidemics with both scourges striking at the same time. It is deeply disturbing to consider that what we are seeing unfold in West Africa could possibly have happened before.

MORE HISTORY AND LESSONS WORTH LEARNING

Bubonic plague is a frightening disease in its own right, which is why Russian Tsar Nicholas II funded an Anti Plague program in Siberia during the construction of the Trans Siberian railroad in the 1890s. Plague was—and is—endemic in Siberia and Central Asia, carried by wild rodents who serve as reservoir hosts. Rats are like people in this particular disease equation: victims that die from the illness. Rats infested with plague-infected fleas could easily scurry aboard a Moscow-bound train (fleas are the vector that transmits the virus, just as water is the vector that transmits cholera). Even if the rats themselves died along the way, there were plenty of people onto which their disease-filled fleas could jump. Trains, then, could spread plague all along the route, though the threat to Moscow was especially worrisome. The Russians understood that trains tore across ecosystem boundaries in ways that the world had never experienced before, presenting new challenges to public health.

The bubonic plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis, was identified in 1894, so the lab science was still in its early days. To unravel the mysteries of the plague’s transmission cycle, researchers had to go out into the field to  observe wild rodents and their wild fleas. It took years of meticulous work, noting every detail about habitat and changes in the weather, but the Russians learned to identify the early warning signs that allowed them to effective preemptive action, stopping a human outbreak before it started. (During the Soviet era, the Anti Plague labs were folded into the nation’s budding bioweapons program, completely subverting the goal of public health into a tool for mass death.)

We need to take a page from those pioneering Russians. The threat to public health from environmental degradation has never been greater. There are many more and much faster modes of transportation now and that is just a part of the picture. Massive deforestation has laid waste to vast, complex ecosystems, while carbon pollution has led to an increase in extreme weather and extended the range of disease-carrying bugs. There are also far more humans to be at risk: the global population has multiplied fourfold since the early days of the Trans Siberian.

In a very deep and fundamental way, environmental health is public health. Yet conservation biologists typically are called upon only after there has been a new and scary disease outbreak, tasked with fingering which wild animals are to blame when the truth is we need only look in a mirror.

These diseases are not “emerging,” to use the medical jargon. They are being unleashed—aided and abetted by bureaucracies designed to favor narrow specialization over broad (eco)systems thinking. When science and policy are out of sync, the only winners are pathogens. We need environmental scientists to connect the dots, provide perspective and take more central and powerful roles within public health. It may be a bit of a cliché to say it is all of a piece, but it really is.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: THE LONG ROAD BACK TO EDEN

Nature is an avid multi-tasker, which is why a deal to save Liberia’s remaining forests is such good news. Announced last week at the UN Climate summit,Norway has committed to paying Liberia $150 million dollars to stop deforestation by 2020. Norway’s support means the cash-strapped, Ebola-beleaguered country will not have to sell off what remains of its natural treasure to loggers. It also means its forests will continue to soak up atmospheric carbon for all of us, while preserving biodiversity, protecting watersheds, limiting erosion and serving as a natural disease barrier.

That last benefit may not mean much in terms of Ebola, at least for now, but it may make a difference for another illness endemic to the region: malaria. A new study, one of a series of focused on the Brazilian Amazon, confirms a link between deforestation and increased rates of the disease in nearby communities. Why? Deforested land provides prime breeding conditions for mosquitoes.

Nature, it has been said, bats last. We can no longer affect ignorance that what we have done to the planet won’t come back to bite us. We know better and the quality of our collective future depends on what we do next.

For now, all we can do is hope that the global efforts to quash Ebola in West Africa are successful over the coming months, both for the people whose lives, families and countries hang in the balance and for the rest us for whom this is the most sobering of teachable moments.

— J. A. Ginsburg

RELATED

• Global reforestation news and resources, Mongabay.com

The other day my friend Adam, a fellow BusinessWeek alum, posted a question on Facebook about whether a bout of Ebola conferred immunity on survivors. In other words, if it didn’t kill them, did it make them stronger, more resistant? The short answer is yes, but just like cold and flu viruses, there are several strains and immunity to one does not readily translate to others. In fact, it turns out that Ebola’s deadly trick involves disabling a key component of a victim’s immune system. The survivors are the ones who somehow manage to hang on long enough to mount a workaround defense that itself doesn’t prove fatal.

My big splash at the magazine was a special report (“Bioinvasion”) on emerging zoonotic diseases, which are illnesses that affect several species, humans among them. Not only are the majority of diseases zoonotic, but also almost all the headline plagues to emerge in the last few decades, including Ebola, are as well. The article received a lot of attention at the time, including receiving an award from the American Society for Microbiology, which led to an address book full of “-ologists” of every description. My favorites were—and are—veterinary epidemiologists who always seem to be at least a half step ahead of anyone in public health.

Tracey McNamara was head of pathology for the Bronx Zoo during the early days of the first West Nile outbreak. She boldly challenged the CDC’s initial diagnosis of another virus by making the link to dead crows (her necropsy freezer was full of birds that had perished on zoo grounds). "If you wait for the first human index case, you’re too late," she told me during an interview. Those words stuck with me, yet over and over and over again, divisions between public health, livestock health and wildlife health agencies make it difficult to get ahead of the curve.

The first human case in the West African Ebola epidemic was traced to a young child in Guinea where, it turns out, roasted bat and bat soup are menu staples. That is significant because migrating fruit bats turn out to be the key reservoir hosts: species that carry and can transmit the virus but aren’t devastated by it. Health officials suspected a link early on and put a ban on bat dining in March, yet in the chaos that has unfolded, food shortages could make that a challenge to enforce. In any case, it still doesn’t address why, after presumably centuries of bat cuisine, it is now such a dangerous choice. Earlier the investigation another all too plausible explanation was put forth: the exotic animal and bush meat trade literally smuggled the virus into West Africa. The answer might yet turn out to be a combination of both where a disease-carrying animal shipped into the area managed to infect some bats and it was off to the viral races.

Ebola is not the only bat-transmitted scourge to make headlines in recent years. Nipah, Marburg and Hendra viruses all have a bat connection as, of course, does rabies. Curiously, one the most promising Ebola vaccines is based on one for rabies and provides protection against both.

These are viruses that long been circulating in bats and to which humans have largely been blissfully oblivious. So what has changed? It is going to come down to habitat loss,climate change, increased trade and faster travel, none of which are easily addressed by public health efforts. There is no end in sight for the crisis in West Africa and a real threat to the rest of the world. When a deadly virus can travel first at the speed of a migrating bat and then by plane, train and automobile, no place and no one is truly safe.

Every few years, generally in the immediate aftermath of a new or particularly deadly zoonotic disease, the push is on for a “one health” approach to medicine that connects the dots between human and animal health. It never seems to last very long. The wildlife surveillance component is usually the first to fall from lack of funding, while monitoring livestock and poultry becomes mired in the politics of regulation. Public health infrastructures in places such as Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone that have been wracked by decades of war and poverty have never been high priority. By the time the World Health Organization is brought into the picture, the virus has a substantial head start.

Data science can help. Healthmap, a very clever and comprehensive data aggregator, pointed to the possibility of a hemorrhagic fever cluster over a week before the WHO declared an Ebola outbreak. Likewise, cell phone data can be used to map possible routes of spread, potentially in real time, though the balance between potential threat and privacy concerns have yet to be thrashed out. Still, almost all the data feeds are focused on human actions. Until there is a better handle on wildlife health, the response is still going to be about playing catch up.

There is a real opportunity for citizen science to fill in some the blanks, providing field reports of sick and dead wildlife and ailing livestock and pets. It wouldn’t be that hard to set up. It could follow the template—or perhaps become part the database—of Project Noah, a brilliant, massive crowdsourced web-based wildlife field guide.

Beyond our narrow species-specific enlightened self interest, this is yet another wake up call on the importance of doing right by the environment. Deforestation, chemical contamination, carbon pollution—there is a perfect storm besetting our planet, threatening everything that calls it home.

— J. A. Ginsburg

"…The typical parent, the typical taxpayer, the typical voter, when asked what constitutes a quality education will talk exclusively about the who and the what: the teachers and the curriculum. But we know the where is also part and parcel of a quality education. We believe that where our children learn matters. And when we send our kids to schools with crumbling walls, with leaky roofs, with mold all over the carpets, not only are we not creating an environment for a quality education, but we’re also creating conditions that get in the way…"

— The Center for Green Schools 

American public schools are in such disrepair, it will take more than a half trillion dollars to bring them up to date, according to a 2013 report by the Center for Green Schools, supported by the National Education Association, the 21st Century School Fund, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Lung Association and the National PTA. 

Put another way, fixing American public schools is a half trillion dollar-plus business opportunity with a long string a collateral “goods”: healthier children and teachers, better environments for learning, digital-age connectivity and cheaper operational costs. This is the low-hanging fruit of school reform. The classroom, as Reggio Emilia founder Loris Malaguzzi famously put it, is the “third teacher.” Children learn from their surroundings, good or bad. Right now, hundreds of thousands of American children are learning that they are a low priority, which it both shameful and shortsighted. We are blighting our own future. 

The “go-to classroom” in the US is a noisy, stuffy, dimly lit, poorly insulated   prefab trailer, notes Ann Hand, CEO of Project Frog, a San Francisco-based construction company on a mission to build better schools. Prefabs are typically pushed into service decades beyond a projected five year lifespan. “They’re full of mold,” says Hand. “The number one cause of absenteeism in California? Asthma.” The most dedicated teachers, thoughtful curricula, committed parents and motivated children are no match for a literally toxic environment. You can’t learn if you can’t breathe.
 
The good news is the dramatic and fast difference righting wrongs can make. “There are a lot of studies out there that say that with natural daylight, kids’ grades go up about 20%. That’s taking someone from a C to an A,” says Hand. Improve acoustics and air quality and academic success  almost becomes a given. 

Yet faced with anorexic budgets and long construction schedules, administrators and school boards often have little choice but to opt for quick and dirty band-aid repairs. Enter Frog with its “technologically advanced component buildings” designed to maneuver past these very hurdles. Components are delivered to construction sites in a series of cheerfully branded, IKEA-like flat-packs that can be assembled into a building—aka, a Frog—over summer break. Unlike a prefab classroom whose dimensions are determined by the size of truck (determined, in turn, by the width of a traffic lane), Frogs are free of any such restrictions. Instead, Hand explained at the recent KIN Global conference, Frog schools are designed around what’s best for learning. 

Mixing human-centered designed to focus on students’ needs and integrative design for better building performance, Frog has figured out how to deliver a higher quality school faster and at a competitive price. Improved energy efficiency means a Frog costs less to run, too. 

"…We have urban planners and architects on our staff, but they sit next to people from product design, people from strong manufacturing backgrounds. We’re crashing all of those capabilities together and really creating an innovation engine that we just so happen to be asking…Is there a better way to build?" 

Clearly, the answer is a resounding yes, but it has been a years-long nail-biting journey full of cash-flow cliffhangers and near-miraculous team triumphs to get there. The first installment of Frog’s first large scale order—15 of 40 schools in California—was finished with only hours to spare before the morning bell of the first day of class last fall. Immediately, the company shifted gears to analyze dozens of lessons learned from a summer spent on the exhilarating edge of panic and possibility. Hand slowed down the sales pipeline to give Froggers—there are fewer than 60 employees—a chance to catch their collective breath. In addition to schools, Frog had been building healthcare clinics for Kaiser-Permanente and developing a “flex” design adaptable for almost any use. Sales had been on track to hit $100 million this year, but Hand cut the target in half, figuring time was more valuable than money in the near term to add resiliency to supply chains and smooth out the rough edges of production. If all goes well in the next couple of years, Hand sees IPO in Frog’s future. It turns out daylighting not only boosts grades, but bottom lines as well. 

WHILE YOU’RE AT IT, THROW IN A GARDEN, PLEASE…

For Kimbal Musk—of the irrepressibly enterprising family Musk (Tesla, Solar City, SpaceX)—the sweet spot is right outside the school building in the garden. For nearly a decade, Musk has been working to spread the good food word, first with a handful school garden near his Kitchen chain of “community bistro” restaurants in Colorado and now with hundreds of gardens in Chicago, Los Angeles and Denver.  

"… Scale does matter. It really does matter…When you do one school, you have a system. When you do a 100 schools, you have to have a totally different system…There’s no point in doing one school. You’ve got to do 100 schools, create the system that works for 100 schools and then you have a system you can scale."

Like Project Frog, Musk’s Learning Gardens are modular, flexible, affordable and designed to be an easy “yes” for school administrators. The components are basic but thoughtful: a series of sturdy above ground planting boxes set at the perfect height for young gardeners. They can be placed almost anywhere, from asphalt to rooftops, and are easy to maintain, pre-plumbed for irrigation. Set up takes just a couple days, with children, teachers and parents doing the actual planting. 

Musk wants kids to learn about science and nutrition but sees Learning Gardens as a kind of all purpose outdoor classroom: a part of the school, rather than a special project tucked away behind a fence. In fact, proper siting is essential. Gardens must located where kids naturally gather or Musk’s team won’t build them. “Scale is a combination of how many schools you can be in and how many kids you can reach when you’re in those schools,” he explains. “The critical thing about what we do is that it works in every single school yard in the world.”

MAKING A DIFFERENCE AND NOT JUST A DENT

"Change at Scale," the theme of this year’s KIN Global, focused on the difference between a good idea and a transformative one. It turns out there is a pattern—something I first learned from energy pioneer Amory Lovins while writing a magazine story on distributed power generation. If a solution is modular, flexible, scalable, affordable and recyclable, bet on it. It almost doesn’t matter what subject—energy distribution, social networks, personal computers, IKEA furniture—the formula works. This is nature’s tried and true strategy: from particles and proteins to atoms and cells to everything that is and has ever been. In fact, the smaller the building block, the greater its potential. 

Hand and Musk have developed solutions that embody those characteristics, bringing an elegant clarity to problems that have confounded generations of school administrators, school boards and politicians. Rather than try to shore up a broken system, they have set their sights on outcomes (happier, healthier, more successful students), then took the list of seemingly insurmountable hurdles as marching orders. It turns out a healthy school environment is good news for the environment as a whole which, of course, is an A+ for everyone.  

— J. A. Ginsburg

RELATED: 

• State of Our Schools Address / Center for Green Schools / (video)

• Why Going Green Means Big Business in the Construction Industry / Issie Lapowsky / Inc magazine

• How Kimbal Musk brings garden classrooms to Chicago Public Schools / Amina Alahi / Chicago Tribune

A couple of months ago, I spent a mindblowing weekend reimagining space suits as part of Team Sentio for a science hackathon at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. Our goal was to turn things inside out: Instead of creating a protective cocoon that restricted movements and blunted senses, we set out to design a suit that would improve mobility, increase dexterity, and expand sensory awareness. We modeled synesthesia, assigning new functions for senses underused in space (e.g. hearing solar wind, feeling cosmic rays). We engineered empathy, connecting team member sensors so individual experiences could be shared. And we spent a lot of time thinking about the evolution of the human hand, both past and future.

"…Darwin was the first to speculate that toolmaking could have played role in developing the shape of the human hand, which is unique among primates and, indeed, unique among all species. It turns out he was right. Our destiny has literally always been in our hands. Yet while human hands are exquisitely adapted to life on Earth, new hands with new abilities will likely be required for life beyond our planet. For that, evolution will need a jumpstart…”

--Science Hack Day Chicago 2014: Reinventing the Space Suit, Cosmic Biomicmicry and the Joy of Thinking Different

Engineers here on the home world, though, impatient with the ploddy process of natural selection, have beaten us to the punch. To evolve a thumb better suited to build BMW cars the old fashioned way would require tens of thousands of years, for example, so the ever-practical German car manufacturer turned to CAD and 3D printing to create a thumb worthy of Iron Man himself. They took a cue from invertebrate exoskeletons—which are so exquisitely custom fit, they are shed once outgrown—scanning each worker’s thumb to fabricate an orthotic perfectly tailored to the individual. A process called selective laser sintering was used to print out the exo-thumbs combining hard plastic and soft silicone.


"The finished thumb guard flexes in a closed position. But because the structure is perfectly fitted to the wearer’s thumb the pieces lock into place when the digit is raised into a thumbs-up position.

The locked splint resists strain and spreads the load of pushing something like a stiff rubber plug into holes in the car’s chassis – something that was causing pain and strain for production-line workers."

— BMW 3D prints new thumbs for factory workers

FLEXI-HAND v.2

It is one thing to augment a digit and quite another to take on a whole hand. When first introduced last spring, the Flexy-Hand prototype was immediately recognized for pushing the boundaries of prosthetics, which is saying something considering all the amazing stories of international collaborations over the last year designing 3D printed Robohands. Using a a new elastic filament called Filaflex, the Flexy-Hand is modeled to look more like a real hand, complete with fingernails. Its second iteration includes an attachment mechanism. The design has been uploaded to Thingiverse, so anyone can customize and improve it.

At a materials cost of less than $30, plus a little maker know-how, who couldn’t use an extra hand or two? In fact, Team Sentio discussed the possibly of adding extra hands, arms, legs and even a tail to our souped up spacesuits. Why should octopi have all the multi-limb fun?

WITH FEELING….

While an autoworker kitted out with a BMW exo-thumb still has a muffled sense of touch, an artificial hand offers none, providing mechanical functionality but no sensory awareness. Yet hands are central to much of what we know about our environment. Through our fingertips we know whether a texture is smooth or rough, wet or dry, cold or hot and all the subtleties in between. We can feel the springiness of a computer keyboard and the connectedness of holding another’s hand.

The next big advance in prosthetics will bring touch into the equation. It is already beginning to happen with reports of experimental surgery connecting electrodes to nerves in an amuputee’s upper arm. But imagine if an artificial hand were made of material that felt more like a real hand, mimicking the plasticity of human tissue and laced with a network of sensors.

One such material candidate might be a new kind of hydrogel nicknamed “tough water,” a super-absorbent hybrid polymer scientists at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have been investigating. Tough water is as unlikely as it sounds: a material made up mostly of water—just like us—that returns to its original shape after being stretched—just like rubber or silicone.

"The water nature of the hydrogel might allow us to deliver drugs directly through it. So in the case of burn patients who wear compression bandages to reduce scarring, could we use this material for that?

What if we were able to use a material like this stuff, hydrogel, in a 3D printing system to actually print vessels, organs, ligaments and things along those lines? We could potentially actually print a meniscus to place in a damaged knee. You would actually print this shape and actually implant it and hopefully cells migrate into it and replace it. I think that would be the ultimate goal of a technology like this."

—Edward Doherty, Wyss Institute

Tough water is still a laboratory curiosity, but its potential is impressive.  Imagine Flexy-Hand (v. 57…)  printed with a tough water filament, fitted with thin carbon nanotube transistors wirelessly linked to a nervous system. It might not be the same as real hand, but then it might be better, able to sense things that we cannot and connect in ways we cannot yet fathom. Even Iron Man could use a few of those.

— J.A. Ginsburg

RELATED:

• 20 Things You Didn’t Know About Animal Senses / Molly Loomis / Discover magazine
• Team Sentio video