I could show you what recently was

on television as a high quality video:

60 Minutes, many of you may have seen it.

And it was the now director of the entire piece of the

veteran's administration--

who, himself, had lost an arm 39 years ago in Vietnam--

who was adamantly opposed to these crazy devices that don't work.

And it turns out that with 60 Minutes cameras rolling in the background,

after he pretty much made his position clear on this --

he had his hook and he had his --

he wore this arm for less than two hours

and was able to pour himself a drink and got quite emotional over the fact that, quote --

his quote --

it's the first time he's felt like he's had an arm in 39 years.

But that would sort of be jumping to the middle of the story,

and I'm not going to show you that polished video.

I'm going to, instead, in a minute or two,

show you an early, crude video

because I think it's a better way to tell a story.

A few years ago I was visited by the guy that runs DARPA,

the people that fund all the advanced technologies that

businesses and universities probably wouldn't take the risk of doing.

They have a particular interest in ones that will help our soldiers.

I get this sort of unrequested -- by me anyway -- visit,

and sitting in my conference room is a very senior surgeon

from the military and the guy that runs DARPA.

They proceed to tell me a story

which comes down to basically the following.

We have used such advanced technologies now

and made them available in the most remote places that we put soldiers:

hills of Afghanistan, Iraq ...

They were quite proud of the fact that you know,

before the dust clears,

if some soldier has been hurt they will have collected him or her,

they will have brought him back,

they will be getting world-class triage emergency care faster than you and I would be getting it

if we were hurt in a car accident in a major city in the United States.

That's the good news.

The bad news is

if they've collected this person and he or she is missing an arm or

leg, part of the face, it's probably not coming back.

So, they started giving me the statistics on how many of these kids had lost an arm.

And then the surgeon pointed out, with a lot of anger,

he said, "Why is it?

At the end of the Civil War, they were shooting each other with muskets.

If somebody lost an arm,

we gave them a wooden stick with a hook on it.

Now we've got F18s and F22s, and if somebody loses an arm,

we give them a plastic stick with a hook on it."

And they basically said, "This is unacceptable,"

and then the punchline:

"So, Dean, we're here because you make medical stuff.

You're going to give us an arm."

And I was waiting for the 500 pages of bureaucracy, paperwork and DODs.

No, the guy says,

"We're going to bring a guy into this conference room,

and wearing the arm you're going to give us,

he or she is going to pick up a raisin or a grape off this table.

If it's the grape, they won't break it."

Great he needs efferent, afferent, haptic response sensors.

"If it's the raisin, they won't drop it."

So he wants fine motor control:

flex at the wrist, flex at the elbow, abduct and flex at the shoulder.

Either way they were going to eat it.

"Oh, by the way Dean.

It's going to fit on a 50th percentile female frame --

namely 32 inches from the long finger -- and weigh less than nine pounds.

" 50th percentile female frame."

"And it's going to be completely self contained including all its power.

So, they finished that. And I, as you can tell, am a bashful guy.

I told them they're nuts.

(Laughter)

They've been watching too much "Terminator." (Laughter)

Then, the surgeon says to me,

"Dean, you need to know more than two dozen of these kids have come back bilateral.

"Now, I cannot imagine -- I'm sorry, you may have a better

imagination than I do -- I can't imagine losing my arm,

and typically at 22 years old.

But compared to that, losing two?

Seems like that would be an inconvenience.

Anyway, I went home that night. I thought about it. I literally could not sleep

thinking about, "I wonder how you'd roll over with no shoulders."

So, I decided we've got to do this.

And trust me, I've got a day job, I've got a lot of day jobs.

Most of my day job keeps me busy funding my fantasies like FIRST and water and power ....

And I've got a lot of day jobs.

But I figured I gotta do this.

Did a little investigation, went down to Washington, told them

I still think they're nuts but we're going to do it.

And I told them I'd build them an arm.

I told them it would probably take five years to get through the FDA,

and probably 10 years to be reasonably functional.

Look what it takes to make things like iPods.

"Great," he said, "You got two years."

I said, "I'll tell you what.

I'll build you an arm that's under nine pounds that has all that capability in one year.

It will take the other nine to make it functional and useful.

" We sort of agreed to disagree.

I went back and I started putting a team together,

the best guys I could find with a passion to do this.

At the end of exactly one year we had a device with 14 degrees of freedom,

all the sensors, all the microprocessors, all the stuff inside.

I could show you it with a cosmesis on it that's so real it's eerie,

but then you wouldn't see all this cool stuff.

I then thought it would be years before we'd

be able to make it really, really useful.

It turned out, as I think you could see in Aimee's capabilities and attitudes,

people with a desire to do something are quite remarkable and nature is quite adaptable.

Anyway, with less than 10 hours of use, two guys -- one that's bilateral.

He's literally, he's got no shoulder on one side,

and he's high trans-humeral on the other. And that's Chuck and Randy together,

after 10 hours -- were playing in our office.

And we took some pretty cruddy home movies.

At the end of the one I'm going to show,

it's only about a minute and a couple of seconds long,

Chuck does something that to this day I'm jealous of, I can't do it.

He picks up a spoon, picks it up,

scoops out some Shredded Wheat and milk,

holds the spoon level as he translates it, moving all these joints simultaneously, to his mouth,

and he doesn't drop any milk.

(Laughter)

I cannot do that.

(Laughter)

His wife was standing behind me.

She's standing behind me at the time and she says, "Dean,

Chuck hasn't fed himself in 19 years.

So, you've got a choice:

We keep the arm, or you keep Chuck."

(Laughter)

(Applause)

So, can we see that?

This is Chuck showing simultaneous control of all the joints.

He's punching our controls guy.

The guy behind him is our engineer/surgeon,

which is a convenient guy to have around.

There's Randy, these guys are passing a rubber little puck between them.

And just as in the spirit of FIRST, gracious professionalism, they are quite proud of this,

so they decide to share a drink.

This is a non-trivial thing to do, by the way.

Imagine doing that with a wooden stick and a hook on the end of it, doing either of those.

Now Chuck is doing something quite extraordinary,

at least for my limited physical skill.

And now he's going to do what DARPA asked me for.

He's going to pick up a grape -- he didn't drop it, he didn't break it -- and he's going to eat it.

So, that's where we were at the end of about 15 months.

(Applause)

But, as I've learned from Richard,

the technology, the processors, the sensors, the motors, is not the story.

I hadn't dealt with this kind of problem or frankly,

this whole segment of the medical world.

I'll give you some astounding things that have happened as we started this.

After we were pretty much convinced we had a good design,

and we'd have to make all the standard engineering trade-offs you always make --

you can always get three out of four

of anything you want; the weight, the size, the cost, the functionality --

I put a bunch of guys in my plane and I said,

"We're flying down to Walter Reed, and we're going talk to these kids,

because frankly it doesn't matter whether we like this arm.

It doesn't matter whether the Department of Defense likes this arm.

"When I told them that they weren't entirely enthusiastic, but

I told them, "It really doesn't matter what their opinion is.

There is only one opinion that matters, the kids that are either going to use it or not."

I told a bunch of my engineers, "Look we're going to walk into Walter Reed,

and you're going to see people, lots of them, missing major body parts.

They're probably going to be angry, depressed, frustrated.

We're probably going to have to give them support, encouragement.

But we've got to extract from them enough information to make sure we're doing the right thing."

We walked into Walter Reed and I could not have been more wrong.

We did see a bunch of people, a lot of them missing a lot of body parts,

and parts they had left were burned; half a face gone, an ear burned off.

They were sitting at a table.

They were brought together for us.

And we started asking them all questions.

"Look," I'd say to them, "We're not quite as good as nature yet.

I could give you fine motor control, or I could let you curl 40 pounds;

I probably can't do both.

I can give you fast control with low reduction ratios in these gears,

or I can give you power; I can't give you both.

And we were trying to get them to all help us know what to give them.

Not only were they enthusiastic, they kept thinking

they're there to help us.

"Well, would it help if I ..."

"Guys, and woman, you've given enough.

We're here to help you. We need data. We need to know what you need."

After a half an hour, maybe, there was one guy at the far end of the table who wasn't saying much.

You could see he was missing an arm.

He was leaning on his other arm.

I called down to the end,

"Hey, you haven't said much.

If we needed this or this, what would you want?"

And he said, "You know, I'm the lucky guy at this table.

I lost my right arm, but I'm a lefty."

(Laughter)

So, he wouldn't say much.

He had a great spirit, like all the rest of them had great spirits.

And he made a few comments.

And then the meeting ended.

We said goodbye to all these guys.

And that guy pushed himself back from the table ... he has no legs.

So, we left.

And I was thinking,

"We didn't give them support and encouragement;

they gave it to us.

They're not finished giving yet."

It was astounding.

So, we went back.

And I started working harder, faster.

Then we went out to Brooke Army Medical Center.

And we saw lots of these kids,

lots of them. And it was astounding

how positive they are.

So, we went back,

and we've been working harder yet.

We're in clinical trials, we've got five of them on people.

We're screaming along.

And I get a call and we go back to Washington.

We go back to Walter Reed,

and a kid, literally,

20 some-odd days before that was blown up.

And they shipped him to Germany

and 24 hours later they shipped him from Germany to Walter Reed.

And he was there,

and they said we needed to come.

And I went down and they rolled him into a room.

He's got no legs.

He's got no arms.

He's got a small residual limb on one side.

Half of his face is gone,

but they said his vision is coming back.

He had one good eye.

His name is Brandon Marrocco.

And he said,

"I need your arms, but I need two of them."

"You'll get them."

This kid was from Staten Island.

And he said,

"I had a truck, before I went over there, and it had a stick.

You think I'll be able to drive it?"

"Sure."