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"  Dean Kamen&amp;#039;s first visit to a machine shop was a revelation. He was too young to drive, so he bummed a ride. The smell of oil, the glistening equipment, the grinders throwing sparks--so this was how precision parts were made. When Kamen started his first company, while still in high school, he outfitted his own machine shop in his parent&amp;#039;s basement. &amp;quot;Each time I bought a tool,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;I extended my capability to do something, to make something.&amp;quot;   LEADERSHIP AWARD   He certainly did. While still an undergraduate, Kamen created the first wearable infusion pump to steadily deliver vital drugs, reducing the time patients were confined to hospitals. Among his inventions are a portable kidney dialysis machine for use in patients&amp;#039; homes, the iBOT wheelchair (which can climb stairs), a futuristic prosthetic arm and the Slingshot water purifier to improve health in impoverished parts of the globe. In 1989, Kamen founded FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a high-energy robotics competition for teens. &amp;quot;My greatest invention,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;is helping create thousands of new inventors.&amp;quot; Along the way, Kamen fulfilled any kid&amp;#039;s dream of life as a modern Edison, with helicopters and airplanes that he pilots himself, a private island in Long Island Sound that jokingly seceded from the United States and a high-tech company with about 200 employees, housed in a beautiful 19th-century textile mill fronting the Merrimack River in Manchester, N.H.  classid=&amp;quot;clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000&amp;quot; codebase=&amp;quot;http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,47,0&amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt; seamlesstabbing=&amp;quot;false&amp;quot; type=&amp;quot;application/x-shockwave-flash&amp;quot; allowFullScreen=&amp;quot;true&amp;quot; swLiveConnect=&amp;quot;true&amp;quot; allowScriptAccess=&amp;quot;always&amp;quot; pluginspage=&amp;quot;http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt; PM: Can you remember the first time you used a tool?  DK: No, I can&amp;#039;t. I guess as a kid I was more of a born physicist than an engineer. I remember thinking about how a ball bounces--very predictably. On each consecutive bounce it goes a little less high until it stops. It never is sitting there and suddenly starts to bounce and gets higher and higher. Why? So many things in the world at first appear mysterious, and then you start to see general patterns. And I realized there must be some rules and that they&amp;#039;re comprehensible. I later decided that&amp;#039;s what physics is all about--giving me the rules of the world.  PM: As a teenager, you had a company that made audiovisual controllers. Did the customers know you were in high school?  DK: No, no. And we worked hard to keep it that way.  My younger brother would bring his friends over after school and they&amp;#039;d solder circuit boards down in the basement. My mother would send out invoices. PM: How did you go from that to medical devices? DK: My older brother would come home from med school, and his focus was pediatric hematology and oncology, which is essentially taking care of little babies with leukemia. It&amp;#039;s not a happy thing. He would come into the basement and say, &amp;quot;You know what I really need? I can&amp;#039;t deliver the right amount of a drug because all the equipment that we have in a hospital is sized for an adult.&amp;quot;  So I made a little precision device. I did this for maybe two, three years. My day job was making money doing the audiovisual stuff, and on the side I&amp;#039;m building medical equipment for my brother. Remember, these are the days before the Food and Drug Administration had authority over medical devices. I just made this thing, and my brother would go into the hospital and do experiments. PM: Eventually, though, that device did become a business, once you adapted it to deliver a steady dose of insulin to diabetics.  DK: So you go from childhood leukemia, which we hope remains one of the rarest conditions in the world, to the most common chronic disease state where you need continuous infusion of a drug. Suddenly, boom--we might help define a whole new generation of ways to treat chronic disease.  PM: Could some kid today do what you did--invent a medical device?  DK: Some parts of it are frankly much easier to do and some parts are harder. The technologies are easier because there&amp;#039;s such a huge amount of technology on the shelf. There&amp;#039;s almost no amount of computation that&amp;#039;s not available at a very low cost. The irony of that is that society has become withdrawn and nervous about technology, about change, about the future. Whether it&amp;#039;s terrorism or the swine flu, people are way more risk-averse than they ever were before.  I mean, there was a time when most people thought you could do whatever you wanted except extraordinary things where you better go check. We now live in a world where little kids will walk by the river outside my window and say, &amp;quot;Are we allowed to touch the water?&amp;quot; You know, they go to a playground and say, &amp;quot;Are we allowed to use that?&amp;quot; I think we live in a world where everybody is looking for some authority to give them permission to do anything, including think.  PM: What&amp;#039;s your opinion of the debate over healthcare? DK: I&amp;#039;m very worried that the entire debate is misguided. I mean the whole supposition: &amp;quot;We have a crisis in healthcare.&amp;quot; Our healthcare system is developing incredible devices to improve the quality of people&amp;#039;s lives. We&amp;#039;re developing pharmaceuticals that alleviate the need for surgery. We&amp;#039;re making the surgeries that are necessary ever less invasive. If we have a crisis, it&amp;#039;s the embarrassment of riches. PM: But how about rising costs and concerns about healthcare being rationed? DK: Each side of this debate has created the boogeyman and monsters like &amp;quot;We don&amp;#039;t want to let this program come into existence because that will mean rationing.&amp;quot; Well, I hate to tell you the news, but as soon as medicine started being able to do incredible things that are very expensive, we started rationing. The reason 100 years ago everyone could afford their healthcare is because healthcare was a doctor giving you some elixir and telling you, you&amp;#039;ll be fine.Of course we ration today.  PM: So what&amp;#039;s the answer?  DK: The way to ration less is to make more good technical solutions. Diabetes alone, if you include all of the long-term, insidious consequences, is responsible for about 30 percent of the federal reimbursement for healthcare. But what if tomorrow we could wipe out diabetes? I&amp;#039;m sure in 1920 if you asked actuaries to say what percentage of our GDP are we going to spend taking care of people with polio, they&amp;#039;d say: &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;ll sit in iron-lung machines their whole lives with three people watching over them. We can&amp;#039;t support them all.&amp;quot; But what did it actually cost to deal with polio? Oh, $2 apiece. We gave them the Salk vaccine.  If you want to sit here today and project forward these horrific costs of treating everybody and you want to assume we are not going to make therapies and cures better, simpler and cheaper, well, you know what? We might actually get to that being the situation--if we stop investing in technology, if we stop believing that the future ought to be better than the past. I think this debate shows a fundamental lack of vision, a lack of understanding of what&amp;#039;s possible. PM: In 50 years, what will be considered your biggest contribution? DK: That&amp;#039;s easy. FIRST. PM: Why?  DK: What&amp;#039;s the most practical way to ensure you&amp;#039;ll have great inventions? What would you want to invent? Inventors. At a FIRST event, you look up at the stands at the Georgia Dome, you&amp;#039;re looking up at thousands of opportunities to do something unbelievable. You think, one of these kids is going to make some engine that doesn&amp;#039;t pollute, one of these kids is going to cure some kind of cancer.  PM: FIRST requires hands-on problem solving as the kids design and build their robots on a deadline. Is there enough hands-on learning in schools? DK: Most of what kids get in school is at a pretty high level of abstraction, especially in math and science. Imagine if we said it&amp;#039;s important for kids to really love and get involved in some critical skill--like football. So we&amp;#039;ll make a football curriculum. At five or six years old we&amp;#039;ll show them pictures in a book. The next year we&amp;#039;ll explain some of the rules, and give tests on them. And this will go on for eight or 10 years before they&amp;#039;re ever allowed to touch the ball or play the game. You&amp;#039;d say, &amp;quot;Well, Dean, nobody would do that. That&amp;#039;s idiotic.&amp;quot; Really? That&amp;#039;s the world of engineering. At five or six years old we teach kids what the numbers look like. Then we test them on adding and subtracting. By the time they&amp;#039;re 17 years old, and you say, &amp;quot;Have you ever used trigonometry to do anything in your life, ever? Ever?&amp;quot; And they&amp;#039;ll look at you.  This is a really bad time for this country to sit back on its laurels. Because this is the first time in global history that we are creating a village that will be a meritocracy. I happen to think that&amp;#039;s great. And if we want to continue to live in a place that&amp;#039;s the envy of the world, we better redouble our efforts to get all of our kids on the varsity team of thinking and creating.  PM: What do you love about flying your helicopter? DK: I love everything about flying a helicopter. The physics of a helicopter, the aerodynamics of it, the mechanical gizmo-ology of this organized bucket of bolts to me is fascinating beyond almost any single machine. And then when you add that you put yourself inside it and literally wear it--you don&amp;#039;t really fly it. When I was a little kid I always thought how cool it would be to just get in a helicopter and cheat gravity, leave from your own house, go to your own building. And now I&amp;#039;m sort of living that dream. And after doing it now for decades, I gotta tell you, it doesn&amp;#039;t wane. Every time I get into that helicopter and pick it up off that pad and just hang there for a moment and spin and feel like I&amp;#039;m cheating gravity, I get the same rush of adrenaline I got the first time I flew.  PM: What do you think of science fiction as a way to inspire kids?  DK: Most kids are intimidated by science, but they seem to all love science fiction. You know what the difference is between science fiction and science? Timing. Every generation turns the science fiction of their grandparents into the science of their generation. You want to know where the world is going to be? Look at good science fiction. PM: Did you have a favorite science-fiction tale? DK: I was always especially fascinated by one concept in science fiction, and I&amp;#039;m afraid it&amp;#039;s the only one where I&amp;#039;ll see very little progress in my lifetime--the time machine.  PM: If you did have a time machine, what would you do? DK: I&amp;#039;d go back so I could understand how people thought and why they did what they did as they evolved ideas. I&amp;#039;d go forward to answer questions that I&amp;#039;m desperate for answers to, answers that I know will be trivial, common knowledge in 50 or 100 years. But mostly, whether I was going forward or going backward, I&amp;#039;d know that I have all the time in the world to learn it all. Because I&amp;#039;d keep myself somewhere in that space before the forever of not being here anymore.  classid=&amp;quot;clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000&amp;quot; codebase=&amp;quot;http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,47,0&amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt; seamlesstabbing=&amp;quot;false&amp;quot; type=&amp;quot;application/x-shockwave-flash&amp;quot; allowFullScreen=&amp;quot;true&amp;quot; swLiveConnect=&amp;quot;true&amp;quot; allowScriptAccess=&amp;quot;always&amp;quot; pluginspage=&amp;quot;http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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