The MIT News Office (via Near Near Future) reports that "MIT, Brown University and the Providence Veterans Affairs Medical Center have begun a five-year research project to restore arm and leg function to amputees."
The project is led by Hugh Herr (left), who I teased yesterday morning about building a robotic fish.
Unlike Dr. Herr's robotic fish, I don't have anything sarcastic to say about his very worthwhile efforts to improve artificial limbs. A recent New England Journal of Medicine article found that "a far larger proportion of soldiers are surviving their injuries" due to advanced medical technology. Many of these soldiers are suffering injuries that require ampution because IEDs are "producing an unprecedented burden of what orthopedists term 'mangled extremities'--limbs with severe soft-tissue, bone, and often vascular injuries."
While I am on the subject, I highly recommend Beyond Northern Iraq--an award winning blog by Stuart Hughes, a BBC journalist who lost his leg covering the Iraq War. Far from depressing, his blog is wry, witty and--as this post suggests--sometimes hilarious:
Reopening this posting, it's clear from the stats that having written the words "Jennifer Krum" on this blog has inadvertently done wonders for my traffic.
I therefore feel duty-bound to inform the amputee porn fetishists who shouldn't be here in the first place that Ms Krum's Playboy pictorial is now online (or so I'm reliably informed.)
Definitely not work-safe.
--Jeffrey Lewis
