__Dean Kamen, multimillionaire inventrepreneur, is going global with a robochair that climbs stairs, a miracle motor that fights disease, and his wildest notion of all - that scientists will be the 21st century's superstars. __
Dean Kamen's sense of what's possible is governed by the immutable laws of nature. Everything else is up for grabs.
Kamen, 49, is a self-taught physicist and multimillionaire entrepreneur who lives in a hexagonally shaped house of his own design atop a hill just outside Manchester, New Hampshire. Invisible from the road, the estate is outfitted with a softball field, a wood-paneled library that's full of awards and honorary degrees (Kamen never graduated from college), a wind turbine to help supply power, and a pulley system that can deliver a bottle of wine from the kitchen to the bedroom.
He calls the place Westwind, and he stuffed it with a collection of toys and antiques that includes a jukebox, a slot machine, and a 25-ton steam engine once owned by Henry Ford. In Westwind's basement, there's a foundry, a machine shop, and a computer room, where Kamen often toils late into the night. He keeps a Porsche 928 and a black Humvee in one garage, two Enstrom helicopters in the other. The smaller, piston-driven chopper takes him to and from work at his offices in downtown Manchester; the larger, turbine-driven version is reserved for longer hops, like to his private island off the coast of Connecticut. For trips more than a few hundred miles, he flies his twin-turbofan CitationJet.
Kamen has high-powered friends to match his taste in toys, and throws lavish parties that entice many powerful people to New Hampshire. Visitors have included George W. Bush, NASA administrator Dan Goldin, and, more recently, John Doerr of the VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. But it's not the Rolodex, the air force, or the tricked-out Batcave that separates Kamen from the usual posse of tech multimillionaires. It's the way he's gone about acquiring it all, and the offbeat, often idealistic ways he chooses to spend it.
While Kamen won't divulge the size of his fortune, much of it stems from having invented things he decided ought to exist - no market research necessary - like first-of-their-kind medical devices.
While Kamen was attending college in the 1970s, his brother - then a medical student and now a renowned pediatric oncologist - complained that there was no reliable way to give steady doses of drugs to patients. So Kamen invented the first portable infusion pump capable of delivering drugs (such as insulin) to patients who had previously required round-the-clock monitoring, freeing them from a life inside the hospital.
In the mid-1990s, he devised a phone book-sized dialysis machine - at a time when similar devices were as big as dishwashers and required patients to make regular trips to dialysis centers. Vernon Loucks, former chair of Baxter International, contracted Kamen's privately held company, Deka Research & Development, to develop the machine. "We didn't believe it could be done," he recalls. "Now it's all over the world. Dean is the brightest guy I've ever met in this business, bar none."
When he watched a man in a wheelchair try to negotiate a curb in the late '80s, Kamen wondered whether he could build a chair that would hop curbs without losing its balance. After $50 million and eight years in development, the Ibot Transporter - a six-wheeled robotic "mobility system" that can climb stairs, traverse sandy and rocky terrain, and raise its user to eye-level with a standing person - is undergoing FDA trials, and should be available by 2001, at a cost of $20,000. That may sound high, but keep in mind that the Ibot erases the need to retrofit a home for a wheelchair. Plus, mobility system is if anything an understatement: In June, Kamen saddled up his Ibot and climbed the stairs from a Paris Métro station to the restaurant level of the Eiffel Tower - then promptly called John Doerr on his cell phone.
"At first blush, you'd stay away from developing something like the Ibot, just because of the legal implications," says Woodie Flowers, a mechanical engineering professor at MIT and a friend of Kamen's. "You're going to put a human in it and it'll go up stairs? That's nuts. But he did it. He's not one to get caught up in conventional wisdom."
Lately, Kamen has broadened his work beyond health care. He believes technology and ingenuity can solve all kinds of social ills - like pollution, limited access to electricity, and contaminated water in many third-world countries, where bacteria from human feces in drinking water is a leading cause of cholera. To help ameliorate the water problem, Deka's team of 170 engineers is working on a nonpolluting engine - funded by several million dollars of Kamen's own money - based on a concept first floated in the early 1800s but never realized.
The device is called the Stirling engine; Kamen hopes it can be developed into an affordable, portable machine that will run a water purifier/power generator that could zap contaminated H20 with a UV laser to make it safe for drinking. "It can burn any fuel, and you can do all kinds of things with it," he says. "It might be very valuable in emerging economies, giving them access to electricity, even the Net."
Another project, to be unveiled in the next year, will necessitate building "the largest company in New Hampshire," Kamen says with characteristic bravura. He's shy about details, except to say it involves a consumer device unrelated to health care and will require $100 million in financing. Among the investors: Kleiner Perkins.
But Kamen's first love and greatest passion these days is an idea that may be the farthest-fetched of all: turning engineers and inventors into pop-culture superstars. Operating through a nonprofit outfit called U.S. First (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), Kamen works to encourage kids to pursue careers as scientists, engineers, and big thinkers. Lots of people talk about doing that, but to Kamen it's a holy crusade, and he sincerely believes he can reprioritize society to value inventors the way it values athletes. "Our culture celebrates one thing: sports heroes," he says. "You have teenagers thinking they're going to make millions as NBA stars when that's not realistic for even 1 percent of them. Becoming a scientist or an engineer is."
Kamen launched First several years ago when he realized that many American teenagers were unable to name a single living scientist. The organization sponsors a national competition that matches high school students with engineers from local companies. The kids are given a standard kit of parts and challenged to build a working robot in six weeks. The robots are pitted against one another on a playing field, and the best-designed, wiliest bots rise to the top.
Dean Kamen, with his unconstrained sense of what's possible, has proven the skeptics wrong many times before. But honestly - replacing quarterbacks with engineers as mainstream heroes? Maybe he's been spending too much time in his Batcave.
Kamen wears the same uniform every day, whether he's in Deka's machine shop, meeting with bankers, or visiting the Oval Office: beige Timberlands, Levi's, and a cotton work shirt. With his pompadour of wavy black hair, he looks like a 1950s auto mechanic. In cold weather, he adds an olive-drab army jacket, its pockets crammed with small tools.
Kamen talks fast, and his voice retains the brassy streak of his native Long Island. He's funny and charismatic, but he has the air of someone used to shouldering big, improbable projects - driven, haunted, quixotic. He doesn't take vacations, and he hasn't paused to marry. "If I'm awake, I'm working," he says. "Deka and First are my work, my family, my hobby. They're everything."
His day usually begins by 9:30 at Deka headquarters, a renovated mill building on the banks of the Merrimack River. That gives employees "an hour of sanity without me in the morning," he says. Kamen works until 9 or 10 pm, when he breaks for dinner, bringing along a staffer or two to talk shop.
Deka projects come in two flavors: Kamen's ideas, and everything else. Everything else - mainly contract research for health care concerns - is what pays the bills. Deka designed the HomeChoice portable dialysis machine in partnership with Baxter, as well as a medical irrigation pump for Davol. Deka has also worked on a series of innovative vascular stents (shunts that keep blood vessels clear) for Johnson & Johnson. "If you've got a tough problem, there's only one place to go," says Baxter's former chair Loucks.
By comparison, Kamen's projects are far-out inventions, like the Ibot or the Stirling: grand in scope, slower in development, and often too risky to attract corporate funding. "Sometimes we crash and burn. It's better to do it in private," he says. "I'd rather lose my own money than someone else's."
When things work out, Kamen basks in his success. On a frosty day last winter, I followed him around downtown Manchester as he took an Ibot out for a spin. The Ibot moved so fast that I had to break into a trot just to keep up. It not only operates in four-wheel drive - a standard motorized wheelchair has two-wheel drive - but it has a "balance mode," in which the front wheels rise up, balancing the Ibot upward, like a dog begging for a treat.
The chair's dual processors direct the grounded wheels to move back and forth slightly, compensating for weight shifts. The Ibot is so stable in balance mode that its occupant can even win a shoving match with just about any human.
In front of First headquarters, I watched as a crowd of gawkers stopped Kamen to admire the Ibot. One man asked how the chair works: "Does it just balance with weights?" Kamen - at eye-level with the guy, balancing on two wheels - paused a moment and smiled. "Technically," he said, "it's magic."
Magic moments aside, Deka also has its failures. A project to develop an automated bedside pharmacy - tied into a hospital's computer network and able to deliver more than 30 drugs without manual intervention - is on hold after soaking up several million dollars in funding. "We ran into a lot of political problems," is all Kamen will say. "The drug companies don't want it to happen."
He might run into problems with the Stirling engine, too. The development of a marketable Stirling device has eluded the brightest engineering minds since Robert Stirling, a Scottish minister, patented the first version in 1816. The basic principle of Stirling's external combustion engine is simple: A chamber is filled with a gas that expands as it is heated by a small heat source, such as a propane flame, and contracts when cooled. The process operates a piston and drives the engine. The advantage? Cheap, local fuels can be used to run the engines, and Kamen has adapted his model to produce electricity instead of mechanical power.
But producing the thing is a more complex matter. While many have tried to use Stirlings to power drive shafts for vehicles, they have proved too expensive to manufacture on a mass scale, and they're not always efficient enough. One low tech problem is designing seals that guard against waste as the heat is transferred into a form that does useful work.
Deka's version heats a chamber containing helium, under pressure, and Kamen says it can run on gasoline, propane, fuel oil, diesel, alcohol, or even solar power - with one-fifth the emissions of a gas stove. Deka's engineers think they'll succeed where others have failed because they've ironed out all the kinks. "We looked at the history of the Stirling - all the money and time and expertise poured into it - and identified a half-dozen key goofs that previous teams had made," says project leader Chris Langenfeld. "Seventy percent of it was a materials challenge. We had to track down the right composites to use as seals."
Kamen hopes that his family of Stirlings, five years in development, will soon bring portable electricity to nations without a reliable power grid - or any grid at all. He envisions briefcase-sized Stirlings powering cell phones and cell towers, as well as purifying water. He aims to have them on the market in the next two years, and is currently working on the marketing issues - like how developing nations will be able to afford bulk purchases of the engines, which are projected to cost $1,500 apiece.
Staffing for the Stirling project alone involves about 20 people, including chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineers; thermodynamicists; particle and combustion physicists; and software designers and testing technicians.
"Deka is one of the highest-morale operations I've ever seen," says Ray Price, president of the Economic Club of New York and a close friend of Kamen's. "There's no bureaucracy, and very little structure. Dean expects performance, but how they get to solutions is up to them."
Kamen supervises the 10 or so projects under way at Deka at any given time, and is rarely at his desk. He refers to himself as "a human entropy producer," roaming the halls and labs, tossing out ideas, asking about timing, and prodding project managers.
Deka also has its mercilessly intense side. "There's a sorting process that happens at Deka," says MIT's Flowers, also an adviser for First. "You have the people who stick with Deka because they realize it's a great place to learn, to try things that haven't been done. Successful people listen to, understand, and respect Dean." But Flowers adds that he has known some MIT grads who have found the experience less than satisfying. "One of them would never cross the threshold again. Dean occasionally runs over people."
Those who stick around remain aware of the impatience that simmers beneath Kamen's surface. The same is true of those people who contract with Deka. Bob Gussin, Johnson & Johnson's recently retired chief scientific officer, convinced his former company to fund the Ibot, despite great internal resistance. He calls Kamen "brilliant," but says, "Dean is so intense and so aggressive that you always have to worry whether he'll get frustrated at not moving fast enough. Sometimes his intensity is almost frightening."
Kamen exhibited a pronounced entrepreneurial bent from an early age, as well as a dislike for rote learning. In junior high, rather than do his homework, he would read demanding primary texts like Isaac Newton's Principia on his own, and then heckle his science teacher. As a teenager, he built control systems for sound-and-light shows in his basement, and before long, he was getting contracts for installations at Manhattan's Hayden Planetarium, the Four Seasons, and the Museum of the City of New York. While still in high school, he was asked to automate the Times Square ball drop on New Year's Eve. Before graduation, he was earning $60,000 a year, rivaling the combined income of his father, a comic book artist, and his mother, a high school teacher.
Kamen's tendency to put his own projects before his schoolwork continued at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. On frequent trips home, he worked on his portable infusion pump, eventually dubbed Auto-Syringe. But the basement was getting crowded. Kamen needed more room. He engaged an architect to expand the basement under a newer wing of the house, and hired a crew to prop the house on stilts to make room for a Bridgeport milling machine, an arc welder, lathes, saws, and other equipment purchased from a neighborhood machine shop.
What did his parents think? Kamen sent them on a cruise during the period of heaviest construction.
After five years at WPI, Kamen still hadn't collected enough credits to graduate, so he was asked to leave. He moved back to Long Island and poured his energy into Auto-Syringe. The New England Journal of Medicine published an article about the benefits of the pump, and the National Institutes of Health ordered 100 units. In 1979, to escape taxes and overcrowding, he moved to New Hampshire. "I saw the license plates that read LIVE FREE OR DIE, and that sounded pretty good to me," says Kamen.
After two years, he sold Auto-Syringe to Baxter for an undisclosed sum. Up until that point, he'd hardly taken a salary, plowing the majority of his profits back into the business. For the first time, he felt rich. Within days of the sale, he bought a helicopter, fulfilling a childhood dream.
The helicopter led him to North Dumpling Island, a speck of land with a lighthouse, located in Long Island Sound. His flight instructor's wife, a real estate agent, told him the island was for sale. One winter day, he set out to find it. He brought the chopper down near the lighthouse tender's home. A frightened old man, part of the family that owned the island, came out to see what was going on. The young inventor befriended the man and his wife. When Kamen later bought the island (at a bargain price), he let the couple continue living there.
Though Kamen doesn't visit the island much anymore, it's a microcosm of his worldview, a whimsical combination of leave-me-alone and dreams of techno-utopia. An aerial photograph that hangs in Kamen's office at Deka bears a caption that reads "The Only 100 Percent Science-Literate Society."
When Kamen wanted to erect a wind turbine on North Dumpling and the state of New York objected, he seceded from the US. Though the secession has never been officially recognized, he signed a nonaggression pact with his friend, then-President George Bush, and enlisted Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry's as "joint chiefs of ice cream." North Dumpling has its own flag, its own anthem, a one-ship navy, and its own currency. One bill, which Kamen carries in his wallet, is the value of pi. "You can't make change for it," he says with a grin. "It's a transcendental function."
After the sale of Auto-Syringe in 1982, Kamen began buying 19th-century mill buildings in Manchester and renovating them as office space (he now owns 570,000 square feet of office space in the city). He set up Deka R&D in one, and soon got to know city and state politicians, like John Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire who would go on to become a notorious chief of staff for President Bush. Today, Kamen has a direct line to New Hampshire governor Jeanne Shaheen.
"In a small state like New Hampshire, Dean is a very visible guy," says Jay Wood, president of Kana Communications, one of Kamen's tenants. "His helicopter comes buzzing down the river and lands on a building - you can't ignore that."
When it comes to First, Kamen's a complete noodge. He makes sure that the state's pols are all visible supporters, which means First events are usually peppered with political types. Every four years, when the presidential candidates roll through New Hampshire looking for votes, Kamen makes First headquarters - aka First Place - and Westwind available for rallies, parties, and speeches, and looks for a quid pro quo from the candidates - soliciting promises to invite First winners to the White House.
One day during my visit, Kamen and I get a chance to meet up with George W. Bush. Kamen's already been all over the Eastern time zone, but nothing is more important to him than scoring promises on behalf of First. He woke up in Cleveland before dawn, then flew to visit Bose Corporation, near Boston, to show off the Ibot and talk with Amar Bose about marketing Deka's top-secret consumer device. He picked up a banker from Credit Suisse First Boston at Manchester airport to discuss financing, then wolfed down a dinner of pizza and beer at First Place, where George W. was giving a speech. After the speech, Kamen drags me through the crowd toward the candidate.
Apparently George W. indicated at a recent Westwind dinner that he might be able to attend the First nationals in Orlando. "I want to get him to promise to come in front of a reporter," Kamen tells me. "You're going to be my witness."
I'm standing in a parking lot near Manchester airport with Kamen's parents, Woodie Flowers, and Rich Cox, a Deka technician, waiting for Kamen to arrive. I'm looking for the Hummer. His mother knows better. She points to the sky and says, "There's Dean."
Kamen sets the little Enstrom down on the tarmac, and before long we're piling into the CitationJet. To Kamen, the Citation is a "beautiful machine," with its twin Williams-Rolls turbofans, top altitude of 41,000 feet, and maximum speed of Mach 0.7. The thing looks fast even standing still.
I'd heard a few stories about Kamen's piloting before I boarded. One was that he had a less-than-perfect attendance record at the CitationJet training program. But as a friend tells it, he missed only two questions on the final - the highest score in a class full of professional pilots. Afterward, he proved to the instructor that those "wrong" answers were actually correct.
On an unusually warm March afternoon, we're off to Ypsilanti, Michigan, the site of the initial round of First regionals. Kamen is upbeat, as evidenced by his safety speech before takeoff: "In the event of an emergency, those bimbos in the high heels who served you coffee will be of absolutely no use," he says. Of course there are no flight attendants on the plane.
Kamen sees the lack of appreciation for science in America as a problem - but that's not to say he's calling for a revamping of the educational system. In his view, more teachers, textbooks, PCs, and Internet access won't get students jazzed about learning. "They need to have access to challenging, hands-on projects that result in a tangible product" - like building robots. And they need role models - engineers - to assist them.
Kamen refers to First as "the NCAA of smarts." The competition has no formal instructional agenda. You just have to build a bot that can play a game better than the others do. In January, groups of high school students receive kits and a description of the game. Each group has to build the robot in six weeks, working with engineers from local companies - like Du Pont, Ford, and Honeywell. There are only two restrictions: expense (no more than $425 can be spent on additional parts, supplied by a company called Small Parts) and weight (the robot can be no more than 130 pounds). At the competition, two student teams will be paired to form an alliance.
This year, the robots have to pick up basketball-sized rubber balls and drop them in bins, earning one point for yellow balls and five for scarcer black ones. Robots also earn five points for ascending a ramp in the center of the field, 10 for hanging from a chin-up bar, and 10 more for helping a partner robot hang from the bar.
Once we're on the ground, we hustle off to the campus of Eastern Michigan University, where the students are trying out their robots. Kamen has no official duties tonight, but he can't wait to see the action. Inside the field house, teams are making last-minute adjustments and sawing off vestigial robot pieces to make the weight limit. Kamen talks to a team tinkering with Chief Delphi, one of several robots sponsored by Delphi Automotive Systems. Two teenagers approach: "Can we have your autograph?"
It's just as Kamen would have it: High school kids treating an engineer like a celebrity. And it happens several times over the weekend. MIT professor Flowers, who is serving as an emcee, is equally adored.
The following morning, at the kickoff, there are pep bands and flag bearers, honor guards and spirit corps. Students stomp their feet and cheer wildly. When two opposing robots face off to get to the ramp, the screams are deafening.
Kamen watches most of the two-minute matches from the sidelines, fixated. He marvels at a robot named V Force that can grab the chin-up bar, slide laterally along it, and, with a long arm, pluck balls out of its opponent's goal and place them in its own. "Just another science fair, huh?" he mutters to me after a particularly exciting match.
In the ensuing two days, the competition will have elements of WWF aggressiveness and flashes of Nascar-style maneuvering - except that this event is rooted in mental dexterity. But that's not enough for Kamen. He wants First to attract the same attention lavished upon professional sports. That's why he spends his energy at First events needling bigwigs at sponsoring organizations. This year, GM, Johnson & Johnson, Motorola, Xerox, and NASA together are supporting 171 teams. But Kamen wants more. He wants to include every student in the country, and have the events televised. (He also wants you to enlist, as a kid or backer: www.usfirst.org.)
Xerox chair Paul Allaire, who is smitten enough with the event to sit on the First board, is skeptical. "Is it totally practical? I'm dubious. But it's a good, if lofty, goal."
Another First board member, Bill Murphy, chair of Small Parts, waves off naysayers. "You watch," he says. "Dean's a schemer. He won't quit until it happens."
Walking the halls backstage at EMU, Kamen bemoans how difficult his mission to change the culture has been. "The inertia is enormous," he says. "If I'd have known nine years ago that it would've taken this much energy, I ..." He falls silent. But there's only one way Kamen can finish the thought: "Hell, I still would've done it."
When the finals begin, the excitement increases palpably. In the first game of the best-of-three finals, Chief Delphi pokes its snout into its opponent's goal, sucks out three balls, and skitters over to deposit them in its own goal. As the seconds tick away, it snatches another two points. Delphi's red alliance wins the first match, 34 to 16.
The next match goes to blue. "It happens like this every time," Kamen says gleefully.
In the rubber match, the action centers on the chin-up bar. Both blue alliance robots manage to hang, seizing the lead. But Visteon, Chief Delphi's red alliance partner, charges blue's Techno Beast, knocks it down, and, in the waning seconds, pulls itself up to the bar for the win. The audience roars.
Sly and the Family Stone's "You Can Make It if You Try" blasts over the PA, and the First judges form a receiving line. Hundreds of teens line the aisles, exchanging high-fives.
Heading back to Willow Run airport, Kamen is thinking ahead to the nationals at Epcot Center in Orlando. He's campaigning to get Governor Jeb Bush, who will attend the finals, to pledge that every Florida public school will participate next year.
Meanwhile, the Ibot is sailing through FDA trials and could be available by early 2001. ER star Noah Wyle is planning to make a feature film about Kamen and First. And work on the Stirling engine is going well, though, of course, not fast enough for Kamen.
On the flight back to Manchester, he cracks a joke over the intercom about pilots reporting basketball scores in midflight. "Who cares about bounce-bounce-throw?" he asks.
I ask if he knows the outcome of the First regionals at the Kennedy Space Center. "Let me call ground control," he says, mimicking a pilot-controller exchange. "Ground, this is Citation six-Delta-Kilo. Do you have the results of the First regionals in Florida?"
Everyone laughs, and then K. C. Connors, First's regional manager and Kamen's girlfriend, chimes in. "A few more years, Dean," she says. "A few more years."
