Frank Wilson’s letter from America

Frank Wilson, world renowned neurologist, discusses his experience with the Big Picture Company in the US.

Frank, from Stanford University School of Medicine, Author of The Hand: How Its Uses Shape the Brain, Language, and Human Culture and is very interested in how people learn best in practical environments.

He offers a glimpse of the higher level learning and contribution that a Big Picture intern can make and this opens up internship ideas for teachers and students in Australia.

Frank WilsonThe basic idea of this project is to extend the "mentorship" or "learning internship" concept a bit, offering students not simply the chance to work with a mentor but a chance to become involved in a large, scientifically and socially significant project that would afford the opportunity to work with any of a number of possible mentors in a variety of situations.  The specific example I suggested was "Build an artificial arm or hand that actually works."   The original idea came from friends at the Lemelson Center at the Smithsonian in Washington, who had done a summer program for DC kids on facial reconstruction that had been enormously popular with the kids.  Me being a "hands" guy and this being a time when the public is acutely aware of a new and mostly young population of amputees, I thought the idea at least worth mentioning.  The expectation is that high school students would be attracted to the idea without knowing how powerful a draw it come become, or how many possible separate tracks it might turn into once they had passed through the "portal". 
 
So much has happened that I really can barely keep up with it, and what follows in this note is just a quick summary of the highlights, with attachments that help make it clear that there is still a huge challenge despite the fact that people have been trying to solve this problem for close to 500 years (in the United States, since the Civil War).
 
As I work toward completion of the Appendix of the Prosthetics proposal for Big Picture students, I wanted to share with you just one of the jewels it contains: the final chapter from Katherine Ott's exceptionally informative (and readable!) book, Artificial Parts, Practical Lives:  Modern Histories of Prosthetics (cover and contents attached).  There are a number of reasons for this choice:
 
1. While one might not expect to literature on prosthetics to offer much in the way of creative writing, the opposite turns out to be the case. The example I've chosen, "Technology Sits Cross-Legged: Developing the Jaipur Foot Prosthesis", by Raman Srinivasan, reminded me of my first exposure to Salman Rushdie.  Srinivasan, anticipating the surprise of at least some readers at his style, explains in the endnotes that he "... let the historical narrative succumb to the tropological temptations of India. I found no other satisfactory alternative."    
 
2. In late June, 2006, Elliot Washor and I participated in an unusual and, for Big Picture, extremely important 3-day meeting in Aspen Colorado.  There, thanks to the foresight, organizational wizardry and extremely hard work of Dorothy Dunn (who developed the program for the meeting's sponsor, AIGA), Elliot and I worked with several design teams on both conceptual and pragmatic issues confronting Big Picture Schools and the program's leadership.  Two nationally prominent designers attending that meeting have continued to interact with Big Picture in highly significant ways:  Mark Ecko and Allan Chochinov.  Thanks to that meeting, and to ongoing conversations with Ralph Caplan and other like-minded individuals, we are discovering how much we have to gain from the modern "design-thinking" theory and practice.
 
3. On January 25, 2007, Elliot and I (along with Ralph Caplan, Liz Wolfson, and Jeff Wilson) met with Milton Glaser and the President of SUNY, Shirley Kenny, to discuss SUNY's plans for a new SUNY campus at Southampton for which an unusual curriculum had been proposed and was being developed.  The meeting was meant to be an informal exchange of ideas, and the discussion made clear how complex the issues are for anyone attempting to deviate from the accepted "academic and research" model that dominates American higher education.
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4. On November 7, 2007, I was invited to visit the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose and to attend the exhibition of work of the 2007 Laureates of the Tech Museum Awards.  One of the winners was Dr. Devendra Raj Mehta, who received the SanDisk Equality Award for his role in the development and distribution of the  Jaipur Foot, the subject of Srinivasan's chapter in the Ott book, attached.  This was my first encounter with the Jaipur Foot, and it was not to be the last.
 
5. On Friday, April 18, Allan Chochinov and I joined a small group of educators, publishers, artists, and designers for a day-long "conversation" at the Philip Johnson Glass House. Our topic, Toward a 21st Century Renaissance, was overseen by Roger Mandle, retiring President of the Rhode Island School of Design.  In preparing for the meeting I had begun to understand -- thanks to a quirk of Renaissance history -- that my own long professional interest in the human hand was bringing me inexorably to a deeper appreciation of a host of largely unmet challenges arising from the need for replacement arms and hands for great numbers of men, women, and children all over the world.  The Renaissance connection -- of which I would have been entirely ignorant but for the work of Claire Sherman and Peter Lukehart -- was a single image (attached) of an artificial hand designed by the French Army Surgeon Ambroise Pare' in 1575, reproduced and documented in the 1990 exhibition Writing on Hands, developed and curated by Claire and Peter for Dickinson College and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.
 
With that connection in mind, I expressed during our PJGH Conversation the view that the need for an artificial arm and hand that really work for the user remains the same challenge to 21st century physicians, artists, designers, and engineers as was the case 500 years ago.  The problem is made unusually interesting because of a whole range of special present-day circumstances that everyone in these professions acutely understands.
 
At the end of the PJGH meeting, Allan and I began a dialogue that continues to the present, one consequence of which (we hope) will be Allan's organization of a quarter-long Artificial Hand Design Challenge to students in his masters program at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
 
6. The following week, April 23-25, I attended a meeting of scientists hosted by the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins, the purpose of which was to review progress on the DARPA-funded project, Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009.  In preparation for that meeting, thanks to Steve Gard and Richard Weir, I had the opportunity to meet with the prosthetics research group at the Rehab Institute of Chicago. Attending these meetings gave me the opportunity to see just what can, and has been, done to address the almost indescribable neurobiological, computational, and engineering complexities of human arm and hand function.
 
As you will discover in reading the Srinivasan chapter, the evolution of a functionally successful human limb prosthesis -- upper or lower -- is both a colossal technological problem and a richly engaging human problem.   
 
It is exciting to imagine that a new generation of students might find themselves attracted to the world of science because thinking about, or knowing, someone who has lost a hand or an arm leads them to wonder what it would take to build an artificial arm and hand that really work, and to wonder what they themselves could do to help.

With thanks to all of you for inspiring me to continue my own journey of learning and discovery...
 
Frank Wilson