Hugh Herr

You just don't know what you're going to find.

That's correct.

Jim and I go way back.

We were climbing buddies in our early 20s.

And he came to me and said, Hugh, I'm in so much pain.

My quality of life is so poor.

Does it make sense for me to consider amputating that leg?

So we chatted about it, and Jim's timing was quite insightful because we had just invented a new surgical paradigm called the agonist-antagonist myelinar interface in 2014.

And when Jim called me, we were actually prepared to do the first human surgery with this new technique.

And Jim volunteered to be that first human subject.

So that's called proprioception?

The current amputation paradigm hasn't changed fundamentally since the U.S.

Civil War and breaks these dynamic muscle relationships and in so doing eliminates normal proprioceptive sensations.

Consequently, a standard artificial limb cannot feed back information into the nervous system about where the prosthesis is in space.

The patient, therefore, cannot sense and feel the positions and movements of the prosthetic joint without seeing it with their eyes.

My legs were amputated using this Civil War era methodology.

I can feel my feet.

I can feel them right now as a phantom awareness.

But when I try to move them, I cannot.

It feels like they're stuck inside rigid ski boots.