Dean Kamen is rarely at a loss for words. In fact, the man is rarely at a loss for anything.
At a recent conference at Boston University, Kamen, 58, took up more than triple his allotted time for a keynote speech as he worked the assembled tech-heads and computer geeks into a near-frenzied lather amid shouts of “Dean for President,” and basked in the warm embrace of a nearly five-minute standing ovation. Definitely not your average conference fare.
But what else would you expect from the man who, in his spare time, decided to create a “Super Bowl of Science,” because he was tired of seeing pro athletes treated as kings while more and more American kids rejected science outright. Kamen’s pet project, “FIRST: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology,” once held in his Manchester mill building, is now held annually in a packed Georgia Dome; every winning team gets to visit the president of the United States.
Kamen’s near-legendary list of innovations ranges from insulin pumps to the revolutionary DEKA arm. But his run hasn’t come without some criticism; detractors claim that some of his inventions, most notably the Segway and its parent iBOT, are nothing more than innovations made for the fun of innovating.
MassDevice took a few minutes to speak with Kamen about these issues in a long-ranging and, frankly, exhausting interview.
MassDevice: Let’s start with a philosophical question: Are we solving the right problems in healthcare, or are we just solving the most lucrative?
Dean Kamen: That depends very specifically on who you ask and what particular company you’re dealing with. Certainly there are a lot of companies that try to identify a place where they can solve a problem and do the analysis of the smallest investment in for the biggest return. There’s nothing wrong with that — it’s called business.
There are other organizations, like university research hospitals that spend their time pushing the limits of their knowledge doing curiosity-based research, coming up with what people today might say are “only academic solutions,” or “unrealistically expensive propositions.”
But five or 10 years down the road, those things become the source and the basis of a whole generation of technology and products that suddenly become critically valuable, necessary and affordable.
So you’re asking a question that is the subject of a lifetime of philosophy and debate and doesn’t lend itself to a one-line answer.
MassDevice: Okay, then in your opinion, are we solving the right problems in healthcare?
DK: If you’re asking for my opinion on the trend these days, I think, scarily, the general trend is that companies are more interested in figuring out how to fit into a niche in our reimbursement system that can optimize a way to make a lot of money.
Whether it’s going to be better in the long run for creating better medicine, better public policy, we’ll see. But shame on us. We’ve created this environment and now we’re living with it, and it’s probably going to get a little worse before it gets better.
MassDevice: Can we change the course we’re on?
DK: I think it would take a lot of courage and a lot of vision to change it and it would take effort on the part of the general public. The public can always blame the politicians for misleading them and disappointing them. They can always blame big business for not focusing or being greedy.
{IMAGELEFT:http://www.massdevice.com/sites/default/wp-content/uploads/featureArt/Kamen_Dean_200.jpg}The public can do all of that but sooner or later, the public — you and me — are going to decide that healthcare is important to us and that we are going to do our exercise and we are going to avoid the tobacco, the alcohol, and eating a lot of stuff that we know damn well is bad for us, and we’re going to decide to put away some of our own money to pay for the things that we ought to value — like good healthcare.
We as a society continue to think, “I’m going to lose all my extra weight because I’m going to take a pill,” or “I’m going to relinquish to government or insurance company all responsibility for what healthcare I get and how I get it,” or “I’m not willing to work at or be responsible for my own healthcare,” or “I don’t want to pay for it. I don’t want to be involved in the tough decisions and compromises.”
If we want to live in a society that, frankly, has been lured into thinking that this is reasonable by people that want to be politically correct and want to get your support, and get your vote, and give you easy solutions, and tell you that you’re always a victim and that there’s always a reason that it’s not your fault.
If the general society of this country doesn’t want to start becoming, once again, responsible for themselves and committed and willing to pay for things that are important to them, I think we’ll continue to deteriorate.
We desperately want to believe in the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus and that somebody is going to give us all the healthcare we need and it’s going to be free, that somebody is going to solve our problems with obesity without telling us to change our lifestyles.
We just have a society that is desperately trying to believe in things that are simple or easy. I think somebody has got to, whether it’s a politician or somebody else, has got to get the public to look themselves in the eye and say that every one of the 300 million people in this country has got to be working towards being healthier, has to be putting money away to pay for the things they value for themselves and their kids and be responsible enough to understand there’s no free lunch, there’s no free healthcare, there’s no easy way to stay healthy without your own personal effort and involvement. Until we start telling people that and have them believe that, I think we’re just kicking the can down the street.
MassDevice: Do next-generation prosthetics like the DEKA arm, which often cost so much to develop, have a future beyond governmental projects?
DK: If you mean, “Do I see a future in terms of the technology and the capability?” Absolutely. It’s going to be stunning.
If you mean, “Do I see a future in terms of it becoming a real industry that is creating profits, that will attract major businesses?” No, and I hope that’s the case. The last thing we need to do is spend another couple years sending kids into harm’s way, having their arms blown off in such large quantities that there’s an industry to put ’em back on. I hope this stays a small industry driven mostly by very, very, small and specialized individual needs.
MassDevice: Some critics would say that, while brilliant, your inventions aren’t in tune with what the market can support. Do you consider the cost of mass-producing a product when you’re innovating?
DK: All the time. We’ve shipped 150 million cassettes for home dialysis and it’s probably 80 percent of the world market. Almost every medical product we’ve made succeeds if it can be made better or simpler. That’s always a consideration.
But in the case of the DEKA arm, it clearly wasn’t, because we’re not so naive to think that just because we can make a wonderful, terrific arm then suddenly there’s going to be a market for thousands or 10s of thousands, or millions of them.
{IMAGELEFT:http://www.massdevice.com/sites/default/wp-content/uploads/featureArt/DEKA_100x100.jpg}And I’ll say it again: I hope there never is a market for that many. We’re making these because, although it’s a small population, these people are in desperate need of a solution and in this case the government and the military is capable of paying for it and getting it on these kids. We’re happy to do our part to help these kids. I don’t think we’re going to make money on this. We didn’t set out to make money doing this.
MassDevice: Is there any technology in the medical world right now that you find fascinating or amazing? Anything in particular that you have your eye on?
DK: There’s so much out there, it’s amazing. I think we are finally turning the art of medicine into the science of proteomics, genomics, physiology, neurobiology — every aspect of medicine is being broken down into real science, real engineering. I think over the next 10 or 20 years, things that we used to think were impossible to understand will be clearly understood.
MassDevice: Any specific breakthrough that you think is really going to change the way we view things in the near future?
DK: For one thing, as we get better and better at understanding the genetic relationship between disease state and how we treat diseases, I think certainly the pharmaceutical industry and biologics will change more in the next decade or two since it’s changed since we discovered what an antibiotic was.
MassDevice: How about the medical device space — do you see anything there that’s revolutionary?
DK: I think devices will continue to move, as they have in the past, in a nice, positive progression but not nearly as much as some of these areas we discussed.
MassDevice: Was the insulin pump one of your first inventions or just one that got the most attention?
DK: It was one of the first that got any attention.
MassDevice: What was your first foray into the medical world?
DK: In the medical world the insulin pump was, but there were other kinds of drug delivery we were developing before the invention that you’re calling the insulin pumps.
We were making pumps for delivering chemotherapy, oxytocin and Pitocin for labor and delivery. We were making different kinds of specialty pumps for hematology, endocrinology and then some of us realized that with the technology getting smaller and more capable and more programmable, we could make one for the world of insulin delivery — and compared to all those other products, which were niche market, this was a big one.
MassDevice: Is there one invention or innovation that you hold particularly close to your heart?
DK: (laughing) All of them. There are some you like because it was a great technical achievement, although that market might be small. Others are just an elegant way to go out there and have a huge impact on a large population. They’re all very different. It’s like kids. You can’t say one is better than the other. They’re just different.
MassDevice: How disappointed were you that the iBOT didn’t catch on, especially since it’s not in production anymore?
DK: I think that it will [catch on]. I’m sure the day after Edison made the first light bulb everybody got so excited when they went home that night and they all read about that light bulb sitting with their kerosene lamps, doing what they’ve done their whole lives and what their parents had done their whole lives. I don’t know how many decades it was between the time Wilbur and Orville proved that you could take cast iron, wood and canvas and make it fly and airlines giving frequent flier miles out.
Am I disappointed that in that long chain of what you’ve got to do to make it, to make it reliable, make it produceable, get it through the FDA in this case as a Class III device? Those were all huge hurdles and having it get through all those hurdles and having it get to CMS and having them say, “Oh, this thing has wheels and motors, it’s a motorized wheelchair, we’ll reimburse it like a motorized wheelchair.”
Was that a stunning, confusing, disappointing situation? Sure, that would be like if I made the $100 laptop and somebody says, “Let’s see, some kid uses this instead of a pencil and a piece of paper, okay we’ll give you 40 cents.”
That would be disappointing. Do I believe that in the end every kid is going to use a laptop instead of a piece of slate and chalk? Yes. Will it take longer for society to pick it up and adopt to it? Probably.
{IMAGELEFT:http://www.massdevice.com/sites/default/wp-content/uploads/headshots/Kamen_Dean_100x100.jpg}Technology is moving faster and faster. We all know that. It’s Moore’s Law. People are not moving faster and faster, society is moving slower and slower. The frustration between what’s possible and what’s happening is widening, not shrinking. Society is getting older; that makes it more conservative. Society is getting more complex. We have more bureaucracy, we have more concern about change becuase we’ve seen some of the unintended consequences that haven’t been good and we’re like the cat who jumps on the hot stove and won’t jump on a hot stove again.
We, like that cat, won’t jump on a cold one either. So we have a lot of forces in our society that are creating a larger gap between what’s possible, what should be and what is.
Does that frustrate me? Of course it frustrates me. But I’m an eternal optimist and I think all these things will happen. We’ll just have to push at them and let society move at the pace society moves.
MassDevice: You’ve said you’ve been making medical innovations for 30 years and now you’re known as the Segway guy. How would you prefer to be known?
DK: (laughing) First, I’d like to be known as somebody who has worked hard at important projects and, every once in a while, one of my ideas actually makes enough of an impact on people that they’re willing to change the way they do things and turn one of my inventions into an innovation.
Every once in a while, that happens and it gives me the energy, incentive and resources to do it again.
