Suzanne Sataline, Author at Suzanne Sataline

The ‘Purpose Driven Church’ Splits Believers

Posted on September 5, 2006 by Suzanne Sataline

Veneration Gap
A Popular Strategy for Church Growth Splits Congregants

By Suzanne Sataline
September 5, 2006

IUKA, Miss. — In April, 150 members of Iuka Baptist Church voted to kick Charles Jones off the deacons’ board. The punishment followed weeks of complaints by Mr. Jones and his friends that the pastor was following the teachings of the Rev. Rick Warren, the best-selling author and church-growth guru. After the vote, about 40 other members quit the church to support Mr. Jones.

Mr. Warren, the effusive pastor of stadium-sized Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., is best known for his book “The Purpose Driven Life,” which has sold 25 million copies and urges people to follow God’s plan for them. He has spawned an industry advising churches to become “purpose-driven” by attracting nonbelievers with lively worship services, classes and sermons that discuss Jesus’ impact on their lives, and invitations to volunteer.

But the purpose-driven movement is dividing the country’s more than 50 million evangelicals. Some evangelicals, like the Iuka castoffs, say it’s inappropriate for churches to use growth tactics akin to modern management tools, including concepts such as researching the church “market” and writing mission statements. Others say it encourages simplistic Bible teaching. Anger over the adoption of Mr. Warren’s methods has driven off older Christians from their longtime churches. Congregations nationwide have split or expelled members who fought the changes, roiling working-class Baptist congregations and affluent nondenominational churches.

Last summer, the evangelical church of onetime Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers split after adopting Mr. Warren’s techniques. That church, Valley View Christian Church in Dallas, wanted to increase membership and had built a huge sanctuary several years ago to accommodate hundreds of people. Church leaders adopted a strategic plan built around Mr. Warren’s five “fundamental purposes”: worship, fellowship, discipleship, ministry and evangelism. One goal was to make sure more than 19% of the church’s members were adults in their 20s and 30s, says the pastor, the Rev. Barry McCarty.

The Rev. Ron Key, then the senior minister, says he objected to the church’s “Madison Avenue” marketing. “I believe Jesus died for everybody,” Mr. Key says, not just people in a “target audience.” He says the leaders wanted church that was more “edgy,” with a worship service using modern music. Mr. Key was demoted, then fired for being divisive and insubordinate.

About 200 people, many of whom had left the church earlier because they thought it should give more money to mission work, began worshiping in a Doubletree Hotel, and later in a college gym, with Mr. Key as pastor. Ms. Miers, the White House counsel, worships with them when she comes to town, a White House spokeswoman says.

At a time when many churches are struggling with declining or aging congregations, advocates of the purpose-driven movement credit it with energizing congregations, doubling the size of some churches and boosting the number of “megachurches” of more than 2,000 members. Mr. Warren says his church and nonprofit arm have trained 400,000 pastors world-wide. He reaches many more through sales of his sermons, books and lessons on the Web. Mr. Warren says he donates 90% of his money to fund philanthropy and overseas training.

Mr. Warren preaches in sandals and a Hawaiian shirt, and he encourages ministers to banish church traditions such as hymns and pews. He and his followers use “praise team” singers, backed by rock bands playing contemporary Christian songs. His sermons rarely linger on self-denial and fighting sin, instead focusing on healing modern American angst, such as troubled marriages and stress.

As membership in Protestant churches stagnated in the 1980s, Mr. Warren, a Southern Baptist in Orange County, Calif., learned from surveys that the region’s Reagan-era baby boomers said they didn’t connect with their parents’ churches. He figured they might find God if they could sit in a theater-style auditorium and listen to live pop music and sermons that could help them with ennui and personal problems. Through Mr. Warren’s Internet marketing savvy, tens of thousands of subscribing pastors learned about his church, which draws 20,000 people each weekend. In the past decade, many pastors jumped to replicate his methods, creating new churches and transforming existing ones.

Christians have long divided over efforts to adapt and modernize their faith. Some believers worry that purpose-driven techniques are so widespread among Protestant churches that they are permanently altering the way Christians worship. Some traditionalists say Mr. Warren’s messages misread Bible passages and undermine traditions. Mr. Warren is “gutting” Christianity, says the Rev. Bob DeWaay, author of a book critical of the approach. “The Bible’s theme is about redemption and atonement, not finding meaning and solving problems,” the Minneapolis pastor says. A spokesman said Mr. Warren believes the Bible addresses sin and redemption, as well as human problems.

Some pastors learn how to make their churches purpose-driven through training workshops. Speakers at Church Transitions Inc., a Waxhaw, N.C., nonprofit that works closely with Mr. Warren’s church, stress that the transition will be rough. At a seminar outside of Austin, Texas in April, the Revs. Roddy Clyde and Glen Sartain advised 80 audience members to trust very few people with their plans. “All the forces of hell are going to come at you when you wake up that church,” said Mr. Sartain, who has taught the material at Mr. Warren’s Saddleback Church.

During a session titled “Dealing with Opposition,” Mr. Clyde recommended that the pastor speak to critical members, then help them leave if they don’t stop objecting. Then when those congregants join a new church, Mr. Clyde instructed, pastors should call their new minister and suggest that the congregants be barred from any leadership role.

“There are moments when you’ve got to play hardball,” said the Rev. Dan Southerland, Church Transitions’ president, in an interview. “You cannot transition a church . . . and placate every whiny Christian along the way.”

Mr. Warren acknowledges that splits occur in congregations that adopt his ideas, though he says he opposes efforts to expel church members. “There is no growth without change and there is no change without loss and there is no loss without pain,” he says. “Probably 10% of all churches are in conflict at any given point, regardless of what they’re doing.” That, he contends, “is not just symptomatic of changing to purpose-driven. It would be symptomatic in changing to anything.”

Despite successes elsewhere, the exodus at some churches adopting the purpose-driven approach has been dramatic. Since taking the job of senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Lakewood in Long Beach, Calif., seven years ago, the Rev. John Dickau has watched attendance slide to 550 from 700. “I’ve often wondered, where’s bottom?” he says.

Mr. Dickau has emulated Mr. Warren by favoring sermons about marital and family issues. He says he has attended several Church Transitions conferences to glean new insights and is personally coached by Mr. Sartain. Still, Mr. Dickau says, he made plenty of missteps, mainly, moving too fast. He proposed that the church drop the word “Baptist” from the name, to reach people who wouldn’t identify with a denomination, but the congregation vote failed.

He jettisoned the piano for a guitar. And still people left, he says — because the music is modern, because the congregation no longer uses hymn books, because the center screen that displays the song lyrics obscures the cross. Having a smaller congregation has meant trimming the $1.7 million budget to be able to afford adding to the sound system and new stage lights, which cost $150,000, Mr. Dickau says.

Still, he says he doesn’t regret adopting a purpose-driven approach. “This church won’t be here that much longer if we don’t make these changes,” he says.

The Rev. Bob Felts, pastor of Brookwood Church in Burlington, N.C., says his former congregation seemed enthusiastic about the purpose-driven approach in the 1990s. So he eagerly introduced the concepts to his new church starting in 2001.

Half the members, he said, balked at his decisions to dress casually, restrict choir performances and use electric instruments. Services now may start with a piercing electric-guitar solo, boosted with amplifiers from the $50,000 sound system. Nearly five years into the process, Mr. Felts says he has more young people than in years past: 40% of those who attend are under 22, as opposed to 20% years earlier. But attendance shrank to 275 this summer from 600. (He expects returning students from the area college to swell the rolls by 70.) Mr. Felts says he had to cut tens of thousands of dollars from the annual budget, which is now $600,000. He says some departing members have accused him of “ruining the church.”

Mr. Felts says that despite his church’s troubles, most churches that follow the purpose-driven way are growing. “It takes time and persistence,” he says. “You’re talking about a new paradigm.”

Mr. Warren’s philosophy has become such a lightning rod that some church leaders are reluctant to declare that they are using purpose-driven methods — and some congregants see hidden agendas in the smallest changes at their churches.

Since Iuka Baptist’s founding in 1859, its services had remained much the same. Sunday morning began with hymns such as “How Great Thou Art” and “O Worship the King,” followed by prayer and a lengthy sermon. Many of the white working-class families who attend the church have known each other since high school.

But the church was in debt and wasn’t growing. After Iuka’s pastor moved to another church in 2003, a search committee recruited the Rev. Jim Holcomb, 48. He preached with gusto, liberally salting his sermons with personal stories and jokes. Changes were coming, he told members, and he warned that the church could lose some members because of it.

Mr. Holcomb says he partially read an earlier Warren book called “The Purpose Driven Church” and read Mr. Warren’s essays in the Ladies’ Home Journal. He says Mr. Warren’s teachings were never part of his agenda. He was promoting “aggressive, evangelistic outreach” to bolster the church. “If that’s purpose-driven, then I’m purpose-driven,” he says.

Innovations that are hallmarks of many purpose-driven churches soon began rippling through Iuka Baptist. Mr. Holcomb began a second worship service at 8:30 a.m. Sundays with a “praise team” that sang hymns as well as Christian pop songs with lyrics beamed on a screen. In 2005, Iuka Baptist adopted its first mission statement, a tactic that Mr. Warren says helps the church focus on its objectives. One of the school’s adult Sunday school teachers bought each of his 12 students a copy of “The Purpose Driven Life.” The church’s youth minister assigned the book to his 60 middle-school and high-school students.

The church began to grow. Membership this spring was 694 local members, up 170 since Mr. Holcomb became pastor, according to church staff. But the changes dismayed several older members. Charles Jones, 67, had belonged to Iuka Baptist for 59 years and was one of 15 deacons, or lay officers. He and his wife, Nena, were married at the church, as was their daughter.

The Joneses grew disappointed that they rarely heard Mr. Holcomb deliver messages from the pulpit about God’s wrath or redemption. “He didn’t preach on somebody going to hell,” says Mrs. Jones, 61. Mr. Holcomb says he has always preached sound biblical messages.

Mrs. Jones began scouring the Internet to investigate all the changes taking places at Iuka. Her searches led her to Web sites run by critics of Mr. Warren as well as to Mr. Warren’s own Web site.

More than a dozen church members, including the Joneses, began meeting privately to complain about changes. Church leaders became angry. “The Rev. Jim Holcomb has been slandered and insulted by some of you,” the church’s minister for education, the Rev. Kim Leonard, thundered at one service. Mr. Holcomb and Mr. Leonard deny that Iuka Baptist was becoming purpose-driven. Mr. Leonard says it was “coincidence” that the new initiatives resembled strategies advocated by Mr. Warren and his movement.

Then a Web site run by a critic of Mr. Warren posted a letter from Mrs. Jones describing her worries about Iuka Baptist and comparing the congregation’s admiration for Mr. Holcomb to the cult followings of Jim Jones and David Koresh. The posting sparked angry emails from church members. A church meeting was soon called. Hundreds of people packed into the pews. After heated arguments, the congregation voted 150-to-41 to throw Mr. Jones off the board. The members also accepted the resignations of two other deacons, friends of Mr. Jones who had been asked to leave the board. In the weeks that followed, 40 church members quit.

With no church to worship in this spring, Mr. Jones led 30 former Iuka members in prayer one May night at a public park. He asked God to bless their former spiritual home and those who had forced them from it.

“Keep your eyes on Iuka Baptist Church, Lord,” Mr. Jones said, his head bowed, “that you may open their eyes and their hearts.”

Mr. Holcomb, the pastor whose changes at the church started the controversy, has left Iuka for another church. A search committee continues to look for a new pastor. Deacon Kenny Phifer said the committee won’t hire a pastor who will make Iuka purpose-driven.

Popular Science

War Wounded Hope for Breakthroughs

Posted on July 19, 2006 by Suzanne Sataline

Waiting For an Arm and a Leg

By Suzanne Sataline
July 2006

There’s always a Plan C—West Point teaches you that. If the road is mined, the bridge in splinters, and your opponent’s brigade massing on your left, you find a new road, build a new bridge. That´s Army DNA, the building blocks of a successful warrior, and it has been flush through Capt. Dawn Halfaker’s cells since her first weeks at the elite military college and as a guard on its women’s basketball team. Keep moving. There´s always another way.

Then you graduate and, because you’re an action junkie thrilled by weapons and foreign cultures, you´re assigned to run a military police station outside Baghdad. One morning before sunrise in June 2004, you´re bumping along in a Humvee on a routine patrol when someone aims a rocket-propelled grenade your way. It’s a lucky shot. The bomb tunnels into the carriage, shears off your buddy´s arm, and blasts through your own, making spaghetti out of tendons and muscle. What the insurgents don´t get, the surgeons finish off, leaving you with nothing below your shattered right scapula but expectations.

You’re 24, a child of the computer age. When you wake up and learn there is no more right arm to write and eat and shoot jumpers with, you just know that the country that invented supercomputing and reconstructive surgery can give you something gleaming and spectacular. An arm to rival Will Smith´s appendage in I, Robot.

Since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 370 U.S. soldiers have had amputations. Indeed, there are wheelchair traffic jams on the third floor of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. That´s where Halfaker befriended Melissa Stockwell, a former gymnast and rock climber who was in Baghdad for only a few weeks before she lost her left leg to a roadside bomb in April 2004.

The two women bonded in frustration. Stockwell, 26, received the microprocessor-enhanced C-Leg but struggled for months to walk free of pain, wishing that the large silicone socket holding what she calls her “little leg” wouldn’t chafe or thrust to the side, broadcasting her limp. Halfaker was the lone female soldier with what’s bloodlessly called a shoulder disarticulation, her right side barren like a sheer cliff. Prosthetists fit her at first with a partly mechanical, partly battery-powered arm held on with a thick plastic socket that fit like a shield and was Velcroed around her body. The device worked with muscle power; when she shrugged, pulleys and cables would trigger the motorized arm to open a blocky claw. It was a prosthetic born out of a previous war, uncomfortable and clumsy, and made her feel like a Playskool toy-and she let the prosthetists know her displeasure. “I don’t want an arm that weighs 20 pounds. I want an arm that weighs three pounds,” she told them. Something that wouldn’t slow her down. She was offered a hand that was a hook, a device straight out of the post-World War II weepie The Best Years of Our Lives. Absolutely not. “Because,” Halfaker said, “it looks like a hook.”

And that was it. There was no Plan C. For Stockwell, there was no leg and socket that would allow her to stride quickly and pain-free, that didn’t leave raw, angry marks on her pale thigh. For Halfaker, there was no arm that was strong and nimble and light enough that she could slip it under a silk blouse. Stockwell persisted, learning to walk in her new mechanical leg, though with a noticeable limp. She adapted. Halfaker rebelled, left her arm in a heap in her room. She learned to wash, dress, drive, and run with one arm, her empty sleeve dangling by her side. She adapted too.

But one day soon, in part because of the experiences of Iraq veterans like Stockwell and Halfaker, prosthetics wearers won´t have to do so much adapting. It´s the prosthetics that will be doing the adapting.

Prosthetics Manhattan Project

Nothing about a prosthetics patient’s fake limbs is optimal-not their speed, mobility, comfort or looks. This is partially because the market, though steady, is small, and the funding to advance prosthetics technology doesn´t flow as heavily as it does in, say, cancer research. There are about 1.8 million amputees in the U.S-mostly elderly stroke and diabetes patients-but the number of prosthetics users is significantly lower. Another inhibiting factor, of course, is the tremendous challenge of mechanically replicating the movement and dexterity of human limbs, which are as dependent on two-way communication with the brain as they are on the strength of bone and muscle.

But Halfaker and Stockwell were injured at an auspicious moment in the country´s attitude toward the prevention and treatment of limb loss. The nationwide support organization Disabled American Veterans has been lobbying for improved care for aging veterans hobbled by back and hip pain aggravated by poor-fitting prosthetics. Meanwhile, in Iraq, Kevlar vests and slick battlefield surgical units have kept more wounded soldiers alive (even if with missing limbs) than during any previous war. Government officials, keenly aware of the shoddy treatment given injured Vietnam vets-who often waited months for prosthetics-have vowed that these young men and women would not be treated the same.

In addition to the best care available now, that promise has sparked serious investment in the future. Don´t just think sockets and computerized body extensions, scientists are being told. Collaborate across fields. Explore every angle-even the regenerative powers of salamanders. In 2005 the Department of Veterans Affairs budgeted $7.2 million to create the Center for Restorative and Regenerative Medicine at the VA Medical Center in Providence, Rhode Island. This year the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-which has paid for everything from mine-hunting robotic lobsters to sleep-deprivation research-began funding two prosthetics projects for $48.5 million, hoping the teams will devise a stronger, more functional arm in two years and, in four years, a neurally-controlled arm with sensory capabilities and greater degrees of motion.

The ultimate goal: to create prosthetics that interact with the body, tapping directly into the brain´s desires and sending back progress reports. To do this, artificial limbs will need additional sensors to gather information on speed, angle, gait and balance. Improvements in metals, plastics and other materials will make prosthetics lighter, more flexible and more easily integrated onto the body. “It requires a kind of Manhattan Project” in terms of coordination and commitment, says prosthetics innovator Hugh Herr, director of the biomechatronics group at MIT´s Media Laboratory. Herr is a uniquely knowledgeable advocate for amputees, having worn two below-the-knee prosthetics for decades, since losing his legs to frostbite while ice climbing in New Hampshire as a teenager. “We’re at a time in history where there are many core technologies that are getting close,” he says. “And if there’s funding, there will be an opportunity for dramatic and profound innovation-what even Hollywood would view as bionics.”

Painstaking Progress

Before World War II, amputees wore static prosthetic attachments that were little better than peg legs. Then came complicated strap-, cable- and pulley-intensive mechanical arms, which opened a claw. By the 1960s, Soviet scientists had discovered that the amputee´s body has far more resources to call upon. Electrodes placed on the skin could detect a muscle´s myoelectric signals-its contractions-and transmit them to a battery-powered prosthetic, which would bend or straighten the arm. By the early 1980s, as the needs of injured Vietnam veterans spurred research, microprocessors allowed for gradations of movement and speed, rotation and flexion. Still, the stiff prosthetics make a series of many individual, sometimes jerky motions instead of executing seamlessly combined moves. The technology has advanced past the old myoelectric arms, which processed one signal at a time to move the elbow, wrist or hand. But even with simultaneous functioning of these controls, motions can be slow and require the wearer’s intense concentration. Simply doing dishes or getting dressed can be exhausting.

Prosthetic-leg wearers have seen more innovation than those needing arms, partly because there are more lower-limb amputations (95 percent of amputees), which means a bigger market for those working to improve the technology. Stockwell’s C-Leg, made by Otto Bock HealthCare in Germany, employs a microprocessor and hydraulics to enable the leg to swing forward automatically once a certain percentage of the wearer´s weight has shifted. The Icelandic company Ossur’s newer Rheo knee is similar to the C-leg, using a microprocessor to sense the knee´s position and load, which allows the leg to adapt to the person’s gait.

But these high-tech replacements can’t tell the wearer where the limb is in space. The devices act in mute isolation, unable to share information with the central nervous system, unable to grasp the user´s desires or even coordinate with the opposite limb. The only way to know whether the C-Leg has negotiated a curb is to look directly at the leg. “Your ankle talks to your other ankle-you´re distributed,” says Herr, one of the Rheo´s inventors. “Amputees are not yet distributed. So if I´m using the Rheo or the C-Leg, and I´m walking along and I see steps up ahead, I have no way to tell my knee that.”

Then there is the pain. Prosthetics can be heavy. If an arm socket is too tight, it pinches; too big, and the prosthetic leg feels unsteady. After six months with her C-Leg, Stockwell still moved in stages-torso, hips, legs-hating it when people stared. She decided to wear shorts, even in winter. “I’d rather they see my legs,” she explains, “than wear pants and have them wondering, ‘What’s wrong with her?'”

Bionics: We Do Not Have the Technology . . . Yet

The higher up the arm or leg someone is amputated, the more flexibility and range of motion disappears. Losing a foot is better than losing a knee; losing a wrist beats missing an elbow. Strip away multiple joints, and the body loses pronation, supination, abduction and adduction–those lovely, complicated multi-joint moves that allow people to sip iced tea or sidestep a pothole, moves that current prosthetics cannot mimic with ease.

As an orthopedist, Roy Aaron understands this. The Brown University Medical School professor was sobered every time he read about soldiers missing arms and legs. Here were lithe, active, determined people in prime physical shape. Years of wearing current prosthetics would leave them crippled with arthritis and other overuse injuries.

Aaron had time to think about this more deeply when his own body crashed. Confined to his bed for a few months in 2004 with a bad back, he dictated notes about a multipronged prosthetics project. The effort would marry tissue engineering, electronics, metallurgy, neurology and robotics, leveraging a toolkit of techniques to create hybrid limbs-part biological, part synthetic-that would one day allow amputees to move supplely and pain-free, their minds and bodies again working together as one. If researchers could replace the lost tissue and nerves and integrate the new flesh with smart, robotic prosthetics that could sense what their wearers´ minds and bodies wanted to do, Aaron thought, these young people could once again move with ease.

Aaron’s timing couldn’t have been better-his vision helped secure some of the new VA funding for the creation of the Center for Restorative and Regenerative Medicine. There, he´s finding ways to save damaged joints and extend the residual limb, commonly called the stump. His quest is for humans to mimic the axolotl, a type of salamander and the highest animal on the evolutionary scale that can regenerate a limb. “Cut a limb off, and he’ll just regenerate a whole arm or whole leg, toes and everything,” he says. “I’ve got to figure out how to talk to these newts and find out how they do it.”

But the marvelous future that this technology promises is too distant to help Halfaker, who worked with a custom-prosthetics designer at Walter Reed to fashion a limb that is light, realistic-looking-and otherwise utterly unfunctional. The designers made a translucent silicone socket liner that hugged her scar and was secured by a bra strap. Onto that they screwed an aluminum rod with tubing that could be bent into several positions. They then added urethane foam padding and, finally, stainless-steel fingers that can be bent into position. Her new arm was hand-painted by a former makeup artist with CSI: Miami to match her other arm, freckles and all. No motors, no sensors, no microprocessor. No utility except psychological: It would fill Halfaker´s sleeve and make her seem, at first glance, complete. “I want to look like I did before,” she says. “Who wouldn’t?”

Melding Body and Bionics

Of the many hurdles on the road to creating a Halfaker-friendly prosthetic, one of the most critical is the socket, the place where flesh and prosthetic meet. There have been plenty of socket innovations, including vacuum sockets that suspend the limb and suction sockets that add or remove fluid to maintain a consistent fit. But the best option would be to get rid of the socket altogether.

In 1952 Swedish orthopedist Per-Ingvar Branemark discovered that a titanium rod inserted in a rabbit´s bone fused well. He called it osseointegration, and the technique has worked wonderfully for dental implants, false teeth built on rods anchored in the patient´s underlying bone. In 1990 Branemark´s son, Rickard, an orthopedic surgeon at Sahlgren University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, surgically implanted rods into human patients´ bones to act as a stable base for a prosthetic arm or leg. But several patients suffered complications. The skin never fused around the rod, acting as if it were a wound, and infections sprouted.

At Brown, molecular biologist Jeffrey Morgan and dean of engineering Clyde Briant are seeking ways to stop such infections. Briant is experimenting with titanium and alloys in search of a combination that is strong yet compatible with human tissue. Morgan is growing skin cells that will cling to the metal, forming a natural seal. It shouldn’t be impossible: “Brown students,” he observes, “have pierced noses.”

Once science figures out better ways to attach artificial limbs, prosthetics themselves need to become smarter, able to act on signals sent directly from the brain. Consider the case of Jesse Sullivan, a power lineman from Dayton, Tennessee, who lost both arms at the shoulder after being electrocuted on the job in 2001. A year later, doctors transferred four nerves (which were no longer infusing muscle) that had controlled his left arm out of his shoulder area and into his pectoral muscles. Six months after that, Todd Kuiken, director of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago´s Neural Engineering Center for Artificial Limbs, detected signals in the nerves. Kuiken´s team studded the surface of Sullivan´s chest with electrodes and joined them with wires to a multi-jointed prosthetic. The goal was to connect brain to artificial arm by redirecting signals from Sullivan’s severed nerves. It worked. When doctors asked Sullivan to think about opening his hand, the device, almost instinctively, sprung open. “It was the greatest feeling I’d had since I’d been hurt,” Sullivan says. He can now eat, mow the lawn, and do his laundry, but his arm fulfills only a small fraction of the nerves´ potential power. The nerve for hand closing controls at least 20 muscles, Kuiken says, “and I’m using it for just two different signals. If we tease it out, we might get better and better control.” Kuiken is now developing sensors that will allow Sullivan to feel what he is touching.

Another way to power artificial limbs is to bypass the nerves and tap directly into the brain. That´s what John Donoghue, director of Brown’s Brain Science program and the chief scientific officer at Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems in Foxborough, Massachusetts, is working toward with the invention of BrainGate, a chip that was implanted in 2004 into paralyzed 25-year-old stabbing victim Matt Nagle. With the four-millimeter-square chip in his primary motor cortex, Nagle thinks about moving a cursor on the computer screen to the right. His neurons fire in a certain pattern, and those data are transmitted through a plug affixed to his skull to the computer, which moves the cursor. Soon, BrainGate´s developers got really ambitious. They lay a prosthetic arm, tethered to the computer, on Nagle’s lap and told him to open the hand. He did, just by thinking, and swore in amazement as the hand unfurled. Donoghue promises that future versions will operate wirelessly; Cyberkinetics is developing a control system that uses wireless transmitters and fully implantable power sources.

Fully Wired Limbs

In time, the brain will need to start hearing back from the prosthetics it’s sending signals to. It ordinarily receives a flurry of sensory feedback from a human leg-the terrain being navigated, the pitch of the incline-and can signal adjustments that need to be made. Next-generation prosthetics will be loaded with far more sensors than the Rheo and C-Leg have. They will pick up many, if not all, the cues that biological joints receive and be able to track their own pitch, forward thrust and spatial orientation.

But embedding prosthetics with sensors is useful only if those sensors can communicate with the wearer’s brain and spinal cord. The most promising middleman for such chatter is an invention called artificial nerve cells, or BIONs–”bionic neurons.” Developed by researchers at the Alfred E. Mann Institute at the University of Southern California, these implantable devices (centimeter-long glass capsules equipped with electrodes) have already been successfully injected in or near patients´ muscles and nerves to treat paralysis and to stimulate the limbs of stroke and arthritis patients. The researchers are now working on BION2, which will amplify existing nerve signals-sending instructions to the muscles and pr0cessing feedback from the limb-and might improve communication between a prosthetic limb, such as a hand with moving digits, and its wearer´s brain.

When these sensors determine that a leg needs extra power-for, perhaps, an uphill climb-they might operate in tandem with computer-controlled motors, also integrated into the prosthetic, to give the wearer a boost. Herr and his team have fashioned an “active ankle” that can behave like a spring or add or dissipate energy. His prototype has a motor in the ankle and a series of springs. The wearer would have wireless sensors implanted in his remaining leg muscle that would communicate with the ankle´s internal computer, augmenting power when needed. Herr has tried the device himself and describes it as equivalent to hopping onto a powered airport-terminal walkway. “If it were a product,” he says, “I would call it the Catapult.”

As all these technologies are refined, the artificial limbs will begin to look more and more like human limbs from the outside-and possibly even from the inside, as the human design is geared so well to its many tasks. Multi-jointed fingers will replace hands that have only three unjointed fingers, to achieve more naturalistic dexterity. Mechanical knees and ankles will become progressively more streamlined and efficient. Ultimately, even the means by which the joints are activated will become more humanlike.

Roy Kornbluh, a senior research engineer at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, has been experimenting with an electroactive polymer, also known as artificial muscle, that expands when voltage is applied and contracts when it´s turned off. “The more voltage, the more it stretches,” Kornbluh says. The process mimics human muscle, which changes shape in response to chemical signals.

Thinking Through Every Step

When a soldier loses a leg, she spends hours in physical therapy simply learning to stand. Stockwell started out on crutches. Next she stood using two canes. Then one. She stood on one leg. She stood and threw a ball. Finally, she stood on a C-Leg and hobbled down some parallel bars. In time, she walked free of bars. Then she pulled her seated physical therapist around the room, harnessed like a horse with some long stretchy Therabands. Running is the last step, the ultimate sign of the wearer´s success at managing body-machine mechanics. She had tried to run on a leg without an artificial knee, which forced her to kick with a circular eggbeater motion. The effort exhausted her.

Her prosthetist, Elliot Weintrob, had another idea. One brisk day in early spring last year, Weintrob, Stockwell and her husband, Dick, who is also a soldier, drove to a track in northern Virginia. Stockwell slipped into a socket consisting of an Ossur Total Knee attached to a bouncy Ossur Flex-Run Foot, a spring shaped like a large upside-down question mark. The knee could swing forward freely but did not have the C-leg´s ability to catch and lock if she started to fall.

“I’m scared,” Stockwell said to her husband. She tucked some hair behind her ear.

“You can do it,” he replied softly. They walked to a middle lane and he whispered in her ear, “Take off!”

She took six choppy long steps, her prosthetic leg flapping forward. Out of habit, she made the eggbeater motion. Weintrob pointed this out.

“I feel better,” she said hopefully. She started again, an awkward rise and collapse to her gait. She stopped, her face flushed, tendrils of hair twirling around her face. She started again. You could tell it hurt by the quick, short steps she took, her arms pinched against her body. She ran like she had stubbed her toe-over and over again.

Eventually, she got the hang of it. Months later, she managed to make her leg work well enough to compete in road races and triathlons, where she uses an arm-cranked bike. Last fall, inspired by her experiences, Stockwell began studying prosthetics at a Minnesota college, all the while convinced that her chosen field will ultimately become obsolete. A century from now, she says excitedly, prosthetics won´t be necessary: Doctors will be regenerating limbs!

At the track last spring, though, her back was sore, her backside was chafed, and she was tired of thinking about where to place her left leg next. “Every step,” she said. “I think about every step.”

The Wall Street Journal

The eBay Atheist

Posted on March 9, 2006 by Suzanne Sataline

On eBay, an Atheist Puts His Own Soul
On the Auction Block

By SUZANNE SATALINE
March 9, 2006

A few weeks ago, Hemant Mehta posted an unusual item for sale on eBay: a chance to save his soul.

The DePaul University graduate student promised the winner that for each $10 of the final bid, he would attend an hour of church services. The 23-year-old Mr. Mehta is an atheist, but he says he suspected he had been missing out on something.

“Perhaps being around a group of people who will show me ‘the way’ could do what no one else has done before,” Mr. Mehta wrote in his eBay sales pitch. “This is possibly the best chance anyone has of changing me.”

Evangelists bid, eager to save a sinner. Atheists bid, hoping to keep Mr. Mehta in their fold. When the auction stopped on Feb. 3 after 41 bids, the buyer was Jim Henderson, a former evangelical minister from Seattle, whose $504 bid prevailed.

Mr. Henderson wasn’t looking for a convert. He wanted Mr. Mehta to embark with him on an eccentric experiment in spiritual bridge-building.

The 58-year-old Mr. Henderson has written a book for a Random House imprint and is currently a house painter. He runs off-the-map.org, a Web site whose professed mission is “Helping Christians be normal.” Mr. Henderson is part of a small but growing branch of the evangelical world that disagrees with the majority’s conservative political agenda, and wants the religion to be more inclusive and help the disadvantaged.

Days after the auction, Mr. Henderson flew to Chicago to see Mr. Mehta, who is studying to be a math teacher. The two met in a bar, where they sealed a deal a little different from the one the student had proffered. Instead of the 50 hours of church attendance that he was entitled to for his $504, Mr. Henderson asked that Mr. Mehta attend 10 to 15 services of Mr. Henderson’s choosing and then write about it.

Mr. Mehta also agreed to provide running commentary on the church services on the off-the-map site and take questions — bluntly sharing a nonbeliever’s outlook on services that many consider sacred. The deal called for Mr. Henderson to donate the $504 to the Secular Student Alliance, a group headed by Mr. Mehta that has 55 chapters in the U.S. and abroad.

“I’m not trying to convert you,” Mr. Henderson said at the bar. “You’re going there almost like a critic….If you happen to get converted, that’s off the clock.”

For Mr. Mehta’s first service, the two attended noon Mass at Old St. Patrick’s, a Catholic church near Mr. Mehta’s apartment. In the third pew from the rear, Mr. Mehta silently gazed at the statues and the worshipers’ folded hands. He tried to follow along, but was a beat behind the congregation as it stood and knelt on cue.

Mr. Henderson asked Mr. Mehta to score the priest, on a scale of one for boring to 10 for “off the charts.” Mr. Mehta gave him a three. “More stories” in the sermon, Mr. Mehta suggested — and less liturgy.

Asked about that advice, the Rev. John Cusick, who said the Mass that day, was unfazed: “There’s nothing he could say that I haven’t heard 100 times over.”

Mr. Mehta’s commentaries award sermons kudos for clarity, demerits for redundancy. After a service at Chicago’s nondenominational Park Community Church, he criticized the preacher for repeatedly referring to a Bible verse in which the Galatians are called “fools” for doubting the divinity of Jesus — without explaining why the passage was relevant to his congregation. The room, Mr. Mehta noted, was already full of people who didn’t share the Galatians’ doubts.

Associate Pastor Ron May wrote in to thank Mr. Mehta: “As the guy who spoke yesterday, I really appreciate the honest eval. (Unfortunately, a lot of the time you only get polite smoke…good job…thanks for the message.)”

Mr. Mehta was born in Chicago and raised in Jainism, an ancient Indian faith whose followers vow to harm no living thing, not even microbes in the air.

He praises famous atheists, but has also read parts of the Bible, loves watching televangelists like Benny Hinn and Joel Osteen, and admires their appeal to congregations. “If I could be an atheist pastor?” he says, “Oh God, that would be great!”

Mr. Henderson, who was a member of the Association of Vineyard Churches, a nondenominational ministry, says he preached for 25 years, but says he grew disenchanted because many of his peers were obsessed with gathering more believers and increasing their budgets. Off-the-map started as a hobby, an outgrowth of a long talk with a friend and co-founder Dave Richards, who had been a member of one of Mr. Henderson’s congregations, about why they disliked evangelizing.

Mr. Henderson began interviewing nonbelievers — in front of audiences and video cameras — about the ways Christians had offended them. That material became part of his book, “a.k.a. ‘Lost,’ ” espousing his softer approach, published last year by WaterBrook Press.

Hiring Mr. Mehta has been his wisest investment, Mr. Henderson says. The Web site received 5,000 hits in the first 10 days after the auction — typically the number of visits in an average month.

Some visitors to the site castigate Mr. Henderson for giving an atheist a forum. One said he was “rather misguidedly (throwing) money at someone to simply get him ‘churched’ for a time so he might possibly get ‘saved?’ ”

Mr. Mehta has also been reading and critiquing church bulletins. In one, Park Community asked the congregation to pray, in advance of a coming meeting on the construction of a church building “that God would…open the doors to the right parking solution, allowing us to build a worship space for 1,200 people, rather than the 850 currently permitted.”

“Really?” Mr. Mehta observed on the Web site. “That’s what you’re praying for? Do they think a god will change parking restrictions? Will a god change the price of nearby property? Will a god add another level to a parking structure?”

Mr. May, the pastor, admitted such talk sounds weird to an outsider. “It’s good to be reminded it’s unusual,” he said

Mr. Henderson says he is thrilled that Mr. Mehta is prompting such reactions. “We’re getting to a place where we’re talking and not converting,” he says.

With about half his obligation to Mr. Henderson fulfilled, Mr. Mehta says he’s no closer to believing in God, although he does admire churches for the communities they create. Church, he has decided, is “not such a bad place to be.”

The Wall Street Journal

After Katrina, Faithful Save Saints

Posted on December 3, 2005 by Suzanne Sataline

Combing Gulf Coast, Faithful Secure Relics of Battered Churches

By SUZANNE SATALINE
December 3, 2005

SLIDELL, La. — Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, two old friends went searching for keepsakes in the ruins of their childhood church, Our Lady of Lourdes.

Lisa Aldridge dug through the shorn ceiling beams and tree branches out back. “There’s a statue down here!” she called out, and stood, cradling a pumpkin-size, decapitated wooden head in her arms.

“Oh my God, Lisa,” her friend Wendy Jochem said. “It’s Jesus!”

There was a deep slice through the crown of thorns and a missing lock of hair. The head’s left side was coated in oily mud, which Lisa’s brother, Philip, tried to hose off. The women found the statue’s pinkie, which Mrs. Jochem later set on a shelf in her Stuart, Fla., home.

Ms. Aldridge’s childhood home near the church was destroyed by the storm, so she strapped the head into her car’s passenger seat and drove to her sister’s house in Tallahassee. The rest of the statue was still bolted to the cross, perched on the last slab of roof left when the cathedral ceiling collapsed, awaiting its own rescue.

The Gulf Coast is awash with church-less and sometimes headless statues. Wooden and ceramic images of Jesus, Mary and Joseph have turned up in water, under ceilings and crumbling walls, and on train tracks miles from an altar.

Intact or broken, these are sometimes the sole treasures from parishes that have all but vanished. The people who shelter these objects hope to

return them someday to rebuilt churches. To those who lost everything, custody of a saintly image can be a source of comfort. Family milestones are intertwined with parish life and finding a religious relic is akin to recovering the past.

In Tallahassee, Ms. Aldridge’s sister, Terri, placed the bust on her wood stove and clustered small crucifixes around it. A 48-year-old optometrist, Terri Aldridge hadn’t practiced her faith for years. But in time, she says she started meditating by the bust of Jesus, staring at its parted lips and downcast eyes. It set her thinking about Christmas midnight Mass during her childhood, when the white-gloved altar boys had carried candles through the darkened church. “The spirit of that entire building is embodied in that head. It’s like the church is sitting right there,” she said, breaking into tears during a telephone interview. “It’s damaged, but it’s not gone.”

Catholic saints have an unusually powerful presence in the New Orleans region, where back-road lawn shrines cocoon casts of Jesus’ mother. Catholic traditions brought by the French and Spanish and adopted by Haitians and Africans blended into popular culture. On St. Joseph’s Day, March 19, revelers visit strangers’ homes to see hand-built altars festooned with the saint’s likeness.

After seeing the destruction of her St. Bernard Parish home, east of New Orleans, 60-year-old Lynn Adams ran next door to her church, Prince of Peace. She found the statue of Mary keeled over on a hassock, but otherwise fine, and moved it to her cousin’s garage. “I’m not no holy roller, but I believe in signs, I do,” Mrs. Adams says. The statue’s survival proves God exists, she believes, and she said as much in a note she left in the statue’s place: “He took care of His Mother.”

Hope nestles in the smallest fragments. Parishioners of St. Thomas the Apostle in Long Beach, Miss., unearthed from the wreckage the hands and forearm of a crucifix. “If you find something, at least you can take that something into your future,” says Paula Spears, the liturgy director at St. Thomas, who is safeguarding the items.

Scavenging one day in Bay St. Louis, Miss., Caleb Kergosien, 12, spied a 3-foot carved figure of Christ in a Water Oak tree. It turned out to be from St. Joseph’s chapel of Our Lady of the Gulf, where his parents had married 15 years ago.

The statue hung in the family’s government-supplied trailer for a week, watching over meals and homework time. “The truth is, that week, they were a little better behaved,” says the boy’s father, Geoff Kergosien, who has since moved the figure to storage with the family’s other possessions.

The Aldridges weren’t alone in sifting through the remains of Slidell’s Our Lady of Lourdes. Hazarding collapsed beams and dangling stained-glass windows, Susan Daigle grabbed the Blessed Mother statue. On her way out, a hail of falling glass narrowly missed her, she says. She went back, scooped up a St. Joseph, and then scurried back again to snatch the St. Anthony, face-down in mud. “I do daring things,” says Mrs. Daigle, 64. “But they’re going to take care of me in the end!”

Homeless from the storm, Mrs. Daigle stored two statues in her daughter’s closet and left the St. Anthony with former Slidell Mayor Sam Caruso. Father Adrian Hall, the priest at Our Lady of Lourdes, praised the “devotion” of his parishioners for rescuing the statues and other pieces. The church is keeping a record of who has what.

Mr. Caruso, a former seminarian, has long collected items discarded by churches — including the marble altar railing where he knelt for his First Communion, which serves as the base of his dinner table. The mud-freckled St. Anthony now leans against the Caruso home, overlooking wooden pilgrims on the lawn. His daughter-in-law, Anna, prayed to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, when part of the garage door went missing. She found it.

Last month, the body of the crucifix from Our Lady of Lourdes rose from the splinters of the church. Its spindly limbs, bleached white by the sun, twisted from the jib of a power company truck before the linesmen tucked it into a woodworker’s van. “I’m not real religious, but he’s Jesus and he needs help,” says John Schott, 40, the woodworker and former altar boy who volunteered to make repairs.

The carved statue — 10 foot 6 inches “with thorns,” Mr. Schott says — is in his furniture repair shop now. He plans to disinfect the wood, which is probably pine, fill the cracks with glue and resin, then stain it. The crucifix, brought from Italy more than 40 years ago, will be stored until the church is rebuilt. He will also need to reattach the head, which he has yet to see.

Mr. Schott’s hardest task was removing Christ from the cross. Because it was too unwieldy to lower the entire crucifix, Mr. Schott lay on a sliver of church rooftop strewn with broken glass and sawed at the bolts connecting the body to the cross. Then he examined the nails and recalled a childhood wish to remove Jesus’ pain. “Being a Christian, I wanted to get the nails out of his hands and feet,” Mr. Schott said.

The wood shrank as it dried. After a couple of weeks, Mr. Schott tugged. The nails slipped out easily.

The Boston Globe Magazine

The Bionic Arm

Posted on July 31, 2005 by Suzanne Sataline

It’s a medical marvel from one Midwestern doctor with the help of a tiny Massachusetts lab. A prosthetic limb that can be controlled simply by thinking it to move is giving hope to amputees returning from war.

The Bionic Man

By Suzanne Sataline
July 31, 2005
The Boston Globe Magazine

JESSE SULLIVAN HAD BEEN A POWER LINEMAN FOR NEARLY 23 years in Dayton, Tennessee, a quiet town of 6,000 people. It’s a much sleepier place now than it was 80 years ago, when a high school science teacher named John Scopes was tried for teaching the theory of evolution. On a May afternoon back in 2001, City of Dayton Electric assigned Sullivan to move an overhead wire. It was a routine task: Back-feed the power supply, clamp the line, install a switch. Sullivan had done it thousands of times. He glided up in an aerial bucket. At the top, for a reason that to this day he does not understand, Sullivan reached out and touched the power line.

He had forgotten to wear his rubber gloves. Seven thousand two hundred volts of electricity ripped through his body. Once. Twice. The current ricocheted off the sweat in one armpit, leapt over his chest, and sent a ball of fire tearing down his other arm. A surgeon would later find that Sullivan, then 54, had burned from the inside out – his bones heating up and searing his muscles and skin. The surgeon would have to amputate his arms at the shoulders, including the shoulder joints. His fishing friends would later joke that God had thrown their buddy back; he wasn’t a keeper. Sullivan is a religious man, and he knew there had to be a reason why he had been spared.

Sullivan had cheated death. No one would have denied him a sinecure at his rural home, wearing some off-the-shelf prosthetic arms as he puttered around his yard. But that choice would have limited him forever.

Sullivan’s loss was severe. The higher that the arm or leg is amputated, the more one’s flexibility and range of motion are lost. Losing a hand is better than losing an arm at the elbow, because the patient can still bend his arm and draw it toward his body. Losing an arm at the elbow is better than losing it at the shoulder. Sullivan had lost all of both of his arms. His body was a sheer cliff. Even the best prosthetic arms available would take him months to master, with no guarantee he’d ever be able to dress himself, shave, or sip a mug of coffee.

Dr. Todd Kuiken, a specialist at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, learned of Sullivan’s injuries when he came to be fitted with conventional prostheses. After meeting him, Kuiken knew Sullivan was the perfect candidate for his work, the culmination of more than 20 years of research. Sullivan might not have his arms, but he still had working nerves in his shoulder area. And they were crackling with information. Kuiken thought their power could be harnessed to operate a prosthetic arm, so that Sullivan could, in essence, command a fake arm to move just by thinking about it. And because Sullivan had been right-handed, Kuiken wanted to put the new arm on his non-dominant side.

Sullivan would need a special prosthesis, one that was multijointed and powerful, one that would bend and extend with perfect coordination, as if it were a natural extension of his body. Kuiken, director of RIC’s Neuroengineering Center for Artificial Limbs, asked Sullivan to go under the knife once more. Kuiken then turned to the folks at a tiny lab in Holliston, Liberating Technologies Inc., manufacturer of the Boston Digital Arm System.

THANKS TO SEAT BELTS AND SAFETY STANDARDS, prosthetics manufacturing is a small, static industry. About 200,000 people wear artificial limbs, according to a 1994 tally (the latest available). Innovations come quietly – after all, patients can live long lives without arms and legs. Few scientists pursue prosthetics research, because the market is minimal and the government doles out little money, except during times of war.

With the war in Iraq, young men and women are coming home missing arms and legs, sometimes both. These soldiers, many of them better educated than those of past wars, want the most expensive and advanced prosthetics, in order to return to work and to active lives. Government agencies are paying research scientists millions of dollars to develop devices with computer chips and resilient fibers that are smaller, lighter, and more maneuverable than earlier devices. European scientists have attached artificial limbs directly to amputees’ bones with titanium rods, replacing uncomfortable silicone sockets. Researchers developing the BrainGate System, a project of Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems Inc. in Foxborough, implanted electrodes into a quadriplegic, allowing him to bypass his severed spinal cord and operate a computer with his thoughts. “The convergence of technologies,” says Dr. Leigh Hochberg, a Massachusetts General Hospital neurologist and BrainGate investigator, “will have great potential to assist people with a large range of disabilities.”

The widget geeks at Holliston’s Liberating Technologies Inc. are just a few of the many crew members on a futuristic mission: to help a man move his artificial limbs as if they were the real things.

“I think what Dr. Kuiken is trying to do is push the envelope,” says LTI’s owner, Bill Hanson. “It was a lot to ask. [The Boston arm] was never designed to do all that, because nobody had ever done it before.”

ON A FRIGID JANUARY AFTERNOON THIS YEAR IN HOLLISTON, Craig Wallace glues electrodes to his thick arms and links the prosthesis that Jesse Sullivan will wear to a computer. It’s a battery housed in plastic molded to look like a forearm, in a color reminiscent of Crayola’s peach crayon. The plastic arm has a lifelike hand, flecked with painted-on hair. Wallace checks that the computer software is reading his own muscles’ electrical signals and correctly translating directions to the plastic arm. Wallace, an electronics designer, types on the keyboard. On the desk, the arm arches and the hand opens, then curls forward. The fingers splay out. It looks a bit like he’s operating Thing, the Addams Family‘s pet hand.

LTI has sold prosthetic parts for hundreds of children with birth defects, adults who have survived car wrecks, and workers injured on the job. The upper-limb market is minuscule – only 13 percent of the country’s estimated 1.2 million amputees wear artificial arms. Most of the research and therefore most of the stunning developments have focused on the larger leg and foot market.

“The upper extremities involve a spinal reflex and a higher level of human intent,” says MIT scientist Hugh Herr. Prosthetic legs are easier to develop and to use, in large part because “you can do an awful lot with just spinal reflex controls,” he says. In other words, to be able to pick up that cup of coffee involves thinking and acting on intentions. With walking, joints and muscles in the ankle perform almost instinctively.

Many of the biggest prosthetics developers are international corporations that buy the rights to projects nursed over many years by individual researchers at large universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Liberating Technologies Inc. started out as a project of the Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. and became an independent company four years ago, moving its arm molds, worktables, computers, and seven employees into a bland office park just inside Interstate 495.

While LTI is busy developing refined electronic prosthetics, it also repairs and provides limbs based on technology from the 1960s and ’70s. Sullivan uses a mechanical arm on his right side, which he prefers for tasks like writing. Mechanical arms with cable controls require the wearers to shrug and tense back muscles to move hooks.

“If your muscles weren’t strong enough or couldn’t master the technique, that was your problem. You had to conform to the system,” LTI’s Wallace says. “That’s all gone away.”

The Boston arm relies on another kind of muscle power: myoelectricity. When brain impulses stimulate a muscle to contract, the muscle generates a tiny amount of electrical energy. An electrode eavesdropping on the skin channels that impulse to the Boston arm. The arm’s microprocessor transforms that information into electric signals that can run arm, wrist, and hand motors. Technicians can program that microprocessor to bend or straighten the arm and open or close the hand at various speeds.

Soviet scientists developed the first myoelectric arm in the 1960s. It’s likely they took their cues from MIT mathematical genius Norbert Wiener, the man who founded cybernetics, the interaction of human and machine. Orthopedic surgeons at MGH discovered the Soviet experiment and, in Cold War style, wanted an arm of their own. Thus began “the most politically-intrigued project that I have ever witnessed at MIT,” says professor emeritus Amar Bose, founder of Bose Corp., of Framingham. To this day, the participants grouse about who deserves credit. Bose says that after a few years, he quit the project in disgust.

For two years in the early 1960s, Wiener and Bose, along with surgeons at MGH and a few others, drew up plans for their own myoelectric arm. Bose says Wiener drove the project. “We were like technicians carrying out the invention of the man,” Bose says. By 1967, MIT professor Robert Mann and his graduate engineering students had fashioned an experimental design, funded by workers’ compensation carrier Liberty Mutual. More prototypes were made, and, in 1973, the company hired physicist T. Walley Williams III to transform one of the devices into an elbow that could be marketed.

Williams teamed up with Bill Hanson in 1984. Hanson was a young MBA graduate, and he hit it off with the effervescent, Latin-spouting, world-traveling Williams. They continued developing the myoelectric arm for Liberty Mutual until the company decided to sell off some of its research subsidiaries in 2001. Hanson then created Liberating Technologies, making Williams its product development director.

By then, Hanson had met many amputees and had made it his mission to help the injured return to work. He is riled by tales of insurance companies that refuse to pay for prosthetics. In Massachusetts, a bill is being considered that would require private insurers to match Medicare’s coverage for artificial limbs by paying 80 percent of the cost. “People like to be productive,” says Hanson, 58. “They like to feel useful.”

Initially, workers’ compensation paid for Sullivan’s medical costs. Kuiken’s current work is funded by the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research, a program of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

The Boston arm has benefited from the digital revolution, allowing users greater control and range of motion. Still, it is not a replacement for a real arm. Prosthetics operate stiffly, making distinct, sometimes jerky motions. Older myoelectric arms read one signal at a time, and wearers had to switch controls from the elbow, to the wrist, to the hand. Three years ago, the LTI staff introduced technology on the Boston arm allowing for simultaneous control and more natural movement. Williams, 73, wants people “to control elegantly. We’re trying to get people to do things the way they did before their arm was lost.”

MANIPULATING AN ARTIFICIAL ARM REQUIRES A DANCER’S physical discipline and a chess player’s mental focus. Most amputees operate their artificial arms through a combination of muscle might and battery power. But the motions are slow and require awkward mental gymnastics, such as having to think about tensing the forearm to open the hand. Kuiken wanted to use Sullivan’s existing arm nerves to control his myoelectric arm. The doctor knew that the ulnar, median, and other nerves would still operate as if Sullivan’s arms were there, even if the nerves were surgically rerouted to muscles in his chest. When Sullivan thought about closing his hand, his brain would still fire his median nerve, and his chest muscle would contract, signaling the Boston arm to operate the hand.

To use the Boston arm, Sullivan needed more surgery, and there would still be no promises. But he was determined: “I wanted an arm that worked.”

In 2002, Dr. Gregory Dumanian, a surgeon at Northwestern University Medical Center, transferred from Sullivan’s shoulder area to his pectoral muscles four nerves that at one time had controlled his left arm. Six months later, Kuiken detected signals in the nerves. In January 2003, Kuiken’s team fit Sullivan with the Boston arm, wrist, and hand. Prosthetics technicians taped electrodes to Sullivan and asked him to think about opening his hand. The artificial hand popped open. “It was the greatest feeling I had since I’d been hurt,” Sullivan says

With his new arm, Sullivan could rake leaves, start the lawn mower, even feed himself, although it took time to learn how to eat soup. But challenges remained. He had to rely on his wife, Carolyn, to open a jar or tie his shoes. He longed to drive.

Last year, Kuiken wanted to see how much more information he could coax from Sullivan’s nerves. Three other amputees had had nerve-transfer operations, but Sullivan, the first, was farthest along. As always, the patient was eager to try more. “He’s a saint,” Kuiken says.

Kuiken’s crew obtained an experimental setup: a powered shoulder unit, along with an arm rotator and a hand with wrist-flexing and wrist-rotating abilities. Kuiken asked LTI to soup up a Boston arm that would let Sullivan bend his elbow, swivel his arm in and out and raise it over his head, rotate his wrist, and grasp. It wouldn’t quite make him the new $6 million man, but certainly someone worth tens of thousands of dollars.

IT’S THE FIRST MORNING IN MARCH OF THIS YEAR, AND A BEVY OF technicians and researchers swirls around Sullivan in an exam room on the Rehabilitation Institute’s 17th floor in Chicago. Sullivan is standing with a wry smile while people paste electrodes to his chest and the experimental arm is locked onto his left side. He winks at himself in the mirror.

He has a soft belly, spindly legs, and shaggy hair just starting to gray. He misses hugging his wife and compensates by throwing the empty arm of his leather jacket over her shoulder.

At last, everything is ready. Laura Miller, the certified prosthetist, watches signals on a laptop computer.

“Close hand,” she calls out. The hand snaps shut.

“Can you lower the arm?” The shoulder motor grinds as the arm jerks down. Miller adjusts the motor’s speed with the computer.

“Bend elbow?” It kinks. Sullivan’s chest muscle pulses.

“Close?” The elbow flies up.

“Don’t force it,” Miller guides. “Do a gentle open.” The elbow flexes.

Hanson, the owner of LTI, smiles.

Sullivan grows eager. His straightened arm begins climbing toward the ceiling. Higher, higher, the hand swiveling out.

“Taxi!” Sullivan calls, raising his eyebrows. “Taxi!” Standing nearby, his wife, Carolyn, bursts out laughing.

Sullivan tests the arm for two weeks. When he returns to Tennessee, his arm stays in Chicago for more development. In 2003, Kuiken discovered that when Sullivan’s scarred chest was touched, he felt sensations in his missing arm. Last month, Kuiken placed sensors on Sullivan’s prosthetic hand and wired them to a plunger device on his chest. The hand sensors trigger the plunger, which presses against Sullivan’s skin, allowing him to “feel” how hard he is gripping something.

The team’s work has excited other scientists. “In terms of the importance to the field of prosthetics, it’s enormous,” says Bernard Hudgins, director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of New Brunswick and a longtime research leader in the field. “We’ve never had a major advance in the technology until Todd [Kuiken]’s work.”

Others caution that science and industry are years from offering a similar arm to all amputees. The unit needs to be lighter and to be rigorously tested. And for an arm to be truly lifelike, it would need to have a hand with movable fingers. Doctors would have to tap multiple sites within a muscle or tease complex signals from a nerve or even the brain – work that is years away. And there’s a time limit: A year after amputation, nerve signals may start to grow faint.

Back at the Holliston office, Hanson gets a new video of Sullivan using the arm. The robotic stuttering is gone. Sullivan bends his elbow while lifting his shoulder, unfurling his arm as if he’s reaching out to shake someone’s hand. Hanson calls his staff in to watch. “No amputee, no prosthetic system has moved like that,” he says later. “It’s the kind of movement we’ve always been hoping to get but never were able to get.”

Sullivan says his arm is no longer an experiment. “I feel my own hand. In my mind’s eyes, they’re there.” He can’t wait to take the newest arm home; it is, after all, a part of him.

The Boston Globe

Welcome to Vorkuta

Posted on May 23, 2004 by Suzanne Sataline

Welcome to Vorkuta

In this former prison town in Russia’s Far North, why can’t the government pay people to leave?

By Suzanne Sataline
May 23, 2004

VORKUTA, Russia – The road from this city in Russia’s far north cuts into the frosty gray bleakness, sweeping past exhausted coal mines and crumbling watchtowers near settlements named “Komsomol” and “Industrial.” One grim housing block is home to pensioner Rasma Pavlovna Stodukh.

Stodukh arrived in Vorkuta in 1947, during the Soviet Union’s second wave of repressions. As a teenager, she was accused of aiding Latvian partisans and convicted of treason. She and two dozen male prisoners were packed into a cage on a train that crawled toward the cusp of the Arctic Circle, bound for one of the most infamous prison camps in the Soviet Union.

For 13 years and four months Stodukh shoveled coal onto a conveyor belt and dreamed of seeing the next day. In January the night winds bellowed 50 below zero, gusting through the slats of the wooden barracks. After she was freed in 1959, Soviet laws prevented her from returning to Riga and so she remained in Vorkuta, marrying and raising a family.

Today, at 76, she lives in a cluttered, dusty apartment with sinking floors and drafty large windows that let in a few hours of meager sunlight in winter. “We hoped to save money here and maybe a little later move from Vorkuta, but then we stopped thinking about it,” Stodukh said.

To some this arthritic grandmother might seem just another one of Russia’s stoic survivors. But in the eyes of the Russian government and the World Bank, she’s a roadblock to the country’s economic reform.

Last year, with $80 million borrowed from the World Bank, the government asked Stodukh and thousands of other residents of three northern cities to leave, offering a one-time payment of $2,400 toward the cost of housing — a huge sum for pensioners who might receive $70 monthly — if residents would abandon their decrepit homes and move south, to what northerners call “the mainland.” To the authorities, the north is a new kind of costly prison, so cold, so remote, and so poor that local governments are going broke trying to provide food and fuel. Just whittling away these outposts, according to World Bank officials, could save these cities $15 million a year — and create a model for evacuating other unsustainable communities across the globe.

But the economists and demographers failed to take into account one thing: the power of the Russian refusenik.

Since the program began signing on volunteers, 2,053 people have taken the payments and moved, and another 4,000 are expected to go soon. But hundreds of families — including former prisoners in Vorkuta, Norilsk, and the Magadan region — said no. Many said their relatives were dead and they had no one to join. Others said the laughably small housing allotments would not allow them to afford shelter elsewhere. Some discovered that the Russian government would cut off their monthly pension if they returned to their now-independent homelands.

Asked about her own decision to stay, Stodukh warbled a patriotic rationale echoed by others stuck in the north. “If a person has been living in a place so long, it’s his motherland,” said Stodukh, who keeps photographs of herself smiling with other prisoners in a field. “That is the best place for him.”

The first thing you notice in Vorkuta is the wind. It howls down from the North Pole, rattling antennae and battering the wood-frame hangar at the tiny local airport. Only when you manage to open your eyes do you see the white tsunamis of snow that curl over apartment houses and consume cars. Standing outside, even for a few minutes, strips the down from your nose and cheeks. The cold rages for 10 months of the year.

The mining villages outside the city cluster off the main road, collections of wood, cement, and steel structures that appear suddenly after miles of ice. Between the villages, the bluish-white moonscape is unblemished by trees or road signs. Sometimes there’s a scattering of wooden crosses, an impromptu cemetery of German prisoners. Not that the dead stay buried. Come spring, the ice melts, the land heaves, and coffins bob to the surface. In July the water gives birth to thick swarms of mosquitoes.

On a bright April day, 22 degrees below zero, Vitali Troshin shrugged off the wind as he scurried out of the limping VW bus he had commandeered for a tour of his adopted city. An artist and town gadfly, he motioned to the

edge of a cliff overlooking the frozen Vorkuta River. Below lay a bowl of frosted earth, the city’s birthplace. The site of the first prison camp, closed in the 1960s, it was plowed under a few years ago. Troshin hopes to raise money to build a memorial that will encourage people to visit.

“The idea is to show this tragedy was vast,” he said. “In the history of the whole world no sitting government killed so many people and sent so many to camps.”

Soviet geologists discovered rich coal deposits just west of the Urals in the late 1920s. Josef Stalin decided the best and fastest way to extract it would be by force. In 1931 a team of prisoners arrived by boat, supervised by secret police agents. Somehow they survived on the tundra and began building what would become Vorkutlag, one of the country’s biggest, most brutal camps. By 1938, during the Great Terror, writes Anne Applebaum in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Gulag: A History” (2003), Vorkutlag had grown to 15,000 prisoners, many sentenced there for false crimes such as joking about Stalin. After World War II political prisoners from Poland and Germany swelled the ranks again.

Prisoners built the power plants, schools, apartment blocks, and many of the city’s existing landmarks. More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet empire, many buildings still bear the hammer and sickle insignia. The interiors of the Mining College, the Palace of Youth & Culture, theaters, and the city’s many skating rinks — all grandiose stone structures — appear untouched since the 1950s. The telephone and telegraph office rely on technology current in Stalin’s day.

Many prisoners were freed after Stalin’s death in 1953. But the Soviet Union’s rules often barred people from returning home and restricted where they lived. So many stayed, mixing and marrying with camp administrators and others who viewed a voluntary northern assignment, with its hardship pay, subsidized goods, and Black Sea vacations, as a path into the middle class.

The freebies ended with communism’s collapse. The government still subsidizes fuel and food, but has allowed prices to climb to market rates. The reevaluation of the ruble in 1998 plunged Vorkuta, like much of the country, into poverty. Retirees like Zhenya Khaidarova, a geologist who moved here in 1973, understand the philosophical benefits of democracy but are bitter about its costs. “For many years Vorkuta was a gulag of political prisoners. Today it’s a camp of economic prisoners,” she said.

Not that she is eager to leave. Asked about the mines that have closed and the beggars on streetcorners in their shaggy reindeer-fur boots, Khaidarova stiffens. “Not only Russians but foreigners say, `If I were free I’d come to Vorkuta with pleasure,”‘ she said.

By the late `90s, government economists realized how fast northern cities were straining the country’s budget. Demographers estimated Russia needed to move 76,000 people from the Komi Republic, where Vorkuta, with its current population of 157,000, is one of the biggest cities. The government’s first program, which offered pensioners new apartments in less expensive regions, got so backlogged that people lost hope of being able to move, said Andrei Markov, a senior human development specialist with the World Bank in Moscow who oversees the program. At the government’s request, the World Bank designed the Northern Restructuring Program to speed things along.

After five years of planning and delays, the government distributed the first housing vouchers last year in the nickel capitol of Norilsk, a gold-mining outpost near Magadan, and Vorkuta. The money would not cover an apartment in Moscow or St. Petersburg, Markov conceded, but it would be adequate for one in the regional capital, Syktyvkar, west of the Urals and a 26-hour train ride from Vorkuta. Officials hoped it would be the largest mass migration since Stalin’s time, when entire populations were shipped thousands of miles across the country.

But so far only 1,700 of the 8,400 people who were eligible have moved from Vorkuta, Markov said. In Norilsk the numbers were worse: 200 out of 23,000.

The World Bank’s efforts weren’t helped by Vorkuta’s pugnacious mayor, Igor Shpektor, who blamed the World Bank and the Russian government for closing mines too hastily and impoverishing his people. Today he laughs bitterly at the inflation-battered housing vouchers. “The program for moving is only for the rich, and most people here are poor,” he said.

Shpektor brags about the region’s tourism and mining possibilities. But analysts say shrinking the cities is the only viable plan. Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy of the Brookings Institution, authors of “The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold” (2003), say that if Russia doesn’t evacuate the north, the country will drain precious assets it needs to invest.

“The fact is, you have millions and millions of people living in the wrong places,” Gaddy said in an interview. “Short of beginning a forced move, where you put everyone in a cattle car and move them to western Russia, you have to depend on incentives. And that’s costly.”

But for most residents the incentives aren’t costly enough. On a visit last spring, Raisa Sevastyanova was one of the last residents in the Sovietskiy development, holed up in a nearly vacant apartment house that was walled in by snow, her barren rooms smelling of sewage.

Sevastyanova was a KGB clerk in Moscow when she was arrested in 1952 and forced to confess that she wanted to kill Stalin. She was shipped to Vorkuta, leaving behind her husband and young daughter. She was freed in 1956 but never got permission to rejoin her family. Years later, the government “rehabilitated” her, wiping out her conviction and boosting her monthly pension to 2,300 rubles, about $76. The 1998 currency devaluation drained her savings. “That’s why today I often say, ‘Russians need their second Stalin,”‘ she said, laughing.

Today Sevastyanova repairs fur coats for a living. She moved up the Russian government’s waiting list and secured an apartment in Tambov, a city in south central Russia. But like many residents of Vorkuta, she is convinced that she will die if she moves to a warmer climate. She ought to go to Moscow instead, she said, but she can’t imagine how she could afford it.

Sevastyanova is pessimistic about the Russia she lives in — and the one she might find if she ever escapes Vorkuta. “Today people don’t have jobs. People with a higher education sell ice cream,” she said. “I’m sure in the camps we lived better than poor people do today.”

The Washington Post

Spa? Da!

Posted on January 8, 2003 by Suzanne Sataline

Spa? Da!

Russian and Turkish ‘banyas’ of Brooklyn provide a little rough relaxation on a winter’s day.

By Suzanne Sataline
January 8, 2003

Lie down, he ordered.

I dutifully obeyed. You do this in the smothering steam of a Russian sauna when a man approaches you clutching a thicket of fresh oak leaf branches. You follow because you are dressed solely in a swimsuit, woozy from the prickly heat and eucalyptus vapors aswirl in the air, and because, with a crowd of Russians staring, you don’t want to look like an American wimp.

I slunk onto the towel spread on the hard benches in the wood-lined room. The air was briny with sweat and the yeasty scent of burped beer. I instinctively covered my head. Alex Dolgolevsky, a man I had met only an hour before, repositioned my arms by my side and instructed me to kick off my plastic sandals. Standing over me, he shook the branches like a talisman. Droplets of water sizzled on my back and evaporated in a blink.

“Are you ready?” he asked in a heavy Russian accent. I held my breath and focused on one thought: I bet they don’t come after you with tree branches at Canyon Ranch.

There is just no equivalent to a Russian steam bath. Be it called a banya or bania in Russian or a shvitz in Yiddish, Russian baths offer the Zen calm of their Finnish and Japanese counterparts, with some hearty Slavic energy. Spend a day at one of New York City’s bathhouses and you experience a welter of contradictions: pain and pleasure, fear and calm, searing heat and Siberian cold. Not to mention a rather twisted notion of maintaining optimum health.

Many men (for most visitors are men) gather weekly with friends as a prescription against urban tensions. For adventuresome souls, a banya is a dirt-cheap vacation. No translator needed. And afterward, your skin looks pink and soft as a baby’s. “It becomes an addiction,” says Michael Gold, a Hasidic salesman at the Russian-Turkish Baths. “It becomes part of your culture, part of your life.”

Right now is the time to discard all notions of mud packs and plush towels and sliced cucumbers alighting on your eyelids. The banya ritual in Brooklyn is more of a do-it-yourself experience echoing pagan, pre-plumbing days when communal sweating was the only cleansing option. And soap was really rare.

There are some differences from bathing in the old country. Russia’s historic bathhouses are opulent temples of gilt and marble, far grander than the simpler structures here. And New York baths are coed, to the discomfort of many older Russian women. In spite of everyone’s scanty dress, though, a banya ritual is a spiritual retreat, not a sexual playground. A woman might draw a few winks, an offer of a massage, but nothing more.

New York spas, in keeping with the polyglot culture, offer a range of ethnic bathing styles: Slavic dry heat, wet Finnish saunas and the water-dousing common in Turkish baths. But in every other way the regimen is decidedly Russian — the bonhomie, the hot tea, the sweaty plunge into cold water (or, when available, snow), and the dumplings and shish kebabs and rich soups. And, yes, the vodka shots.

The whole process “attacks the toxins, increases circulation, it boosts the immune system. It cleanses everything inside of you,” says Alona Kruglak, co-owner of the Russian-Turkish Baths. Then she noticed a table of Georgians working through a two-liter bottle of Stolichnaya. “We’re getting men who don’t go to gyms. This is Russian gym culture.”

The Russian-Turkish Baths are favored by Turkish emigres, religious Jews and post-Soviet yuppies. The heat in the Russian room is not very intense. (Some think it’s downright cool.) The main attraction is the Turkish spa. Small and brightly lit, lined in part with cut stone, the room has several spigots that shoot cold water. One Saturday night everyone agreed that the oven along the wall needed reviving. The banshchik, or attendant, opened the door and ladled water on the hot stones. A Santa Ana wind blew through the room. A young man hoisted a bucket of icy water and dumped it over his head, dousing me as well. I screamed, then tried it myself.

Russians believe the shock forces toxins from the body. “It’s exercise for the cells,” said Boris Kotlyar, owner of the rival Mermaid Spa.

Peace-seekers flock to the Mermaid. Tucked just outside the Hasidic community of Sea Gate, near the festive Russian strip of Brighton Beach, the Mermaid’s owners have just put an $800,000 face-lift on the place. Besides three Russian banyas the spa has a scorching dry sauna, a Turkish bath, a whirlpool and two small but deep tile pools that are machine-fed with chipped ice.

Everyone seems to linger, though, in one compact steam room. Lined with savory cedar, the tight quarters are hemmed in by high, built-in benches, trapping the heat. One Sunday night several men and women gathered on the top tier where the air throbbed. They sat on towels molting until they agreed it was not nearly hot enough. A volunteer flicked water on the stones, nudging the thermometer above 220 degrees. The revelers sighed loudly, sweat pooling on their chests. Four young men slathered their limbs with a mixture of salt and honey to strip and moisturize their skin. Four minutes passed, then five. With a groan each person shot for the door, lunging for the showers or the pools. One young man, head wrapped in a white bandanna, smiled and uttered the wish of good health to all: “S lokim parom!”

You can have a massage or a venik treatment, literally a broom scrubbing with oak or birch branches soaked in water. But strangers will offer to scrub each other, and in the communal spirit of bathing, why not agree?

That was how I fell under the hands of Alex Dolgolevsky one wintry Saturday at the Mermaid. He began softly slapping the oak leaves against my shoulders, working toward my waist. He started gently, as if he were dusting me, then added more vigor. In time he pressed the leaves into my back, the twigs tickling my skin, driving the heat into my pores. With more gusto, the slaps traveled down my back. Fwash, fwash, fwash. I felt like a Chevy advancing through a car wash. After two minutes, I gasped for some cool air. “To the shower!” he ordered. I scurried from the room, gulping air. I stepped directly under the spout and drenched myself. Toweling off, I heard Alex’s command: “Again!”

Again?

My limbs felt loose and rubbery, my heart pumping like a piston. The banya, I realized, is about suffering for your redemption. You slog through the heat, you weather the cold, you imbibe strange smells not always associated with cleanliness. Mostly there’s the pain, the blessed pain, that keeps everyone coming back for more.

I looked at Alex with glee and agreed.

“Again!”

Inquirer Sunday Magazine

Pickup Artist

Posted on November 12, 1995 by Suzanne Sataline

Lew Blum calls himself a civil servant for property owners. But he’s been called a few other things, too.

Pickup Artist

By Suzanne Sataline
November 12, 1995
Inquirer Sunday Magazine

THE HOSTAGE BEHIND BARS is a ’93 Ford Thunderbird with a sassy Carmen-esque red paint job. For the ransom of $90 Patricia Tannehill can drive away free – no ticket, no record, no Denver boot to stalk her down.

She proceeds to have a conniption fit on the sidewalk of 40th near Girard.

“Ninety dollars! They must have somebody working their way through town!” She is sputtering, practically spitting tobacco leaves every time she drags on her cigarette. The nurse technician from Southwest Philly had merely parked her luxury sedan that morning at University City Townhouse at 40th and Market and stepped into a nearby restaurant for a plate of eggs with a companion.

But Tannehill’s car did not have the requisite green residents’ sticker. When she returned an hour later, the T-bird had flown. Her only clue as to its whereabouts hung high above the lot. Lew Blum, the guy with the Hook-a-saurus, had her car!

She is pacing the sidewalk, in sticker shock.

“They charge more than a ticket!” Tannehill spouts. “This is nothing but a big ripoff, a hole in the wall! Who can I call? The police?”

She cocks her hip, and stands her ground on the chipped sidewalk outside Blum’s place. She is pouting now, and the rain drips from the rolled edges of her black crocheted hat. She gets wetter.

Of course she pays.

They all do. That is one of the facts of getting your car towed: Whether you scream or whether you don’t, it costs the same.

IN THE CATALOG OF THE detested, certain professions rise to the top. Politicians. Reporters.

Tow-truck drivers.

Sure they are loved when needed: when the clutch goes bad, the brakes fail in the rain, after the 11-car pileup on the westbound side of the Walt Whitman. These situations provide the bulk of Lew Blum’s business – up to 18 cars a day during the worst of the winter in 1994.

Every other time, a tow is an affront, a plight to the people who ditch the Chevy at the Rite-Aid and catch the el to work, or park overnight at the lot next door and believe no one will ever find out.

Actually, Lew says, it’s these people who are the violators. They are law-breakers, bums, scammers and thieves, those who pay no heed to the signs as big as a large-screen TV and steal free parking from hard-working merchants. The people who make the city hell for those who park by the rules.

All he does, Lew will tell you, is give back plots of asphalt to the folks who own them. At $90 a pop. Cash.

This might happen four times a day. But these tows invite the worst headaches and produce the most invective from suited-businessmen and Delaware Avenue party girls, all who yearn to know: Has this man no heart?

“Even the cops think I’m a shyster!” Lew offers.

So we ask:

Lew, are you a shyster?

“No!”

Are you a rip-off artist?

“They think I am,” he says contritely.

Well then, what are you?

“I’m a hard-working, honest businessman,” he says, no trace of doubt in his voice. “I give a service. I perform a duty. I’m like a vigilante for property owners.”

The strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” should be playing . . .

“If there’s anybody they should holler at it’s the people who own the property. I’m just doing as I was told. I enforce the rights! I’m an enforcer!”

Lew Blum as Clint Eastwood?

Yeah, chuckles Lew, who is similarly armed, “Go ahead — make my day.”

In his quest to rid the world of the illegally parked, he has become one of the mechanisms that make the city work, a corollary in the urban theorem that 20th-century vehicles on 18th-century streets with 8th-century manners means you have now entered the towing zone.

Tow trucks were used at the turn of the century, to remove stalled trollies and, later, broken buses. Then they became a way to move cars out of traffic, or to haul a vehicle from the fire lane.

Part of the duty of towing companies, said Anthony Tomazinis, director of the transportation planning studies laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, is “the correcting of human aberrations” – ones that city fathers never imagined.

The smart people in this town park at meters and garages. The others take chances. So when Lew’s people come to haul your Honda away, remember:

If you don’t want trouble, if you want to stay off Lew’s closed-circuit camera, if you want to keep Gina and Gino, the Rottweiler twins, from breaking your eardrums, just keep your mouth shut and hand over the money like the nice man asks.

IN PHILADELPHIA THERE ARE three big names in towing. Actually two – George Smith and Lew Blum, uncle and nephew, respectively. There’s the Main Line Hooker, but he doesn’t belong here, Lew says dismissively.

People know Lew, or, at least his name. It’s everywhere, over vacant lots and apartment buildings, fast food joints and judges’ spots. Everyone thinks he’s been around for a hundred years.

So when you meet Lew Blum there are a few things that shock you.

He is not fat. He does not smoke a cigar. (He prefers Newports.) He is not 100 years old.

Despite that nighttime growl on the phone (a hoarseness he perfects watching Eagles games), he is quite enthusiastic and charming. He is a trim, single, 40-year-old with sparkly eyes, a devilish mustache, a dashing dark European face attributed to his half-Greek, half-Jewish lineage. Lew Blum is a towing babe.

But it’s his name, not his face, that everyone knows.

He’s done everything to get it out there. All his employees wear Lew Blum T-shirts, and he gives out red satiny Lew Blum novelty jackets. A few years ago he went so far as to co-opt a Connecticut company’s logo of a dinosaur towing away a car. Hook-a-saurus was born, and Lew Blum became bigger than ever.

“Somebody said it somewhere,” he says, his voice rumbling from the fights and cigarettes, “whether it be good or bad publicity, they still got to know who you are.”

Most people don’t know that he is a third-generation tower. His grandfather, Lew Smith, owned a garage, and little Lew, who grew up on North 38th Street, hung around all the time. At 8, Lew learned to retread tires. When his grandfather started towing with a used truck, Lew would ride around with him, careful to position the J-bar correctly. Before long, it was all Lew wanted to do.

As a teenager Lew worked for his uncle, George Smith, until they had a falling out. At 16, Lew left the family business, worked for a variety of garages, and towed using an old truck with a homemade boom. But he got frustrated doing all the work and sharing part of the money. In 1977, he pleaded with Penrose Dodge to give him a chance. For $500 down, they sold Lew a $22,000 truck. On Jan. 1, 1978, he established Lew Blum Towing Co.

He never hesitated to call the business anything else. But he knows there’s a price to pay for all that fame.

“It’s Lew Blum Towing Co. they don’t like,” he explains. “I thought, what if the name was Auto Tow. Then when they’d meet me they’d say, ‘Ah, Lew Blum. I just met him! What a guy!’ ”

But that’s not how it is. Tonight the hothead with the ’78 black Monte Carlo might use other choice adjectives to describe Lew.

Hothead parked his car, the one with the fuzzy dashboard turtle toy, on the 200 block of Race and dashed inside an apartment. He comes back, no car. The guy spews at Lew over the phone, claiming he was just in there a minute. Then he claims he never left the car.

An hour earlier, a kid in an American sedan started a beef, shouting, “Lew Blum don’t know who he’s messing with.”

Everybody, Lew says, is a gangster.

“Is it their stupidity? Their ignorance?” He lurches forward in the cordovan chair. “And then they get mad at Lew Blum for towing their car. Now he doesn’t like Lew Blum.”

And he laughs, a hollow cough.

“I just inherited an enemy. Now the guy in the Buick is going to get me. Now the guy in the Chevy hates me.” He looks down at his blotter. “Anybody else hate me?”

It’s a slow night. Nope, tonight’s enemy list is short.

Lew likes to say he comforts the public. If this is true, his methods are a bit disconcerting.

He has created a fortress out of his cramped office with the filthy mustard walls and shelves dotted with dusty books such as The Bible as History. A 1994 calendar hangs on the closet door.

In the vestibule, the door to the office is locked and stamped with footprints from the disconcerted. Closed-circuit TV cameras record activity at the front door, vestibule, garage door and interior garage areas. A car owner is instructed to wait in the vestibule until he surrenders his driver’s license, keys and cash through a slot in the locked door. Then he must wait until an employee drives the car into a gated area that can be accessed only when Lew electronically opens the garage door. Motion detectors signal when anyone steps up to the doorway or lurks in the garage.

And there’s Gino and Gina, the Rottweilers that run in perpetual circles. One once tore into the arm of an insurance adjuster who entered where he wasn’t supposed to.

Watch where you sit. There on the cordovan leather desk chair rests a .22- caliber Smith & Wesson.

The whole place is designed for minimal contact with the public. If they see you, Lew knows, they’ll fight with you.

The phone rings. A party girl from the Silk City lounge wants to know if Lew has her white T-bird. Yep, Lew replies.

Expletives sear the phone wires. Lew hangs up.

Yep, Lew, someone else hates you.

EILEEN IS ON THE PHONE. Today, Eileen is always on the phone. Eileen is calling again because she cannot believe she has to pay for storage after her crumpled Toyota (suffering death by motorcycle) was towed away.

That’s $200, please.

“This lady,” Lisa Riddick decides, “has got a problem with barometric pressure.”

Riddick is one of the reasons Lew has invested in the cameras, the dogs, the reconfigured office. She is the manager, the tough guy, and Lew’s best friend. When she started five years ago, Lisa would get bugged when folks called threatening to kill her. Then there was the guy who kicked down the door.

Almost every week she told Lew she was out of there.

So he gave her a raise.

That was a half-dozen raises ago. Now she has a house, a new car, a nice life. And she’s only 25. She has endured, this woman with the narrow eyes and strong, angular face, a female Wesley Snipes. When they call her a witch (or worse), she calmly agrees.

And asks for $90.

She straightens out Eileen and her mom in less than an hour. It’s square now. They will pay. Lisa smiles. She talks to Eileen’s mom like she’s an adolescent.

“It’s kind of like a learning experience for you,” she instructs. “If it was me I would have said ‘why is the tow so much?”‘

WHEN PEOPLE HEAR THAT $90 figure, they assume Lew is a billionaire. (He boasts he could sell the business for $1 million.)

But there’s all this stuff people don’t consider.

Lew only earns when he tows. He has two notebooks of letters, contracts with private lot owners (like Rite Aid, Boston Market, Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.) that allow him to police their lots and haul away illegal parkers. Lew gets no contract fee.

So he can never rely on his weekly take. During the winter of ’94, the really bad one, they towed 12 illegals a day, at $90 apiece. They had 18 to 20 breakdowns, at $40 and up. As fall began this year, things were dreary slow. An entire day could yield only three illegals and six breakdowns. And that doesn’t count the three people a night who called and left before Lew’s trucks arrived.

If you think your insurance is bad on your ’89 Probe, consider that it costs him $6,500 to insure one tow truck a year. (He has five.)

Towing itself has gotten harder. Back when cars had metal bumpers, Grandfather Lew could throw chains across the front of a Monte Carlo and tug the thing away with a J-bar. Now, with front features like plastic splashes and valances, Lew Blum’s driver uses a hydraulic lift to scoop up cars to avoid damage.

The lawsuits are numerous. One ornery BMW owner can produce months of drudgery in small claims court with a $350 judgment in the end.

There’s extortion. The city. The cops. Everyone wants a piece.

Lot owners try to get kickbacks for each car towed. (Lew tells them to use another tower.)

The Parking Authority posts tiny signs that nobody can see and gets enough tows to make Lew look like a piker.

When cops get the hook, almost all want a break. They flip their badge, and Lew weighs the consequences of retaliation – and sometimes feels pressure to let it slide.

He keeps those receipts in a bottom drawer, what he now calls the “threat file.” He peels them off one at a time.

“Narcotic cop. Eighth District. Twelfth District. . . . Here’s a captain from Major Crimes. First District. A cop in the 23d.” The stack is four inches thick – tows that could’ve brought him $5,000. Enough to pay salaries, or a couple of months of mortgage. He gets madder the more he works through it.

It’s not that it never happened to him. He’s been towed before. By his uncle, the other Philadelphia towing giant: George Smith.

It was a few years back. One of his trucks even. George offered to cut the price, but Lew said he would pay either all or nothing. He paid in full.

IT’S MOVIE NIGHT AT LEW Blum Towing. Let’s see what’s playing.

The videos are from Lew’s private collection, a medley of live-action shorts recorded off the closed-circuit camera. Lew films whenever he thinks there’s going to be a problem. Call this cinema vitriol.

The staff has some all-time favorites (now since erased):

The Guy Who Pissed On-Camera.

The Guy Who Wagged His Penis.

The Guy Who Threatened to Vomit.

The projectionist, Lew himself, loads a tape into the VCR. The images on the 13-inch jump and warble like bad singing. The first feature pops into view.

It stars a couple of Jersey girls with serious hair. They are shapely things. You can see this from the rather indirect camera angle that beams down into the vestibule, catching their parted tresses and shapely calves. The image is black and white, but you can imagine sequins and gold lycra on these indignant young things.

Next to the girls lurks this hulking body, which turns out to the bouncer from a Delaware Avenue club. One of the blondes is screaming her bloody head off, Lew says, at a door. Except you can’t hear the words because the static is so bad. She sounds like the teacher in those Charlie Brown cartoons: Wah wah wa, wa waaaa.

Lew tries another.

This reel features a beefy guy, T-shirt, sweat shorts, hair buzzed to the height of a golf fairway. Your inclination is to fix him up with one of the Jersey girls.

He catches sight of the camera spying on him. This is a man who has just taken a cab ride into a Godforsaken corner of Philadelphia and relinquished 90 bucks so he can be temporarily imprisoned between a door and a metal gate while he waits to reclaim his personal belonging. There is no one to talk to. And he feels the need to express himself.

“You’re a . . . .” Not surprisingly, his words are short on syllables, long on color. He offers to kick Lew where it might do some good.

And then he hurls a wad of spit at the camera.

Did you see, did you see?, Lew implores. Did you see what I have to put up with?

Veneration Gap A Popular Strategy for Church Growth Splits Congregants

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Prosthetics Manhattan Project

Painstaking Progress

Bionics: We Do Not Have the Technology . . . Yet

Melding Body and Bionics

Fully Wired Limbs

Thinking Through Every Step

On eBay, an Atheist Puts His Own Soul On the Auction Block

Combing Gulf Coast, Faithful Secure Relics of Battered Churches

The Bionic Man

Welcome to Vorkuta

In this former prison town in Russia’s Far North, why can’t the government pay people to leave?

Spa? Da!

Russian and Turkish ‘banyas’ of Brooklyn provide a little rough relaxation on a winter’s day.

Pickup Artist

Veneration Gap
A Popular Strategy for Church Growth Splits Congregants

On eBay, an Atheist Puts His Own Soul
On the Auction Block