Running Again: Alum Helps Victims Dream of Next Year’s Marathon

My doctor told me recently to stop running. He said my knees, like most human knees, have had enough of high-impact exercise after twenty years of road races.

He’s the third doctor to tell me so. Maybe this time it will sink in. In a small, perhaps completely incomparable way, I've felt the same zeal to overcome the body’s limitations that those who have endured paralysis, severe arthritis, or amputations experience. We all have that need to mend, overcome the pain, and return to the challenge.

So when I heard interviews with victims of the Boston Marathon bombing in the past few weeks, who, despite severe injury and amputation, vowed to run the race again, I nodded my head. I understood.

MIT Media Lab Associate Professor Hugh Herr SM '93 heard the same declarations coming from bombing victims this month. He, too, understood.

But Herr, himself a double amputee, is in a unique place to help. Partnering with No Barriers USA, Herr and his Biomechatronics Research Group intend to support any marathoner who, despite severe injury or limb loss as a result of the bombings, aims to run again next year.

No Barriers, a nationwide nonprofit with a goal of improving lives through assistive technology, launched the No Barriers for Boston fund on April 26. It hopes to raise $500,000 to support investments in sport-specific prosthetic limbs to help survivors run, bike, swim, or otherwise compete athletically again.

“Assistive technology makes a profound impact on the lives of people struggling with physical disability,” Herr wrote in a May 3 post on a Wall Street Journal blog. “It created a passion in me for science and engineering that has since defined my career.”

Herr's award-winning team focuses on creating "intimate extensions of the human body" that react with ease to the nervous system’s electromechanical commands as fluidly as natural limbs. With fourteen patents relating to the field of bionics, Herr hopes to make an array of such advanced prosthetics commercially available and affordable.

What about knees like mine? In a New York Times interview last week, Herr speculated that someday, “smart” pants that act like a second skin on one’s legs might make running a painless, lifelong pursuit.  My joints like the sound of that.

An avid athlete himself, Herr says he intends to run alongside his fellow amputees in next year’s Boston Marathon.

“We will participate as a beautifully defiant statement to the world that we the people will not be intimidated, brought down, diminished, conquered or stopped by acts of violence,” he writes.

Update, 3/19/14: Herr's work for marathon victims continues. Read about the prosthetic he developed for one survivor of the attack and her long-term recovery, courtesy WBUR.