By Angela Marshall
Other winners of Common Wealth awards this year are journalist Sam Donaldson, former U.S. Senate majority leader Bob Dole, Broadway choreographer Susan Stroman and author Joyce Carol Oates.
It was Kamen's Segway Human Transporter that made national headlines in 2001 as "It," an invention touted before its unveiling as being as big as the PC. The Segway is a two-wheeled, electric-powered machine that mimics human balance and can travel up to 12.5 miles per hour.
The Segway evolved from one of Kamen's other inventions, the Ibot, a wheelchair that can climb stairs and allow the user to stand. After years of creating medical inventions, he was frustrated by the limitations forced on disabled people.
"It seemed to me that if we now have the technology, literally, to put people on the moon, to go under the oceans, to cross the continents in a few hours, we ought to be able to give a person that can't walk the ability to go where everybody else goes, and the dignity to stand up and look their peers in the eye, and I just figured we would study and learn and understand how to essentially replicate the human balance, put it into a machine and give it to the people that have lost that capability," said Kamen.
He used the Ibot to climb the Eiffel Tower.
Kamen is a self-taught physicist and mechanical engineer who began his career in the basement of his parents' Rockville Centre home. Once he ran out of room in the basement, which he called his electronics shop, he decided there was some perfectly good space being wasted under the back yard. So he dug a hole the depth of the basement, put in three cement walls and knocked a hole in the existing basement. He built a waterproof deck on top with a trap door so that he could use a crane to load any mechanical equipment he needed. "And it worked just fine," Kamen said with a laugh.
After graduating from South Side High School, Kamen went to Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts for five years, but left without earning a degree. He doesn't want to be a role model for college dropouts but does admit that he had differences of opinion with teachers and professors on more than one occasion. He describes himself as a "slow, deliberate thinker" who "didn't do well in the academic environment where things were being thrown at you and you're supposed to regurgitate them."
Kamen doesn't think someone who doesn't do well in a high school science class should rule out science as a career. "I think scientific thinking more than anything else requires tenacity and patience and carefully really understanding the core of these very big ideas, and you don't do that by reading the one-paragraph synopsis about all of Newton and remembering which one they call Newton's first law, Newton's second law, Newton's third law. It's not a question of how you label them but if you understand them."
Hoping to instill in young people a love for science equal to that for athletics, Kamen founded For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, or FIRST. The organization is dedicated to encouraging students to understand, use and enjoy science and engineering. The FIRST Robotics Competition, which teams from South Side have participated in, is an annual event that matches professional engineers with high school students nationwide. Hundreds of teams participate in regional competitions and an annual championship at Walt Disney World's Epcot Center.
Recalling FIRST's development, Kamen said, "Let's build an institution that does for smarts what the U.S. Olympic Committee does for athletics. Let's build the NCAA of the Olympic committee of smarts. Let's create an environment in which science and engineering is presented to kids in such a way that it's every bit as much fun, and every bit as exciting and every bit as accessible as all the other sports they play."
Kamen is dedicated to making FIRST work and to changing the culture of America. He is afraid that if Americans don't change the things they celebrate -- sports and entertainment -- it "does not bode well" for the country's future competitiveness, standard of living or quality of life "because a shot putter and a guy that bounces a ball are not the people that cure the diseases, make the water drinkable and make the standard of living that Americans think is their birthright."
He continued, "Our culture needs to get back to a place where kids -- particularly women and minorities -- see that opportunities in science and technology and inventing are absolutely as accessible and fun and rewarding as the world of entertainment and sports."
While still in college, Kamen invented the first wearable infusion pump, which allows drugs to be dispensed automatically into a patient's body, ending the need for frequent hospital visits for chemotherapy patients and others. He also invented the first wearable insulin pump for diabetics and many other infusion devices.
Kamen founded DEKA (the first two letters of his first and last name), a research and development corporation, in 1982. It is based in Manchester, N.H. There he created, among other things, a portable dialysis machine that enables kidney patients to undergo dialysis in their own homes, and the Crown heart stent, which keeps arteries clear. Vice President Dick Cheney has one.
"I was always trying to build things to both understand the world of science and technology and also to make money," Kamen said. "I never wanted to get a job. I always wanted to have my own business and set my own goals. So I've never had a job. I've never gotten a paycheck in my life."
For a man who has never drawn a paycheck, he's got plenty of expensive toys, including a Hummer and two helicopters. Kamen owns an island off the coast of New Hampshire.
When neighboring political leaders objected to his plan to build a "nice, clean" wind turbine, Kamen declared North Dumpling Island's independence from the United States and signed a non-aggression act with President Bush. Kamen said he gives foreign aid to the U.S. in the form of FIRST.
As for winning the Common Wealth award, Kamen said it's always exciting to be recognized. "It gives you energy to keep going and take risks and work hard," he said. "And to try to do something better."
