This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Dec. 6, 2012 - In the opening sequence of "The Six Million Dollar Man," the narrator sonorously intones, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better, stronger, faster.”
It was scientific fantasy. But Eric Leuthardt, M.D., who was only a year old when that television show debuted, envisions a not-too-distant future when the Six Million Dollar Man might just be the guy next door.
He’s written a novel, set 40 years in the future, about the coexistence of people and intelligent machines and entities that are both human and mechanical. His upcoming murder mystery is science fiction, but he’s working now with technology that would have been considered sci-fi 40 years ago.
The 39-year-old Washington University neuroscientist and neurosurgeon directs the university’s Center for Innovation in Neuroscience and Technology and is a physician at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. He and his team are working on devices that let people control machines with the flicker of a brain wave.
“It’s an explosive field in science,” Leuthardt said.
Their research is called brain-computer interfaces (BCI) or neuroprosthetics, devices linked to the brain that decode electrical signals, converts the information and causes the machine to obey the thought.
Scratching the surface
In 2004, Leuthardt and a colleague, Daniel Moran, discovered that BCI could be used to play the aptly named videogame from the ‘70s, Space Invaders.
“We hashed it out over lunch,” said Moran, a biomedical engineer at Wash U. “We did the study in a year and it turned out great.”
The discovery won Leuthardt a spot on MIT's Technology Review 100, a list of the most remarkable innovators under the age of 35.
He recently developed a brain-controlled iPod/iPhone application. By donning a brainwave recording headset, people can think-pilot a helicopter.
But it’s not about fun and games.
The goal is to return function to people who have lost a limb, suffered paralysis due to spinal cord injury or stroke, or have motor disabilities caused by such illnesses as epilepsy and brain tumors, Leuthardt’s specialties.
The game technology has led to practical applications.
Last year, Leuthardt announced two significant “firsts” by his team.
They performed temporary surgical implants that have allowed patients to use regions of their brain that control speech to control a computer. The “mouse” is their voice or thought; they can manipulate a cursor on a computer screen simply by saying or thinking of a particular sound.
Another temporary neuroprosthetic brain implant procedure by Leuthardt’s team restored arm movement to partially paralyzed patients. He hopes this discovery will lead to people operating motorized wheelchairs or even restore mobility to partially paralyzed limbs.
Despite having made tremendous strides in a very short time by combining biomedical engineering and neurology, Leuthardt is not satisfied.
He began his research with the intention of enabling spinal cord injury patients to move and locked-in patients, people who cannot move or talk, to communicate. After 10 years, that has not happened.
“We’re not there yet because technology needs to get smaller, cheaper, safer and faster,” Leuthardt said, ticking off the reasons briskly because he’s given it plenty of thought. “We’ve just begun to scratch the surface, but we are scratching it.”
Man on fire
Leuthardt has a lot of irons in the fire. His time, he says, is pretty evenly split between research and patient care, which includes cutting-edge surgical procedures. That’s when he’s not teaching or inventing something new. He has been named one of the world’s most prolific patent holders. He estimates that he has been issued around 160 biomedical, software and user-interface patents, with another 800 or so pending.
He has a blog on Tumblr, Brains & Machines, which he modestly admits has followers. But that’s not its purpose.
“It’s a catalog of my thoughts,” Leuthardt said. “It forces me to make an idea more understandable.”
His diverse topics include exploration of the role of religious faith in coping with illness, social justice, and a whimsical entry on how paintings evoke reactions in babies. The research subject was his daughter, Ellie Claire, now a year old. She gets a weekly visit to the St. Louis Art Museum; she prefers Chagall.
He talked about ethics and medical profit.
“Money in and of itself is not an evil, any more than gravity or other natural forces are evil,” Leuthardt writes. “(But) at the end of the day, ethics are paramount because we are doing something that affects people’s lives. We must do the right thing for the patient.”
In his copious spare time, he has written a 400-page thriller in which a neurologist helps solve a series of murders.
"Red Devil 4" is scheduled for publication in 2014 by Tor/Forge. It was edited by Patrick J. LoBrutto, who describes the book as "speculative fiction."
“It’s taking science and going a step or two further,” LoBrutto said. “It’s interface between computer and man in all the ways we can be brought together into one entity.
“I think his book is going to do very well because he draws the future so well,” LoBrutto said, adding, “Working with Eric was a dream. He’s a brilliant and talented scientist and a gifted storyteller as well.”
‘Unbelievably driven’
Leuthardt was born in Boston to a German father, now a retired auto worker, and an Italian mother, a former teacher. He briefly lived in Stuttgart, Germany, but spent most of his childhood in Cincinnati.
Growing up, no one had him pegged for success.
“Teachers thought I was a slow learner in grade school,” he laughed. “I had a hyperactive mind and they wanted me to sit down and not ask questions.”
A high school science internship at the University of Cincinnati, where he met a professor he credits with changing his life, Keith Crutcher, set him on the road to a career in medicine.
He received his undergraduate degree from Saint Louis University and his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He returned to St. Louis for neurosurgery residency at Washington University, then did a fellowship at the University of Washington. He joined Washington University in 2006 as a faculty member in the departments of neurological surgery and biomedical engineering.
He’s now a man who moves with purpose but unhurriedly; his manner casual. His office assistant calls him “E.” Only his musical taste – which runs toward the frenzy of Cake and the hip hop of Gorillaz – hints at obsession.
“I want to have an impact so that 10 minutes before I die I will know that I have done something,” Leuthardt says without a bit of bombast. “I want to do something that is meaningful. That’s my currency. I am very driven, unbelievably so.”
When he’s not moving a warp speed, Leuthardt is home in University City with his wife, Melissa, their daughter, and two border collies, Slider and Rawley.