Legs - or Super Legs? Two Extraordinary Women

My first TED post this year was about Juan Enriquez' presentation. He talked about advances in tissue generation and advanced robotics that could revolutionize how we think of our bodies. How would we handle a world where these devices would enable people to become 'better than human' he asked.

Then I attended a TED University talk by Aimee Mullins, a beautiful athlete, actress, and fashion model. She strutted on stage, all 6'1" of her, wearing very high heels. After a double take, I realized both her legs were prosthetics (she had amputations below the knee when she was one, due to missing fibula bones.)

Aimee showed us some of her favourite legs, including the legs with which she won paralympic medals in long jump and sprints.


These days she thinks of legs as wearable art, rather than mere imitations of human legs. She had 'cheetah legs' for a movie in which she played a cheetah. But my favourites were a beautifully carved ashwood pair built for a fashion show. They looked like finely tooled leather boots.

Aimee said she liked the legs she was wearing, because her normal height was 5'8", but it was fun to be 6'1". When a girlfriend first saw these legs, she had protested "That's just not fair!". What a milestone, she said, that someone with two legs would envy her.

Will such devices turn the tables so that we think of people with disabilities as being advantaged?

We met another extraordinary woman at TED, on the main stage - Lena Maria Klingvall. Born with no arms and one stunted leg, she was another incredibly self-confident, multi-faceted person. A swimming medallist in butterfly and the back stroke. A singer, a pop star in Japan. She can drive a car. She can do calligraphy. She can knit and crochet. She can eat with chopsticks.

Lena Maria attributes her success to great parents and her own positive and stubborn personality. I think her touch of exhibitionism is handy too!

These were two very inspirational women.

Millennium Seed Bank

There will be three sessions of TED University this year. This afternoon, in one and a half hours, we had 16 speakers. There were just so many good ideas, but I'll tell you about the one that was most surprising and exciting to me.

Jonathan Drori told us about the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens, with a mission to collect and preserve seeds of all the plants in the world. A daunting goal you might say. But they’re well on their way. Started in 1999, MSB already has 3B seeds stored from 24,000 species, representing 10% of the world’s plants and they expect to cover 25% by 2020. The initial focus is on dryland plants because they are the most threatened. The seeds are preserved in a very dry, subzero environment and are removed every 10 years or so, to see if they can still be germinated.

The MSB partners with over 50 countries around the world. All seeds collected are stored in the home country, with duplicates sent to Kew. Ownership of the seeds in Kew remains with the home country, an important factor in gaining co-operation, Jon says. I talked with Jon at one of tonight’s parties and he explained much of MSB’s success arises from this collaborative approach.

Why bother? Simply put, all life depends on plants. The MSB is ensuring biodiversity by protecting plants which are being threatened by habitat reduction and global warming. In addition, the germination tests yield immediate benefits to farmers by demonstrating the best methods of germination.

Aside from being a trustee of the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, Jon was the architect of the BBC’s wonderful web site, and is currently a consultant on emerging media strategies and a Visiting Industrial Professor at Bristol University, specialising in misconceptions in science and the uses of technology for learning. He is also a director of a company which develops science-based diagnostic tools and interventions for children with autism and dyslexia. You might call him a Renaissance Man.

TED University

Each year, on the morning prior to the beginning of the conference, a number of TED attendees give short (10 minute) talks on a range of interesting topics. People register and move from class to class like in university.

A couple stand out for me:

In How to Have Effective Board Meetings I heard the oft-repeated advice to start each board meeting with a short description of the good and bad things that have happened since the last board meeting. But the idea of calling them Peaches, Lemons and Lemonades was great.

The most powerful talk was packed with information about worst-case scenario climate change. The thesis was that climate change was full of discontinuities, and yet the IPCC report was based on conservative linear extrapolations of where we are today. He presented a lot of evidence that could argue for larger and earlier climate change than IPCC predicted, at least equally likely to their predications.
A session on water as game changer was a series of anecdotes about the benefits arising from bringing water to those who hadn’t had it. The story that struck me was the provision of a well in Kenya that enabled a mother to stop walking 5 hours a day just to get water, allowed her to grow a vegetable garden with the time, even produce some extra crops for sale, and allowed the children to go to school since they didn’t have to accompany her on the walk. My memories of the women walking along the roads in Africa for water made this particularly meaningful to me.

Majora Carter (a fabulous speaker from a previous year – see her at TED.com) had us practising to have a difficult conversation. I was paired up with Jeff Bezos’ mother, a similar age and stage of life as me, and that was quite interesting.