He speaks with an Irish accent: “Let me get the little one for ya.” And the man we just met, wearing a white T-shirt, blue jeans, and sporting dark scruff, hops over a wooden fence into the wispy tall grass of the pasture, then glances down where his feet landed. He sees something glinting in the sun, a set of horse blinders and a bug net used to keep critters out of horses’ faces.

“I’ve been looking for those,” he says. “I spent 30 minutes this morning trying to find them.” He deftly picks the items up and places them in his pants pocket.

It’s a warm, late summer afternoon, and I’m holding my 1-year-old daughter, Molly, in my arms as we stand atop a hill, surrounded by farmland, at the Baltimore County Center for Maryland Agriculture. My wife, Jamie, stands next to me with the stroller, and the sturdy Irishman, who later introduces himself as Jim, is off in a nearby field fetching a horse to show our baby. In the distance, four horses, two big and two small ones, are grazing, and when Jim gets about 40 yards away, he whistles to get the smallest’s attention, coaxing the white pony toward us, like he’s walking a dog off leash.

“You’re like the horse whisperer,” Jamie yells to Jim as he gets closer. To me, he looks more like Ray Liotta as “Shoeless” Joe Jackson exiting the cornfields in the famed baseball movie Field of Dreams, with horses in tow instead of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox. The remaining horses, two of them large brown and white thoroughbreds, follow the little one, their tails swooshing with curiosity. “They think I have food,” Jim says with a chuckle.

Molly is doing her amused, curious pointing thing at the biggest one, when Jim tells us about where they came from and what they’re doing here. One, named Tina, is an old racehorse rescued from a kill pen in Pennsylvania. The other big one is a laidback 31-year-old named Doc, who injured a back leg about 18 years ago and was donated by River Valley Ranch, a nonprofit ministry in Manchester, Maryland. Today, they’re used as therapy horses for kids and adults.

As Jim speaks, we look around and see endless forest and clear skies to the north and west, Timonium office buildings to the east across the valley of Interstate 83, and the tops of buildings in Towson to the south. It quickly becomes clear we’re standing on a hidden gem of a property, an oasis on the edge of the city, a place that makes us think, “How did we not know this was here before?”

I start taking notes on my phone. “You’re a writer?” Jim says. “You should write a feature about this place. We’re trying to get the word out.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Of course, Baltimore and the entire state of Maryland has a deep and rich equestrian history. The Preakness has been run in the city for well over a century, and a quick drive from downtown will take you past fields of horse farms soon enough, but the proximity and accessibility of this particular farm—it’s also a county park—with its old racehorses grazing for public view minutes from our own home, took us by surprise.

At 149 acres, the place is roughly the size of 113 football fields in the beautiful Maryland countryside, which Jim says reminds him of the Irish hills in which he was born, and it’s open to the public every day of the year. It’s also much closer and cheaper than a trip to Ireland.

It’s a well-traveled area of Baltimore County—you’ve likely driven past it on your way to the Hunt Valley Mall or Oregon Ridge Nature Center—but we’re not the only ones who have passed the brown, county-styled Agriculture Center sign near the road without thinking twice.

“I think people drive by and think we’re a private business or something,” says Gina Porter, the farm’s manager, who was hired in July. “I want people to know that this is a county park for them paid for by their tax dollars. And we’re open sunrise to sunset every day.”

We had come across the Agriculture Center on the recommendation of a good friend who suggested it as a way to break the pandemic-fueled monotony of endless walks around our neighborhood. (As new parents, we were desperately looking for a socially distanced place to wander around outside between Molly’s naps.) We had never even heard of the place, but our friend told us it was near Oregon Ridge Park, and there were goats. That was about all the incentive we needed.

The day we were there, there couldn’t have been more than a half-dozen people on the property, but fortunately one of them was Jim. After a picnic lunch in the shade of a row of starting-to-turn-fall-color trees, we spotted him leaning against a metal fencepost within eyeshot of the parking lot and what looked like a barn behind him.

“Are we allowed to walk around here?” my wife asked tentatively. “Well, you’re not going to get arrested,” he said. Then he pointed us to a steep hill, over to the right where the horses were roaming today.

His full name is Jim Phelan, and he’s a 48-year-old former jockey (taller than you might think) who was essentially born into the horse industry in Ireland and rode professionally for three decades during a globetrotting career in Ireland, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Australia, and Dubai. He moved to Baltimore 15 years ago to work as an exercise rider to keep the horses in shape at Pimlico Race Course and Laurel Park.

He’s an obviously approachable guy, and that was before we learned he’s also the lead singer and banjo player in the Irish band The ShamRogues, a group he started in 2009. His wife, Katie, a Baltimore-born Irish dancer, is in the band, too. When we ask him what he does at the Agriculture Center, where he’s worked since 2018, he shows some of the charm befitting a frontman and modestly calls himself a “gofer.” His official title is Farm and Livestock Specialist. Along with another staffer and two interns, he tends to and feeds the horses, sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens on the property.

 

“I WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW THIS A COUNTY PARK PAID FOR BY THEIR TAX DOLLARS.”

 

As we chat upon the hill next to a run-down, long white barn that looks like it likely dates well before the turn of the last century, when this land was privately-owned, Phelan starts telling us exactly what goes on here. Yes, you can pull up the driveway, lined by beautiful trees on both sides, park, and simply spend a few good hours wandering the grounds, or you can take part in more deliberate activities like farming or gardening classes.

The first building you’ll see is the welcome center. Admittedly, it does look more like a corporate headquarters than a place for visitors, and it kind of is, as it doubles as an office for several farming agencies, like the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and used to serve as a voting location in election years. It was originally conceived as a one-stop shop for local farmers to get questions answered and do business.

Now it almost feels like a one-stop shop for anyone interested in the outdoors. For a family, you can simply sit outside and have a picnic in a quiet landscape while watching the black and white sheep and goats. For the sustainable-minded looking to grow their own food, there’s an upcoming program for that, too. This spring, says Porter, a University of Maryland graduate who grows her own food at home, the county will start providing some of the Agriculture Center’s farmland to beginning farmers who are interested in a low-cost and low-risk way of getting started.

In a greenhouse near the welcome center, there is already space for rent, “similar to a community garden,” Porter says, where volunteer farmers and county staff have grown organic food that’s donated to the Maryland Food Bank. The American Chestnut Foundation is breeding disease-resistant trees in there, too, to try to help bring back the species from the brink of extinction.

If you’re looking to exercise, there are challenging hiking trails, and off-road bike riders are welcome, one of the few county parks where that is the case. And, broadly speaking, the land is a sanctuary for animals, like the horses and four rescued pigs in two separate pens. Two fell off a truck on I-695, saving them from being bacon, and the other two were found abandoned in a landfill. (We fed those two potbellies a few extra carrots and strawberries left over from our picnic lunch.)

And the horses, whether they know it or not, are paying their rescues forward to kids and adults who visit them. Doc, for instance—he’s one of the horses we saw, the calm-tempered 31-year-old—is part of the Eagala organization, which uses horses in open-air, equine therapy sessions for children dealing with anxiety, depression, or other disorders.

In certain situations, having a sensitive, non-judgmental animal like a horse present can help kids open up to a therapist. Separately, the farm has welcomed schoolkids and foster children from the city and surrounding areas for field trips that expose them to a new environment.

But perhaps the center’s most signature program is its partnership with Saratoga WarHorse, a New York-based nonprofit with a chapter in Baltimore. Founded in 2012 by decorated Vietnam War veteran Bob Nevins, it brings together rescued former racehorses and war veterans, active-duty military, and recently, frontline workers facing COVID-19—who are struggling with conditions like post-traumatic stress—for free, hands-on therapeutic sessions.

Roughly every other Friday, in one of the Agriculture Center’s indoor or outdoor arenas, or pens, Phelan hands a half-dozen naturally skittish horses over to trainer Suzanne Berger and a class of five or six participants for private, confidential sessions over the course of three days.

The abiding philosophy of the program is this: The horses that have been saved and the humans looking for relief have more in common than you may imagine.

Take Tina, who ran two races in her career and finished last both times. After her offspring were equally unsuccessful racing, “she kind of got lost along the way,” Phelan says, and was ultimately saved by a former owner who learned she was bound for slaughter in Mexico.

“They were going to be decommissioned,” says Marc Junkerman, a police lieutenant, Army veteran, and graduate of the WarHorse program, putting the horses’ often near-death post-racing condition in end-of-duty military terms. “They weren’t going to stud.”

 

THE MEETING BETWEEN HORSE AND HUMAN IS DESIGNED TO BUILD TRUST ON BOTH SIDES.

 

When Junkerman went through the program two years ago, he was dealing with a separation from his wife, caregiving for his father who was going through cancer, stresses from work, and was in a bad place, just like the horses once were.

The meeting between horse and human is designed to build trust on both sides. It might start with the horse running wild around the pen—and a few new realizations.

“You’re locked in a pen with a 1,200-pound thoroughbred,” Junkerman says. “I didn’t realize they were that freaking big in real life and run that fast for real.”

The session ideally commences with an especially cathartic moment, a horseman’s handshake: a gentle nuzzle from the big animal. In some cases, it culminates with a participant guiding the horses through a series of tight, reinless figure-eight walks.

Those things only happen if the horse trusts you, if you let it see you and its surroundings long enough to get comfortable, a formidable challenge. A horse is a prey animal, explains Porter, that sees two different sets of images out of each of its eyes, meaning its brain is on extra alert for predators. That’s something that veterans, also on high alert from the battlefield, know all too well and can struggle letting go of in civilian life.

“It’s a forgiveness thing,” says Porter, “that the predator—the veterans, so to speak—can gain the trust of the prey, and that allows them to release some of the trauma they have.”

Junkerman, who now volunteers for the WarHorse program, recalls his experience while sitting on a set of metal bleachers that overlook an outdoor equestrian pen. He says of the property, “This is everything community is supposed to be, where everybody can be themselves and enjoy,” adding that a few licks from a former racehorse named Dun, Dun, Dun—on loan from nearby Sagamore Farm—changed his life.

“I felt something on my hands,” he says, “and I’m like, ‘Are those horse’s lips?’ And at that point, you bond, and you don’t see or hear anything else. It’s therapeutic.”

It’s not an atypical story. “I’ve seen people come here who were suicidal and leave changed,” says Phelan, who describes some veterans leaving in tears.

As he speaks, the big rescued horses behind him, Tina and Doc, and the two smaller ponies, are slowly walking back to the center of the field, suddenly uninterested in us.

It turns out, Jim didn’t have food, and neither did we. And it’s getting close to Molly’s nap time, which means we need to leave this sanctuary behind for now.

But we promise to come back soon, to which Jim says, “Please, anytime.”

When Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Major was wounded in 2006 while deployed in Afghanistan, he not only lost both of his legs, but also his optimism for life. As a double amputee, his honorable discharge from the military was only a small comfort for the long road of recovery ahead.

But in 2014, he heard about Catch A Lift Fund (CAL)—an organization designed for post 9/11 wounded veterans to help them regain their physical and mental health through fitness—and has since changed his perspective.

“Part of my recovery process is working out,” Major said. “Working out is like therapy for [veterans]. For me, it helps me take my mind off the negative stuff in my life—my injuries, my setbacks—it helps me keep a positive outlook on life.” 

After Baltimore native and Army Cpl. Christopher Coffland was killed in action in 2009 during a mission in Afghanistan, his sister Lynn founded CAL. Inspired by the outpouring of messages and calls she received about how much her brother helped others through exercise, Lynn decided this would be a great way to help veterans heal. In fact, program’s name is based on something her brother would often say.

“He believed that if you were physically fit, then you were mentally fit,” she said. “That’s how he lived his life from an early age. He would work out no matter where he was—whether running around the block or pushups in the living room—he would say, ‘I’m going to catch a lift.’” 

Since 2010, CAL has been providing yearly gym memberships, fitness programs, and in-home gym equipment to veterans anywhere in the country. Although the nonprofit is based in Baltimore, it services veterans in all 50 states and has helped thousands of vets nationwide see improvements with weight loss, sleep habits, medication reduction, and personal relationships. 

Because physical injuries aren’t the only types of wounds veterans experience, the program also includes group counseling, weekly motivational texts, and peer support. 

“These wars have created invisible injuries like post-traumatic stress disorder,” Lynn said. “But that is now considered a combat injury. Traumatic brain injury happens often—it affects your brain in many different ways.”

Most of the program’s funding comes from individual donations and grants—90-percent of every donation goes directly to the program—with the rest generated from yearly fundraising events. For the past six years, the foundation has hosted a benefit in Baltimore to help raise funds so they can continue to service the veterans in need. This year’s event was held at the American Visionary Art Museum where the foundation debuted a new promotional video to show donors how their support has saved lives. But there is still more work to be done.

“The need outweighs the funds that we’ve been able to raise,” Lynn said. “These men and women served us so selflessly, now we have to fight for them.”

For Major—who is featured in the video—the program has helped him find his second wind. Since joining three years ago, he’s become more active—he currently runs a military rugby club team—has grown as a leader, and feels like he’s getting back to who he was before he was injured.

“It’s been fantastic,” he said. “Seeing other vets with smiles on their faces, feeling proud of themselves, makes me feel proud. It gives me the purpose I thought I lost when I retired from the military. With this program, I’ve found out I’m not alone.”

Some stood, some knelt, some sat, some stayed in the locker room, and one even stretched for the National Anthem during Sunday’s NFL games. Following comments made by President Donald Trump at a political rally in Alabama on Friday calling on NFL owners to fire any player who “disrespects our flag,” multiple teams in the organization came together on Sunday in one of the biggest displays of open protest.

The Ravens and Jaguars kicked off a long string of protests in London Sunday morning with 10 Ravens players—including Terrell Suggs, C.J. Mosley, and Lardarius Webb—either taking a knee or standing with locked arms in solidarity in response to the president’s remarks.

“That’s a total disrespect of our heritage,” President Trump told supporters on Friday in Huntsville, Alabama. “That’s a total disrespect of everything that we stand for. Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now.’”

This was the first time any Ravens player protested—just as quarterback Colin Kaepernick did back in 2016 in protest against the treatment of African Americans in the United States.

Following the Ravens early game, a number of other NFL players followed suit by staying in the locker room during the Anthem, including members of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Seattle Seahawks, and Tennessee Titans. Trump responded to the series of protest on Twitter Sunday.

Supporters of the protests insist the act is less about the American flag and National Anthem, and more about the right to exercise free speech and speak up about racial injustice. 

“In nearly 25 years as a sports executive, and a lifetime spent as an American citizen, I have never been so appalled by the abusive blood lust of my country’s highest governmental office, to defile my country’s constitutional guarantees,” president of MASN Sports, John P. Angelos, wrote on Twitter. “Anti-American and anti-citizen abuse of [the Trump administration’s] power should be repudiated, protested, and legally opposed on every front.” 

However, opponents of the athletic protests believe their actions are unpatriotic and disrespectful to those who have served or are serving in the military. Locally, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey R. Gahler took to Facebook to express his anger with the Ravens franchise.

“The embarrassment that is the NFL continues and people wonder why I am on strike,” Gahler wrote. “Ravens join the nonsense of taking knee [sic] while on the soil of the country we gained our independence from. Will be doing a housecleaning of any Ravens merchandise later today and getting it all ready for the burn.”

There are many people in Baltimore that have mixed feelings about the protests that happened on the field Sunday, wondering if there is a way to simultaneously respect the right to free speech while also honoring the country and its veterans.

“Just a thought . . . what if every past, current, and future American military person chose to take a knee instead of fighting to keep our country safe and free?” Bar Liquorice owner Jeff Cahill posted on Facebook. “I do respect anyone’s right to peacefully protest, but it has to be tempered with the respect for those who fought and lost their lives [my family included] in service to this country, which is what our flag and National Anthem symbolizes.”

The protests have also gone beyond the NFL, with Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry declining an invitation to visit The White House. President Trump then rescinded the invitation and Lebron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers sounded off on Instagram. The ripple effect continued into the MLB when Oakland Athletics’ catcher Bruce Maxwell, who is from a military family, became the first baseball player in history to kneel during the National Anthem on Saturday.

The weekend of protesting has caused a firestorm on a local level with a mixed bag of protests, support, boycotting, and championing. For Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti himself, he sees all of the dialogue as a reflection of democracy.

“We recognize our players’ influence,” he said. “We respect their demonstration and support them 100 percent. All voices need to be heard. That’s democracy in its highest form.”

At Thoroughbred Placement Resources (TPR) in Upper Marlboro, Kimberly Godwin Clark works to re-home hundreds of former racehorses, many of which have gone on to brilliant second careers in eventing, show jumping, fox hunting, and pleasure riding. In September 2014, TPR launched its Hero Horses program, in which active-duty military, wounded warriors, veterans, and their families are invited to the farm to meet and help the horses—and perhaps even themselves.

For more, check out the
“Fresh Starts” story in the May issue of Baltimore magazine.

As far as celebrating New Year’s Eve in Iraq goes, the holiday was going well for Jonathan Kuniholm. He had spent the last evening of 2004 with a few dozen fellow Marines and Army soldiers, taking a break from the war to enjoy a talent show at the chow hall. Using a borrowed acoustic guitar, he played and sang “Driver 8” by R.E.M., and a bluegrass version of “Greensleeves.”

The next day, while investigating a grove of palm trees along the Euphrates River, an improvised explosive device blew up in the middle of a clearing and knocked Kuniholm to the ground. The blast broke his rifle in half and nearly severed his lower right arm. A medic applied a tourniquet to the shattered arm, which was later amputated below the elbow.

He doesn’t like to talk about it. “I’m glad I’m not dead,” says Kuniholm, 35. “Anything after that is a gift.”

But get him talking about his life since, and the words flow much more freely. When he’s not working as a Duke University doctoral student in biomedical engineering—he may eventually benefit from his own research into grasp control—he works at an industrial design firm he co-founded almost four years ago in Durham, North Carolina. But every day, he is still making the transition to life as an amputee.

“If I need to test the bathwater to see if it’s too hot for my son, I’m going to do it with my other hand,” he says. “If I’m going to hold my son’s hand, I’ll use my other hand.” His son will still hold the prosthesis without complaint, and so will other children. But he has to look at where his prosthetic hand is to see if anyone is on the other end. “It takes me a little longer to tie my shoes. It takes me a little longer to put on my pants. As long as I know and understand and don’t let it frustrate me, there’s not a whole lot I can’t do.”

When he plays guitar now, his left hand’s fingers press the strings against the frets, changing chords like always. But the guitar pick goes in a prosthetic hand that strums only—no finger picking. “It chews up my guitar a little bit. If I miss with the pick, I gouge it all up,” he says.

Like many amputees, Kuniholm has a different prosthesis for different tasks. There’s his body-powered prosthesis, which operates with cables and rubber bands. When he moves the rest of his arm, the hand end opens and closes based on the distance between the hand and harness strapped to his opposite shoulder.

He also has a myoelectric prosthesis, activated by electrical impulses from his forearm muscles, but he doesn’t wear it because other prosthetics work better. The one he uses for flying airplanes is shorter than a regular arm and doesn’t bend. And he has another with a basic hand prosthetic, complete with a cosmetic covering, which helps minimize the stares of strangers. He uses yet another to control a stylus when he is doing his design work.

“Prosthetics tend to do very few things well,” he says.

Despite the swath of medical marvels and technological strides made in helping patients, prosthetic hands have long been left behind on the evolutionary ladder. Hand and arm prosthetics have evolved very little from simple, crude approximations of the natural limb developed decades ago. Look at the current technology for prosthetic legs, for example: The devices let amputees climb stairs, run a marathon, drive a car, or kick a ball with a child.

“Why can’t we do that for the arm and the hand?” asks Colonel Geoffrey Ling, program manager at the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is overseeing a project to improve prosthetics. “The best hand prosthetic one can get is a hook, right out of Peter Pan.”

Its functions are limited, and it’s inflexible. “It’s heavy, it’s clumsy, [and] cosmetically, it’s just horrid,” says Ling.

Something is, finally, being done. Ling and Kuniholm are both part of a $70 million effort by the federal government to change that frustrating fact. And they’re just two of hundreds of people attempting to build a better arm for the many American soldiers who have undergone amputation following injury while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Spearheading this work is the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, just down the road from Baltimore. The legendary facility—one that is known for its innovative military and aerospace technology—is leading an international 250-person effort to create an artificial arm that works as well as a natural one.

The project’s goals are lofty: APL hopes to design an arm that can sense temperature, touch, and vibration, and that can sense the position of the arm and hand relative to the body. An arm that can tolerate heat, cold, water, humidity, and dust. An arm that will allow an amputee to regain the fine motor control needed to thread a needle, use a computer keyboard, or play a piano or a guitar. And a hand that will not just strum a guitar, but one that will let the wearer use the prosthetic fingers to perform fretwork and change chords.

The arm must also fit comfortably enough to use for 18 hours a day, and have the internal power to work for at least 24 hours.

Right now, “the best hand prosthetic one can get is a hook, right out of Peter Pan,” says Colonel Ling.

And it has to last for 10 years.

The first phase of the project—dubbed Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2007—aims to integrate existing technologies and map out areas of research for a new kind of mechanical arm. Last year, the APL won a $30.4 million grant to develop an entirely new arm that works like a biological limb. APL is serving as the project’s lead institution, working with dozens of colleges and universities in the U.S. and Europe, plus research and industry leaders such as Otto Bock Health Care of Germany and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Hopkins’ schools of medicine, engineering, and public health are working on the project as well.

If DARPA officials like the results, the lab will get another $24.4 million toward the project’s second phase. That project—called Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009—will create an arm that transmits data to and from the brain; it aims to create an arm that is sensitive enough to sense temperature and texture, yet strong enough to lift a suitcase.

Possibly the earliest evidence of amputation and prosthetic surgery came from the Egyptian pyramids at Giza, where archaeologists uncovered a mummy dated to between 1550 and 700 B.C. According to The Lancet, the London-based medical journal, the woman’s big toe had been amputated and replaced with a wooden prosthesis that was painted dark brown. Two wooden plates and seven leather strings held in place a perfectly shaped big toe, even including the nail.

Centuries later, in 484 B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about an imprisoned Persian soldier named Hegesistratus. With one foot bound in wooden and iron stocks, he cut off part of his own foot and escaped. Later, he wore a wooden replacement and became an enemy to Sparta.

In the U.S., prosthesis technology advanced during the Civil War, which produced some 50,000 amputees. Government funding for Civil War veterans and the discovery of anesthetics allowed longer surgeries to attach more functional prosthetics. World War II produced nearly 7,500 major amputations, spurring development of currently used technology. Today, prosthetics consist mostly of body-powered mechanical parts made of straps, bands, metal, wood, and plastic—and no matter how they are assembled, they are a poor substitute for one of the human body’s most dynamic and elegant devices.

“The human limb system is an incredibly complex and very amazing system,” says Stuart D. Harshbarger, program director at the Applied Physics Lab. “Look at how strong a human hand is. For its volume, it’s fast, dexterous. It’s silent when you move it. Its skin covering doesn’t leave big baggy areas when you move it,” he continues. “It’s a very highly integrated biological system that’s remarkably capable.”

The big challenge, explains Harshbarger, is to copy the arm’s mechanical systems and fit them into the space of a human limb. In this case, the goal is to make something no heavier than a woman’s arm (which weighs an average of seven pounds) that can lift up to six times as much as its weight. An arm made of existing mechanical parts would weigh six times that much.

Part of the problem facing developers is that arms and hands are far more complicated than legs and feet. Hands have between 20 and 30 tiny muscles and joints that allow someone to type, button a shirt, pick up a pencil, or carry a grocery bag. Toes and feet help with a much smaller range of balance and mobility tasks.

Researchers started by looking at current leading-edge technologies ranging from state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs to robotics to spacesuits that allow astronauts to manipulate their hands. By the end of last year, they finished Prototype 1, which was designed to have “seven degrees of freedom.” Proto 1, as developers call it, can move at the shoulder and in two ways at the elbow, flex and rotate the wrist, and pinch fingers together or with the thumb at the top—as if holding keys or a dollar bill.

“Look at how strong a human hand is. It’s a very highly integrated biological system that’s remarkably capable.”

On a rainy Friday in January, in a squat, painted-brick office park in Laurel, researchers at APL are packing up Prototype 1 for a trip to Chicago, where a double amputee from an electrical accident is waiting to test it.

On the floor, a worker sifts through a plastic tub of startlingly lifelike prosthetic arm covers, selecting one for the strapping mannequin representing the modern American soldier. Under harsh fluorescent lights, a half-dozen researchers and developers click at computers nestled amid piles of papers, empty soda bottles and a half-eaten package of Oreos.

The mannequin towers at 6 feet, 4 inches tall, wearing black combat boots, sand-colored fatigues, helmet, and sunglasses. Computer cables jut out from the left shoulder, which joins a dark gray upper arm the size and shape of a potato chip can. The mechanical hand looks like something out of a Terminator movie.

Presiding over Proto 1’s final workout before getting its first human test, deputy project manager John Bigelow smiles as he describes the action as a programmer manipulates the device using a computer and mouse. The arm rises up and down, the palm turns upward and down, and the fingers slowly open and close. The arm moves a little too fast in first tests, so developers put speed thresholds in place.

“It’s quite peppy,” Bigelow says.

By August, the APL team must deliver and demonstrate Prototype 2, which must show even greater capability. If DARPA likes it, then the group will spend the next two years getting this new technology—which will become the new standard—ready for commercial manufacturing and for Food and Drug Administration review by the end of 2009. Working with Otto Bock, one of the world’s largest prosthetics makers, parts of the new technology will become commercially available along the way.

“What we’re most excited about is the technology that will be developed,” says Dr. Ross E. Andersen, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “It will have a phenomenal effect on the field of prosthetics.”

Researchers are collecting input from the people who know best what a better artificial arm needs. Andersen has gone to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. three times to meet with amputees, physicians, and therapists to ask them their opinions. Soldiers are talking about the kinds of activities they want to do, like skeet shooting, fishing, and water skiing. They want better looks, fit, and function without weightier limbs, Andersen says. “We’re getting some good feedback that will help the engineers come up with something that won’t sit on the shelf.

“We’re not developing some one-shot bionic limb,” he says. “The last thing we want to develop is a limb that on paper looks good but that a patient won’t use.”

Like the human arm, a prosthetic limb has many parts. The “terminal device,” a term borrowed from robotics, is the piece a wearer uses to interact with the world. A hand or a hook usually attaches to some kind of wrist, then a frame that attaches to the wearer’s remaining arm. Different terminal devices do different jobs, whether holding a guitar pick or a stylus. And while one prosthesis might let the wearer pick up a suitcase, it would crush an egg.

Individual prostheses are as different as the people who wear them and the myriad tasks humans do. Some amputees want a prosthesis to help them pursue their passions—playing piano, quilting, or hiking. Looks are most important for others, who want only to avoid cruel or curious stares.

Experts say the commercial incentive is slim to develop a better prosthetic arm. Research and development is slow (but is being sped up by these DARPA projects), and it takes years for any business to recoup product design costs. Researchers have abandoned numerous innovations over the years because there aren’t a lot of people to buy them.

Because of the small consumer market, prosthetics makers must wait for other industries to develop new technologies that are adaptable to their field, says Gary Berke, president of the American Academy of Orthotists and Prosthetists, a 2,500-member organization based in Alexandria, Virginia. Batteries to power artificial limbs used to be huge, but cell phones and other electronics slimmed them down. “We basically leech off of those,” Berke says. Current prices start around $7,000 for a basic above-the-elbow prosthesis, reaching as high as $75,000 to $120,000 for what DARPA is developing, he estimates.

“We’re not developing some one-shot bionic limb,” says Hopkins professor Ross Andersen.

While the federal government is pouring millions of dollars into building a better prosthesis, nobody at Hopkins is going to get rich off the project. Prosthetics is a notoriously low-margin industry. “One of our colleagues was joking,” Andersen recalls, “‘if we’re really successful, we’ll make thousands of dollars.'”

Each year, 82 percent of amputations occur because of diabetes and other complications of the vascular system, the body’s network of blood vessels, according to the National Limb Loss Information Center, based in Knoxville, Tennessee. Nearly all of those amputations—97 percent—happen to the leg. More than two-thirds of trauma-related amputations, however, happen to the arms.

Among the 1.9 million people living with limb loss in the U.S., most of them don’t need a better arm. But the project became a priority at DARPA—which was founded after the launch and orbit of the Soviet Sputnik spacecraft surprised the Western world—after the U.S. went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Improvements in body armor saved lives, but left survivors with missing limbs. By January 2, Walter Reed had treated 383 amputees from the war in Iraq and 38 from Afghanistan, a hospital spokeswoman says.

“Before the war . . . we didn’t have young people losing their arms,” says Colonel Ling, the DARPA program manager, who served in Afghanistan in 2003 and Iraq in 2005. “In Afghanistan, there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t see a kid who lost a hand or a foot from a Russian land mine.”

Part of the new research is looking into how to pick up a stronger signal from the brain when it tells the arm and fingers what to do. In a way, it’s like someone in Takoma Park trying to tune into broadcast television from Baltimore. The signal is clear enough, but not as good as in Fells Point. In prosthetics research, TV Hill is the brain, Fells Point is the shoulder, and Takoma Park is the elbow. The elbow gets the signal, but the shoulder gets it stronger.

In the amputee who will be testing Prototype 1, surgery remapped his remaining nerves at the shoulder to the pectoral muscles (or between the spinal cord), which act like an amplifier of the brain’s signal. Surface electrodes on his chest then pick up nerve impulses—and the brain’s instructions to the arm. In Prototype 2, developers are picking up the brain’s signal in new ways, such as by implanting sensory capsules the size of two grains of rice under the skin. The tiny devices wirelessly transmit sensory data—temperature or touch—back to the nerves.

“The trick is to put the signals back in the brain,” Ling says. “We’ve got to hack into the central nervous system itself.”

Paul Goszkowski changes his prosthesis like he changes his shirt. He wears a different artificial leg depending on whether he’s walking his dog, cutting his grass, or building a pond out of three tons of Pennsylvania bluestone—the project he chose to pull him from a post-amputation funk. “You have to try something so out of the ordinary just to convince yourself that the loss is not going to affect your life,” says Goszkowski, 47, a chiropractor in Federal Hill. “I had to learn how to use a shovel without a leg.”

A diabetic since age 4, Goszkowski developed two small blisters on his toes that wouldn’t heal. Two toes were amputated after bone infection set in; a subsequent surgery led to infection that eventually cost him most of his right leg in 2001. Coming out of the hospital, Gozskowski found little help for a new amputee. He quickly realized he can’t wear his prosthesis in the shower—the mechanical parts will rust—but he didn’t know where to find items for everyday activities, such as a shower chair.

“I was told by the occupational therapist in the hospital, ‘I think Sears carries that.’ I was just appalled. They had taken this leg but couldn’t tell me how to live without it,” Goszkowski says.

After three years of trying to find adaptable wheelchairs and exercise equipment he could use, Goskowski and fellow amputee John Yanke founded the Amputee Center of Maryland, an information network and support group. The center’s website, amputeecenterofmaryland.org, features a handy 120-item glossary of amputee-related terms plus a list of doctors, homebuilders and exercise equipment makers who cater to amputees.

“It’s the frustration level that gets to people. That frustration level is so high,” says Goszkowski, 47. “Imagine your life right now. If you’re driving or talking on the phone, you limit yourself to only half of what you can do.”

Goszkowski and Yanke developed a handbook to answer questions for new amputees, and they wrote pamphlets about how to clean and care for the residual limb. A prosthesis sometimes relies on a sort of sleeve that rolls up over the stump, gripping like a scuba diver’s suit. Halting air circulation around a stump can trigger bruising and infection, and amputees constantly have to care for the residual limb, Goszkowski says.

Many of the amputees who have come to Goszkowski’s group started as healthy people with no major health problems. One man was a sailor sanding his boat. He cut his leg and stayed in the Chesapeake Bay all day; infection claimed the limb. Another was a carpenter who cut his leg on a piece of old timber. One woman in her 30’s slipped and got a splinter when she fell—ironically—down a wheelchair ramp. A few months later, she lost the leg.

Sometimes Goszkowski almost forgets he’s an amputee. Women and children fawn over his 3-year-old dog, a Corgi named George, when the two go for a walk. “If I go in my shorts, and I don’t have a covering on my prosthesis,” Goszkowski says, “it’s like I’ve grown a third eye, and they don’t want to let their kid touch my dog.”

In past decades, the small consumer market forced the abandonment of lots of innovative ideas for prosthetics. The DARPA project ends in 2009, but it will take many years for the advances made at APL and other centers to reach the general public, officials say. When it does, it will cost about as much as a new Mercedes, estimates Ling.

“If I go out in my shorts, and I don’t have a covering on my prosthesis, it’s like I’ve grown a third eye.”

That will be too expensive for people like Sarah Mallon. She was born with her left arm ending five inches below the elbow; therefore, all her mosquito bites end up on her right arm. And neither a prosthesis—nor her left arm—is any good for scratching those itches. Also, since buttons on women’s shirts are on the left side, she says it’s aggravating to button a shirt with the “wrong” hand.

Mallon, 34, got her first prosthetic as a 6-month-old orphan. Her occupational therapist adopted her and raised her in Simsbury, Connecticut; she always wore her prosthesis except when sleeping, bathing, or swimming.

In first grade, as the only kid with a visible handicap who wasn’t in special ed, her teacher had her present her artificial arm for show-and-tell. “Kids asked me how I turned on a light switch,” she says. Using her stump, “I walked over and turned on the light. All you have to do is put it under the switch and push it up.”

“Someone asked me how I tied my shoes,” she says. “I just sat down on the floor and told them to watch when I did it. Ask me how I do something with a prosthesis, and it’s like asking someone how they use two hands.”

Mallon hasn’t bought a prosthesis since age 18 because they are too expensive: Insurance will only pay half the cost of the $8,000 limb. She stopped wearing the device once in the early 1990’s, during a year in Mexico, where a prosthesis would have labeled her as rich and a target for muggings.

A few years later, working at a home for children with mental and physical problems, she accidentally cut a boy with her prosthesis, and stopped wearing it around children. “Since I have my own kids, that means I don’t wear it anymore,” she says.

But last month, Mallon decided to give it another try: her youngest child is now 4, and she feels the risks are now very small—plus her mother offered to pay half of the cost.

Mallon was fitted for her first new prosthesis in 16 years. With straps and a closeable hook powered by back and shoulder movement, “it’s almost exactly like the one I had when I was younger,” she says. One improvement is that it attaches with a sort of silicone “sock” that will prevent it from sliding around so much.

Since she’s not a veteran, she probably won’t see the expensive benefits of the APL’s work for many, many years—and there’s no guarantee that she’ll be able to afford a new prosthetic arm even when one becomes available. But she knows what she wants it to do.

“When I dream, I have two hands,” Mallon says. “My mom says that’s because I see my prosthesis as a hand. It would be so neat to have one with nails that can scratch.”