Physcient is, in fact, a medical technology company. But its décor speaks to the exceptional careers of its co-founders, Hugh Crenshaw and Charles Pell. They both got their start studying biomechanics— how creatures fly, swim and crawl. Mr. Pell built models of muscles and fish heads. Dr. Crenshaw earned his Ph.D. figuring out how single-celled creatures swim. And over the past 20 years they’ve profitably translated their understanding of biomechanics into inventions, from robotic submarines to pill sorters.
Now they’re turning their attention to the world of surgery. The instruments that surgeons use today, they argue, were invented before biomechanics became a mature science. They work against the physics of the body, instead of with it.“The technologies remain remarkably unchanged,” said Dr. Crenshaw.“Maybe we can do better.”
Dr. Crenshaw and Mr. Pell are starting with a kindler, gentler rib spreader. Surgeons often treat the broken ribs and other painful side effects ofopen heart surgeryas inevitable. But Dr. Crenshaw and Mr. Pell have invented a new kind of rib spreader that takes into account how bones can bend, rather than break. Their preclinical studies on pigs suggest that it causes far less damage.
If it turns out to work as they hope, the inventors will turn their attention to other tools of the trade.“The entire surgical tray is going to be transformed,” said Mr. Pell.
As a boy, Mr. Pell was, in his words,“a congenital geek.” He spent his free time building rockets, cars and wave machines. He went to art school and earned a master’s degree in sculpture, but his sculptures were more like robots than marble busts. After graduate school, Mr. Pell headed for California, where he ended up director of research and development at a company that built robotic dinosaurs for museum exhibits. He continued to come up with strange designs, like a water-filled arch that fish could swim inside to travel from one pond to another.
To figure out if a fish could physically survive the journey through a water bridge, Mr. Pell called up Stephen Wainwright, a pioneer in biomechanics at Duke University.“He said,‘Who are you, and why are you doing this?’ ” recalled Mr. Pell. Despite his initial misgivings, Dr. Wainwright ended the conversation by offering to fly Mr. Pell to Duke for a visit. Not long afterward, Mr. Pell became the director of the BioDesign Studio at Duke.
At the studio Mr. Pell helped Dr. Wainwright and his colleagues build models to test their ideas about biomechanics, creating models of spinal cords, muscles, jaws and dozens of other animal parts.“These models can physically surprise you,” said Mr. Pell.“They can show you things that you didn’t think of before you built them.”
One of Mr. Pell’s biggest surprises came when he tried to make a simple model of a swimming fish. He built a rubber tube with a rounded front and then stuck a rod a quarter of the way down its length. When he put the tube in water and turned the rod back and forth between his fingers, it generated a wave with its tail. While making a new version of that tube, Mr. Pell accidentally nicked the tail end. That new shape, he discovered, caused the water to flow in a different pattern around the tube, creating thrust.
Mr. Pell, Dr. Wainwright and their colleagues got a patent for the design and started a company called Nekton to develop products from it. First, they turned it into a commercially successful bathtub toy. But when the Navy discovered Mr. Pell and his colleagues could get fishlike thrust from something without any moving parts, they encouraged him to get into the business of building underwater robots. Mr. Pell and his colleague at Nekton ended up making a highly maneuverable yardlong robot called the Pilot Fish.
“We started out as a toy company; we ended up as a defense contractor,” said Mr. Pell.
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