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"  Besides personal flying vehicles, it looks like there&amp;#039;s a focus on medical devicesnanorobots, robotic prostheses and so onon your show. Is that because medicine is of particular interest to you, or is that where a lot of the innovation is happening these days? I wouldn&amp;#039;t be so arrogant as to tell you that I can have no bias, but I have tried not to make all the field trips to places that I personally have a passion for. The only caveat is that I told the producers that I wanted to choose subjects to which I know I can add value. If all I&amp;#039;m going to do is open the door and say, Hey, what do you do here?&amp;quot; then you guys don&amp;#039;t need me. I&amp;#039;ve got to feel comfortable that I can ask intelligent questions. And what could be more relevant to the general public and the kids than the environment, energy, health care, transportation and robotics? I thought that was a pretty fair place to put the boundaries. Why is this on Planet Green? Will there be a focus on low-impact technologies? When they came to see me, I said, &amp;quot;Gee, only one of the topics that I just mentioned is really about the environment.&amp;quot; And they said, &amp;quot;Dean, Planet Green isn&amp;#039;t only about green and green energy.&amp;quot; Yes, some of the stuff I do will be related to that; it&amp;#039;s a pretty fertile area where a lot is going on in technology. But the channel is not only about those things green. How did this get started? Two or three years ago, I got a call from [the producer] Jon Kamen [no relation]. He said Discovery wanted me to go investigate the cool things going on in the world. So, I said, &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s give it a try.&amp;quot; Over a period of a few months, we took maybe 20 field trips centered around some broad areas like genomics, nanotechnology, microbiology, converting waste to fuel and the future of aviation. And we turned them into visually exciting pieces and interesting dialogue with some passionate inventors out there. What should we expect to see? The goal was to go to these places and talk to people and make it relevant to the public without dumbing it down so much that it&amp;#039;s a waste of time or an insult, like, frankly, most news is. How much are you involved in each episode? I didn&amp;#039;t visit every one of the places. I visited most of them, but Joanne [Colan] visited some. She&amp;#039;s great at getting to the issues and making this thing move smoothly, because I certainly am not known for that. Will this show somehow tie into your work with FIRST? I started out thinking that I&amp;#039;m doing this for one reasonI told them [the producers] that up front. I don&amp;#039;t make any money, I don&amp;#039;t have time to be doing this, I don&amp;#039;t consider myself a professional or somebody that should be doing this, but I&amp;#039;ll do anything to get more promotion of FIRST. I&amp;#039;ve got to get the word out. I told them I&amp;#039;ll go and do this and I hope you&amp;#039;re happy, but, in return, you have to make a serious effort to help me get the word out about FIRST. Any interesting stories from production so far? The very first episode&amp;#039;s got a lot that&amp;#039;s relevant to my day job. We&amp;#039;re looking at nanobots that literally can guide individual chemotherapeutic agents to individual tumors and tumor cells in the body without the collateral damage. Typically, chemotherapy is like, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve got a fire in the wastepaper basket in my house. I know how to put that fire out: I&amp;#039;ll flood the building.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s a reason patients lose their hair, vomit for weeks and get weak: Because you&amp;#039;re killing the cells. You&amp;#039;re flooding the building. With some of these nanotechnologies, they basically take little nanobots and let them crawl all through this building carrying micro fire extinguishers, and when they get to a place where there&amp;#039;s a fire, they&amp;#039;ll let them unload the squirt.   There&amp;#039;s an episode on medical robotics, on eye surgery. You can literally get technology into the eye to deal with macular degeneration in ways that you couldn&amp;#039;t possibly do with the big clumsy thumbs of a surgeon. That whole episode&amp;#039;s pretty neat. And there&amp;#039;s a whole episode on bionic people, the prosthetic ankle made at West Point for soldiers that have been destroyed by IEDs. That is pretty exciting.   And there are fun ones: I got to go down to Terrafugia and, you know, I love to fly. I fly airplanes and helicopters. And we flew down and landed in the parking lot with a guy who&amp;#039;s building a car that deploys a set of wings and takes off. That&amp;#039;s a fun thing to spend an afternoon doing.   We went to Pittsburgh and met a guy who spent 10 years trying to figure out how to restore liver function. He removed the liver from laboratory mice. After lots of failures, he, almost by luck, found that he could take a few viable liver cells from a mouse that had its entire liver removed and inject these viable cells into the belly. They would migrate into the lymph nodes in and around the belly and they would latch on, start to grow, develop their own vascular system and become these multiple, distributed livers. And they would start functioning as livers. It was astounding. When you think about that, if that worked, I mean, right now, there are a few hundred thousand people on the organ donor list waiting for livers. Unlike kidneys, you can&amp;#039;t keep people alive if their liver completely fails. If they don&amp;#039;t get a liver before that happens, it&amp;#039;s over. If this guy&amp;#039;s stuff can be translated from mice to humans . . . Imagine somebody you know comes home and says, &amp;quot;I just visited the doctor and he told me that I&amp;#039;m starting to develop end-stage liver failure, but he gave me an injection of this stuff and I&amp;#039;ll be fine.&amp;quot; The alternative today is that he has three months to live.   So, we visited some incredible places and some incredible people with a lot of passion and a lot of energy. I hope that we gave some sense of the significance and importance of what they&amp;#039;re doing. I hope by asking them the right questions and having them explain it at the right level of dialoguewithout dumbing it down at allthat we made it very comprehensible to see how elegant the thinking is and sometimes how wonderful the luck was to see the effect and develop it further. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a6171/dean-of-invention-q-and-a-kamen/>