A football player making a tackle during a game. (© Joe/Fotolia)
What do football superstars Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, and Adrian Peterson all have in common? Last year they wore helmets that provided the poorest protection against concussions in all the NFL.
"You're only as protected as well as the worst helmet that's out there."
A Dangerous Policy
Football helmets are rated on a one-star to five-star system based on how well they do the job of protecting the player. The league has allowed players to use their favorites, regardless of the star rating.
The Oxford-trained neuroscientist Ray Colello conducted a serious analysis of just how much the protection can vary between each level of star rating. Colello and his team of graduate students sifted through two seasons of game video to identify which players were wearing what helmets. There was "a really good correlation with position, but the correlation is much more significant based on age."
"The average player in the NFL is 26.6 years old, but the average age of a player wearing a one-star helmet is 34. And for anyone who knows football, that's ancient," the brain doc says. "Then for our two-star helmet, it's 32; and for a three-star helmet it's 29." Players were sticking with the helmets they were familiar with in college, despite the fact that equipment had improved considerably in recent years.
"You're only as protected as well as the worst helmet that's out there," Colello explains. Offering an auto analogy, he says, "It's like, if you run into the back of a Pinto, even if you are in a five-star Mercedes, that gas tank may still explode and you are still going to die."
It's one thing for a player to take a risk at scrambling his own brain; it's another matter to put a teammate or opponent at needless risk. Colello published his analysis early last year and the NFL moved quickly to ban the worst performing helmets, starting next season.
Some of the 14 players using the soon-to-be-banned helmets, like Drew Brees and Philip Rivers, made the switch to a five-star helmet at the start of training camp and stayed with it. Adrian Peterson wore a one-star helmet throughout the season.
Tom Brady tried but just couldn't get comfortable with a new bonnet and, after losing a few games, switched back to his old one in the middle of the season; he says he's going to ask the league to "grandfather in" his old helmet so he can continue to use it.
As for Colello, he's only just getting started. The brain doc has a much bigger vision for the future of football safety. He wants to prevent concussions from even occurring in the first place by creating an innovative new helmet that's unlike anything the league has ever seen.
Oxford-trained neuroscientist Ray Colello is on a mission to make football safer.
(Photo credit: VCU public affairs)
"A Force Field" of Protection
His inspiration was serendipitous; he was at home watching a football game on TV when Denver Bronco's receiver Wes Welker was hit, lay flat on the field with a concussion, and was carted off. As a commercial flickered on the screen, he ambled into the kitchen for another beer. "What those guys need is a force field protecting them," he thought to himself.
Like so many households, the refrigerator door was festooned with magnets holding his kids' school work in place. And in that eureka moment the idea popped into his head: "Maybe the repulsive force of magnets can put a break on an impact before it even occurs." Colello has spent the last few years trying to turn his concept into reality.
Newton's laws of physics – mass and speed – play out graphically in a concussion. The sudden stop of a helmet-to-helmet collision can shake the brain back and forth inside the skull like beans in a maraca. Dried beans stand up to the impact, making their distinctive musical sound; living brain tissue is much softer and not nearly so percussive. The resulting damage is a concussion.
The risk of that occurring is greater than you might think. Researchers using accelerometers inside helmets have determined that a typical college football player experiences about 600 helmet-to-helmet contacts during a season of practice and games. Each hit generates a split second peak g-force of 20 to 150 within the helmet and the odds of one causing a concussion increase sharply over 100 gs of force.
By comparison, astronauts typically experience a maximum sustained 3gs during lift off and most humans will black out around 9gs, which is why fighter pilots wear special pressure suits to counter the effects.
"It stretches the time line of impact quite dramatically. In fact in most instances, it doesn't even hit."
The NFL's fastest player, Chris Johnson, can run 19.3 mph. A collision at that speed "produces 120gs worth of force," Colello explains. "But if you can extend that time of impact by just 5 milliseconds (from 12 to 17msec) you'll shift that g-force down to 84. There is a very good chance that he won't suffer a concussion."
The neuroscientist dived into learning all he could about the physics magnets. It turns out that the most powerful commercially available magnet is an alloy made of neodymium, iron, and boron. The elements can be mixed and glued together in any shape and then an electric current is run through to make it magnetic; the direction of the current establishes the north-south poles.
A 1-pound neodymium magnet can repulse 600 times its own weight, even though the magnetic field extends less than an inch. That means it can push back a magnet inside another helmet but not affect the brain.
Crash Testing the Magnets
Colello couldn't wait to see if his idea panned out. With blessing from his wife to use their credit card, he purchased some neodymium magnets and jury-rigged experiments at home.
The reinforced plastics used in football helmets don't affect the magnetic field. And the small magnets stopped weights on gym equipment that were dropped from various heights. "It stretches the time line of impact quite dramatically. In fact in most instances, it doesn't even hit," says Colello. "We are dramatically shifting the curve" of impact.
Virginia Commonwealth University stepped in with a $50,000 innovation grant to support the next research steps. The professor ordered magnets custom-designed to fit the curvature of space inside the front and sides of existing football helmets. That makes it impossible to install them the wrong way, and ensures the magnets' poles will always repel and not attract. It adds about a pound and a half to the weight of the helmet.
a) The brain in a helmet. b) Placing the magnet. c) Measuring the impact of a helmet-to-helmet collision. d) How magnets reduce the force of impact.
(Courtesy Ray Colello)
Colello rented crash test dummy heads crammed with accelerometers and found that the magnets performed equally well at slowing collisions when fixed to a pendulum in a test that approximated a helmet and head hitting a similarly equipped helmet. It impressively reduced the force of contact.
The NFL was looking for outside-the-box thinking to prevent concussions. It was intrigued by Colello's approach and two years ago invited him to submit materials for review. To be fair to all entrants, the league proposed to subject all entries to the same standard crush test to see how well each performed in lessening impact. The only trouble was, Colello's approach was designed to avoid collisions, not lessen their impact. The test wouldn't have been a valid evaluation and he withdrew from consideration.
But Colello's work caught the attention of Stefan Duma, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech who developed the five-star rating system for football helmets.
"In theory it makes sense to use [the magnets] to slow down or reduce acceleration, that's logical," says Duma. He believes current helmet technology is nearing "the end of the physics barrier; you can only absorb so much energy in so much space," so the field is ripe for new approaches to improve helmet technology.
However, one of Duma's concerns is whether magnets "are feasible from a weight standpoint." Most helmets today weigh between two and four pounds, and a sufficiently powerful magnet might add too much weight. One possibility is using an electromagnet, which potentially could be lighter and more powerful, particularly if the power supply could be carried lower in the body, say in the shoulder pads.
Colello says his lab tests are promising enough that the concept needs to be tried out on the playing field. "We need to make enough helmets for two teams to play each other in a regulation-style game and measure the impact forces that are generated on each, and see if there is a significant reduction." He is waiting to hear from the National Institutes of Health on a grant proposal to take that next step toward dramatically reducing the risk of concussions in the NFL.
Just five milliseconds could do it.
Entomologist Jessica Ware is using new technologies to identify insect species in a changing climate. She shares her suggestions for how we can live harmoniously with creeper crawlers everywhere.
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Entomologist Jessica Ware
D. Finnin / AMNH
Maybe it feels like a core human instinct to demonize bugs as gross. We seem to try to eradicate them in every way possible, whether that’s with poison, or getting out our blood thirst by stomping them whenever they creep and crawl into sight.
But where did our fear of bugs really come from? Jessica makes a compelling case that a lot of it is cultural, rather than in-born, and we should be following the lead of other cultures that have learned to live with and appreciate bugs.
The truth is that a healthy planet depends on insects. You may feel stung by that news if you hate bugs. Reality bites.
Jessica and I talk about whether learning to live with insects should include eating them and gene editing them so they don’t transmit viruses. She also tells me about her important research into using genomic tools to track bugs in the wild to figure out why and how we’ve lost 50 percent of the insect population since 1970 according to some estimates – bad news because the ecosystems that make up the planet heavily depend on insects. Jessica is leading the way to better understand what’s causing these declines in order to start reversing these trends to save the insects and to save ourselves.
A company called Second Sight made an implant that partially restored vision to people who'd been blind for decades. But when Second Sight pivoted, it stopped servicing its product, leaving many in the dark.
The Argus II uses the implant and a video camera embedded in a special pair of glasses to provide limited vision to those with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that causes cells in the retina to deteriorate. The camera feeds information to the implant, which sends electrical impulses into the retina to recapitulate what the camera sees. The impulses appear in the Argus II as a 60-pixel grid of blacks, grays and whites in the user’s eye that can render rough outlines of objects and their motion.
Smartphone and computer manufacturers typically stop issuing software upgrades to their devices after two or three years, eventually rendering them bricks. But is the smartphone approach acceptable for a device that helps restore the most crucial sense a human being possesses?
Ross Doerr, a retired disability rights attorney in Maine who received an Argus II in 2019, describes the field of vision as the equivalent of an index card held at arm’s length. Perk often brings objects close to his face to decipher them. Moreover, users must swivel their heads to take in visual data; moving their eyeballs does not work.
Despite its limitations, the Argus II beats the alternative. Perk no longer relies on his guide dog. Doerr was uplifted when he was able to see the outlines of Christmas trees at a holiday show.
“The fairy godmother department sort of reaches out and taps you on the shoulder once in a while,” Doerr says of his implant, which came about purely by chance. A surgeon treating his cataracts was partnered with the son of another surgeon who was implanting the devices, and he was referred.
Doerr had no reason to believe the shower of fairy dust wouldn’t continue. Second Sight held out promises that the Argus II recipients’ vision would gradually improve through upgrades to much higher pixel densities. The ability to recognize individual faces was even touted as a possibility. In the winter of 2020, Doerr was preparing to travel across the U.S. to Second Sight’s headquarters to receive an upgrade. But then COVID-19 descended, and the trip was canceled.
The pandemic also hit Second Sight’s bottom line. Doerr found out about its tribulations only from one of the company’s vision therapists, who told him the entire department was being laid off. Second Sight cut nearly 80% of its workforce in March 2020 and announced it would wind down operations.
Ross Doerr has mostly stopped using his Argus II, the result of combination of fear of losing its assistance from wear and tear and disdain for the company that brought it to market.
Jan Doerr
Second Sight’s implosion left some 350 Argus recipients in the metaphorical dark about what to do if their implants failed. Skeleton staff seem to have rarely responded to queries from their customers, at least based on the experiences of Perk and Doerr. And some recipients have unfortunately returned to the actual dark as well, as reports have surfaced of Argus II failures due to aging or worn-down parts.
Product support for complex products is remarkably uneven. Although the iconic Ford Mustang ceased production in the late 1960s, its parts market is so robust that it’s theoretically possible to assemble a new vehicle from recently crafted components. Conversely, smartphone and computer manufacturers typically stop issuing software upgrades to their devices after two or three years, eventually rendering them bricks. Consumers have accepted both extremes.
But is the smartphone approach acceptable for a device that helps restore the most crucial sense a human being possesses?
Margaret McLean, a senior fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in California, notes companies like Second Sight have a greater obligation for product support than other consumer product ventures.
“In this particular case, you have a great deal of risk that is involved in using this device, the implant, and the after care of this device,” she says. “You cannot, like with your car, decide that ‘I don’t like my Mustang anymore,’ and go out and buy a Corvette.”
And, whether the Argus II implant works or not, its physical presence can impact critical medical decisions. Doerr’s doctor wanted him to undergo an MRI to assist in diagnosing attacks of vertigo. But the physician was concerned his implant might interfere. With the latest available manufacturer advisories on his implant nearly a decade old, the procedure was held up. Doerr spent months importuning Second Sight through phone calls, emails and Facebook postings to learn if his implant was contraindicated with MRIs, which he never received. Although the cause of his vertigo was found without an MRI, Doerr was hardly assured.
“Put that into context for a minute. I get into a serious car accident. I end up in the emergency room, and I have a tag saying I have an implanted medical device,” he says. “You can’t do an MRI until you get the proper information from the company. Who’s going to answer the phone?”
Second Sight’s management did answer the call to revamp its business. It netted nearly $78 million through a private stock placement and an initial public offering last year. At the end of 2021, Second Sight had nearly $70 million in cash on hand, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
And while the Argus II is still touted at length on Second Sight’s home page, it appears little of its corporate coffers are earmarked toward its support. These days, the company is focused on obtaining federal approvals for Orion, a new implant that would go directly into the recipient’s brain and could be used to remedy blindness from a variety of causes. It obtained a $6.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health in May 2021 to help develop Orion.
Presented with a list of written questions by email, Second Sight’s spokesperson, Dave Gentry of the investor relations firm Red Chip Companies, copied a subordinate with an abrupt message to “please handle.” That was the only response from a company representative. A call to Second Sight acting chief executive officer Scott Dunbar went unreturned.
Whether or not the Orion succeeds remains to be seen. The company’s SEC filings suggest a viable and FDA-approved device is years away, and that operational losses are expected for the “foreseeable future.” Second Sight reported zero revenue in 2020 or 2021.
Moreover, the experiences of the Argus II recipients could color the reception of future Second Sight products. Doerr notes that his insurer paid nearly $500,000 to implant his device and for training on how to use it.
“What’s the insurance industry going to say the next time this crops up?” Doerr asks, noting that the company’s reputation is “completely shot” with the recipients of its implants.
Perk, who made speeches to praise the Argus II and is still featured in a video on the Second Sight website, says he also no longer supports the company.
Jeroen Perk, an investigator for the Dutch customs service, cried for joy after partially regaining his sight, but he no longer trusts Second Sight, the company that provided his implant.
Nanda Perk
Nevertheless, Perk remains highly reliant on the technology. When he dropped an external component of his device in late 2020 and it broke, Perk briefly debated whether to remain blind or find a way to get his Argus II working again. Three months later, he was able to revive it by crowdsourcing parts, primarily from surgeons with spare components or other Argus II recipients who no longer use their devices. Perk now has several spare parts in reserve in case of future breakdowns.
Despite the frantic efforts to retain what little sight he has, Perk has no regrets about having the device implanted. And while he no longer trusts Second Sight, he is looking forward to possibly obtaining more advanced implants from companies in the Netherlands and Australia working on their own products.
Doerr suggests that biotech firms whose implants are distributed globally be bound to some sort of international treaty requiring them to service their products in perpetuity. Such treaties are still applied to the salvage rights for ships that sunk centuries ago, he notes.
“I think that in a global tech economy, that would be a good thing,” says McLean, the fellow at Santa Clara, “but I am not optimistic about it in the near term. Business incentives push toward return on share to stockholders, not to patients and other stakeholders. We likely need to rely on some combination of corporately responsibility…and [international] government regulation. It’s tough—the Paris Climate Accord implementation at a slow walk comes to mind.”
Unlike Perk, Doerr has mostly stopped using his Argus II, the result of combination of fear of losing its assistance from wear and tear and disdain for the company that brought it to market. At 70, Doerr says he does not have the time or energy to hold the company more accountable. And with Second Sight having gone through a considerable corporate reorganization, Doerr believes a lawsuit to compel it to better serve its Argus recipients would be nothing but an extremely costly longshot.
“It’s corporate America at its best,” he observes.