Sorry, we left an implant in your brain

What happens when you get a life-changing device implanted into your body... and then the company that maintains it goes bankrupt? Guests: Jennifer French, Executive Director and Founder of ⁠Neurotech Network⁠, a nonprofit focused on education and advocacy for neurotechnology, and ⁠Liam Drew⁠, freelance science journalist who reported on abandoned neurotech for ⁠Nature⁠ For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  Anyone who listens to Unexplainable knows that music is really important to me. So I want an amazing sound system. But I also want something that's easy, that just works. Sonos delivers on all fronts. The sound is incredible and my Sonos system follows me wherever I go. I can mix and match speakers in any room in my apartment, louder in the living room, quieter in the kitchen. And the Sonos app makes it all super easy. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Our story begins in the late 90s.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  March of 1998, the dot com era, when the internet was coming about. It was really an exciting time to be in consumer technology.

• 0:52Speaker 03

  You've got mail.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Jen French was working for a consumer tech business.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  It was laptops and printers, a very young company.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  And her company was about to go public.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  It was kind of a work hard, play hard type of lifestyle.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  She worked hard to launch the company's IPO and then?

• 1:14Speaker 02

  We rented a house on the side of a ski mountain in New England.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  She played hard. And for Jen, playing hard really meant playing.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Snowboard during the day and play poker at night and have lots of fun.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  She's big on games and sports. She loves to sail, loves to snowboard.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  That weekend, there was a full moon. And if you've ever snowboarded under a full moon, it's beautiful. Like the ski slopes just glow. So a dozen of us went down for what's called the midnight run. And 11 made it to the bottom. And I didn't. I hit a patch of ice, went down a 40-foot embankment and hit a bunch of trees. And ended up face down in the snow. And I don't remember much from that night. I have little spots of memory. Looking up at the full moon and crying for help and being really cold.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Being in an emergency vehicle, covered in thermo blankets, shivering, not being able to move.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Waking up in the emergency room when they had put me in traction. It's when they try to pop your spinal cord back into place.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  They came into a room and explained to me that I have a spinal cord injury and that I would be paralyzed for life.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  The injury was at the base of Jen's neck.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  So I could move like my arms, I could shrug my shoulders, but I really didn't have any movement below that.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  The prognosis was that she'd never walk again. What did you feel at that, at that moment when you're, I mean, when it's sort of starting to hit the realization?

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Um, well, it, it didn't. To be honest with you, I mean, I was in denial for a while.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  It started to sink in, in rehab. She was able to restore some of her hand movements. But even when she finally went home three months later, she was still unable to do so many of the things she used to be able to do.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, you name it. I couldn't get in and out of my house independently. I couldn't drive. I couldn't make myself food. I mean, dressing myself was a full-on workout. There would be days where I couldn't put my shoes on and I'd throw them across the room. I mean, I think I went through phases of denial and windows of depression.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  And Jen was always looking out for a cure. A clinical trial or experimental treatment that could give her hope of walking again.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  At the time, stem cells were the big thing, but you know, I, I, I didn't understand all the biologics behind it. And if I don't understand something, I have a hard time jumping in. But, you know, I, I understood electricity.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Scientists at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland claimed they could implant electrodes inside the body and use electricity to make paralyzed people walk again.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Jen knew it was just a clinical trial at first.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Okay, we're gonna go down this new frontier and if it works, great. If it doesn't, at least I made my contribution to science.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  But if the clinical trial proved that it worked, a company called Neurocontrol was already standing by. They had acquired the rights to the technology and were planning to commercialize the device to provide a permanent cure for paralysis. Jen picked up her life in the Northeast and moved to Cleveland.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  The first procedure was seven and a half hours. I just remember the room being full of people because it was an experimental surgery. So we were kind of training new people on the surgery. So they implanted eight electrodes in my back and my glutes and hamstrings and quads and hips.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  The electrodes went under her skin, right onto the muscle.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  When you think about how our muscles move, we send a command from our brain, it goes down our spinal cord, it goes out to the peripheral nervous system and the peripheral nerves say, hey muscle, you need to contract and it contracts the muscles.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  But Jen's injury had severed the communication between her brain and her nerves on her muscles. So this new system of electrodes were kind of like a system of artificial nerves, nerves that wouldn't be controlled by her brain, per se.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  They give you a control box. It has all the brains, it has the circuit boards, the battery power.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  It would be controlled by a remote control. Pretty soon, it came time to take the new system out for a spin, to have Jen try and stand up by herself. It was a whole event.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  My husband took off of work, he was there and my mom was there, my parents. I get in position, press a button, wait a few seconds and I hear a beep and it starts contracting.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  You could see like the contraction in your muscle. And that's the first time I had seen it in a year and a half. And that was, you know, that was just amazing. Like, oh, my God, you can make my muscles work again. This is, this is so cool, right?

• 6:40Speaker 02

  I mean, jeez, being able to stand up and look down and all you see are your legs and you don't see these big braces around it or any other big supports. It's just you standing. I mean, that, that was amazing. I don't think there was a dry eye in the room, actually. I think it was, it was more of awe of, of science and technology, but also like, wow, this is, this is real. And it really works. This isn't a pipe dream.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  After the clinical trial ended, Jen took the device home with her. At least temporarily, she got her life back. She was able to get out of bed in the morning, climb stairs. She could stand up at baseball games. She could even sail again. All that was left to make the cure permanent was for the company, Neurocontrol, to commercialize it. She was still waiting to hear about next steps when she got some news.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  I was implanted in 1999. And then in year 2001, I was on the NIH campus.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  She was at a conference at the National Institutes of Health, which was one of the funders of her clinical trial. Some of the Case Western researchers she'd worked with were there.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  At that conference, one of the, the main researchers came up to me, got on his knee and told me.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  He got on his knee?

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, he, well, he got down to my level and said, I need to talk to you. Neurocontrol went out of business. The whole aspirations of this being commercialized went down the tubes. It hit me like a, like a brick. There were tears. I mean, it was a dark moment, you know?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Without a company to fund the device's future, Jen would be paralyzed all over again.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  You know, it's like facing a spinal cord injury for your first time and becoming paralyzed. What's next? Right? So that's the question that kept going in my head is what's next?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  This week, what happens when the life-changing technology implanted deep inside your body suddenly gets abandoned? I'm Julia Longoria. This is Unexplainable.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Does your device make a sound?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yes. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You have to hear. Oh, hang on. Okay. Okay, let me turn it off. So you're gonna laugh at this. One of the engineers, his kids were really young at the time. And he said, how can I make a distinct sound so that people know when it's turning on? So, okay, I'm gonna power it up now. And tell me if you recognize this tune.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  I just hear like a duh, duh, duh.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Exactly. You know what song that is?

• 9:58Speaker 01

  What is it? No.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Do, re, mi.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Oh, like from, like from Sound of Music.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yes. So, yeah, engineers always put their little fingerprint on things.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Jen's remote-controlled neuroimplant is still with her. We were on video chat. I watched her use the device to get up and sit down a few times.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  I know some people in the research world call it the Radio Shack device. Probably some of your older listeners, but it still looks like a product of the 90s.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, a Radio Shack device in every sense of the term, I guess.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  So I've been in this long-term clinical trial for 23 years. If you take start to finish, it'll be 25.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  When the company that was gonna take her device to market went bankrupt, she and the team at Case Western Reserve got creative. What did you do next?

• 10:55Speaker 02

  The research team regrouped and took everything back into research. So that's how it became a long-term research study. Yeah, so it's under various grants, actually. Most of them are government grants. The team in Cleveland is amazing to be able to still support this device. But I'll tell you, that was a window into, you know, the concept of abandonment.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Since the company Neurocontrol went out of business in 2001, no other company has picked up Jen's device. About 350 people would have lost the life-changing technology. But the researchers at Case Western have figured out ways to provide versions of what a company would provide. They use old parts and keep applying for academic grants to keep the devices up and running in as many patients as possible. Listening to Jen's story, like, what was going through your mind?

• 11:51Speaker 04

  I mean, it's a funny thing to say, but Jen was basically one of the lucky ones.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  This is Liam Drew.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  I arrived at Jen's story, having spoken to several people who'd had neural devices implanted that had changed their lives much for the better and then completely lost access to those devices.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  These days, Liam's a freelance science journalist.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  Having previously been an academic neuroscientist.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  You were previously an academic neuroscientist?

• 12:21Speaker 04

  Yes. I've been reporting on neurotechnology now for around eight years.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  I first learned of this phenomenon of abandonment from a piece Liam wrote in Nature Magazine a few years ago called "Abandoned."

• 12:36Speaker 04

  Abandonment has actually become the sort of the name for this problem. It's a fairly obvious name for it, but it's been interesting to see that term become quite standard in the literature.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  The first patient that Liam encountered with an abandoned neuroimplant had a very different fate from Jen French's.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Her name was Rita Leggett.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Rita wasn't paralyzed. Rita suffered from seizures.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  Her life had really been defined by epilepsy for a long time. And by the end of her 40s, she was quite depressed and she was sort of anxious about leaving her home.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  And then Rita had a device implanted in her brain that could warn her when a seizure was coming.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  The device, just through simply, well, there's nothing simple about it. Just by warning her that a seizure was imminent and giving her that control that she could take herself to a safe place. Maybe take a dose of medicine that would make the seizure less severe.

• 13:40Speaker 04

  Gave her an unbelievable lease of life. She actually met a man and got married. Utterly, utterly transformative. The very complex and unprecedented relationship that could form between a human being and a brain implant. But then the tragic end of the story was that although this device was very successful, the startup that was developing it couldn't attract sufficient funding to keep going with it. Rita and her husband sort of fought tooth and nail to buy the device and somehow get support. But it was simply a case of, that's it.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  It's, it's over. You, you can, you can have it for as long as the battery runs, but we can't recharge it.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  And as I've learned about more and more cases of this, what's, it's seemingly, I found it utterly shocking to begin with. And I think it probably is shocking to a lot of people, but it's often the battery that's the problem. Something that simple. So, I mean, I'm a biologist by training. I don't know a lot about batteries. But companies are basically coming up with proprietary batteries. And so if that's a unique part of the technology, then when the company goes, all support for that battery system goes with it.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  It's like, it's so simple. It sounds so dumb. Like you, you laugh so you don't cry. Like, I can't imagine having this like life-changing relationship with a device just severed because you can't replace the battery.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, no, I, yeah, I was exactly the same at the beginning. I was just like, really? That's the issue? Rita, she had to travel to the hospital to return the the external part of the technology.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Because part of it was just still in her brain.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, the internal part remained in her brain. And Rita had to hand over the device to a stranger. And the stranger just said, you can leave a note if you like. And so she just sort of left so disheartened. Yeah. And and the internal part of the device is still in her brain. And that's quite a common thing. Quite often, these devices that are left in people's brains can be incompatible with MRI scans. And so they can actually become a real problem. I think they've got slightly better in recent years. But, you know, just in terms of human costs, not being able to have an MRI scan because you've got some device left in your head or body for a trial is quite a price to pay for that.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  When there's not even an upside if it doesn't work anymore.

• 16:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, exactly, exactly.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  But Liam talked to another patient who was staring down the barrel of that same fate, having a device abandoned in his brain because the company went bust and couldn't replace the bespoke battery.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  Markus Bo. Markus lives in Germany. And he had an implanted nerve stimulator that treats cluster headaches, debilitating type of headache.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  He was sort of up to six to eight, one hour long, excruciating headaches every day.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  In Markus's case, the nerve stimulator is is in his left cheek. And it sort of intermingles with the nerve fibers that run to your face to help you control your face. And and they're responsible, it seems, for triggering these cluster headaches. And so if you can sort of zap those with electrical pulses, then that disrupts and sort of quells the headache. Again, he just really felt like he got his life back with this device. The trial was a was a great success. The device was very effective.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  But cluster headaches are very rare, and so it's not a big market. The company that developed this system has gone bankrupt. And no one has access to this device anymore. He's an electrical engineer by training and he has been for the last two or three years at the time maintaining his own device.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Maintaining his own device?

• 17:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, so you've

• 17:49Speaker 01

  What does that mean?

• 17:50Speaker 04

  So again, it was this proprietary battery. So it wasn't a case of just going to the shop and buying a new bunch of AA batteries. It was this very rare battery. And he initially scours the internet and he finds a company in America that will sell him a battery of this nature. And he has sort of has to convince the insurers that he is qualified to do this. But he gets a battery from America, replaces it, it works, that battery runs out. He goes back to the American company, they've stopped making it. So he's got to scour the internet again and he finds a company in China who are willing to make a battery of this nature. And so he's able to maintain the device.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  There is something very like, I don't know, like 2025 dystopia about how like this man is forced to like hire a Chinese company to just DIY his own medical device. It's just like, again, laugh so you don't cry. It's really wild.

• 18:46Speaker 04

  Completely. In this case, he's been able to maintain it, but for for many of these people, it was just a sort of brief few years of respite from a sort of life defining condition.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  He's still there?

• 19:09Speaker 04

  Julia? Oh damn, what's going on here?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  After the break, how to combat abandonment.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  Oh, come on.

• 19:21Speaker 05

  Support for the show comes from Shopify. Starting a business requires you to be resourceful. And the more you flex that muscle, the more you start to see opportunities for growth. For example, launching your business with Black Friday approaching means you can take advantage of the extra online traffic. And Shopify is there to help you make it all happen. Shopify says they are the platform for a record breaking, reliable holiday selling season for businesses at every stage.

• 19:50Speaker 05

  They have pre-built website themes and an AI site builder, which should make it easy to launch a beautiful, professional-looking store. And you don't ever need to touch a line of code to do it. They also have a mobile app that lets you run your store from anywhere. And they say their AI e-commerce expert sidekick can help you manage almost any business task with a single prompt, including holiday discounts. With Shopify, you can easily sell everywhere people shop: online, in person, across social media, even in AI chats. If you are ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/unexplainable to start your free trial.

• 20:33Speaker 05

  That is Shopify.com/unexplainable. Go to Shopify.com/unexplainable today to hear your first.

• 20:54Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 20:57Speaker 04

  I think my computer just crashed. I don't know.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Oh, fun.

• 21:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. There we go.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Speaking of technology abandonment.

• 21:09Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Great. So I think we have this idea, or I certainly have this idea somewhere deep in my psyche, that if we have a new miraculous technology, health technology that works, like, we just assume, some of us assume, that the economics will just kind of work themselves out. Like, the good ideas are going to rise to the surface. But it feels like your reporting shows, like, the economics don't always work out, even if it's a technology that works.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, certainly. The cluster headache device and the epilepsy warning system were both clinically really effective. It was business issues that sank both of them.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Do you have a sense for what a company needs to succeed, watching the ones that didn't?

• 22:02Speaker 04

  No, I think that's beyond my pay grade.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Same.

• 22:07Speaker 04

  Well, yeah.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  It's a big feat to bring a pretty high maintenance technology to hundreds of people without breaking the bank.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  The first person who gets one of these devices implanted in them will typically have the full attention of the entire team, right? The engineers checking that it's working. You'll have the neurosurgeon, the clinical team, the nurses and doctors, the scientists checking the outputs of it, all of them in the room, you know, troubleshooting, willing them on. And then as it becomes a product, you basically want it to be something. I mean, it needs to be something, but, you know, someone with.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Self sustaining.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, basically self sustaining and sort of something that someone can program themselves and use themselves. And that's, that's a real challenge in this field. Scalability.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  It seems like it takes a village almost to get these medical devices up and running. But then you don't want to have to pay a village to keep them running forever.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  Basically, yes.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  The village that makes neuro implants possible knows that their industry has a problem. Liam went to a sort of convening of the village after his story in Nature magazine came out.

• 23:18Speaker 04

  A year after it came out, I went to a meeting at the Royal Society and there was a session that was dealing with how we can protect people from abandoned devices. And I sort of sat down and the chair, a neurologist from Florida, introduced the panel. And then he said, if anyone really wants to know the background to this session, they should read Abandoned by Liam Drew.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  In this conference room full of doctors, nurses, patients and industry, Liam's reporting helps spark a conversation about what can be done about the problem of abandonment. One big idea that comes up a lot, says Liam, is the idea that some kind of plan has to be in place in case a company goes south.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  I mean, the tricky problem with companies going bust is that no company. Plans to go bust. The company that I reported on that did go bust, I spoke to one woman who'd had Nuvecra's spinal cord stimulator implanted, and it was when she went back to the surgery to have her stitches removed that she was told that the company had gone bust. The company had given no warning whatsoever. Their devices were being implanted, you know, essentially on the day they went bust. So there was no sort of warning that they were about to go belly up and not be able to support these devices anymore. So sort of short to medium term support, just to sort of cushion the fall of the of the device being

• 24:41Speaker 04

  no longer available, feels like one part of it. And the harder issue is what you do about the long term. Can't they put money in a escrow account? Can they set up a sort of nonprofit parallel organisation? Can they take out insurance? Everyone wants that support to be in place, but I think if you're a business person dealing with a startup where, you know, margins are small and they hear those plans and they just think that's expensive. That's just a big chunk of change for a small startup to take on. And so I remember very clearly one business person just saying, it's not going to change unless there is legislation that demands change.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  But even patients are hesitant about legislation. They don't want to have barriers to entry for startups that go out on a limb and support these life-saving devices.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  It does have to work from a business perspective because if it becomes too expensive to develop new devices, you're not going to get the new devices that could help people. So one other thing I will say, just as I don't know, maybe it's a bit gloomy, but another layer of this is that We all know from our phones, for example, how quickly technology changes. Like an iPhone sixteen compared to an iPhone two is night and day. Whereas, you know, an aspirin is an aspirin and it was a hundred years ago. And so how do companies keep supporting version one, version two of their technology when they're on version sixteen? Because, you know, we're all expected to sort of not use a iPhone two or three anymore.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  But if it's, if your iPhone was implanted in your head and you didn't have any say about what iPhone you were going to use, that's a different issue. So I think one of my biggest concerns about this is that we've seen an absolute mushrooming of neurotechnology companies. So I think just that that investment and that will to create good products is is great. And hopefully that will benefit people who need them. But at the same time, it's it's potentially going to create a crowded marketplace in which there will be winners and losers and we'll see issues of this nature.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  So it seems like people on all sides of this village that make a medical device possible agree that that there's a problem.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  What is the solution to the problem? Is there one?

• 27:14Speaker 04

  I don't think we know what the solution is yet. It's, um.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  Everyone who tries to create these devices

• 27:25Speaker 04

  is trying to do a good thing.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, it takes years, decades from an idea through initial studies, through larger studies. You know, it literally takes decades to bring a product to market. In my experience, everyone I've ever spoken to in this field is incredibly passionate about helping people. And that's what drives them. So the idea of sort of. Helping them and they're not is really distressing. And that was most evident in the Case Western team, which have just kept supporting people and like just sort of finding a way, you know, sort of talking to insurers, talking to the hospitals, just making it work.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Why is it so thorny? Like, it feels like everyone has good intentions, from what you're saying, like, people have thought about this so deeply, people who have all the personal stakes in the world can't, still can't offer up a solution. I wonder why you think it's so unanswerable?

• 28:28Speaker 04

  Um, I think everyone would just like it not to be a problem. Um, you know? I mean, everyone's ideal version is that you sort of come up with a wonderful piece of medical technology and your company is de facto a huge success and you support people using it for the rest of their lives.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Do I have a relationship with my device? I absolutely have a relationship with my device. I take it everywhere with me. I use it every day and, um, and when it doesn't work, it's like I'm paralyzed again. It's like this loved one that you're missing, you know?

• 29:18Speaker 01

  I'm just curious, like, this is a very silly question, so feel free to disregard, but like, do you, do you, does it have a name? Like, do you, I don't know, do you like find yourself personalizing the device? I, I'm someone who like names my cars and things like that, but I'm just curious.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Well, Julie, I haven't gone that far. I haven't made it, I haven't put eyelashes on it.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Fair, fair, you're not quite as goofy as me.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  No, I wouldn't call it goofy. It's just, it's my box and, but I'm also, maybe, maybe that's just my way of subconsciously keeping a little bit of separation because I know that at some point in my life, I'm going to have to give this back, you know? And I don't want to get too attached to it, even though I know I am. Maybe it's, maybe it's a subconscious thing on my part.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  When we're looking at all of the federal funding that is being cut off, all of the funding from National Institutes of Health, Brain Initiative, you name it, their funding has been dropped considerably and just wiped clean with no consideration of people in clinical trials. Right now, we don't know. I mean, I live every day with the possibility of being paralyzed again. You know, I've had, over the years, I've had the whole system fail twice. And twice, I've been paralyzed and then waiting for them to get grant funds so that we can re-implant.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Knowing what you know now, if you could time travel back to the 90s, before you moved to Cleveland, before you got this device implanted, knowing the uncertainty that you're facing, would you stop yourself from going through with it?

• 31:10Speaker 02

  No way in hell. No way. No. It's been, you know, it's been an incredible journey. I wouldn't have taken this career path if I didn't get implanted. Now, I'm in the neurotech business. So I run a nonprofit called Neurotech Network that focuses on education and advocacy of neurotechnology, devices, therapies, and treatments. And it really is a labor of love. I wouldn't have even gotten into this field if I hadn't gotten implanted. Who knows where my career would be? So I cherish what I do. I cherish being able to learn. So I wouldn't change a thing in the past.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  You can learn more about abandoned neurotechnology in Liam Drew's piece, "Abandoned in Nature." There's a link in our episode description. Audio clips of Marcus Bol in German were courtesy of Nature. This episode was produced by me, Julia Longoria. We had editing from Meredith Hadanat, who also runs the show. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, fact checking from Melissa Hirsch, music from Noam Hassanfeld. Jorge Just is our editorial director, and Bird Pinkerton muttered to herself, "Everything is legal in New Jersey," before shoving the note in her pocket and turning around.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show. And if you have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We're at [email protected]. And you can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. It really helps us find new listeners. You can also support this show and all of Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. You can go to vox.com/members to sign up. If you do, you'll be helping make this place run, but you'll also be getting unlimited access to all the reporting on vox.com. You'll get exclusive newsletters, and you'll get all of our podcasts ad-free.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back with a big week next week. From here on out, you're going to be getting not one, but two episodes of Unexplainable in your feed. Get pumped.

• 33:54Speaker 06

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.