- WELLESLEY, Mass. (Reuters)
- A retired illustrator for Mad magazine may be the chink in the armor
of secrecy surrounding the invention dubbed ``Ginger,'' which purportedly
will be more revolutionary than the World Wide Web.
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- When Ginger inventor Dean Kamen gets an idea, he relies
on his father, Jack Kamen, to sketch the initial design. The elder Kamen,
who redesigned irreverent Mad magazine in the 1950s, uses charcoal sketches
to illustrate his son's inspiration.
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- ``I'm sort of like a police sketch artist,'' Jack Kamen
said on Saturday before his son received an honorary degree from Babson
College in suburban Boston.
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- Ginger is reportedly a revolutionary technology whose
secrecy has fueled speculation throughout the world, inspired Web sites
and burned up the phone lines to Jack Kamen's home near Manchester, New
Hampshire. Harvard Business School Press is said to have paid $250,000
for a book detailing Ginger.
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- There have been reports that Ginger is a motorized scooter
and others that it is a personal hovercraft. The inventor himself has firmly
declined to discuss it.
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- ``Reporters are calling all the time,'' Jack Kamen told
Reuters. ``My son worries I'll say too much.''
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- The subject of Ginger is off limits with Dean Kamen,
who has kept his sense of humor despite the clamor over the undisclosed
invention, also known as ``IT.'' For example, he enjoys discussing his
mythical currency, the Dumpling, named after his small island off Connecticut.
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- ``Last summer it was down,'' the younger Kamen said.
``But Ben and Jerry, my joint chiefs of ice cream, have made us ice cream
independent. We went off gold and went on the ice cream standard. As long
as we keep it below 32 degrees, our currency is rock solid.''
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- Dean Kamen steers the media's frenzied interest in Ginger
toward his passion of pairing students with inventors and engineers. For
the past decade, his program called FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition
of Science and Technology) has used a robotics program to stimulate the
creative juices of students.
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- ``All that crap (about Ginger) probably, to some extent,
is helpful to FIRST,'' Kamen said. ``But it certainly wasn't a well-planned,
orchestrated opportunity.''
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- A college dropout, Kamen, 50, showed up at Babson College's
graduation ceremony wearing boots, jeans and a light blue work shirt.
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- ``I didn't like anything about school,'' Kamen said before
addressing a few hundred Babson College graduates. His advice: think of
something important to do and don't give up.
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- Kamen said there was nothing organized about how he came
up with ideas, which have spawned more than 150 patents, especially in
the medical device field. In the 1970s, he founded AutoSyringe Inc. to
manufacture portable infusion pumps to administer drugs such as insulin.
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- His IBOT transporter is a wheelchair that climbs stairs
and allows handicapped people to rise to eye-level with a standing person.
Former President Bill Clinton recognized Kamen's inventive genius last
year by awarding him the National Medal of Technology.
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- His father recalled the time his son came to him with
an idea for a portable dialysis machine.
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- ``He told me to draw a typewriter,'' Jack Kamen said.
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- After that, Dean Kamen took his father's drawing to his
team of machinists and engineers who helped transform the sketch into a
dialysis machine for kidney patients.
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- When asked if he knows what the invention Ginger looks
like, Jack Kamen smiled and nodded his head knowingly. ``I've drawn it,''
he said.
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