J. Lyman; Futurist, Biomedical Engineer
John Lyman, a futurist and visionary who pragmatically applied his pioneering the-future-is-now thinking to the creation of more comfortable and maneuverable artificial limbs for amputees, has died. He was 79.
Lyman, an accomplished biomedical engineer long before the term became familiar, died Thursday of cancer at his home in Sherman Oaks.
Although he worked in and taught specialized engineering at UCLA for more than 40 years before his 1996 retirement, the Santa Barbara-born Lyman was educated as a psychologist and held three degrees in psychology from UCLA.
He joined the UCLA faculty in 1947 as a psychology instructor, but was soon brought into consultation on improving artificial limbs.
The Southland’s aircraft industry, for which Lyman performed research during World War II, hoped to transfer war-developed technology to civilian uses. Northrop Aircraft Corp., in particular, was working with the Veterans Administration and UCLA to move from the existing leather and carved-wood prostheses for amputees to artificial limbs made with lightweight metals and plastics, and featuring better manipulation systems.
L.M.K. Boelter, dean of UCLA’s engineering systems department, asked Lyman to help. Exploring human-machine interaction, Lyman analyzed upper limb motion and the bioelectric properties of muscles. Then he devised new types of hands, arms and other artificial limbs by combining lightweight materials with strong, multi-strand control cables that could respond to human movement.
“He was a man before his time,” said John D. Mackenzie, associate dean of the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Science.
After working in the UCLA Biotechnology Laboratory from its inception in 1951, Lyman served as head of the unit from 1958 to 1980 and then directed its successor, the Human-Machine-Environment Engineering Laboratory, from 1981 until 1996.
He built the UCLA facility into a leading center for research and evaluation of body-originating signal-processing for artificial limbs. Other laboratories and manufacturers around the country sent prototypes of arms and hands to Lyman for evaluation.
Lyman taught engineering from 1950 until 1991, and in 1960 was tapped to lead faculty developers of a UCLA space technology curriculum for future astronauts and rocket designers.
Although his feet were firmly planted in actual science, Lyman also posited theories more familiar in science fiction than imaginable reality.
In 1966, for example, about the same time television viewers were witnessing the remarkable transportation technique heralded by the order “Beam me up, Scotty” on a new show called “Star Trek,” the UCLA professor was talking about teleportation. Lyman predicted that whisking people from here to there without wheels or wings or other mechanical conveyances could become reality by the 22nd century--100 years before the purported time of Capt. James Kirk and the star ship Enterprise.
And Lyman had already predicted in the 1950s that within “the near future” man could be frozen and revived alive during 1,000-year interstellar space trips. By 2067, he said decades ago, humans will have ended air pollution, improved the weather, created artificial hearts and kidneys better than the originals and perfected genetic engineering to eliminate inherited diseases and behavior problems.
In 1967, shortly after Lyman was elected president of the Human Factors Society, he told a Times science writer: “Teleportation is still pretty wild stuff to think or talk about. But the basic concepts do not violate any known physical law.”
Lyman is survived by his son, John; his daughter, Wendy; and his companion, Dolores Yonker.
Services will be private.
