Time - USA (2020-02-03)

65

Erin Smith

LOCATION: San Francisco

INVENTION: FacePrint

I

n 2016, Erin Smith,

then 16, watched old

videos of Michael J. Fox.

She recalls noticing that

“when he laughed or smiled,

it came off as emotionally

distant.” The early symptom

of Parkinson’s is called

facial masking, and for

a science-fair project,

Smith chose to explore

it. She filmed some 15

nursing- home residents as

they watched Super Bowl

commercials, then screened

their expressions using off-

the-shelf facial- recognition

software. After seeing the

results, the Michael J. Fox

Foundation funded a more

robust study with around

500 patients that led

Smith to develop FacePrint,

an AI tool that analyzes

video footage for signs of

Parkinson’s. Now 19, Smith

is studying neuroscience

and computer science at

Stanford University, and

working with its medical

school to get FacePrint

to the point where it can

diagnose Parkinson’s long

before traditional tests are

able to do so.

ÑShay Maunz

publishes weekly

magazines for U.S. elementary

and middle school students

wheelchair and kill him by age 5.

Except he didn’t die. Ndopu is now

29 and can look back with wonder at the

path he’s traveled. “I have outlived my-

self by 25 years,” he marvels.

Like many people granted a span

of years they did not expect to have—

consider Stephen Hawking—Ndopu has

made the most of his good fortune. He

attended Oxford, graduating with a mas-

ter’s degree in public policy. As a young,

black, physically disabled man, as he de-

scribes himself, he campaigns for inter-

sectional diversity and the rights of people

who would in the past have been multiply

oppressed. This year he was selected by

the U.N. as one of 17 global ambassadors

for its Sustainable Development Goals, an

ambitious list of targets including elimi-

nating poverty and hunger, ensuring gen-

der equality, and providing clean water

and sanitation, all across the globe.

One more thing: Ndopu is trying to

go to space. “I defied the odds and chal-

lenges that faced me at birth,” he says,

“and now it’s time to defy gravity.” He

hopes to time his journey for the U.N.

General Assembly in September 2020,

and to address the international body

while flying weightlessly above it. “I

want to be able to use zero G as a stage,”

Ndopu says. “If I have five minutes to

talk to the world, what would I say to

capture humanity’s attention?”

PerhaPs it will be something like the

mission statement of the global fund he’s

established to encourage public- private

investment to address the range of obsta-

cles that prevent people with disabilities

from fully participating in society. That

includes such goals as making buildings

and transit wheelchair accessible, im-

proving technologies that enable those

who can’t use a keyboard to engage with

computers, and fostering job- training

programs for the disabled. The fund has

the backing of the U.N. and the World

Economic Forum, and so far $40 mil-

lion has been pledged, with a target of

$100 million by 2020.

Ndopu’s plans to go to space will

require a lot of collaboration and

more than a few lucky breaks. He is

in discussions with two aerospace

companies (he can’t yet disclose

which) racing to make commercial

space travel available to anyone who

INVENTING

can afford the six-figure ticket. The THE FUTURE

flights, if they happen, would be brief—

just 15-minute suborbital lob shots.

But they would cross the so-called

Kármán line, a boundary generally

accepted to be 100 km (62 miles) up,

which earns a person astronaut wings.

“I want to become the first disabled

person in space,” he says. Traditionally,

‘I have outlived

myself by

25 years.’

astronaut status has been reserved for
the sublimely abled, and Ndopu’s flight
could be a paradigm shift, a dramatic
democratization of space travel.
The mission is by no means a sure
thing, with technical hurdles being the
biggest challenge. Private companies
have been struggling for years to get
the space- tourism business going, and
while progress is being made, it’s quite
slow—set back by a 2014 crash of a Vir-
gin Galactic spacecraft, which killed one
pilot and injured another.
In the event that the rockets aren’t
ready to fly by Ndopu’s September tar-
get date, he will instead opt for a para-
bolic flight aboard a zero-G airplane, an
ordinary jet that creates brief, repeated
intervals of weightlessness as it swoops
through a series of sine-wave-like arcs.
If the timing for the flight does not co-
incide with the General Assembly—it
could happen earlier, depending on air-
craft availability—Ndopu will videotape
his message to be shown when the U.N.
does gather.
The altitude of a parabolic flight
is nowhere near the Kármán line, and
Ndopu will not earn any astronaut wings.
But he will still broadcast to the General
Assembly, and he will still float free from
the wheelchair that typically confines
him—a lyrical triumph of physics over
physique, similar to the parabolic flight
taken by Hawking in 2007, 11 years be-
fore his death.
Hawking inspired millions with his
flight, and Ndopu hopes to do the same.
“I often say I am a kaleidoscope of iden-
tities and experiences,” he says. “I think
my story resonates with a cross section
ILLUSTRATION BY AISTE STANCIKAITE FOR TIME of society.” □