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I was born to an academic family in Columbus, Ohio. Nothing important happened until age 15 at which time I was into making explosives. One June afternoon I decided to put together a pipe bomb, something I'd done before but was careless this time, failing to clean the threads of spilled explosive The last good grip I had on anything was on the pipe cap as I gave it one final twist. There might have been a sound like the pop a match makes when struck followed a millisecond later by a yard-wide ball of pale orange fire. The explosion knocked me back a couple steps. The right hand was gone the left shredded.

Three weeks in hospital and a month after that I was fitted with a back harness connected to a set of prosthetic arms each of which ended with a two-piece "split-hook." My initial reaction was disbelief at the crudity of such an arrangement.