The Boy and the Bionic Hand: A Chance Hospital Encounter Sent an Engineer on an Improbable Mission

One sunny Thursday afternoon last October, Lyman Connor climbed on his bicycle and pedaled from his Roanoke, Va., home for a ride along the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway. He didn’t make it back that day.

Riding down one of the parkway’s steep hills at nearly 40 mph, a car suddenly braked in front of Connor. “The last thing I remember was going over the handlebars,” he says. “When I woke up in an intensive care unit, I had tubes coming out my body to sustain my breathing.”