Inventor never stops operating

Any time Dr. Kevin Stone is riding the KT-22 lift with his wife, Susan, to start a day at Squaw Valley, he knows he'll be at a disadvantage on the way back down. She will be skiing on a left knee with new parts designed and installed by her husband. He will be skiing on a left knee that needs the same new parts.

The problem is that the only orthopedic surgeon who does that specific operation - combining cadaver cartilage with a stem cell paste graft - is Kevin R. Stone, M.D. He hasn't invented a system yet for operating on his own knee, but he is probably working on it.

In the meantime, he is out there on a left knee minus its meniscus, which is the joint's shock absorber. With the attendant arthritis, it is hell in the moguls, but at least he has Joint Juice, a glucosamine drink that is one of 53 patents held by Stone, who lives in Mill Valley, works in San Francisco, and does his inventing on the commute by bike or boat or both.

"If we're doing something next year the same way we're doing it this year, then we clearly haven't learned anything," he says. "Particularly in orthopedics, there is so much room for improvement, so everything I do I try to think about how to do it better."

On Mondays, the thinking starts before dawn at Stinson Beach, where the Stones have a weekend home. By 7 a.m., Stone, 55, is on his bicycle, climbing over the hill to Sausalito, where he cranks up the Boston Whaler waiting at the dock. From there, he cuts across the shipping lanes, planing over the chop to Gashouse Cove, where he keeps a slip across from Marina Safeway. From there, he walks to the Stone Clinic, his sports medicine facility above 24 Hour Fitness on Buchanan Street, two hours end to end.

"Best commute on the planet," says Stone, who is one of those people who believe you are not maximizing your utility unless you are doing two productive tasks at once. Or, as he puts it, "I find a lot of time in every second."

Post-9/11 invention

An example of that came while watching the twin towers come down Sept. 11, 2001. Stone became preoccupied for days afterward until he finally turned to his wife and said, in one of the great non sequiturs, "If I can reel in a 400-pound fish, I ought to be able to reel out a 400-pound person. It seemed to me like a solvable problem."

He hired an engineer to put this hunch to work, and the result is Rescue Reel, a personal escape device that would work on the same principle that a fish on a hook could be lowered back into the water.

"I'm always intimidated when he talks about things so passionately because I know the road it is going to take to get there," says Susan Stone, 51, who is the chief financial officer for the Stone Clinic, and the person on the ground when the ideas land. She's never been able to talk her husband out of an invention, though "the chunk of up-front financing is always daunting," she says.

Rescue Reel

In this case, it was $500,000 spread across the 10 years it took to get Rescue Reel out of Stone's mind and onto his screen saver. When the prototype was built, a photo session was held in which he went up to the roof of his office building and scaled down its side wearing his business suit. He looks at this picture every day when he logs on.

"Our vision is that you keep Rescue Reel in a file drawer," he says. "Clip into a fixed point or a door, or whatever, go out a window and you can lower yourself to the ground."

The Rescue Reel is being readied for the market in time for the 10th anniversary of 9/11 this year. It will cost $1,500, and you can use it only once. Then again, if you are in the position of needing it, you won't be thinking of the one-use limit, much less its cost per use. The production run will be several thousand Rescue Reels, in sizes to reach 30 or 60 stories.