Breakout Artist Dean Kamen, multimillionaire inventrepreneur, is going global with a robochair that climbs stairs, a miracle motor that fights disease, and his wildest notion of all - that scientists will be the 21st centurys superstars. By Scott Kirsner Dean Kamens sense of whats possible is governed by the immutable laws of nature. Everything else is up for grabs. Kamen, 49, is a self-taught physicist and multimillionaire entrepreneur who lives in a hexagonally shaped house of his own design atop a hill just outside Manchester, New Hampshire. Invisible from the road, the estate is outfitted with a softball field, a wood-paneled library thats full of awards and honorary degrees (Kamen never graduated from college), a wind turbine to help supply power, and a pulley system that can deliver a bottle of wine from the kitchen to the bedroom. He calls the place Westwind, and he stuffed it with a collection of toys and antiques that includes a jukebox, a slot machine, and a 25-ton steam engine once owned by Henry Ford. In Westwinds basement, theres a foundry, a machine shop, and a computer room, where Kamen often toils late into the night. He keeps a Porsche 928 and a black Humvee in one garage, two Enstrom helicopters in the other. The smaller, piston-driven chopper takes him to and from work at his offices in downtown Manchester; the larger, turbine-driven version is reserved for longer hops, like to his private island off the coast of Connecticut. For trips more than a few hundred miles, he flies his twin-turbofan CitationJet. Kamen has high-powered friends to match his taste in toys, and throws lavish parties that entice many powerful people to New Hampshire. Visitors have included George W. Bush, NASA administrator Dan Goldin, and, more recently, John Doerr of the VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. But its not the Rolodex, the air force, or the tricked-out Batcave that separates Kamen from the usual posse of tech multimillionaires. Its the way hes gone about acquiring it all, and the offbeat, often idealistic ways he chooses to spend it. While Kamen wont divulge the size of his fortune, much of it stems from having invented things he decided ought to exist - no market research necessary - like first-of-their-kind medical devices. While Kamen was attending college in the 1970s, his brother - then a medical student and now a renowned pediatric oncologist - complained that there was no reliable way to give steady doses of drugs to patients. So Kamen invented the first portable infusion pump capable of delivering drugs (such as insulin) to patients who had previously required round-the-clock monitoring, freeing them from a life inside the hospital. In the mid-1990s, he devised a phone book-sized dialysis machine - at a time when similar devices were as big as dishwashers and required patients to make regular trips to dialysis centers. Vernon Loucks, former chair of Baxter International, contracted Kamens privately held company, Deka Research & Development, to develop the machine. We didnt believe it could be done, he recalls. Now its all over the world. Dean is the brightest guy Ive ever met in this business, bar none. When he watched a man in a wheelchair try to negotiate a curb in the late 80s, Kamen wondered whether he could build a chair that would hop curbs without losing its balance. After $50 million and eight years in development, the Ibot Transporter - a six-wheeled robotic mobility system that can climb stairs, traverse sandy and rocky terrain, and raise its user to eye-level with a standing person - is undergoing FDA trials, and should be available by 2001, at a cost of $20,000. That may sound high, but keep in mind that the Ibot erases the need to retrofit a home for a wheelchair. Plus, mobility system is if anything an understatement: In June, Kamen saddled up his Ibot and climbed the stairs from a Paris Mtro station to the restaurant level of the Eiffel Tower - then promptly called John Doerr on his cell phone. At first blush, youd stay away from developing something like the Ibot, just because of the legal implications, says Woodie Flowers, a mechanical engineering professor at MIT and a friend of Kamens. Youre going to put a human in it and itll go up stairs? Thats nuts. But he did it. Hes not one to get caught up in conventional wisdom. Lately, Kamen has broadened his work beyond health care. He believes technology and ingenuity can solve all kinds of social ills - like pollution, limited access to electricity, and contaminated water in many third-world countries, where bacteria from human feces in drinking water is a leading cause of cholera. To help ameliorate the water problem, Dekas team of 170 engineers is working on a nonpolluting engine - funded by several million dollars of Kamens own money - based on a concept first floated in the early 1800s but never realized. The device is called the Stirling engine; Kamen hopes it can be developed into