A highly regarded hair-restoration surgeon based in Manhattan, Wesley travels several times a year to Utah to spend a few days in the CoorsTek lab. There, he tests and tinkers with his piloscope, a device that’s consumed much of his attention (and financial resources) over the past five years. It’s the first-ever tool that can remove hair follicles from underneath a human scalp (pilo is Latin for hair). Wesley hopes that his creation catalyzes a new era of hair-transplant surgery, one devoid of the scarring that characterizes existing procedures.

That might seem like an incremental, unremarkable improvement, but it isn’t. Any step towards regaining a fuller head of hair without the evidence of scars, to the patients Wesley sees, is a monumental one. His calendar is filled with men coming to his office right after a breakup, their eyes bloodshot from sleepless nights scrolling through online forums like Hair Loss Help and Bald Truth Talk. They’ve become convinced that the way to restore a bruised ego and a broken heart (and maybe get a few dates) is by replacing lost hair.

“There’s no such thing as a hair emergency, but often times they make it seem like there is,” says Wesley, 39, whose 6-foot frame, playful smile, and (yes) healthy crop of brown hair make him look less like a doctor than an actor playing one on TV. “Oftentimes,” he says of his patients, “it’s clear a psychiatrist would be more effective.”

Wesley’s been doing hair transplants since graduating from Yale’s medical school nine years ago. After volunteering in Latin America as an undergraduate at Princeton, he’d originally wanted a job in the ER treating immigrant populations. But while working on his med-school thesis, Wesley came across research on hair follicle stem cells by a renowned New York hair surgeon named Dr. Walter Unger. After the two became friendly, Unger invited him to observe a few hair transplants. That turned into an apprenticeship, and Wesley found that he enjoyed the field’s relaxed pace and close relationships — doctors often spend all day with a single patient, and work with them over months and even years. He opened his own practice in 2007.

The Park Avenue office where Wesley sees patients is small and utilitarian. His diplomas hang on one wall, and a framed picture of Wesley dipping his wife, Anna, at their recent Malibu wedding sits on the bookshelf behind his desk. It’s here that Wesley spends hours doing consultations, trying to convey the benefits and limitations of existing hair-restoration options. Have patients tried Toppik, colored fibers you sprinkle over your bald spot? Or Propecia, a pill that stops balding in up to 88 percent of men? Maybe Rogaine, a topical foam applied twice a day to slow hair loss? Hair transplants, he tells them, can offer robust results in some patients — but can sometimes be accompanied by significant downsides. “You have to get them to see, is the benefit better than the risk?” Wesley says.

By 35, seven out of ten men will be losing significant amounts of hair (40 percent of women experience thinning too, but fewer go bald enough to consider surgery). Despite those statistics, hair transplants remain relatively unpopular: no one tracks the procedures exhaustively, but surveys suggest they trail behind nose jobs, breast implants, and liposuction, three of the most popular cosmetic surgeries.

In part, that’s because hair transplants never recovered in reputation after decades of so-so results. During the 1970s and 1980s, doctors grafted “plugs” of hair follicles from the back of the head to bald areas. The result often resembled doll hair: round clumps with spaces of scalp in between. By the 1990s, doctors were able to transplant individual hair follicles, achieving a more natural look. But to pull that off, they had to take a long strip of scalp from the back of the head to provide “donor” follicles, leaving patients with a swooping scar from ear to ear.

Doctors today still rely on that method, but some also use a technique called Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE). FUE involves removing follicles, one by one, using a tiny punch, and then transplanting them. The procedure doesn’t create one big scar, but it does create tiny, permanent white scars that can widen, and look noticeable enough that some men fill them in with tattoos. The small punches used for FUE can also strip follicles of protective tissue, meaning some portion of the transplant might fail entirely.

Those shortcomings leave a hole that hair transplant specialists are eager to fill, and they’ve got no shortage of ideas. At last year’s annual conference of the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery (ISHRS), surgeons buzzed about a new robotic FUE machine called ARTAS and debated the merits of transplanting beard hair onto human heads. Another surgeon, Peter Panagotacos, told me that he’d successfully grafted pubic hair onto a patient’s scalp. And various doctors, including Wesley, are experimenting with a regenerative powder derived from pig bladder.

All of these developments are tracked eagerly on online hair-loss forums, where hundreds of people share news, recount details of their own hair-hacking regimens, and chronicle the shame and anxiety that can accompany both baldness and its existing surgical solutions. “Should have been slick bald by 26…if not for thinking outside the box and experimenting,” writes “Stevo” on Hair Loss Help, listing some 30 tactics and treatments he currently undergoes (among them is “Indian needling,” a process whereby one rolls a needle-embedded brush over the scalp). “I had a bigger scar than I expected,” admitted another user, “Varonil.” He adds that he considered shaving his head, but didn’t want to expose that he’d undergone surgery for baldness, “like it was something so horrible that it merited disfiguring surgery.”

Wesley’s decision to enter his profession’s world of maverick experimentation, his “aha moment,” he says, came in 2009. On his way home one evening, he was distracted by a subway ad with a picture of three bald heads. It was a shame, Wesley mused, that men who undergo hair surgery can’t shave their heads because of the scars. He wondered: Why does there have to be scarring at all? Was it possible to go beneath the surface of the skin to take out the follicles, eliminating the side effect that so many men were ashamed of? His mother, an immigrant from Mexico who’d grown up in a rough LA neighborhood before becoming a successful veterinarian, had always encouraged Wesley to take big risks. So when Wesley imagined what he might be able to do for his patients — restore their hair, and do it without the downsides — he became fixated on creating a device to accomplish just that.

With Dr. Unger’s encouragement, Wesley got a job working nights at his friend’s wine shop, swapped frequent restaurant meals for a diet of homemade spaghetti, and put every extra penny towards bootstrapping the piloscope. He rented hysteroscopes, devices typically used to inspect uteri, because they were the “most affordable” existing tool with some similarities to his initial concept. From there, Wesley prodded around on cadavers (a practice that’s actually routine when testing new medical devices) and determined that you could insert a device into a layer of tissue below hair follicles but above nerves and blood vessels. When he scraped together enough money, he hired freelance engineers to help craft early prototypes. Two years and $200,000 later, he’d fashioned a crude device and was eager to try it on live scalps. By luring them with the promise of free FUE grafts, Wesley recruited five of his former patients and his brother-in-law to serve as guinea pigs in an experimental piloscopy session. That study showed that follicles extracted with Wesley’s device grew 45 percent better than those transplanted using FUE. From there, Wesley secured $2 million in seed funding and partnered with CoorsTek to refine the device.

At the ISHRS conference in October, Wesley introduced the piloscope to fellow hair surgeons. Within days, online hair-loss forums lit up with people seeking more information. “I heard from credible sources that Dr. Wesley’s technique is ‘amazing’ BUT there are still some barriers,” wrote a user named “didi.” “I think if this was something really interesting, we would have heard something by now,” replied “Arashi.” “Be patient guys,” advised “Javert.” “Maybe something will leak soon!”

Shortly after his presentation, Wesley was a guest on a popular podcast, The Bald Truth, where host Spencer Kobren mused that piloscopy — what Wesley calls the technique — may become the “new gold standard” in hair-transplant surgery. Over 1,000 people subsequently contacted Wesley to volunteer for his next clinical trial, which starts this month. Wesley plans to share the piloscope with a few of the industry’s top surgeons by 2015, make adjustments based on their observations, then release it more widely. He hopes the piloscope will be freely available to hair doctors by early 2016.

Despite the buzz, some doctors in the field still aren’t convinced that Wesley’s device will succeed. “Those of us who’ve been in scalps for a long time have lots of questions,” says Dr. Carlos Puig, a Houston, Texas-based hair surgeon and former president of the ISHRS. He worries about surgical complications like hematoma (bruising) or other swelling that could lead to infection. And Dr. Jim Harris, a prominent hair transplant doctor near Denver, Colorado, is skeptical that surgeons will be able to access enough scalp from a single small incision, “which means more than one incision will be required,” he said in an email. “This runs contrary to what the piloscope is all about.”

But it’s actually Wesley’s mentor, Dr. Unger, who points out the piloscope’s biggest drawback: it still isn’t a perfect solution for patients who need a lot of hair transplanted. Much like FUE, piloscopy can only remove a limited number of follicles before it starts to create noticeable gaps in existing hair. “Dr. Wesley’s device,” he says, “will at least eliminate the production of scars.”

For many men, that might be enough. “I absolutely would have considered it,” says one of Dr. Wesley’s patients, a man who requested anonymity in part because he didn’t want to draw attention to his thick, red scalp scar from an earlier procedure from a former doctor. “That peace of mind is irreplaceable.”

Back in the lab, Wesley grabs a fresh head to give me a side-by-side comparison of piloscopy and the standard FUE technique. He inserts the piloscope’s arm through an incision in the scalp, and carefully clicks and maneuvers for 15 minutes before switching to the other side of the scalp to core out follicles using a FUE punch.

Watching him concentrate, I wonder whether Wesley’s work in this little corner of science is worth it. After all, he estimates that piloscopy may cost a patient upwards of $20,000 out of pocket, and it isn’t exactly a life-saving procedure. Over dinner the night before, Wesley admitted he once pondered that question too — or at least worried that others were. When he first started in the field, his hands would shake and his face would turn red whenever people asked what he did. “When you go to these fancy schools,” he said, “people expect you to go down a more traditional path.” But over several years and hundreds of cases, Wesley found value in helping patients “just get on with their lives,” even if he wasn’t saving them. “Clearly,” he told me, “this matters to a lot of people.”

After more drilling on the cadaver’s scalp, Wesley shows off the results for comparison. The side on which he’s performed FUE looks like the surface of a Parmesan cheese grater. Even though circulation had long since stopped, blood has risen to the surface of the holes — glistening pinpricks that would, in a living body, gradually harden into scars. The side where the hair follicles have been removed by the piloscope looks entirely untouched — exactly as Wesley had intended. “And that,” he says, pulling off his goggles with a smile, “was my equivalent of a fireworks show!”

Photography by Cole Wilson.

“What’s eccentric about enjoying fashion, dance, and design aesthetics?” Carpenter says, on a phone interview from Vienna, where the ITO made its European debut the night before. “A person who spends most of his free time in the balcony of a church playing an instrument that is essentially separated from the culture of his time, that’s not eccentric? I think that’s nihilistic!”

The pipe organ as we know it developed during the Middle Ages. Until the Industrial Revolution, it was considered the most mechanically complex invention besides the clock. That’s largely because organs have so many moving parts. The keys activate the pipes, which make the notes. There are multiple keyboards, called “manuals” — plus an additional keyboard you play with your feet. A different set of pedals control volume, and controls known as “stops” allow the player to change the harmonic texture, or timbre, of the notes. The expression to “pull out all the stops” came from the organ, because when all the stops are pulled out, it creates a powerful sound. And the notes on the organ, unlike on the piano or harpsichord, don’t die away after they’re hit, but keep ringing until the player takes his or her hand away.

Carpenter, who was homeschooled in rural Pennsylvania by his parents, whom he describes as “ex-hippies,” decided to play the organ not after hearing it, but after seeing it — in a picture of a man mid-keystroke in a volume of his Childcraft Encyclopedia set. He was attracted to the grandiosity of the instrument’s enormous, gilded physicality, as well as the player’s elegant tuxedo. “I was raised on movies — Fellini, Gone with the Wind,” he says. “My mother created this high yearning in me for glamour and drama that was in short supply in the backwoods of Pennsylvania.” He found his vehicle in the traditional pipe organ, and in 2009 became the first organist to ever be nominated for a Grammy Award for his solo album, Revolutionary.

But Carpenter felt hamstrung by his chosen instrument’s immobility. Outside of some concert halls, pipe organs are generally built into the architecture of churches. After playing the pipe organ professionally for a decade, he commissioned his own portable digital version from Needham, MA-based organ builders Marshall & Ogletree LLC. Although company principal David Ogletree wouldn’t say how much the organ cost, he said that other organs his company makes start at around $300,000 and run upwards of a million dollars. “Cameron is a huge proponent of the idea that any great artist should have their own instrument that they play on and bring them with,” Ogletree says.

Portable, by a pipe organist’s definition, is different than your average person’s. The ITO fills up a 90-foot stage from end to end, as compared to a pipe organ, which would be 10 times that size. Its console, which consists of five keyboards and a pedal board, is 64 square feet, weighs 2,000 pounds, and can be broken down into five pieces. It contains a primary CPU connected by a network cable to industrial-level servers, which feed their signals to six eight-channel power amplifiers, which then drive 10 speaker carts and eight subwoofer cabinets. Each of the speakers are 6 feet tall, and half of the subwoofer cabinets are larger than a refrigerator.

Many of the sounds produced by the organ are recorded samples of Carpenter’s favorite organs from around the world, and can be selected using the instrument’s hundreds of stop tablets. The organ also contains samples of non-pipe organs, such as the Hammond organ (the instrument played by Ray Manzarek of The Doors and jazz great Jimmy Smith). The Hammond produces its distinctive sound by synthesizing complex wave forms out of individual sine-wave harmonics, varied in intensity via “drawbars” on the console. The ITO, in contrast, uses proprietary sampling technology to convert complex wave forms into bits of data, which are then stored digitally in the instrument’s tone generator servers for instant recall.

In many ways, Carpenter is following in the footsteps of an earlier organ maverick, Virgil Fox. In the 1970s, Fox, dubbed the “Liberace of the organ,” took a less evolved electronic organ on the road with ambitions to create a more mainstream audience for the instrument. But Carpenter has prickled at comparisons to Fox. He was quoted in the Washington, DC, LBGT newspaper, Metroweekly, as saying: “His audiences probably were as racially diverse as a loaf of white bread.”

Carpenter clearly wants to be recognized as a groundbreaking artist, but his approach has rubbed traditionalists the wrong way. Organ player and Cornell music professor David Yearsley has made a sport of poking fun at Carpenter’s bombastic persona, writing in the online magazine Counterpunch: “With an unsettling mix of messianic fervor and chilling monomania, Carpenter describes the historical inevitability of his vision: ‘There was never a decision to make a touring organ. There didn’t have to be a decision. It was a conclusion.'”

David di Fiore, a prominent American organist who teaches at the Catholic University in Ruzomberok, Slovakia, told The Verge in an email that “I do not take kindly to individuals who trash some of the very greatest instruments of the world in favor of, shall we say, inferior products.”

But there are plenty of people in the performing arts world who are fans of Carpenter’s approach. “He’s so enthusiastic and he’s a master organist,” says Randall Kline, founder and executive artistic director of SFJAZZ of San Francisco, which hosted Carpenter in January (he played on the pipe organ at Grace Cathedral). “I applaud him for pushing the envelope and pushing boundaries.”

Most people will not notice a difference in sound quality between an actual pipe organ and the ITO, said Nick Sheer, the editor in chief of the online classical music magazine, Alto Riot, in an email to The Verge. But what they may notice is that the organ is worth paying attention to. “Nothing screams ‘fun’ about an organ, even for classical music, which is a shame because it’s really the only instrument that can fill a space with a BIG presence that nothing else can match,” Sheer wrote. “Hearing an organ in this manner is going to open a lot of doors for people to be intrigued by its sound.”

Having a portable organ, from the performer’s perspective, is an incredible boon. No two pipe organs are alike, and even digital organs, like the ones made by Marshall & Ogletree, are unique one-offs. This means hours and hours of tweaking and and adjustments are required before each performance, and the organist can’t play the same piece of music the same way on one organ as he does on another. It’s not unlike a pro chef cooking in a different person’s kitchen every night.

Carpenter hopes to see other organists commission their own ITOs and take them on the road. If they do, such instruments might one day even bear his name: according to music blog Lucid Culture, the ITO is akin in transformative potential to the Les Paul guitar, and one day it might simply be referred to using the name of its creator — “the Cameron Carpenter.”

Photography by Michael Hart and courtesy Cameron Carpenter. Video courtesy Sony Music Entertainment.

Then one day three years ago, Walker saw a segment on CNN about an experimental drug trial going on in South Carolina to treat people suffering from PTSD. In the study, patients took MDMA, more commonly known by its street name ecstasy, in the company of psychotherapists. The drug’s famous warm-and-fuzzy ability to enhance a person’s well-being and create a surplus of empathy allowed many of the participants to revisit painful memories without their usual fear. In neurochemical terms, MDMA decreases the fear response in the amygdala. It also stimulates the release of the feel-good neurotransmitter serotonin, as well as oxytocin and prolactin, which cause feelings of love and bonding. After taking the drug, many patients could look at their lives in a new way, reprocess trauma, and rewire their own brains.

“I got it, right away,” says Walker, about watching the segment detailing the experiments. He figured, living right next to a college town, he could ostensibly score drugs easily. Why not try it himself?

“Finding MDMA was harder than I expected,” he said. Asking around and attending a psychedelics event got him connected to some people doing sweat lodge and peyote ceremonies, but no ecstasy. But he finally tracked down ecstasy through a friend of a friend’s son and contacted a former therapist, who agreed to work with him while he was high. Jennifer*, who asked that her real name not be used because she feared she could lose her license, was a self-described “conservative” single mom who was typically scared of drugs. But she felt a warmth for Walker and trusted him. “For some reason, it didn’t feel wrong,” she said. “He had really done his research.” The first time was a therapy session like no other. “He didn’t seem high, he just seemed ‘real,’” she said. “We were able to carry on an intimate conversation for the first time.”

“You lose your sense of connection,” says Walker, describing the feeling of having PTSD. But on MDMA, Walker felt deeply connected, not just to his therapist, but also to himself, something he’d long struggled with.

The drug trials that inspired Walker were the work of MAPS, a nonprofit research organization whose name stands for Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. It’s one of a small handful of organizations worldwide trying to establish scientific evidence that psychedelic drugs have therapeutic value.

In the study looking at how MDMA could treat PTSD, the drug was given in conjunction with talk therapy. Patients lay down in a therapist’s office and listened to soothing music with headphones, wearing eyeshades. They had the option of talking about what they were experiencing, and received counseling before and afterwards to integrate what happened to them while on the drug into their everyday lives. According to MAPS, 83 percent of the 19 people treated in a recent group had breakthroughs in this MDMA-assisted therapy and showed significant improvement in their PTSD symptoms.

“The MDMA allowed me to be my very, very, very best self, and I got to take care of my most broken self with my best self,” says Rachel Hope, a sexual-abuse survivor who participated in the study. MAPS’ results from this study were encouraging enough to the FDA that it was able to expand its efforts into what’s known in drug-trial parlance as “Phase 2 studies.” It’s now doing the same study with four new groups of patients in South Carolina, Colorado, Israel, and Vancouver.

In addition to the MDMA-to-treat-PTSD study, MAPS has also studied how LSD can help soothe anxiety in people with terminal illnesses, and in March received approval to study the effects of marijuana to alleviate PTSD. The latter study will be one of only two government-approved medical marijuana trials ever conducted.

Similarly to MAPS, the Santa Fe-based scientific research group the Heffter Research Institute has been collaborating with scientists at UCLA, Johns Hopkins, and NYU to study the therapeutic applications for psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms. In one study, published in 2011, it investigated how the drug might be used to make terminally ill cancer patients feel less anxious and depressed, and reported that of 11 patients given the drug, 30 percent reported an elevated mood that lasted long after the drug wore off. Now, Heffter scientists are looking at how psilocybin might help cure alcoholism and get people to quit smoking.

In many ways, this research isn’t new. Besides the thousands of years of indigenous peoples’ ritual use of mind-altering plants like ayahuasca and peyote, there was some modern scientific exploration of these kinds of substances, too. Before it was criminalized in 1968, LSD was being used by some doctors as an experimental method for treating alcoholism and anxiety. MDMA, prior to being outlawed in 1985, was used by hundreds of psychotherapists in the United States to treat a variety of phobias, addiction, trauma, and even relationship problems. In an interview with psychiatrist Julie Holland, author of the book Ecstasy: The Complete Guide, one of these therapists recalled: “When it came to, for instance, couples therapy, it was a remarkable catalyst.”

MAPS and the Heffter Research Institute were founded with the mission of reintroducing these types of investigations and documenting their results in peer-reviewed journals. MAPS opened in 1986 and Heffter in 1993, after LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin became illegal. But until the 2000s this type of research would have been virtually impossible. The National Institute on Drug Abuse and negative media coverage throughout the ’80s and most of the ’90s depicted drugs like ecstasy, pot, and acid as a scourge without any therapeutic value. (This was the era of the infamous PSA: “This is your brain on drugs!”) These drugs are all, in fact, categorized as “Schedule 1” by the Controlled Substances Act along with quaaludes and heroin, and are defined as having “high potential for abuse and dependence” and “no currently accepted medical use.” But personnel changes in the FDA and a softening of attitudes within the DEA and Institutional Review Boards, both of which greenlight drug trials, have opened up the field of psychedelic research like never before.

“A lot of the demonization of drugs as evil in all walks of American life has really calmed down,” says Jeffrey A. Fagan, professor of law at Columbia University. “And that’s a great thing. There’s no reason why we can’t think in careful and responsible steps about the therapeutic value of controlled substances.” As scientific evidence begins to mount, psychedelic researchers are looking towards a day when drugs like ecstasy, pot, LSD, and psilocybin will be categorized as “Schedule 2” drugs — that is, drugs that have risks associated with them, like Ritalin or Oxycontin, but can be prescribed by a doctor.

Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, says he envisions a future when hospice centers for the terminally ill sit next to psychedelic therapy centers, and licensed doctors can prescribe MDMA in clinics similar to the way methadone is handled. “Things are lining up in our culture and we have the opportunity to reintegrate psychedelics,” says Doblin. “They’ll have an honored place rather than a suppressed place.”

But it may be too early for Doblin and his colleagues to get too excited. By the FDA’s own reporting, only 5 percent of all investigational new drugs actually make it through the testing and approval process. If any of the drugs that MAPS and the Heffter Research Institute are studying ultimately get approved for therapeutic use, the organizations’ research will have to show positive results among hundreds of participants.

Conducting these larger “Phase 3” studies will cost millions of dollars. Unlike commercial pharmaceutical companies with deep pockets, MAPS and the Heffter Research Institute are privately funded, acting, essentially, as nonprofit pharmaceutical companies. The drugs they’re studying have patents that have expired, making them of little interest to Big Pharma. Anybody could ostensibly make generic versions of them, driving down price and potential earnings.

Raising millions more from the public to continue this research won’t be easy, particularly because at least in the case of the Heffter Institute, psychedelic research operated under the radar for years. Dr. David E. Nichols, president and co-founder of the Heffter Research Institute says that his organization tried to keep its work on the down-low because it was widely considered controversial. Take the research around psilocybin and people with terminal illnesses, for example: “There are a lot of taboos about how people die,” says Nichols. But when Nichols describes the effects the drug can have on people dying of cancer, he presents a moving case that would be hard for anybody to ignore.

“We had one woman say, ‘I realized how precious the people are around me — and I want to enjoy them while I still have time here,’” says Nichols, referring to a cancer patient who took psilocybin in his study and is now deceased. “She said that it changed her completely, and she was able to embrace the life she had left, and it should be there as an option for people to do if they want.”

Nichols believes that, culturally, we’re getting closer to that reality. Young people, he notes, are more accepting of things formerly viewed as social ills, like same-sex marriage and certain illegal drugs.

“The people who thought psychedelics were dangerous drugs are getting old and dying off,” says Nichols. It may be that when future generations approach that time of life, they’ll do so with an open mind, and regulations may follow.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that meth was a Schedule 1 drug, which is incorrect. It is classified as Schedule 2.