Posted on | March 17, 2025 | No Comments
Mike Magee
“Navigating Uncertainty: The recently announced limitation from the NIH on grants is an example that will significantly reduce essential funding for research at Emory.”
Gregory L. Fenes, President, Emory University, March 5, 2025
In 1900, the U.S. life expectancy was 47 years. Between maternal deaths in child birth and infectious diseases, it is no wonder that cardiovascular disease (barely understood at the time) was an afterthought. But by 1930, as life expectancy approached 60 years, Americans stood up and took notice. They were literally dropping dead on softball fields of heart attacks.
Remarkably, despite scientific advances, nearly 1 million Americans ( 931,578) died of heart disease in 2024. That is 28% of the 3,279,857 deaths last year.
The main cause of a heart attack, as every high school student knows today, is blockage of one or more of the three main coronary arteries – each 5 to 10 centimeters long and four millimeters wide. But at the turn of the century, experts didn’t have a clue. When James Herrick first suggested blockage of the coronaries as a cause of “heart seizures” in 1912, the suggestion was met with disbelief. Seven years later, in 1919, the clinical findings for “myocardial infarction” were confirmed and now correlated with ECG abnormalities for the first time.
Scientists for some time had been aware of the anatomy of the human heart, but it wasn’t until 1929 that they actually were able to see it in action. That was when a 24-year old German medical intern in training named Werner Forssmann came up with the idea of threading a ureteral catheter through a vein in the arm into his heart.
Werner Forssman in action
His superiors refused permission for the experiment. But with junior accomplices, including an enamored nurse, and a radiologist in training, he secretly catheterized his own heart and injected dye revealing for the first time a live 4-chamber heart. Werner Forssmann’s “reckless action” was eventually rewarded with the 1956 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Another two years would pass before the dynamic Mason Sones, Cleveland Clinic’s director of cardiovascular disease, successfully (if inadvertently) imaged the coronary arteries themselves without inducing a heart attack in his 26-year old patient with rheumatic heart disease.
But it was the American head of all Allied Forces in World War II, turned President of the United States, Dwight D.Eisenhower, who arguably had the greatest impact on the world focus on this “public enemy #1.” His seven heart attacks, in full public view, have been credited with increasing public awareness of the condition which finally claimed his life in1969.
Cardiac catheterization soon became a relatively standard affair. Not surprisingly, less than a decade later, on September 16, 1977, anther young East German physician, Andreas Gruntzig, performed the first ballon angioplasty, but not without a bit of drama.
Dr. Gruntzig had moved to Zurich, Switzerland in pursuit of this new, non-invasive technique for opening blocked arteries. But first, he had to manufacture his own catheters. He tested them out on dogs in 1976, and excitedly shared his positive results in November that year at the 49th Scientific Session of the American Heart Association in Miami Beach.
Poster Session, Miami Beach, 1976
He returned to Zurich that year expecting swift approval to perform the procedure on a human candidate. But a year later, the Switzerland Board had still not given him a green light to use his newly improved double lumen catheter. Instead he had been invited by Dr. Richard Myler at the San Francisco Heart Institute to perform the first ever balloon coronary artery angioplasty on a wake patient.
Gruntzig arrived in May, 1977, with equipment in hand. He was able to successfully dilate the arteries of several anesthetized patients who were undergoing open heart coronary bypass surgery. But sadly, after two weeks on hold there, no appropriate candidates had emerged for a minimally invasive balloon angioplasty in a non-anesthetized heart attack patient.
In the meantime, a 38-year-old insurance salesman, Adolf Bachmann, with severe coronary artery stenosis, angina, and ECG changes had surfaced in Zurich. With verbal assurances that he might proceed, Gruntzig rushed back to Zurich. The landmark procedure at Zurich University Hospital went off without a hitch, and the rest is history.
Within a few years, Gruntzig accepted a professorship at Emory University and relocated with his family. He was welcomed as the Director of Interventional Cardiovascular Medicine.
As the Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine reported in 2014: “Unlike Switzerland, the United States immediately realized Grüntzig’s capacity and potential to advance cardiovascular medicine. Grüntzig was classified as a ‘national treasure’ by the authorities in 1980; however, he was never granted United States citizenship. Emory University had just received a donation of 105 million USD from the Coca-Cola Foundation (an amount which in 2014 would equal approximately 250 million USD), one of the biggest research grants ever given to an academic institution, which allowed the hospital to expand on treatment of coronary artery disease using balloon angioplasty technology.”
Gruntzig’s star rose quickly in Atlanta. His combination of showmanship, technical expertise, looks and communication skills drew an immediate response. Historians saw him as a personification of the American dream. As they recounted, “The first annual course in Atlanta was held in February 1981. More than 200 cardiologists from around the world came to see the brilliant teacher in action. The course lasted 3 and 1/2 days with one live teaching case per half day and, with each subsequent course, the momentum for angioplasty increased.”
According to Emory records, “In less than 5 years at Emory, Grüntzig performed more than 3,000 PTCA procedures, without losing a single patient.” Remarkably, after 10 symptom free years, Gruntzig’s original patient, Adolf Bachmann, allowed interventional cardiologists from Emory to re-catheterize him on September 16, 1987, the 10-year anniversary of his original procedure. The formal report documented that the artery remained open, and the patient was symptom free.
As this brief history well illustrates, science has historically been a collaborative and shared affair on the world stage. In an age where Trump simultaneously is disassembling America’s scientific discovery capabilities, undermining historic cooperation between nations, and leaving international public health initiatives in shambles, it useful to remember that institutions like Emory have well understood that science requires international cooperation, and not only has the power to heal individuals, but also is a critical tool of diplomacy.
Video: Andreas Gruntzig (in his own words).
Posted on | March 6, 2025 | 4 Comments
Join the Tesla Divestiture Movement
Send this link to all your friends and contacts.
Speak up! Push back!
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Mike Magee
For aging Boomers, it is impossible not to hear echoes of Apartheid re-emerging with force 3/4 of a century after the battle for social justice here and in far away lands was fully engaged. The Musk assault, disguised as “efficiency” is little more than stealing money from the poor to give to the rich, and widens an already extraordinary income gap.
The assault is large enough to draw condemnation from a dying Pope Francis, forced to remind Trump, Musk and their enablers of the historic Jesus and the tenets of Liberation Theology.
Our college years in the 1960’s were accompanied by chaos and crisis, and guided by fundamental Judeo-Christian values. My college, the Jesuit-led Le Moyne College, was activist to its core. The movement was championed by two priests, brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan. With the assassinations of JFK, his brother Robert, and MLK; LBJ’s Great Society legislative battles; the Civil Rights movement; and the Vietnam War, America was literally on fire at the time.
It was during this decade as well that a largely student-driven movement emerged to oppose Apartheid in South Africa and rapidly spread worldwide. A seminal feature of that movement was mass education and demonstrations with a goal of creating economic pressure on the leaders of South Africa by divestiture of all stocks and investments that benefited the nation.
Elon Musk, born and bred in Pretoria, South African on June 28, 1971, is more than a little familiar with that history. In fact, Silicon Valley, where Musk would eventually accumulate his massive wealth, is also the home to Stanford University, a site of great importance to the Apartheid movement and the battle for human justice. More on that in a moment.
The economic battle against Apartheid would be waged unabated for over two decades, reaching a head on college campuses in the late 1970s. The explosive growth of protests followed the Soweto Uprising, a notorious event in the Soweto Township outside Johannesburg in June, 1976. South African police opened fire on children demonstrating. The riots that followed lead to a stream of horrendous killings including the murder of the South African Student Association leader, Steve Biko, while in custody.
But it was a sit-in, staged by Stanford students to protest Apartheid, that redefined the struggle by focusing on the use of university divestiture to deliver an “economic punch” to the ruling minority.
A decision made by the Stanford Board to oppose a Ford Motor Company stockholder’s proposal to withdraw operations from South Africa provided the trigger. Stanford at the time held 93,950 shares of Ford Stock. In response to the inaction, the Stanford students launched a sit-in (captured by the Stanford Daily student newspaper below) inside the Old Student Union Building at 1 P.M. on Monday, May 9, 1977. When they wouldn’t leave five hours later, 294 students and faculty were arrested including the daughter of the U.S, Secretary of Labor, Jill Ann Marshall.
Six months later, after repeated demonstrations and disruptions on campus, the Board issued a statement that each of their trustees held a “deep aversion to the practice of apartheid”, and adopted a “South Africa-related ethical investment policy.” Still it took until 1985 for the university to “create formal investment policies that explicitly set out guidelines for investing in South Africa-related companies.”
The weight of the world’s economic-induced isolation did eventually prevail. Nelson Mandela was freed after 27 years of imprisonment, and soon united in his efforts with President F.W. de Klerk to achieve universal suffrage. Together they shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize. And a free election followed one year later.
Many of us today, in our 70s and 80s, once again feel the familiar strains of suppression and oppression in the behavior and actions of Musk, as he toggles emotionally between South Africa, the Silicon Valley, and Washington.
Violence is once again in the air, along with intense greed, cruelty, subjugation, and the targeting of the economically oppressed majority. Oligarchal and super-aggressive, sadly there is nothing new here. Musk’s child-like behavior obsesses on a “super-hero” world and visions of Mars as he ravages the inhabitants of Mother Earth.
Given his life origins and path, might he too respond to intensive economic isolation? And this time it is not Ford, but Tesla, that is front and center.
Musk owns 13% of Tesla stock (valued at $120B) which accounts for 34% of his total wealth. His profiteering with Trump is obvious, visible, and accelerating. A Tesla Divestiture could be the most likely way to “deliver us from evil” as it did with South African apartheid on April 27, 1994.
Want to help? 3 easy steps and then one more.
1. Check – Does your organization own Tesla stock in any form?
2. If yes, organize a teach-in, to explain Divestiture (as in SA Apartheid), its’ purpose and utility.
3. Circulate and post an online petition to ask your organization to divest of all Tesla holdings.
. . . and one more, Copy and Share this post with all your contacts.
Posted on | February 26, 2025 | 2 Comments
Mike Magee
“Chance made the situation; genius profited from it,’ says history. But what is chance? What is genius?”
Leo Tolstoy from “War and Peace”, 1867.
Trump and Vance wasted little time embarrassing America today. Following the game plan of “Professional Wrestling” they did their best to bully and emasculate Ukraine’s President Zelensky, who is twice as smart and many times more courageous than the two combined.
They succeeded only in leaving many more questions than answers. Is Trump and Vance using Zelensky as a shield, easily discarded after taking deadly fire from Putin? Are Trump and Vance capable of holding Musk in check, with his commanding wealth, or is he now the de facto play maker for the nation? Will Americans press “return to sender” in the midterm election to avoid further disgraces for our nation?
It has become increasingly difficult to differentiate what is Trump/Vance and what is Republican. The President and Vice-President are now clearly joined at the hip, a modern day version of Napoleon who Leo Tolstoy described in “War and Peace” 158 years ago. And like Napoleon, they have an army of supplicants determined to follow their leaders with the same conviction as the French army whose fate was to stall in the freezing grounds of Mother Russia and be consumed by epidemic typhus and trench fever.
Consider Tolstoy’s reflections, and judge yourself which apply to Trump and Vance, and are fast at work repeating history.
First, their rise . . .
On The Rise To Power
“Seizing power requires that the old . . . is destroyed; old customs and traditions are obliterated; step by step a group of a new size is produced, along with new customs and traditions, and that man is prepared who is to stand at the head of the future movement and bear upon himself all the responsibility for what is to be performed…A man without conviction, without customs, without traditions, without a name, not even a (military man or politician), seemingly by the strangest chances, moves among all the parties stirring up (hatreds), and, without attaching himself to any of them, is borne up to a conspicuous place.”
Early Success
“The ignorance of his associates, the weakness and insignificance of his opponents, the sincerity of his lies, and the brilliant and self-confident limitedness of this man moved him to the head…the reluctance of his adversaries to fight his childish boldness and self-confidence win him…glory…The disgrace he falls into…turns to his advantage. His attempts to change the path he is destined for fail…Several times he is on the brink of destruction and is saved each time in an unexpected way…the very ones who can destroy his glory, do not, for various diplomatic considerations…”
Fawning and Bowing to Power
“All people despite their former horror and loathing for his crimes, now recognize his power, the title he has given himself, and the ideal of greatness and glory, which to all of them seems beautiful and reasonable….One after another, they rush to demonstrate their non-entity to him….Not only is he great, but his ancestors, his brothers, his stepsons, his brothers-in-law are great. Everything is done to deprive him of the last powers of reason and prepare him for his terrible role. And when he is ready, the forces are ready as well.”
Turning a Blind Eye
“The ideal of glory and greatness which consists not only in considering that nothing that one does is bad, but in being proud of one’s every crime, ascribing some incomprehensible supernatural meaning to it – that ideal which is to guide this man and the people connected with him, is freely developed…His childishly imprudent, groundless and ignoble (actions)…leave his comrades in trouble…completely intoxicated by the successful crimes he has committed…he arrives for his role without any aim…(leading to) the decomposition of republican government…and his presence, clear of any (opposing) parties, can now only elevate him.”
Self-Adoration, Mobs, and Conspiracy
“He has no plan at all; he is afraid of everything…He alone, with his ideal of glory and greatness…with his insane self-adoration, with his boldness in crime, with his sincerity in lying – he alone can justify what is to be performed…He is drawn into a conspiracy, the purpose of which is the seizure of power, and the conspiracy is crowned with success….thereby convincing the mob more forcefully than by any other means that he has the right, because he has the power.”
Next, their fall . . .
The Spell is Broken by a Reversal of Chance
“But suddenly, instead of the chances and genius that up to now have led him so consistently through an unbroken series of successes to the appointed role, there appear a countless number of reverse chances….and instead of genius there appears an unexampled stupidity and baseness…”
The Final Act
“A countermovement is performed…And several years go by during which this man in solitude on his island, plays a pathetic comedy before himself, pettily intriguing and lying to justify his actions, when that justification is no longer needed, and showing to the whole world what it was that people took for strength while an unseen hand was guiding him…having finished the drama and undressed the actor(s).”
Posted on | February 21, 2025 | 2 Comments
Mike Magee
The leaders of America’s scientific community seem genuinely surprised by the actions of the past three weeks. They expected to be spared the wrath of Trump because they believed that “Americans of all political persuasions have respect for science and celebrate its breakthroughs.”
Maybe so. But that is an inadequate defense against a multi-pronged attack which includes purposefully selecting unqualified hostiles to key management positions; restricting scientists travel and communications; censuring scientific discourse; and clawing back promised funding for research projects already underway. This “knee-capping” has extended beyond our geographic boundaries with Trump’s vengeful withdrawal from the WHO and the Musk inspired elimination of USAID.
“This too will pass,” whisper Republicans behind closed doors. But even so, the nature of scientific discovery and implementation is a complex rebuild. This is because the path from innovation to invention to implementation is interdisciplinary and requires collaborative interfaces and multi-year problem solving. Not the least of the challenges is gaining access, trust, and cooperation from the general public which requires funding, public education, and community planning.
Take for example a life saving device that is increasingly ubiquitous – found everywhere these days from rural high school cafeterias to the International Space Station and everywhere in between – the Automated External Defibrillator or AED.
It is estimated that AED’s have the potential to save 1,700 American lives a year. Experts say that over 18,000 Americans have a life threatening cardiac arrest outside of a hospital with a shockable rhythm disturbance each year. But 90% don’t survive because access to an AED is delayed or not available. Without a correction in about ten minutes, you are likely to die. This means that the 6 pound AED has be where the patient is, the bystander has to know what to do with it, and there can be no delay.
Creating the modern day AED was a century long affair according to the “Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers” or IEEE . That organization traces its own roots back to 1884 when electricity first sparked the imagination of our nation’s inventors. As they state, the IEEE has “long been composed of engineers, scientists, and allied professionals. These include computer scientists, software developers, information technology professionals, physicists, medical doctors, and many others.”
Mark Kroll, is an electrical engineer and member of IEEE. He enjoys sharing his role and those of physicians and a range of science specialists in the AED creation story. His starting point is to remind listeners that in order for the AED to reach its potential, it had to be “idiot-proofed.”
Without hesitation he labels the AED as “one of the greatest engineering success stories of the last few decades.” His reasoning is threefold:
- “Efficacy of the waveform that delivers the electric shock.”
- “The innovative way that the unit’s energy is stored and delivered.”
- “The AED’s overall ease of use.”
In the early 1900’s, Thomas Edison’s company, General Electric, was more than aware of the lethality of electric shock (electrocution). The switch from direct-current to alternating current transmission was accompanied by a disturbing increase in accidental electrocution deaths of their linemen. They turned to university experts (at institutions like Johns Hopkins) to get to the bottom of it. While experimenting with dogs, they noticed that a second shock sometimes brought the electrocuted dogs back to life.
In 1921, a Hopkins medical student, Claude Beck, took notice. Beck went on to train in surgery at Yale and Harvard under Harvey Cushing, and in 1926 accepted a position as the first Research Fellow in Surgery at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Beck would eventually transition from General Surgery to Neurosurgery and then to Cardiac Surgery, but always wandered back to the lab to support his primary interest, applied research. In the 1930’s he began to pick up where the Hopkins researchers had laid off, doing a series of animal experiments, applying AC current directly to laboratory animals’ exposed hearts and measuring the effects.
He created the first rudimentary defibrillator in the process consisting of “a transformer to isolate the animal from the 110-volt ac wall supply, a variable resistor to limit the current to a heart-safe value, and two metal tablespoons with wooden handles to deliver the jolt to the exposed heart.” A decade later, while operating on a 14-year-old’s heart, the child’s heart began to beat wildly and stopped. In an act of desperation, he rushed his machine from his lab to the OR and shocked the boy’s heart. When the first shock didn’t work, he repeated it and successfully brought him back to life.
By 1965, local Heart Associations had begun training citizens in closed chest massage for heart attack victims, and the first “portable” defibrillators were utilized with limited success. Much of the reason why was their lack of portability (they weighed 70 kg or 154 pounds) and the machine required two operators – one to apply the “clothes-iron” size paddles, and the other to conduct and interpret an electrocardiogram to assure the victim actually had an arrhythmia, and hadn’t simply fainted or suffered a seizure.
Still, a few were saved, enough to encourage the physicists and engineers to innovate refinements that would make the invention capable of mass introduction. These included;
- In 1980, biomedical engineers replaced the bulky paddles with flexible adhesive patches lined with a metal chloride gel.
- The patches reduced skin contact resistance from 150 ohms to 75 ohms, which allowed for a lower voltage shock. This meant that the defibrillators could be built with higher-density electrolytic capacitors and miniaturized semiconductor switches lowering the weight to 20mg or 44 pounds.
- The patches also simultaneously delivered an ECG allowing the machine to be operated by just one individual.
Over the next two decades, further advances in understanding the generation of a functional modern biphasic wave form, creation of software to automatically detect the target arrhythmia and time the delivery of the shock to the exact 100 millisecond moment when it would be most effective, and the creation of algorithms to get around a range of complicators (for example, what if the victim has a pacemaker).
Nowadays the AED is portable, increasingly accessible, and affordable. The HeartStart model by Philips is available on Amazon Prime for $1,723.63. It weighs only 6 pounds with dimensions about the size of a lunchbox (10.5 x 9.5 x 5.75 inches). So as not to confuse consumer operators under stress, there is only one button – and it delivers the shock. The on-off button was removed a few years ago. Now the machine turns itself on when the case is opened. The machine then guides with verbal commands. With patches attached, the machine automatically does a 3-second diagnosis, repeating the process 3 times. Only if 2 of the 3 tests positively identify an arrhythmia is the machine approved to shock.
And yet, for all the progress, the work in converting from invention to innovation to implementation still has a long way to go. And the actions of Trump and Musk, in undermining the communication and funding between multi-disciplinary scientists and their institutions not only complicates. It is potentially deadly.
What lines of AED investigation have been disrupted?
- Data gathering: Each time an AED device is used in the field, the data gathered is transferred to ongoing research databases to measure effectiveness and guide refinements. These efforts require federal funding.
- The expansions of these devices to schools, churches, airports, and the public square; and the training of citizens to confidently employ the devices without delay is a massive challenge, currently utilizing a combination of federal and state employees and non-profit organizations. Many of these individuals and organizations are on Musk’s chopping block.
- Advances in AED design have demonstrated that CPR chest compression, while awaiting AED arrival, not only moves blood out of the heart but also moves air through the lungs. But responders delivering CPR routinely tire and are less effective after 60 seconds. Current research into next generation AED’s suggests that “complex, lower-voltage waveforms (100 to 200 V) that are delivered once or twice per second and cause strong chest constrictions” could eventually replace human administered CPR, and convert arrhythmias as well.
Will Mark Kroll and his medical science collaborators carry the day? He remains optimistic. He says:
“Indeed, we may now be on the cusp of a wave of medical automation that allows ordinary individuals to intervene constructively when other people’s lives are at stake. The AED, we think, serves as an important case study for how to fit sophisticated life-saving medical electronics into health care and rehabilitation outside of hospitals. Advances in portable and easy-to-use equipment, home-based therapy, remote health monitoring, and telemedicine may one day allow patients to avoid long, expensive, and emotionally draining hospital visits.”
Posted on | February 17, 2025 | 4 Comments
Mike Magee
A lot can happen in the blink of an eye. You can lose everything. Your name, your reputation. But they can be replaced… by determination, strength, empathy, faith… A renewed sense of how blessed you are just to be alive. To have people who love you, care for you, but that only happens if you don’t leave before the miracle. When you realize that tomorrow is a new day. That tomorrow brings hope, and hope is where we find redemption.
Wally West (The Flash), September, 2011
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Susan Kirtley PhD is the Director of Comic Studies at Portland State University. She says that comics “inspire many of us to believe in ourselves and our visions for the future, despite any naysayers. It’s not necessary to have a superpower to be a superhero, but rather faith and commitment.”
Elon Musk clearly shares her religious zeal and is a true believer. His outfits alone deserve graphic novel treatment. Eight years before he showed up in the Oval Office in a long length, villain inspired, black overcoat hunched over with four year old “X” on his shoulder as he decimated the employee ranks of the federal government, he said, “I read all the comics I could buy or that they let me read in the bookstore before chasing me away.”
Aaron Day Lewis, author of “American Comics, Literary Theory, and Religion,” draws straight lines between 1980’s comic heroes and their stark attitudes on good vs. evil, science fiction, societal calamity, and visions of afterlife. The heroes are often “cutting-edge inventors and futurists” or “vigilante billionaires” that morph into “genius detectives…I have to imagine Musk absorbed this idea that there’s this heroism to being smart and innovative… Maybe that inspired him to envision himself as a potential superhero, to write his own superhero story.””
In comic world, science and science fiction confidently blend and blur. In ranking the most powerful super heroes of all time, comic book aficionado Maverick Heart (aka aeromaxxx 777) lists “Flash” as the clear winner, stating “Not only does he have super-speed, but once he reaches terminal velocity, he has shown other incredible powers. During an attempt to measure his top speed, he strained every muscle in his body to run at about 10 Roemers, which is 10 times the speed of light.”
“Roemers?” That’s a reference to Ole Roemer (1644-1710), a Danish uber-scientist, whose seminal discovery of the “speed of light” was celebrated on his 340th anniversary in 2016 with the Google doodle above. Details aside (the Earth’s timing of orbits around our sun were measured against Jupiter moon Io’s orbit around the distant planet), he detected a discrepancy in the measurements of the eclipses which amounted to 11 minutes. He attributed the lag to a speed of light he calculated to be 140,000 miles per second, not infinite as was commonly thought at the time.
Ole was the Elon of his day – tutoring France’s King Louis XIV eldest son one day, serving as Denmark’s royal mathematician the next, and still finding time to meddle in politics – getting himself appointed judicial magistrate, tax collector, chief of police, and mayor of Copenhagen. He was apparently as quick as Elon to downsize the manning table, reportedly firing the entire police force because “their morale was too low.” Not long on empathy, he was also known to target “beggars, poor people, unemployed, and prostitutes” – and not in a good way.
He was also science mentor of choice for up-and-comers in physics, astronomy, and natural philosophy. And that is why Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686-1736), a 22 year old equally ambitious scientist and instrument maker sought him out in 1708, two years before Ole’s demise and burial in the Copenhagen Cathedral.
The road that led to that meeting however was bumpy. At age 15, Fahrenheit lost both his parents to an accidental mushroom poisoning. His guardian then arranged a four-year merchant trade apprenticeship in Amsterdam. But when he completed the program at the age of 20 in 1706, he escaped an agreed upon further commitment with the Dutch East India company and his guardians sought an arrest warrant. When he arrived at Mayor Romer’s doorstep two years later, he was seeking business guidance and a pardon from further legal action. He achieved both.
Ole Romer explained that there was currently intense interest in high quality instruments that could measure temperature. For nearly a century, everyone from Galileo to Huygens to Halley had been working on it. He himself had invented one in 1676 while convalescing from a broken leg, but there was great room for technical improvements.
The challenges were threefold – physical construction, the creation of a standard measurement scale, and reproducible accuracy. He spent the next four years refining his glass blowing skills, discovered that mercury was a more reliable reference liquid than alcohol, and realized he could improve on Romer’s scale – which he did, renaming it the Fahrenheit scale in 1717 in a publication, Acta Editorum.
The famous scale was pegged on three different reference points. The first was the point at which a mixture of ice, water and salt reached equilibrium, which he identified as 0 degrees. The second was the temperature at which ice was just beginning to form on still water. This would be 32 degrees. And the final measure was the temperature when the thermometer was placed under the arm or in the mouth. This became 96 degrees. The span between 0 and 96 allowed Fahrenheit to create a dozen divisions with each subdivided into 8 parts. (12 X 8 = 96)
Fahrenheit thermometers were well-crafted and popular in their day. Their success carried the Fahrenheit scale into two centuries of dominance. But in his day, the unpatented invention did not make him rich. He died at age 50, a virtual pauper. In September of 1736, he was granted a “fourth-class funeral of one who is classified as destitute” at the the Cloister or Monastery Church.
Just two decades later, in 1745, another scientist name Anders Celsius arrived on the scene with a new scale. It would be a slow-burn, taking approximately two centuries to officially supersede the Fahrenheit scale everywhere in the world except (not surprisingly) the United States. Built on a scale of 0 to 100, the Celsius scale is also called the centigrade scale.
American scientific hubris has forced America’s math students to memorize conversion formulas and engage in what management guru, Tom Peters, would call unnecessary “non-real work.”
A down and dirty one: F -30 /2 = C.
Or more accurately: (F-32)/1.8 = C
In the meantime, comic book fantasists with a taste for standard-fare wild tales can purchase the “Trump Trading Card – Assassination Attempt- Gem 10 Graded – Trump Collectible Card” on Amazon Prime with a 17% discount for $19.99.
But for you Trump voters with an unhealthy taste for the supernatural and unknown, Elon is more likely the “Ole” unlikely to disappoint. As Jeffrey J. Kripal, Professor of Religion, Rice University, and reviewer of “American Comics, Literary Theory, and Religion” wrote, “We are not who we think we are. Like the superheroes themselves, we each have a secret identity (or identities). The conscious ego or unitary self is a useful construction, but also an illusion.”
Professor Kripal does leave us with some hope for redemption, with futures not yet fully determined or decided. In fact, these comic circumstances may unveil “super-selves that can become an important part of a new soul-making practice that will result in future selves and future stories in which to live and flourish. Our afterlives… are constantly being rewritten, redrawn, and seen anew. By us, as super.”
In God we pray. Amen
Posted on | February 13, 2025 | 2 Comments
Mike Magee
“The technological leaps of the 1900s — microelectronics, antibiotics, chemotherapy, liquid-fueled rockets, Earth-observing satellites, lasers, LED lights, disease-resistant seeds and so forth — derived from science. But these technologies also spent years being improved, tweaked, recombined and modified to make them achieve the scale and impact necessary for innovations.” Jon Gertner, author of “The Idea Factory.”
The Idea Factory is a history of Bell Labs, spanning six decades from 1920 to 1980. Published a decade ago, the author deliberately focused on the story inside the story. As he laid out his intent, Jon Gertner wrote “… when the drive to invent has become a mantra, Bell Labs offered us a way to enrich our understanding of the challenges and solutions to technological innovation. Here, after all, was where the foundational ideas on the management of innovation were born.”
One of the scholars Gertner likes to reference is Clayton Christensen. As a professor at Harvard Business School, he coined the term “disruptive innovation.” The Economist magazine loved him, labeling him in 2020 “the most influential management thinker of his time.”
A process thinker, Christensen deconstructed innovation, exploring “how waves of technological change can follow predictable patterns.” Others have come along and followed his steps.
- Identify a technologic advance with a potential functional market niche.
- Promote its appeal as a “must have” to users.
- Drop the cost.
- Surreptitiously push aside or disadvantage competitors.
- Manage surprises.
Medical innovations often illustrate all five steps, albeit not necessarily in that order. Consider the X-ray. Its discovery is attributed to Friedrich Rontgen (Roentgen), a mechanical engineering chair of Physics at the University of Wurzburg. It was in a lab at his university that he was exploring the properties of electrically generated cathode rays in 1896.
He created a glass tube with an aluminum window at one end. He attached electrodes to a spark coil inside the vacuum tube and generated an electrostatic charge. On the outside of the window opening he placed a barium painted piece of cardboard to detect what he believed to be “invisible rays.” With the charge, he noted a “faint shimmering” on the cardboard. In the next run, he put a lead sheet behind the window and noted that it had blocked the ray-induced shimmering.
Not knowing what to call the rays, he designated them with an “X” – and thus the term “X-ray.” Two weeks later, he convinced his wife to place her hand in the line of fire, and the cardboard behind. The resultant first X-ray image (of her hand) led her to exclaim dramatically, “I have seen my death.” A week later, the image was published under the title “Ueber eine neue Art von Strahlen” (On A New Kind of Rays).
William II, German Emperor and Prussian King, was so excited, he rushed the physicist and his wife to his castle in Potsdam for a celebrity appearance and lecture on these “invisible rays.” The New York Times was considerably less excited when they reported on January 19, 1896 on the lecture and Roentgen’s “alleged discovery of how to photograph the invisible” labeling the scientist “a purveyor of old news.”
But one week later, on January 26, the paper had a change of heart, writing: “Roentgen’s photographic discovery increasingly monopolizes scientific attention. Already numerous successful applications of it to surgical difficulties are reported from various countries, but perhaps even more striking are the proofs that it will revolutionize methods in many departments of metallurgical industry.”
By February 4, 1896, the paper was all in, conceding that the “Roentgen Ray” and the photo of wife Anna’s hand had “nothing in common with ordinary photographs.” The following day, the Times used the term “X-rays” but never spoke of it again until Roentgen’s death in 1923, when the Times obituary called it “one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.” And in 1901 Roentgen received the Nobel Prize in Physics. Roentgen never sought a patent on his discovery, feeling to do so would be unethical. He donated the 50,000 Swedish krona prize to the University of Wurzburg.
And now to the other “XX” in the room. When Musk purchased Twitter, and renamed it “X”, he was focused on political domination not technologic innovation. He financially inserted himself into Trump World for a small (to him) investment of $300 million. In this oligarchal cocoon, he has been fast at work dismantling federal agencies, often with his 4-year old son (also named “X”) on his shoulders. His targets are laced with obvious conflict of interest. For example, the NTHSP (National Highway Traffic Safety Program) in the Department of Transportation (slatted for destruction) has been investigating Tesla’s high rate of auto-pilot fatal accidents; and the end of federal subsidies for widespread electric charging stations benefits Musk financially since Tesla already enjoys a prohibitive lead over his competitors.
But can Trump and Musk manage the surprises ahead? As Erik Brynjolfsson PhD (MIT), who currently directs Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab and teaches a seminar titled “The AI Awakening: Implications for the Economy and Society,” likes to preach, innovation that promises increased productivity not infrequently encounters paradoxical blowbacks. These come in many forms. For example, dramatic new chemicals that greatly expand crop yield may also be found to irreparably harm delicate ecosystems that hang by a thread.
Or more relevant to Musk, powerful social media platforms, like “X” number 1, may be undermined by the very explosion of misinformation, hate messaging and foreign propaganda that they enabled. Just ask Kelly Ann Conway’s daughter, Claudia Conway, how her mother’s unleashing of “alternate facts” during Trump’s first term has impacted her family trajectory – big time blowback.
Lawless actions by the executive branch have energized city, state, and federal legal practitioners. And Musk’s appearances, with “X” number 2 purposefully poised on his shoulders in the Oval Office, drew a special Press introduction this week from the President. “This is X, and he’s a great guy — high IQ,” said Trump. All of this has sent Musk approval ratings into the cellar along with Tesla sales in Europe and the U.S. In the latest poll of Republicans, 3/4’s do not want Musk to have “a lot of influence” in the Trump administration. And Tesla has experienced its first ever annual sales decline.
More “surprises” likely lie ahead. As legendary Tech Analyst, Kara Swisher, says the “bromance between Trump, Musk may be doomed by egos: There can only be one.”
Posted on | February 6, 2025 | 1 Comment
In 2018, during Trump’s first assault on Medicine’s compassion, understanding and partnership, The House of Medicine stood tall. Will they this time around?
Virginia Commonwealth University’s’s Steven H. Woolf MD, MPH asks that question today in JAMA. It deserves a careful read HERE.
Here is a taste of his insightful commentary (“How should Health Care and Public Health respond to the new US Administration”) directed at the House of Medicine.
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“During the transition period following the November 2024 presidential election, a lingering question was whether the controversial proposals floated during the campaign were merely rhetoric or serious policy intentions. The first week of the new administration erased any doubts that the candidates meant what they said. A flurry of executive actions sent shock waves through the scientific, medical, and public health communities….
“The profession—scientific, medical, and public health societies, journals, academic institutions, and advocacy organizations—must quickly decide how to respond or whether to respond. The profession is diverse. Some in the profession voted for Trump and undoubtedly support at least parts of this agenda, and their response to recent developments may be a thumbs-up….
“However, is there a bridge too far, a point where it is no longer appropriate for medicine and public health to accede? Under what conditions must the profession stand its ground and vocally oppose problematic policies or disinformation? The scientific community is expected to respect diverse viewpoints, but in the final analysis, all share a professional responsibility to oppose policies that threaten the health of patients or the population. To condone policies that the profession knows will compromise health—or to remain silent and look away—is to be complicit in putting population health at risk….
“In the end, politicians and the public are free to ignore medical advice and pursue policies that compromise health and safety, and they likely will, but this does not relieve the profession of its responsibility to make the dangers clear. At the bedside, respect for the freedom of patients to make their own decisions does not excuse physicians from the obligation to present adequate information to make informed choices and to advise against options that the physician believes will do more harm than good. The duty to the population is no different. Regardless of the popularity or powerful interests behind a policy, the responsibility of the profession is to speak out when the science is clear that it will threaten health or safety. Silence is not an option.”
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