Evolution, reason, and liberty. Placemarker.
Posted on 10/06/2002 8:16:21 AM PDT by hispanarepublicana
I was responding to whatajoke who called Ready2go's list a collection of lies. When I asked R2G to provide a citation for the specific instance highlighted by waj he did.
The upshot was that Dr. Patterson DID say the things R2G claimed and it was not out of context therefore whatajoke's claim that they were lies is inaccurate.
How is that putting on blinders?
Yeah, I already commented it is a democRat prelude to another candidate switch with a twist.
They are in the context of never.
So if there's one quote in the whole list which is remotely defensible, all the lies which have been pointed out are allowed to stand as truth?
Creation "Science" is easy.
Here we go w/ the lies again. Is it common practice for scientists that disagree w/ one another to call each other liars?
Or does that only pertain to those scientists that question evolution?
Or to those scientists that wander too far off the reservation?
Frankly, that's what I got from the whole Patterson discussion was that as scientists they are not being creative enough, they are not looking outside their comfy little boxes. Furthermore, that's my whole problem w/ Prof. Dinni, he assumes he knows the TRUTH; well according to Dr. Patterson he doesn't KNOW anything.
False.
Första fynduppgift är från Snogeholm i Skåne och publicerades av N. H. Nilsson i artikeln Luzula albidas arträtt i vår flora, Botaniska Notiser 1882 (Hylander 1971).OK, I don't read Swedish, but I know a date when I see one, and it's clear that old N.H. was getting published in 1882 in something that looks like Botanical Notices. He figures to have missed some of the evidence for evolution that we have now if he started his forty-year search the year Darwin died.
Not exactly a lie, but Ready's quote list doesn't mention that old NH belongs to another time, another level of technology.
The question is not so much "Why continue it?" as "Why start it?" You jump in to save the meaningfulness of one Colin Patterson quote from a list that included Frances Hitching cited as an archaeologist, the ancient "secular creationist" Heribert Nilsson, the odious John Woodmorappe (exposed here, here, and here), "evolutionist" Michael Denton (really!), Tom Kemp, and how many more misrepresentations?What I was talking about in that post, you are still doing. You and scripter were pretending that the remotely defensible Colin Patterson quote was all there is in Ready2go's fraudulent mess. Hunker down real close to the microscope! Swear that you see nothing but what you imagine helps you. Ignore the puddle of slops you're standing in.You and Pietro both, putting your blinders on. How many lies to we have to catch? What's the bet that Ready2go does anything except post the whole list again on some other thread, complete with Hitching, Nilsson, Woodmorappe, "evolutionist" Denton, and all?
What's the excuse for this selective attention span?
As far as the National Academy of Sciences is concerned, Lauterbur does. The IEEE agrees. So does the Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance.
And, so oddly, does Damadian. At the end of this very pro-Damadian article , he lets it slip out.
" "If I had not been born, would MRI have existed? I don't think so. If Lauterbur had not been born? I would have gotten there. Eventually."
And I would have invented quantum mechanics, except those damn Germans got there 75 years ahead of me. Uh-huh.
So, it's a free country. You can believe in Santa Claus, if you like.
Whatever. I consider the attack on Damadian as a "nut" a very telling indication of the objectiveness of the attacker. Furthermore, it is very disappointing when someone I considered "objective" embracing such an attack. Further search makes it clear that both Damadian and Lauterbur have legitimate claim to invention of the technology. I have not attacked Lauterbur or anyone else for any claim of MRI. I have presented what I have found on the subject here. On the other hand, Damadian has been presented as some interloper, who has attempted to take unwarranted credit from others. The accolades speak for themselves. Damadian is no thief, neither is Lauterbur. But my defense of Damadian has been drawn from what I have found on the internet from sites I consider as having no reason to twist the facts. The AIG citation was chosen as it is the only site I found that gave an easy indication of Damadian's views on evolution.
I mentioned further searching. Here it is.
The "Indomitable" MRI
Raymond Damadian's medical imaging machine set off a revolution — but not without controversy
In the vast archives of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History resides the title of ownership to a machine named Indomitable that represents a milestone in the history of medical imaging. Its story is a timeless one of a driven inventor who perseveres through every obstacle only to find that others are racing along similar paths, which in this case led to today's ubiquitous magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines.
Columbia University professor Isidor I. Rabi first observed the quantum phenomenon dubbed nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in 1937. He recognized that atomic nuclei betray their presence by absorbing or emitting radio waves when exposed to a sufficiently strong magnetic field. Within a decade of Rabi's discovery, chemists and physicists had adopted NMR as a standard analysis for substances. But 30-some years would elapse before anyone even considered using the method to scan a breathing human body for cancer.
Enter Raymond Damadian. An experimenter at heart, he brought a fresh perspective to NMR — that of a physician. He had earned a medical degree at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and pursued his medical research career at Brooklyn's Downstate Medical Center.
Damadian's first foray into the field of imaging began when, during a postgraduate stint at Harvard University, he experienced excruciating abdominal pains. Doctors detected nothing using x-rays or other conventional methods short of surgery. Damadian decided a better way must be found to examine the inner workings of the body.
The proverbial lightning bolt struck Damadian in 1969, after he used an NMR machine to investigate his ideas about electrically charged particles in the body. His associate Freeman Cope, a Navy physician and physicist, brought him to a small company on the outskirts of Pittsburgh where the two measured potassium, a common electrolyte, in a strain of Dead Sea bacteria.
At breakfast a few mornings later, Damadian wondered aloud about what would happen "where you have an antenna wrapped around the human body, where you can look at an atom, and then another atom, and then another atom — you could go from one tissue to the next and, without ever invading the body, get the chemistry of each organ." Even Cope thought Damadian's idea far-fetched, but Damadian committed himself to the quest.
In 1970 Damadian returned to test cancerous liver samples from rats with the NMR equipment. On the basis of his electrolyte work, he surmised that the hydrogen signal in cancerous tissue might differ from that of healthy tissue because tumors contain more water. More water meant more hydrogen atoms — two per water molecule. Once the bath of radio waves was switched off, telltale emissions from the cancerous regions would linger longer than those from the healthy, less aqueous regions. It worked. The journal Science published his findings in March 1971. Cancerous tissues could now be detected in humans without resorting to radiation, he reasoned, if a large-scale scanner could be built.
Later that same year, Paul Lauterbur, a chemist and NMR pioneer at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, conceived of a way to use NMR to produce an image. His idea, documented in a notebook, entailed using magnetic field gradients to map out a series of points. In 1973 Lauterbur produced the first NMR image of a small amount of water in a test tube, a feat he published in the journal Nature. Soon after, he imaged the first live subject: a tiny clam.
Though Lauterbur's gradient approach quickly gained favor over Damadian's human scanner method, Damadian filed for a patent on his concept in 1972 and received it in 1974. He forged ahead, determined to make the first human scan. Aided by graduate students, he built the heart of Indomitable, a homemade superconducting magnet, from roughly 30 miles of niobium-titanium wire wrapped on a cylinder. The magnet, a hollow cylinder, spanned 53 inches in diameter, big enough to swallow up a human. On top, the team installed an elaborate liquid helium cooling system to keep resistance in the wire near zero. But the helium leaked miserably, costing $2,000 a week and reducing the magnet's strength.
Without time for modifications, Damadian pushed his team onward. Mike Goldsmith, one of his graduate students, cobbled a wearable antenna coil fashioned from cardboard, capacitors and copper wire. Others fine-tuned the rest: an oscilloscope to monitor the hydrogen broadcasts detected by the coil; a minicomputer to translate the received signals into an image; and a manually operated wooden platform to move the subject. Damadian's moment of reckoning finally arrived on May 11, 1977. Inside his Downstate Medical Center lab, he ran through his checklist, a process that took about 12 hours.
Approval from the school's Human Experimentation Committee seemed unnecessary. Damadian had volunteered himself as the first guinea pig.
With veiled trepidation, Damadian shimmied into the corsetlike antenna coil and sat down on the movable platform inside his shiny, 1 1/2-ton contraption. Without fanfare, Damadian's assistant powered up Indomitable's systems and subsystems.
Seconds passed. Then minutes. The team couldn't detect any radio signal. A half-hour passed. Still no signal. After hours of tinkering, still nothing. "We were very depressed," Damadian recalls. "We had been telling the whole world that we were going to be able to do this thing and we failed."
Eventually the thought occurred that Damadian might be too corpulent for the feeble coil. Apparently fat insulates the body from more than mere cold weather.
For seven weeks after the test, graduate student Larry Minkoff keenly monitored his boss, watching for any odd behavior or ailment. Detecting none, he offered his own svelter torso to science.
The machine appreciated his lean physique. On July 3, 1977, nearly five hours after the start of this test, Indomitable achieved the first human scan and became the first MRI prototype. The crude image, reconstructed first with colored pencils and then by computer from 106 data points, revealed a two-dimensional view of Minkoff's chest — including his heart and lungs.
Damadian trumpeted Indomitable's success to the media, asserting, perhaps a bit rashly, in a July 20 press release that "a new technique for the nonsurgical detection of cancer anywhere in the human body has now been perfected."
A year later, he founded a company to commercialize the technology. Named for his field focusing approach, the Fonar Corporation marketed its first product in 1980, based on the Indomitable prototype.
Today, Indomitable, minus its electronic subsystems, is prominently displayed at the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, on loan from the National Museum of American History. The Hall of Fame inducted Damadian in 1989. A year earlier, Damadian shared the National Medal of Technology with Lauterbur for their independent contributions to MRI technology.
The use of MRI technology, of course, has spread so rapidly that nowadays even dogs and cats benefit from its revealing scans. Improvements to MRI machines have even made it possible to trace thought or perception sequences for brain research.
Despite the technology's success, detractors denounce the first Indomitable image as "meaningless," given its crudeness and vulnerability to bias. Moreover, they view Damadian's so-called breakthrough as a technical dead end: even his own company, Fonar, abandoned the approach and adopted Lauterbur's in the early 1980s. But Damadian considers Fonar's courtroom victory in 1997 over General Electric, which forced the industry giant to award him $128 million for patent infringements, as proof of the priority of his concept.
Raymond Damadian now is racing other experimenters to create a giant MRI machine that will allow surgeons to view patients' interior anatomies while they operate. Historians of science, meanwhile, will review the history of MRI technology to distinguish braggadocio from brilliance, as tough a task as measuring spin on electrons. If claims hold up, someone from the field may again make headlines — as a Nobel Prize winner.
By Julie Wakefield
Yeah tell me about it!
From your pro-Damadian link
But Dr. Damadian's initial work had several flaws. His scanning method relied on a point-by-point analysis of the entire human body, which proved impractical. And it turned out that relaxation rates are not a reliable indicator of cancer, as his paper had theorized.
Nevertheless, his observation of T1 and T2 differences in cancerous tissue was a Eureka moment for Paul Lauterbur. After seeing Dr. Damadian's experiment repeated by a graduate student, Mr. Lauterbur dined at a hamburger joint, where he had a flash of brilliance.
The reason why he was late is interesting. SUNY at the time gave inventors almost no financial incentive to patent discoveries. Had Lauterbur patented MRI, he would have made SUNY rich, but he himself would not have benefitted. So he published instead. After the horse had left the barn, SUNY revised their patent policy, but it was too late.
They could have funded the whole system from that one discovery.
I've embraced neither your nor RWP's position. My #965 is very clear: "Such "inventions" are never attributable to one single individual. Before images could be produced, others laid the ground work. NMR had been around for a while before medical applications were found. " RWP didn't take up an argument with me about that.
Regarding #990
this is an ABUSE!
Slander too...using a good name--person--FR for evil!
BWAAAAAAHAHAHA! You say that like it's a bad thing!
Great question. The reason I jumped in was because I saw general_re's post regarding Patterson and I'm very familiar with the situation. Years ago I heard evo's in talk.origins state the Patterson quote was out of context. After hearing this for so long and starting to believe it, I decided to check into it myself.
That's when I really started to see the selective attention span, the blinders and the obfuscation of the more vocal evos. The quote was most definitely not out of context yet you would never, ever, not in 4.5 billion years ever come to that conclusion if you only listened to evos. You yourself admitted the Patterson letter I posted (the first time here) was more damaging than you imagined. I hope you realized the bias of the piece you were familiar with, once the original letter surfaced.
I don't know how many times I have to say this - I don't read every post in every thread or every thread for that matter. If someone posts an out of context quote, call them on it. Call them on each individual out of context quote. Otherwise, as you said they're just going to keep doing it.
I've had the talk.origins crew pull my words out of context and there's little I can do about it. I can point it out but they don't care as long as it appears to benefit their argument. It's wrong no matter who does it, don't you agree?
If you've researched and I mean really researched the supposedly out of context quotes you mentioned, good for you. If you've only read a link or the title of a link and posted that, shame on you. If I check into another supposedly out of context quote you listed and find out it isn't really out of context, I'm going to be all over you like flies on, um, roast beef. Part of this whole out of context problem is the politics behind it. Truth becomes a casualty. Yes, on both sides.
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