The Rest of the Story 4

Allan was born in Johannesburg, the youngest of three children. He spent his teenage years in Cape Town, and was interested in debating, tennis, and acting. He also loved astronomy, which triggered an interest in physics and mathematics.

At the University of Cape Town he studied electrical engineering, following in the footsteps of his father and brother. But he soon abandoned engineering to learn physics and to engage in mountaineering. After he obtained his undergraduate degree, he went to England and studied physics at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. 

He didn’t finish his PhD, however, because in Paul Dirac’s quantum mechanics class he fell in love with one of his classmates, an American physics student named Barbara Seavey. He wanted to marry her but he had no money. As fortune would have it, there was a teaching position available back in Cape Town. He married Barbara and returned home to South Africa. There he was happy, but isolated from cutting edge research. He didn’t seem posed for success in the high-power and competitive world of physics.

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At Cape Town Allan eventually qualified for a sabbatical, which Barbara wanted to spend in the United States. So they traveled to the Harvard cyclotron, where he worked on nucleon-nucleon scattering with Norman Ramsey and Richard Wilson. While on sabbatical leave, he was offered a position at Tufts University.

Allan became interested in a computer imaging problem: how to make a 2-d image of the inside of an object based on projections taken at different angles. He published the results of this work, but it didn’t make a splash. No one seemed to care about his algorithm. So he went back to his research on high energy physics.

Several years latter, researchers suddenly began to pay attention to Allan’s imaging work. Medical doctors were interested in forming two- or even three-dimensional images of the body using X-rays applied from different directions. Allan’s algorithm was exactly what they needed.

These studies became fundamental to the emerging field of medical imaging. It was so important, that in 1979 he—Allan MacLeod Cormack—and Godfrey Hounsfield shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the invention of computed tomography.

And now you know the rest of the story.

Good day!

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Imagining the Elephant:
A Biography of Allan MacLeod Cormack.
by Christopher Vaughan.

This blog post was written in the style of Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story” radio program. You can find three other of my “The Rest of the Story” blog posts here, here, and here.

The content is based on Cormack’s biography on the Nobel Prize website. You can read about tomographic reconstruction techniques in Chapter 12 of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology.

Allan MacLeod Cormack was born on February 23, 1924, exactly 100 years ago today. 

Happy birthday Allan!

Forman Acton (1920 – 2014)

Numerical Methods That Work,
by Forman Acton.

The American computer scientist Forman Acton died ten years ago this Sunday. In Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie and I cite Acton’s Numerical Methods That Work. For readers interested in using computers to model biological processes, I recommend this well written and engaging book.

Before he died, Acton donated funds to establish the Forman Acton Foundation. Here is how their website describes his life:

Forman Sinnickson Acton was born in Salem City, and he went on to change the world.

Born on August 10, 1920, he began his education in the Salem City school system before attending private boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy and college at Princeton University. He graduated with two degrees in engineering toward the end of World War II, during which he served in the Army Corps of Engineers and worked on a team involved in the Manhattan Project.

After his service, he earned his doctorate in mathematics from Carnegie Institute of Technology, helped the Army develop the world’s first anti-aircraft missiles and became a pioneer in the evolving field of computer science.

Acton conducted research and taught at Princeton from 1952 to 1990, during which time he wrote textbooks on mathematics at his cabin on Woodmere Lake in Quinton Township, Salem County. When he turned 80, he joined the Lower Alloways Creek pool to stay in shape, swimming six days a week for 14 years.

He died on February 18, 2014, in Woodstown, New Jersey, but not before he anonymously donated thousands of dollars toward scholarships for Salem City School District students, some of whom were just then graduating from college. Before he passed, he made it clear to friends and confidants that he wanted these students to have access to the incredible educational experiences he enjoyed.

Eight months after his passing, the Forman S. Acton Educational Foundation was officially incorporated to ensure that all of Salem’s youth also have a chance to change the world.

Sometimes I will read a passage and say to myself “That’s exactly what students studying from IPMB need to hear.” I feel this way about Acton’s preface to Numerical Methods That Work. Russ and I include many homework problems in IPMB so the student can gain experience with the art of mathematical modeling. Below, in Acton’s words, is why we do that. Just replace phrases like “solving equations numerically” with “building models mathematically” and his words apply equally well to IPMB.

Numerical equation solving is still largely an art, and like most arts it is learned by practice. Principles are there, but even they remain unreal until you actually apply them. To study numerical equation solving by watching someone else do it is rather like studying portrait painting by the same method. It just won’t work. The principle reason lies in the tremendous variety within the subject…

The art of solving problems numerically arises in two places: in choosing the proper method and in circumventing the main road-blocks that always seem to appear. So throughout the book I shall be urging you to go try the problems—mine or yours.

I have tried to make my explanations clear, but sad experience has shown that you will not really understand what I am talking about until you have made some of the same mistakes I have made. I hesitate to close a preface with a ringing exhortation for you to go forth to make fruitful mistakes; somehow it doesn’t seem quite the right note to strike! Yet, the truth it contains is real. Guided, often laborious, experience is the best teacher for an art.

 

Robert Kemp Adair (1924–2020)—Notes on a Friendship

Robert Adair.
Photo credit: Michael Marsland/Yale University.

I try to write obituaries of scientists who appear in Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, but for some reason I didn’t write about Robert Adair’s death in 2020. Perhaps the covid pandemic over-shadowed his demise. In Chapter 9 of IPMB, Russ Hobbie and I cite seven of his publications. He was a leader in studying the health effects (or, lack of heath effects) from electric and magnetic fields.

Recently, I read a charming article subtitled “Notes on a Friendship” about Adair, written by Geoffrey Kabat, the author of Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks. I have Getting Risk Right on my to-read list. It sounds like my kind of book.

I admire Adair’s service in an infantry rifle platoon during World War II. I loved his book about baseball. I respect his independent assessment of the seriousness of climate change, although I don’t agree with all his conclusions. He certainly was a voice of reason in the debate about health risks of electric and magnetic fields. He led a long and useful life. We need more like him.

I will give Kabat the final word, quoting the last paragraph of his article.

In early October 2020, Bob’s daughter Margaret called me to tell me that Bob had died. I looked for an obituary in the New York Times, and was shocked when none appeared, likely due to the increased deaths from the pandemic. I wrote to an epidemiologist colleague and friend, who knew Bob’s work on ELF-EMF [extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields] and microwave energy, and who had served on a committee to assess possible health effects of the Pave Paws radar array on Cape Cod. My friend Bob Tarone wrote back, “Very sad to hear that. Adair was not directly involved in the Pave Paws study, but we relied heavily on his superb published papers on the biological effects of radio-frequency energy in our report. He and his wife were superb scientists. Losing too many who don’t seem to have competent replacements. Too bad honesty and truth are in such short supply in science today.” He concurred that there should have been an obituary in the Times.

“Havana Syndrome”: A post mortem

“Havana Syndrome”: A Post Mortem,
by Bartholomew and Baloh.

Remember the Havana Syndrome? You don’t hear much about it anymore. Recently I read an article titled “‘Havana Syndrome’: A Post Mortem,” by Robert Bartholomew and Robert Baloh. These two researchers are long-time skeptics who don’t believe that the Havana Syndrome was caused by a physical attack on US and Canadian diplomats. They are also critical of the National Academies report that suggested microwave weapons might be responsible for the Havana Syndrome. I came to a similar conclusion in my book Are Electromagnetic Fields Making Me Ill?, where I wrote

At this time, we have no conclusive explanation for the Havana syndrome. We need more evidence. Measuring intense beams of microwaves should be easy to do and would not be prohibitively expensive. Until someone observes microwaves associated with the onset of this illness, I will remain skeptical of the National Academies’conclusion.

Bartholomew and Baloh believe that the Havana Syndrome is psychogenic. In my book, I make an analogy to post traumatic stress syndrome: it’s a real disease, but not one with a simple physical cause. Below I quote the abstract from Bartholomew and Baloh’s paper.

Background: Since 2016, an array of claims and public discourse have circulated in the medical community over the origin and nature of a mysterious condition dubbed “Havana Syndrome,” so named as it was first identified in Cuba. In March 2023, the United States intelligence community concluded that the condition was a socially constructed catch-all category for an array of health conditions and stress reactions that were lumped under a single label.

Aims: To examine the history of “Havana Syndrome” and the many factors that led to its erroneous categorization as a novel clinical entity.

Method: A review of the literature.

Results/Conclusions: Several factors led to the erroneous classification of “Havana Syndrome” as a novel entity including the failure to stay within the limitations of the data; the withholding of information by intelligence agencies, the prevalence of popular misconceptions about psychogenic illness, the inability to identify historical parallels; the role of the media, and the mixing of politics with science.

In Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie and I discuss the health effects of electromagnetic fields. It’s crucial to understand the physics that underlies tissue-field interactions before postulating a nefarious role for electromagnetic fields in human health. If you suggest an idea that is not consistent with physics, prepare to be proved wrong.

A final note: Baloh and Bartholomew write

In September 2021, the head of a U.S. Government panel investigating “Havana Syndrome,” Pamela Spratlen, was forced to resign after refusing to rule out [mass psychogenic illness] as a possible cause... A former senior C.I.A. operative wrote that Spratlen’s position was “insulting to victims and automatically disqualifying.”

I think we all owe Pamela Spratlen an apology. Thank you for your service.

 Was “Havana Syndrome” a case of mass hysteria? DW News.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ljf1TVWTSlQ

 

Havana Syndrome: Tilting at Windmills?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IWnhmqVsPc
 

 The Havana Syndrome: A Disorder of Neuropolitics?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izeVdfkYnIo