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Heart Surgeon Takes Notes from da Vinci
vivekg writes "Leonardo da Vinci probably never thought he had the proverbial Holy Grail to a revolution in heart surgery. Almost 500 years after da Vinci's death, intricate diagrams of the human heart made by him have inspired a British surgeon to pioneer a new way to repair damaged hearts."
Old science is not necessarily bad science. In fact, the hallmark of good science is how well is holds up over time and continued testing. Granted, Leonardo de Vinci was not "practicing" modern science. Rather, he was using the oldest form of science which is observational science. However, this approach is still valid and tends to be the most robust type of science which, like Leonardo discovered can also lead to the most controversial reactions from people who have investments in the current understanding of certain topics........... *cough* *cough*, like evolution.
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It's funny how much you can get done once you blow bureaucracy out of the way. Exhuming corpses for study probably broke a billion laws back then as well, but so much has come from his approach.
Then again, I might be confusing the Da Vinci Code with reality. Damned fiction based on facts. It's probably safest to just say that I HEARD that he exhumed corpses. I didn't know him personally.
Am I missing something or does the article say nothing about what the new technique was? And why only the Da Vinchi drawings were the only ones that could have lead to this discovery.
Do you really know how far he is / was?
Most of the time you don't really know until you get there.
You have got to be kidding me! This passes for news? Some doctor says 'whoaaaa mannnn, Da Vinci made some nice drawings' and then invents a new way to repair the heart, and the media links the two together. There is NO mention of what the new procedure consists of or why Da Vinci's drawings helped him invent it. I find it very hard to believe the Da Vinci really had some understanding of heart physiology that we don't and when the article makes no effort to convince me otherwise...well, color me skeptical.
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Go read http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/ backstories and learn why you should never listen to the mass media when it comes to scientific discoveries. I'm really surprised this got posted to
Either you have been brain washed by Marxists or you really have no understanding of economics. See this: http://www.mises.org/etexts/mises/anticap.asp
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
From the article:
His anatomical knowledge came from his post-mortem dissection work, which the Church forbade.
Great minds of the past shouldn't just be honored for their great contributions to art and science. In fact, it may almost be more important that they defied the religiously dictated laws of their times. Even Isaac Newton, who may the most important scientist in our history, dabbled in occult beliefs that some feel led to his gravitational theory.
I tip my hat to Leonardo, Galileo, Newton, and others for having the guts to stand up to the religion to advance humans forward.
Advice for my fellow geeks: before seeking out that threesome you dream of, you might see what a TWOsome is like first.
Uh. What's that? Are you advocating that schools should stop teaching science altogether or that just public school should stop teaching science? If you think the problem is with the public schools, then the obvious strategy is to increase the funding so that they can do their job right. If you're saying that teaching science in schools should be dropped altogether, then I don't know what to say.
Not teaching science in schools is not an option.
The owls are not what they seem
Leonardo was a genius and good drawsman BUT it has nothing to do with modern heart surgery.
Nowdays U have movies of heart in action taken by cameras traveling through it - so every medicine student or engineer can spend hours watching how heart and its subelements work.
Old drawings have no chance to stand up to this. Thats all - unless this "doctor" spend most of the time sleeping instead of learning and his only knowledge comes from exhibitions hes visiting with family from time to time
I think the article is improperly attributing Leonardo's role in the discovery. Leonardo made accurate anatomical drawings of the heart from which the heart surgeon took inspiration. In this sense, I see da Vinci as having provided artistic inspiration for this medical discovery, much as artists throughout the ages have provided inspiration for countless scientists. It is likely that the heart surgeon could have made his discovery based on any other accurate drawing or illustration of the human heart, but da Vinci's beautifully drawn anatomical sketches provided the inspiration. Admitedly da Vinci often blurred the line between art and science, but in this case it seems to me his role is that of an artist and inspiration, not of a scientist.
Uh. No they don't. Where you live, they have the right to take their kid out of the class and homeschool them. Over here, there is not even the homeschool option.
I pay taxes and my money is used on stuff that I don't approve of. Do I have a problem with it? Of course not. That's the way how a society works! Sharing and making compromises. "My tax money should not be used on stuff that I don't like" is nothing but self-centered Ayn Rand inspired whining.
The owls are not what they seem
Personally I believe that the problem is the increasing centralization of control over the schools. This includes all Federal interference and all state interference.
Schools should be funded locally, and have local control. Unfortunately, the various levels of government have stolen the sources which were traditionally used to fund schools, so local funding is a problem which needs solution. This doesn't make it any less necessary. If the local students are to be taught lies, it should be because the local citizens have decided that that's what they want their children taught. (They will suffer the appropriate consequences...but their folly should not be forced on everyone else.)
This has been my position for over 2 decades, and everything I've seen during that period of time has only reinforced the opinion. Only at the college or university level should the state (e.g., Idaho or Pennsylvannia) have any involvement. The states should run the colleges, because specialized education needs to draw from too large an area of population for local funding to be reasonable. They should be tuition free, but have appropriately difficult admissions requirements, and may limit the number of open spots for admission. (The state can decide how many English majors it needs to educate, and how many BioChemists, and fund that many classes of the appropriate type.)
At all levels, private schools should continue to be an option.
Some will argue that this will unfairly penalize the children of poor cities. In my experience in those cities the federal government alone extracts more funds nominally for education than are expended on schooling by all levels of government combined. This may not be true everywhere, but it's certainly largely true. Also, the most important parts of schooling don't require much in the way of funding, though they do require the cooperation of the parents. Thus if the parents will not cooperate with the local school, the school should have the right to refuse to allow the student to attend lessons. Disruptive students are not something that should be tolerated...but when schools are used in the way in which they are currently, that's what you get.
That said, not all students are academically inclined. There needs to be a flexible "tracking" system, which allows those mechanically inclined to develop their skills as well as a track which allows the academic students to develop THEIR skills. I envision one hour per day during elementary school (after third grade) where students experience are instructed in "enrichment specialties", which should include things like band, set theory (arithmetic should be mainstream...by rote, and sorry), wood/metal/plastic shop, etc.
OTOH, this requires a fairly large elementary school. Other benefits would accrue if elementary schools were local enough that all students could walk to them. That way the neighborhood kids would study together. This would probably mean that, e.g., grades K-3 would all be taught in the same room by the same teacher. (If you have enough students to split this in two, perhaps you could split them by distance rather than by age.) This WOULD be an acknowledged combination school and babysitting service, and play areas would be an important part of the situation. Teachers in this class would be expected to LIVE in the school, and keep it open. Provisions for substitutes would be necessary. Etc. Class sizes would be small, but the salaries would be enough to live on given the free rent. (I envision that most of these teachers would start out as mothers raising their kids. So room would need to be sufficient to handle not only the teacher, but also a husband or other partner and their children. With a safe fenced area around it which is the school yard.)
N.B.: A lot of what I'm proposing is just my idea spinning of how it might ideally work out. The important parts are:
1) No central control.
2) Local choice on funding & curricula & environment.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
He wants to make $$ off of his "secret Da Vinci heart procedure", whether it's real or not.
Yep, that's interesting, but I believe that the past has proven (I think there are some examples in mathematics) that lost knowledge can take a very long time to be rediscovered...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Part of medicine is research. You can be sure the first patients to receive a new technique have signed appropriate waivers.
You have the soul of an HMO administrator.
He sited Leonardo's drawings as being inspirational. Inspiration tends not to be entirely rational.
If the technique he has developed works, the answer in this case would be "no".
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
When sales of Britney outstrip sales of the Emperor Concerto something is out of whack.
Could it be your own inflated value of classical music that's out of wack? Britney Spears sucks in more ways than I can count, but I see no intrinsic value in classical music over any other form of music. You really want to know why Britney Spears outsells music that doesn't suck? It's because the music industry thinks its only consumer is the 13-22 crowd. Britney Spears captures probbably half of that age range, so she sells a lot.
Base and rank commercialism has overtaken sensibility. Our choices are far less choices and far more subtle (and sometimes otherwise) manipulation of our choices by mass market driven money making machines.
No, the problem is most companies are run so they can't see past say 5 years in the future (and those are the visionary companies). It's all about short term profits and "playing it safe". It's nothing to do with base and rank commercialism and everything to do with short sighteness.
For example, the food industry: did you know that one of the most healthy foods you can eat is tuna?
No I didn't, nor do I believe it from some guy repeating it on slashdot.
Did you know that some brands of tuna have artificially introduced certain appetite inducing chemicals?
I find this to be a very specious claim. Please provide some kind of reference for this and exactly what you mean by "appetite inducing chemicals". Anything that tastes good could potentially be an "appetite inducing chemical".
Now, to relate all of this back to the original article. What percentage of medical breakthroughs and research have anything to do with cumulative knowledge? What percentage is just purely money driven?
I don't even know where to start with this statement. My guess is a lot of research isn't driven by pursuit of money. Just look at the research done at major universities and you'll find most of it isn't profit driven. Research that isn't profit driven is important because companies don't like funding things whose value isn't immediately apparent. When you take on that attitude you get a bit of tunnel vision. There's obviously a lot of research that is profit driven. What's wrong with that? Without it you'd just have less research going on, not more. Unless the profit driven research is somehow threatening the non-profit driven research I fail to see any problem with profit driven research.
It's only my opinion, but "we" as a civilization will show true evolution when we take use of true knowledge and think less about everything as "business". Business is an artifact. Truth and knowledge serve more faithfully
I'd agree that this current trend toward looking at everything as "business" is pure insanity. I'm not sure that "truth and knowledge" are the perfect goals we should all be striving for. "truth and knowledge" are abstract ideas and not actual goals to be sought after.
AccountKiller
I would mod everyone talking about evolution in school and tax dollars off topic. Serioulusly this article is about a new heart repair surgery inspired by Leonardo. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Evolution v. Intillegent design debate.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.