Rick Dobson: Life from Ice Boxes to LED Lights.
In Cleveland in the days after World War II, I lived in a row house in the University Circle area of Cleveland, Ohio. I remember the guy coming to deliver a big block of ice to keep our food cold. It went into the Icebox, the forerunner of the refrigerator. No electric refrigerators in those days. We did not watch TV. We did not have one. There was a phone on the wall in the hallway. Stark living by today’s standards. But we survived and we thrived.
I don’t remember when, but we got an electric refrigerator. Our first TV is one that my dad built from scratch. A colleague of his designed it. My dad gathered the aluminum for the frame, the resistors, capacitors, wires, and electrical vacuum tubes (the forerunner of today’s transistors and solid-state electronics) to put it together. He built 2 at the same time. He used an old oscilloscope screen with its green background for the picture tube.
Fast forward to the late 1960s. I was a graduate student at Cornell University, studying Theoretical Chemistry, the quantum physics of chemical structures and reactions. There were no computers when I started in 1966. Soon thereafter, a building on campus was remodeled to hold an IBM 360 Computer. It was a real clunker by today’s standards. Here is a picture of one similar to the one at Cornell:
I had to learn Fortran programming language. I did. I submitted a program on punch cards. We used a well established program to generate tens of thousands of data points, all printed on paper. IBM developed a spreadsheet program, the first of its kind. My task was to do a trial run. I did. Submitted the program to run in the wee hours of the morning. The program ran for 2 or 3 hours by its nature and the hourly cost was several hundreds of dollars an hour at night. It cost well over $1000 an hour during the day, in 1967 dollars. It was a Friday night, I think it was even less cost on weekends. It crashed. I mean it crashed the whole system at Cornell University. They had to call in the computer people in the wee hours of the morning to get it up and running again. They looked at my program, made some suggestions for minor changes. And I did it again Saturday night. And again on Sunday night.
Ultimately, the problem turned out to be an error in the design of the spreadsheet program and not an error on my part.
It was a time of social unrest and social growth for many people. The Viet Nam war was raging. The War on Poverty was starting. Racial inequality was being exposed on and off-campus. I took part in volunteer antipoverty work in rural areas, writing occasional articles for an alternative local newspaper. We were a designated part of Appalachia. Drawn to the call to work with people, I dropped out of graduate school after completing a Masters degree. A colleague in the antipoverty office asked me why I did not go to medical school. So I applied, and I got in by the skin of my teeth.
Fast forward to finishing a residency in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, I opened my own office with some high-tech equipment that enabled us to watch the patterns of movement of the spine during weight lifting. We could also monitor the activity of the spinal muscles during weight lifting and side bending. My practice grew to include people with chronic back pain. And that led me to see that people with chronic pain have real problems, ones that the medical profession as a whole simply ignores. For example, pain enhances the force of some of our neuromuscular reflexes, and that can lead to falls and injuries for people in pain. (Details are in my article, Chronic Pain and Falls.)
Throughout my life, I have also been a “do-it-yourselfer.” Car repairs (in the pre-computer days), carpentry, painting, electrical, plumbing. I still tackle these jobs around the house. I retired from medicine in 2011, and I have been working in the electrical department at our local Home Depot. Serendipity does not end there. While trying to help a customer solve a refrigerator light problem for someone who had a brain injury, I did some research. Unfortunately, the customer had a refrigerator with a built-in LED light, and we could not change the light. While doing some research, serendipitously, I found a website that may change our understanding of the nervous system and how it works. The site is www.neuronresearch.net. It is free information. The concept is simple: quantum mechanical mechanisms provide the electrical power of the neuron, as opposed to the energy needed for cellular maintenance. Electrons are “pumped” across specialized areas of the cell membrane. OK, simplifying that a bit, the concepts developed by James Fulton on that website bring the concepts of the nervous system into the 21st century, using current concepts of electronics, solid-state theory, quantum mechanics and all the other scientific concepts that evolved since the mid-1900s. It is very complex, but I hope to start conversations that make it easier to understand and to apply.
And that is where I am at now. A firm believer in social justice, and in basic science. Hoping to write to help us gain progress in both. Thanks for reading and keep the ideas flowing.