Industry Day / Nobel Laureate

Today at the summer school was industry day, where we had presentations from quite a few different companies in the biomedical imaging field. The presentations were on a whole quite good, but a few of them seemed more like sales pitches (how they think we have money to spend, i have no idea). It was pretty interesting to see that the job possibilities in europe, switzerland, and the US for when I finish are pretty bright and there are a number of companies working on projects where I imagine my phd experience would make me quite valuable (Scanco Medical who does bone imaging and strength analysis in preclinical and a few clinical systems, and Varian who does image guided radiation oncology therapy work). The later is located in California but has a huge imaging lab near Zurich, so presumably I could live in one place and visit the other quite often, but I am getting way ahead of myself. Another of the talks was on the new Helium Ion Microscope, which normally would not have particularly interested me, but since I got to watch 2 or 3 experiments on a scanning electron microscope, I am kind of an expert in the topic, haha if only.

Tonight at the ETHZ they had a nobel prize winner, Richard Ernst (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1991/ernst-autobio.html), give a talk about Spectroscopy and Fourier Transforms. Sadly it was after nearly 8 hours of back to back lecturing, 6 cups of coffee, 2 glasses of wine, and a beer, needless to say I was a little out of sorts. He was quite amusing for an old smart guy. I was expecting it
to be dry and I-want-to-kill-myself-boring, but he wasnt. In fact he started by talking about how it always bothered him that a frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, had invented the fourier transform, so he want back and did some research and realized that Euler, surprise a swissman, had invented basically the same technique
quite a few years earlier. After that I was hooked, his talked wandered around a bit, and spent way too much time on 2 and 3d nmr for protein structure determination (ick), but it was pretty interesting to here how he thought about some things. For example he talked about the impulse response of a function being a police man knocking on the
door (input/impulse) and a women opening up and screaming (output/response), while the frequency response of a system as a man coming to the door singing a song (input) and the women answering the door (output/response) being so inspired that she sings louder
(amplitude), but a little slow so shes slightly delayed (phase shift). Had my professor for Signals and Systems used that analogy I would have gotten everything immediately.

But really the point of this whole interlude, was that when he got his first MRI, the doctors came back to him and said, yep everything normal. And he was crushed, because he really wanted his brain to be special or completely different or something along those lines.
Suprisingly or not, I had the same sort of impression when I saw my first MRI, I mean I certainly didnt want to see a brain tumor or anything, but something a little bit out-of-wack would have been appreciated, or at least a "whoa, ive never seen anything like that before". Anyways, I dont need some silly labcoat-wearing scientist to
tell me my brain is special, I know that already.