discovery walk, stanford university.
May. 6th, 2012 11:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
duccioYesterday I spent about half the day at Stanford where a 5 year project of my sister's was officially opened by the medical faculty there. Here is a website with information and lots of pictures of the Discovery Walk.
These are two panels of the project. The panels are black granite from Mongolia that have been laser etched with archive pictures and quotes from Stanford medical research faculty members who have increased scientific medical knowledge during their time at Stanford. The quality of this stone etching technique is astonishing and the pictures look like subtlety detailed high quality photographs; the quotes rendered in a variety of point sizes are sharp and easily readable.
circulatory system and organs.
I read quite a lot of the material and it was presented in an understandable way pointing out various areas of research over time that the researchers at the medical school had concerned themselves with. I got the impression that someone in an interesting field with promising potential would be invited to Stanford and given a lab, a budget, and a go ahead to follow their research.
There was an overriding emphasis upon science and the scientific method, but several times I found quotes where someone would describe suddenly having an idea and then spending years trying to see where their idea might lead, and the illustrations and more quotes would document this area of study. There were groupings concerned with bacteria, parasites and unusual diseases from overseas (that San Franciscans would have to deal with because of it's maritime interests in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), viral studies, radiation work as imaging technology and later as medical therapy, even utilizing their linear accelerator for bombarding tumors with electrons, genetic research, the human genome project, stem cell research, in which Stanford is currently a world leader... This all was quite impressive, and it was amazing to realize how knowledge is accelerating and blossoming, and how so much is so new.
Well, they had speeches by big timers on the medical faculty, and then the landscape architect introduced my sister who talked about the project and thanked her collaborators and all the people at Stanford who had been so supportive.
Then we walked around and studied the project more closely. Later I saw people I knew, friends of my sister. Here are two of them: Ira Nowinski, photographer, and Rebecca Solnit, author, talking with my brother in law, Tim.
Ira takes photographes backstage at the San Francisco Opera among many other projects he is famous for. (Here he has a Fujifilm Finepix x100 rangefinder digital camera [poor man's Leica M3].) He knows all of the big opera singers and told me an extended story about Luciano Pavarotti from the late 1970s involving Lamberghini's and stolen costumes, and getaways (in the costumes) in limos.
After I left to go home, I walked back to the parking structure which is next to the Cantor Art Center, went over there, and looked around with my cousins for awhile at the bronzes in the Rodin sculpture garden.
These are two panels of the project. The panels are black granite from Mongolia that have been laser etched with archive pictures and quotes from Stanford medical research faculty members who have increased scientific medical knowledge during their time at Stanford. The quality of this stone etching technique is astonishing and the pictures look like subtlety detailed high quality photographs; the quotes rendered in a variety of point sizes are sharp and easily readable.
circulatory system and organs.
research with bacteria.
I read quite a lot of the material and it was presented in an understandable way pointing out various areas of research over time that the researchers at the medical school had concerned themselves with. I got the impression that someone in an interesting field with promising potential would be invited to Stanford and given a lab, a budget, and a go ahead to follow their research.
There was an overriding emphasis upon science and the scientific method, but several times I found quotes where someone would describe suddenly having an idea and then spending years trying to see where their idea might lead, and the illustrations and more quotes would document this area of study. There were groupings concerned with bacteria, parasites and unusual diseases from overseas (that San Franciscans would have to deal with because of it's maritime interests in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), viral studies, radiation work as imaging technology and later as medical therapy, even utilizing their linear accelerator for bombarding tumors with electrons, genetic research, the human genome project, stem cell research, in which Stanford is currently a world leader... This all was quite impressive, and it was amazing to realize how knowledge is accelerating and blossoming, and how so much is so new.
Well, they had speeches by big timers on the medical faculty, and then the landscape architect introduced my sister who talked about the project and thanked her collaborators and all the people at Stanford who had been so supportive.
Then we walked around and studied the project more closely. Later I saw people I knew, friends of my sister. Here are two of them: Ira Nowinski, photographer, and Rebecca Solnit, author, talking with my brother in law, Tim.
Ira takes photographes backstage at the San Francisco Opera among many other projects he is famous for. (Here he has a Fujifilm Finepix x100 rangefinder digital camera [poor man's Leica M3].) He knows all of the big opera singers and told me an extended story about Luciano Pavarotti from the late 1970s involving Lamberghini's and stolen costumes, and getaways (in the costumes) in limos.
After I left to go home, I walked back to the parking structure which is next to the Cantor Art Center, went over there, and looked around with my cousins for awhile at the bronzes in the Rodin sculpture garden.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-07 07:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-07 07:38 pm (UTC)