Entries Tagged 'anatomical Models' ↓

It was exactly a year ago that a rather curious proposition arrived by email from the novelist Robert Harris. We’d been friends many years before, but had lost touch.

He explained he was now working on the plot for his next novel. the main character was a brilliant physicist-turned-hedge-fund-manager called Alex Hoffman; he wanted him married to an artist. my art, he said, bore a direct correlation to the novel’s central theme: artificial intelligence. Robert asked if he could bestow my art on his fictional artist, Gabrielle. there would be no other similarities.

Intrigued, I drove to meet Robert in a country pub hidden in the Berkshire Downs. the novel’s title, he disclosed, was The fear Index, so called because of the revolutionary system developed by Hoffman to make billions on the financial markets through tracking human emotions – in this case fear. “I remembered your art,” Robert said, “and I thought, it’s absolutely perfect. It’s an opportunity for Gabrielle to meditate on the brain and on her husband – the brilliant physicist who is losing his mind – and for her husband and other characters in the book to reflect upon it.”

I could follow his train of thought. a few years ago, while studying anatomy at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, I developed a technique to reconstruct the human body, and in particular the brain, by drawing or engraving details from MRI or CT scans on to multiple sheets of glass, layer by layer. This method allowed me to expose the extraordinary inner architecture concealed beneath the surface of the human form, thus creating the most objective form of portraiture. the image floats ethereally in its glass chamber, but can only be viewed from certain angles; from above and the side it vanishes and the viewer suddenly finds himself staring into a void. Since then I’ve undergone a series of MRIs myself to create self-portraits, and, most recently, reconstructed a 2,000-year-old Egyptian child mummy to reveal its human form in 3D without disturbing its bandages.

After I agreed to Robert’s request, he began to painstakingly elicit every detail of my working life; it was like being complicit in your own identity theft. “Your studio is a Victorian-style conservatory?” he confirmed. “Fine. I’ll build that on to the Hoffmans’ house.” I provided an inventory of my studio, which was replicated down to the tin of Taylors of Harrogate Earl Grey Tea in which I keep my drill heads. during the months of writing, I received updates from Robert. In the opening chapter, Alex Hoffman is violently attacked and is forced to undergo a scan. It struck me that if Robert was so meticulous in his research he should perhaps submit himself to an MRI; meanwhile I could create his portrait from his scans. he agreed in the name of research.

I turned for help to Dr Stephen Golding, a radiologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and collaborator on my previous art projects. It was agreed Robert would be scanned out of hours one evening, for a fee to be paid to the hospital. Robert lay motionless in the tunnel for 35 minutes, allowing the radiologist to acquire the scans I requested – axial, coronal and sagittal. he emerged looking stunned. “It was a completely out of body experience,” he said. “I could feel something tangible passing through my head… It was bizarre. It makes one conscious of one’s brain as a piece of high-end machinery.”

Several weeks after finishing the novel, he was in reflective mood: “The book is meant to be a modern gothic novel with echoes of the great 19th-century gothic novels. Lying on the slab, with all that electricity going on around, was pure Frankenstein. It just tied in perfectly with the way the book developed and helped reinforce it.”

When finally presented with his finished portrait, Robert stared at the glass cube, transfixed at seeing the inside of his head laid bare, his brain floating before him. “I had expected not to recognise myself but it’s unmistakably me. It’s like looking at the equivalent of an interior monologue – very apt for a novelist. the more one looks at it the more one sees: it’s impersonal and yet almost embarrassingly intimate.”

Angela Palmer’s work on the Egyptian mummy will be exhibited at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, November 26 to March 2012; angelaspalmer.com

Part of a series on the communications industry

Growing up in the Midwest during the 1960s, Howard Bragman was fairly convinced he was an alien.

“I was fat and Jewish and gay in Flint, Mich.,” he says, “and that makes you a bit of a Martian because there’s not a lot of peers, there’s not a lot of role models to really look to.”

Today, Bragman has made a name for himself in Hollywood as the go-to publicist for helping celebrities come out of the closet — they call him the “gay guru.”

Bragman says he sees his work as a way to create the role models he never had growing up.

“These people are heroes because coming out is the single most important act any gay person can do,” he says. “Because every bit of research that’s ever been done says if you know more gay and lesbian people, you are gonna support our rights.”

Like Calling In ‘The Lone Ranger’

Bragman got his start in public relations after landing a job at a small Chicago PR firm with a huge client — Anheuser-Busch.

“I’ll say really from the first week I was in PR, I loved it”, Bragman says. “I loved PR because there was a bit of the Wild West — you could write your own rules.”

When Bragman launched his own Los Angeles PR firm in 1989, one of his first pro bono clients was Joseph Steffan, a U.S. Naval Academy midshipman who was forced to resign after revealing he was gay.

Twenty years later, Bragman was brought in after word leaked that Family Ties star Meredith Baxter — who at the time was not openly gay in public — had gone on a cruise sponsored by a lesbian travel company with her girlfriend. Baxter says she was panicked.

“This was just so not fair,” Baxter says. “I didn’t know what to do … And my manager said ‘You need Howard Bragman.’ this was kind of like, ‘You need the Lone Ranger.’”

Bragman quickly booked Baxter an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today Show.

Baxter says outing herself on national TV was a terrifying experience, but she credits Howard Bragman with giving her the courage to do it.

“He said, ‘As soon as it’s done, you’ll be free.’ And we walked out the door of NBC studios in December and it was the most freeing thing I had ever experienced,” Baxter says.

Howard Bragman, Smooth Operator

Over the years, Howard Bragman has worked with actors, athletes and musicians. And while Meredith Baxter was a case of quick crisis control, Bragman says he prefers to spend plenty of time with his clients, getting to know them like a therapist would so he can help them reach their goals.

So when former NBA player John Amaechi wanted to write a New York Times best-seller about being a gay sports star, Bragman made it happen by setting up a lot of interviews and personally prepping Amaechi for each and every one.

“My immediate memories are of a very cold and crazy New York where I was getting into a car that we had for the day,” Amaechi recalls. “[Bragman] would be in there with two phones to his ears. He would hand me a third phone to do an interview while we were driving to another studio to do another interview.”

It was chaotic, but it worked. The book was a hit.

‘An Unusual PR Guy’

But Howard Bragman’s moves aren’t always smashing successes. He’s come under fire for taking on clients that some say are anti-gay, like actor Isaiah Washington who used a gay slur to describe one of his Grey’s Anatomy co-stars or the San Diego hotel owner who gave $125,000 in support towards California’s ban on gay marriage.

It’s puzzling because Bragman is himself married to another man.

Fred Karger is the founder of Californians against Hate, a group that boycotted that San Diegan’s hotels a few years back.

“He’s an unusual PR guy,” Karger says. “I thought well maybe because of Howard’s background as an activist … he would end this boycott by negotiating with the sponsors of this boycott — and that never happened.”

Bragman counters that the hotel owner was truly sorry and made amends by offering money to gay groups.

“I sleep well at night because I’ve neutralized him,” Bragman says. “I think that’s a win.”

And anyways, Bragman says he likes the challenge of working with all kinds of people and confronting the parts of their lives that are harder to deal with.

After all, that’s what coming out is all about, he says — whether you’re a politician admitting to an affair or an actor revealing a disease, like when actress Catherine Zeta-Jones recently went public about having bipolar disorder.

Bragman has become such an expert in these situations that he gets brought in as a consultant for ABC News to comment on things like Zeta-Jones’ disclosure.

He’s one of the few publicists you’ll regularly see in front of the camera, but he says his favorite place is still behind the scenes. his next big project is to help launch a book and documentary about Chastity Bono, daughter of Cher and Sonny Bono, who recently became a man.

May 04, 2011 11:08 AM Eastern Daylight Time 

WARSAW, Ind.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Biomet, inc. announced today that its Sports Medicine business unit has received the 2011 Medical Design Excellence Award (MDEA) for the outstanding product design of its JuggerKnot™ Soft Anchor. The MDEA program honored 37 medical products with the award, four of which are implants. The JuggerKnot™ Soft Anchor is designed to allow surgeons to reattach soft tissue to bone in multiple locations in the body, and represents the next generation of suture anchor technology. Unlike conventional metal and plastic devices, the JuggerKnot™ Soft Anchor is made entirely from suture, allowing for substantially less bone removal. The smaller anchor diameter allows multiple anchors to be placed in various anatomical locations.

“The JuggerKnot™ Soft Anchor is a giant step forward in suture anchor technology. it features a unique combination of high strength and small size in an all-suture design”

“The JuggerKnot™ Soft Anchor is a giant step forward in suture anchor technology. it features a unique combination of high strength and small size in an all-suture design,” noted Kevin Stone, Biomet Sports Medicine’s Vice President of Research and Development. “The JuggerKnot™ Soft Anchor provides features not available in metal and plastic anchors to repair soft tissue and helps patients get on the road to recovery.”

The Medical Design Excellence Awards (MDEA) competition (MDEAwards.com) is the only award program that exclusively recognizes contributions and advances in the design of medical products. Entries are evaluated on the basis of their design and engineering features, including innovative use of materials, user-related functions that improve healthcare delivery and change traditional medical attitudes or practices, features that provide enhanced benefits to the patient, and the ability of the product development team to overcome design and engineering challenges so that the product meets its clinical objectives.

an impartial, multidisciplinary panel of third-party jurors with expertise in biomedical engineering, human factors, industrial design, medicine and diagnostics conducted a comprehensive review of the entries.

The 2011 Medical Design Excellence Award winners will be honored at a presentation ceremony on Wednesday, June 8, 2011, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City in conjunction with the Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) East 2011 Conference and Exposition.

About Biomet

Biomet, inc. and its subsidiaries design manufacture and market products used primarily by musculoskeletal medical specialists in both surgical and non‐surgical therapy. Biomet’s product portfolio encompasses reconstructive products, including orthopedic joint replacement devices, bone cements and accessories, autologous therapies and dental reconstructive implants; fixation products, including electrical bone growth stimulators, internal and external orthopedic fixation devices, craniomaxillofacial implants and bone substitute materials; spinal products, including spinal stimulation devices, spinal hardware and orthobiologics; and other products, such as arthroscopy products and softgoods and bracing products. Headquartered in Warsaw, Indiana, Biomet and its subsidiaries currently distribute products in approximately 90 countries.