Word: mcmahon
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...Thomas McMahon, McKay Professor of Applied Engineering and author of McKay's Bees, and his research assistant Peter Greene specialize in biomechanics, a newly invented scientific method which unites biology and engineering. Constructing synthetic models of limbs, eyes and other body parts, the pair attempt to solve medical problems by discovering, simply, what went wrong in the mechanics. They have already made headlines for their peculiar specialty: in 1977, they experimented with artificial legs to discover the ideal running ground and came up with the celebrated new track for Harvard's Indoor Tennis and Track Building. The track has both...
Their latest toy is an artificial eye. Though McMahon and Greene are just starting to apply biomechanics to myopia, its potentials alone signify a major advance. The field has long been what Greene calls a "thicket of controversy." No study has conclusively settled the origins of myopia, nor how much heredity or eye-strain is to blame. "Myopia has been associated with everthing from pregnancy to tooth decay," Greene says. Researchers agree only that myopia is the abnormal bulging of the back of the eye or "posterior sclera," usually around the gap for the optic nerve...
Recent experiments with animals led McMahon and Greene to apply their methods to eyes. Dr. Torsten N. Wiesel, professor of Neurobiology, and Dr. Elio Raviola, professor of Anatomy at the Medical School, did experiments in which they forced monkeys to read, and found that they quickly developed myopia. Dr. J. Wallman at New York University discovered that chickens, when forced with blinders to look straight ahead instead of sideways as they normally do, also become near-sighted. These results indicate that myopia can be induced. Further, because the animals' eyes degenerated at similar rates, which can be computed mathematically, McMahon...
...McMahon and Greene set to work building a mechanical eye. The model immediately provided two insights. First, strain occurs when the two oblique muscles--the muscles in the back of the eye which control its rotation--are tensed greatly, as in reading. The tension stretches and strains the sclera. Though such stretching is normally elastic, if it is both frequent and extreme enough the sclera does not return to its normal position and myopia develops. Second, the eye is least able to reduce strain near the point where the optic nerve enters the eye--Greene draws an analogy with...
Outside shooting from Crimson guards Ann Scannel, Nancy Boutillier, and Stacie McMahon, which normally compliments the inside boardwork of Smith and Holpuch, was missing throughout the game, another decisive factor in the Bruin victory...