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Q. Can a person with a disability get accepted into a medical school?A. Yes, disabled people get accepted into medical schools all the time. See the article below why it is important. However, they may not be able to enter certain specialties.Doctors With Disabilities: Why They’re ImportantFrom war hero to white coat: A wounded veteran's journey to Harvard Medical SchoolJohns Hopkins Magazine -- April 1999Doctors With Disabilities: Why They’re ImportantCredit Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesDr. Gregory Snyder discussing patient cases with colleagues during his rounds at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He uses a wheelchair and says that he’s sometimes mistaken for a patient while working: “It reminds us that at some point we’ll all be patients. And perhaps, when we least expect it.”Growing up, my sister never let our family get a blue “handicapped” placard for the car.Born three months prematurely with cerebral palsy, she uses forearm crutches to get around. But she’d rather walk half a mile across a mall’s parking lot than take the reserved spot next to the entrance. (I found this particularly exasperating during the holiday season when a ready parking spot is more precious than the presents inside.)But the prospect of less stigma and greater support for people with disabilities was a central reason my family immigrated to the United States. My sister was born the same year the Americans with Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) was passed — a law that reaffirmed America’s moral and practical commitment to equality.More than 20 percent of Americans — nearly 57 million people — live with a disability, including 8 percent of children and 10 percent of nonelderly adults. And while the medical profession is devoted to caring for the ill, often it doesn’t do enough to meet the needs of the disabled.People with disabilities are less likely to receive routine medical care, including cancer screening, flu vaccines and vision and dental exams. They have higher rates of unaddressed cardiovascular risk factors like obesity, smoking and hypertension.Compared with nondisabled adults on Medicare, disabled people on Medicare are more than twice as likely to forgo care because of the cost, and three times as likely to have difficulty finding a doctor who can accommodate their needs.The typical response to these types of deficiencies is a call for greater attention to the issue in medical school curriculums. That may be part of the solution. But I’ve sat through enough online modules and uninspired lectures to recognize their limited utility.Far more powerful for medical trainees and the profession would be having more students, colleagues and mentors with disabilities, who understand how a particular impairment does — or doesn’t — affect daily life.It’s Not Even the Disability ItselfOften the barrier to medical care isn’t the disability but a health system poorly equipped to handle it: a lack of transportation, accessible medical equipment and safe methods of transfer. These structural problems can be compounded by cultural ones: stigma, communication challenges and inadequate training for clinicians and staff.In one recent study, researchers called more than 250 specialty practices to make an appointment for a fictional patient they said was partly paralyzed because of a stroke and could not transfer herself from a wheelchair to the exam table. More than 20 percent of offices refused to book an appointment, saying that their building was inaccessible to wheelchairs, they didn’t have height-adjustable exam tables, or their staff wasn’t trained to move the patient. Many practices that did agree to make the appointment admitted they didn’t have the necessary equipment to move the patient, and might need to skip parts of the physical exam.More worrisome is recent evidence that patients with disabilities don’t always receive the same treatments for the same medical conditions. One study compared breast cancer treatment for women with and without disabilities. Researchers found that women with disabilities were much less likely to undergo breast-conserving surgery than full mastectomy — and those who did receive breast-conserving surgery were less likely to get radiation afterward, which is needed to eradicate residual cancer cells. Over all, they were about 30 percent more likely to die of their cancer.Disabled individuals are more likely to feel that their doctors don’t listen to them, treat them with respect or explain decisions properly. Doctors often make false assumptions about the personal lives of patients with disabilities. For example, women who have difficulty walking are much less likely to be asked about contraception or receive cervical cancer screening, in part because doctors assume they’re not sexually active. Disabled patients are also about 20 percent less likely to be counseled to stop smoking during their annual checkups.Dr. Gregory Snyder, a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in BostonCredit Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesDoctors With Disabilities Are Changing the ProfessionMore than 20 percent of the American population lives with a disability, but as few as 2 percent of practicing physicians do — and the vast majority acquire them after completing training. Few people with disabilities are admitted to medical school: Medical students with disabilities also have higher attrition rates than nondisabled students, partly because, despite the A.D.A., they don’t always receive the support they need.A study published last year examined the “technical standards” — expected cognitive and physical abilities — that medical schools require for admission. (Schools are free to determine these standards as they see fit in accordance with the A.D.A.) Researchers found that while most medical schools had such statements listed on their websites, many statements were difficult to find, and only one-third of schools explicitly said they would support accommodations for disabilities. More than 60 percent lacked information on who would be responsible for providing accommodations, the student or the school.Increasingly, though, doctors with disabilities are changing the profession. Dr. C. Lee Cohen, a resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, has a condition that resulted in partial hearing lossin both ears. She uses an amplified stethoscope to listen to patients’ hearts and lungs, and previously used an FM transmitter device to more clearly hear lectures in school.“I’m better at communicating with older patients who have hearing loss,” Dr. Cohen said. “From my experience, I know that when you can’t hear well, your brain parses words and syllables in a certain way. Instead of asking people to repeat themselves, I ask them to rephrase themselves. So when my patients are hard of hearing, I know which sounds they’ll have trouble with. I rephrase so they can understand.”Dr. Gregory Snyder, a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, has paralysis in his legs after a spinal cord injury during medical school. He uses a wheelchair and says that he’s sometimes mistaken for a patient while working. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.“It reminds us that at some point we’ll all be patients,” he said. “And perhaps, when we least expect it.”Over the course of our lives, most of us will acquire a disability: More than two-thirds of Americans over the age of 80 have a motor, sensory or cognitive impairment.Dr. Snyder remembers the difficulty of adjusting to life as a patient after his accident, and the long road to recovery. But he says his disability and rehabilitation have fundamentally changed the way he cares for patients — for the better.“I would have been this six-foot-tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian doctor standing at the foot of the bed in a white coat,” he said. “Now I’m a guy in a wheelchair sitting right next to my patients. They know I’ve been in that bed just like they have. And I think that means something.”There’s good reason to believe a more diverse work force — one that includes doctors with disabilities — would be good for patients and doctors. Patients of various backgrounds tend to feel more comfortable with physicians like them, and that’s true for people with disabilities as well.Having mentors and colleagues with disabilities fosters understanding of different abilities and perspectives, and creates an environment that challenges negative biases about those groups. My sister, as just one example, was the beneficiary of policies (the A.D.A.) and a community that have allowed her to thrive: She recently graduated from medical school and is now training as a radiation oncologist.Dhruv Khullar, M.D., M.P.P., is a physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and a researcher at the Weill Cornell Department of Healthcare Policy and Research. Follow him on Twitter at: @DhruvKhullar.From war hero to white coat: A wounded veteran's journey to Harvard Medical SchoolAug 14, 2017, 1:06 PM ETMichael Koenigs/ABC NewsArmy vet comes back from massive bomb injuries to start Harvard Medical SchoolSeven years before Greg Galeazzi put on a white coat at Harvard Medical School, he wore Army fatigues while serving a year-long deployment in Afghanistan.In May 2011 a roadside bomb tore off Captain Galeazzi’s legs and much of his right arm, just a month before he was expecting to return home.“It felt like I was an empty coke can on train tracks getting hit by a freight train moving at 100 miles per hour,” said Galeazzi.Without a medic on the ground, there was no available pain medication.“All I could do was scream,” Galeazzi recalled. “It’s hard to put into words that sickening, nauseating feeling to see that my legs were just gone.”Due to his unit’s remote position in northern Afghanistan, Galeazzi had little hope of receiving timely medical support.“I put my head back and just thought, 'I’m dead,'” he said.He passed out. Upon waking just minutes later, he discovered that his soldiers had successfully applied tourniquets to both his legs and right arm, which had been nearly severed at the shoulder. A half hour later a Medivac helicopter arrived to take him to the trauma bay.“What I found out then was that the real nightmare was really just beginning,” said Galeazzi.Michael Koenigs/ABC NewsGreg Galeazzi is training to become a doctor at Harvard Medical School after a 2011 roadside bomb in Afghanistan tore off both his legs and much of his right arm.more +He endured over 50 surgeries, hundreds of hours of physical therapy, and numerous months as a hospital in-patient.But the traumatic experience and new limitations did not diminish Galeazzi’s dream of becoming a doctor.“Not only did I still want to practice medicine, but it strengthened my resolve to do it,” explained Galeazzi.Over the next few years, Galeazzi took more than 18 pre-medical courses and achieved his desired score on the MCAT entrance.Galeazzi was accepted into Harvard Medical School this past year and is the only student who uses a wheelchair in his class of 165 students. He has not yet decided what type of medicine he’ll eventually practice, but is leaning toward a primary care field.“You’re that first line of defense. You need to know a little bit about everything. I like the idea of being a jack of all trades,” he said.Galeazzi also looks forward to marrying his fiance Jazmine Romero next year.“Even though I’ve gone through this journey, it’s not lost on me how unbelievable this ride has been,” said Galeazzi.Johns Hopkins Magazine -- April 1999H E A L T H A N D M E D I C I N EAiming HighBy Melissa HendricksPhotos by Mike CiesielskiIf Michael Ain believed in playing the odds, he never would have become a doctor. Rejection letters from more than 20 medical schools--as Ain received--would have convinced most people to change career plans.But more than anything else, Ain wanted to be a doctor. He was smart and knew he could do the job. Being only 4 feet 3 inches, he staunchly believed, should not affect how his dice were cast.Fortunately, the odds do not always prevail. Which is why now, on a rainy day in January, Ain slips on a pair of sterile surgical gloves, climbs up onto a step stool, and calls out, "Scalpel."Proving the naysayers wrong: Ain was rejected by two dozen residency programs on the basis that he wasn't physically up to the job. Today at Hopkins, his surgical card is full. The adjustments have been minor--a stool in the O.R. and specially tailored surgical gowns.FROM A DEMOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE, Ain, 38, is remarkable. A pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital, he is one of only a handful of physicians in the country who are dwarfs. He may be the only dwarf in the world who is an orthopedic surgeon, a field that has the reputation of being the rough and rugged medical specialty.But to Ain, the day-to-day adjustments that enable him to do his job and thus be remarkable are really quite simple. "To be very honest, the only special things I need are a stool in the O.R., and I have special gowns tailored that are shorter."On this particular day, Ain is straightening and fusing the severely crooked spine of a 10-year-old girl named Stephanie. The girl has congenital scoliosis that is progressively getting more pronounced. Fusion will prevent her spine from curving into a painful deformity. "We're doing an anterior and posterior," explains Ain, meaning that he will access her spine first through her chest and then through her back.Ain made the first incision at 9 a.m. He now removes Stephanie's right sixth rib, gaining access to the spine. The rib will also provide the implantable material that he'll use to promote the spinal fusion. Reaching through the chest, Ain removes five of Stephanie's disks, the cushiony material between vertebrae, and inserts slices of the rib in their place. He and visiting resident Michael Mann then stitch Stephanie back up.Ain's hands are muscular. He works with concentration, alternately offering instruction to Mann and punctuating these lessons with banter and bad jokes. At one point, I ask whether the patient will live comfortably without one of her ribs. His eyes twinkling above his surgical mask, Ain replies, "Adam lost a rib, didn't he?"By noon, the first half of the operation is complete.What are the odds?A few years ago, geneticists determined that achondroplasia results from a mutation on the fibroblast growth factor receptor-3 (FGFR3) gene on chromosome 4. "This site seems to be the most mutable in the entire genome," says geneticist and pediatrician Michael Wright, acting clinic director of the Greenberg Center for Skeletal Dysplasia. The mutation is dominant and occurs in about one out of 25,000 births. It is passed from one generation to the next, or may result from a new mutation. In Michael Ain's case, where neither of his parents is an achondroplast, the mutation seems to have occurred anew.If an achondroplastic dwarf marries a person of average stature, there is a 50 percent chance that their child will be a dwarf. If two achondroplasts marry, there is a 50 percent chance that their child will inherit a single copy of the gene for achondroplasia, and thus be a dwarf. There is a 25 percent chance that their child will be of average stature. And there is a 25 percent chance that their child will inherit two copies of the gene. Such "double-dominant" offspring die in utero or before age one."Okay, like we've never been here," says Ain, ordering his O.R. staff to change scrubs and surgical gloves. After putting on a fresh gown and gloves himself, Ain climbs onto his step stool. He and Mann turn Stephanie onto her stomach and begin phase two of the operation. They will fuse Stephanie's spine using small surgical hooks and rods, inserting more slices of the rib between adjoining vertebrae. "The rib helps the fusion because it is bone," explains Ain.It will be nightfall by the time Ain completes the operation.MICHAEL AIN TREATS PATIENTS who have a wide variety of orthopedic illnesses and injuries, from fractured tibia to club feet, but he specializes in the orthopedic problems of dwarfism and related disorders. He fuses painfully curved spines, reduces bones that compress the spinal cord, and performs other procedures for complications that can result from these disorders. In medical terms these conditions are called skeletal dysplasia--literally abnormal growth or development of the bones. Skeletal dysplasia is a grab bag of more than 100 different disorders, most of which cause short stature.The bulk of people with skeletal dysplasia, including Ain, have a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia. Achondroplastic dwarfs have an average size trunk, but their limbs are shorter than average and often their head is enlarged. Many also have bowed legs and swaybacks. On average, they grow to about 4 feet to 4 feet 3 inches. (In contrast, people with dwarfism stemming from an endocrine dysfunction are extremely short-statured but have limbs that are proportional to their trunk size.)While achondroplasia does not affect intelligence, it can contribute to a host of medical problems ranging from chronic ear infections to potentially fatal compression of the spine. Hopkins is one of the world's leading medical centers for patients with achondroplasia and other forms of skeletal dysplasia. Dwarfs from all over the world visit Hopkins for medical care, which is coordinated through the Greenberg Center for Skeletal Dysplasia, named for philanthropists Alan C. and Kathryn Greenberg.Healthcare providers from 23 clinical specialties are affiliated with the Greenberg Center. These include medical genetics, genetic counseling, otolaryngology, ophthalmology, neurology, nutrition, pediatric pulmonology, and, of course, Ain's specialty, orthopedic surgery.Ain is upbeat and friendly and adept at explaining medicine in plain English, traits that endear him to many patients. But he means something special to his patients who are dwarfs, like 26-year-old Heather Davis. "I'm glad he can get beyond the barriers and has dedicated his life to helping people," says Davis, who was Ain's surgical patient two years ago and is now a graduate student at the University of Minnesota.Marie Bieniek, mother of 5-year-old Andrew, says her son "adores" Dr. Ain. Andrew has traveled with his parents to Hopkins several times to be treated for complications of dwarfism. In September, Ain straightened Andrew's severely bowed legs."Some doctors think they can try to make him normal," says Bieniek. "Dr. Ain knows Andrew is normal already. He wants to keep him healthy."A visitor meeting Ain for the first time almost expects to encounter a saint. So it is somewhat refreshing to find that he is an unpretentious mortal with a Long Island accent.Being cast as a role model, says Ain, makes him uncomfortable. "I try to downplay it," he says with a shrug.Ain grew up in Roslyn Heights, Long Island, where his parents still live. His father is a lawyer, and his mother is a travel agent. Neither is a dwarf.Five-year-old Andrew Bieniek "adores" the upbeat Dr. Ain, according to his mother, Marie. The little boy has traveled to Hopkins several times to be treated for complications of dwarfism; last fall Ain straightened Andrew's severely bowed legs."When I was growing up, I didn't have role models who were dwarfs," he says. "My mother and father were good role models, great role models. They were very wonderful, always encouraging. Being short could never be used as an excuse--if I came home and didn't make the basketball team or get an A. They always instilled in me I could do anything I wanted to."As a child, Ain saw a fair share of doctors and made a trek every year to Johns Hopkins Hospital to be examined by medical geneticist Victor McKusick, who diagnosed Ain's condition. Ain did not require serious medical interventions, aside from having ear ventilation tubes implanted, a procedure prescribed for many achondroplasts. (Having a smaller throat and nasal passages appears to impede ventilation, which raises the risk of middle ear infections.) However, young Michael spent enough time in examining rooms to experience a callous side of doctoring. Some doctors, says Ain, "used to talk in the third person: 'Michael's drainage output this, this, and this.' They'd kind of talk about you."In school, he experienced the teasing that most "little people" go through. But he has always been outgoing and made friends easily. He and eight childhood friends get together every year for a reunion.After attending Andover Academy in Massachusetts, Ain went to Brown University, where he decided he wanted to become a doctor. "I thought medicine was a fascinating field, a chance to help people." Having been a patient himself, he felt, would also be an advantage. He was determined to have a better bedside manner than many of the doctors who treated him when he was a child.At Brown, Ain built the solid academic and extracurricular record that medical schools seek in their applicants. He majored in math, earning a better-than-B average, did research in a physiology lab, and earned good MCAT scores. He also played second base on the varsity baseball team, co-directed the university's Big Brother program, and was an officer in his fraternity. Ain sent out 20 to 30 applications to medical schools all over the country including Hopkins. On the advice of a guidance counselor, he noted in the personal letter each school required that he was a dwarf. "Because I am," Ain says simply. "It shaped me."At first he thought he had a good chance of getting into medical school. But then his optimism began to fade. During several of his admissions interviews, officials told him he'd have great physical difficulty performing the duties of a physician. When Ain pressed them to explain, they told him he would not be able to reach his patients' bedside. To Ain, the solution seemed obvious. He would use a footstool. Others worried that he wasn't strong enough. Ain, who had been lifting weights and working out regularly, fired back, "I'm stronger than anybody you're interviewing today." He suggested he could match any of them in the weight room. What about gaining the respect of his patients? asked some interviewers. Ain thought that was a lame excuse. His classmates at Andover had chosen him to receive the coveted "End of the Year Award," signifying their respect and admiration. He had proved his leadership skills time and again. "You don't have to be intimidating to be respected," Ain says.But Ain's fears were confirmed. One by one, the thin envelopes bearing rejection notices arrived, until eventually Ain had received one from every medical school to which he had applied.Ain was devastated. Although none of the letters mentioned his height, he had no doubt that some or all of the admissions offices believed a dwarf could not or should not become a physician."I was scared. I was angry. I was hurt. It was the only time I hit the wall," he says. "It was the only time I felt trapped."The experience challenged his whole outlook. "I was being denied this for no good reason, for a reason I couldn't do anything about. It goes against everything I was taught. My parents told me I could do anything I wanted as long as I pushed myself. If this was going to happen, then during the first 23 years of my life, this lie was being made."Ain decided to try again. He returned to Brown the year after he had graduated to try to improve his chances of getting into medical school. He took two advanced science courses, earning two A's with distinction. He continued his research and got his work published. He applied to about 20 medical schools, including some of the same ones he had applied to the first time, again frankly revealing that he was a dwarf.Again the thin envelopes began arriving. But this time, one envelope was fatter than the others. It was an acceptance from Albany Medical College in upstate New York.One of the Albany faculty members who interviewed Ain was B. Barry Greenhouse, then an associate professor of anesthesiology. Greenhouse and Ain hit it off. Greenhouse was a baseball fan and was impressed that when Ain played for Brown he had batted against Ron Darling, the Yale player who went on to become a famous Mets pitcher. Moreover, says Greenhouse, "I just felt he was a good student. He impressed me immensely with his intelligence. He was a compassionate, decent young man who would be a credit to the medical profession. If I were ill, I would like him to be my doctor."Getting a straight answerWhen Michael Ain was 19, he underwent a surgical procedure known as an osteotomy to straighten his bowed legs. It involved breaking and resetting the legs. The procedure caused Ain a good deal of pain, and he lay in a body cast for several months.A wrestling injury prompted Ain's surgery, but doctors recommend the procedure to many achondroplasts with bowed legs to reduce their chances of arthritis.Now that he is an orthopedic surgeon, Ain suspects that this medical premise may not apply to all achondroplastic dwarfs, about half of whom have the condition. "I think many [achondroplasts] do not need any type of treatment," he says.The link between bowing and arthritis is based on research involving patients of average stature, Ain notes. Bowing may increase pressure at the knee joint, setting the stage for arthritis. But because achondroplasts have shorter limbs, they may not have the same degree of risk, suggests Ain.To test this theory, he and biomedical engineer Edmund Chao are creating a biomechanical computer model of bowleggedness. Ain is also conducting clinical studies in achondroplasts older than 40 to see whether the amount of arthritis the patients have correlates with their degree of bowleggedness.--MHAin did well at Albany and decided while he was there that he wanted to become a pediatric neurosurgeon. He was an avid woodworker and had always enjoyed working with his hands. And he liked the immediate gratification such surgery provided. Ain applied to 14 residency programs, had nine interviews, and was rejected by every program. He then applied to nine or 10 general surgery residencies, including some "bottom of the barrel programs" to which a candidate with inferior credentials would have been admitted. Again, they turned him down.The gatekeepers of the residency programs were blunt. "Every place one guy said, 'You can't do it physically' or 'Patients won't respect you,'" recalls Ain.Ain spent the next year doing a pediatrics residency at the University of California at Irvine. Though he enjoyed working with children, he still yearned to be in the operating room. So Ain wrote to John Hall, a renowned pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Children's Hospital in Boston, who had done surgery to straighten Ain's bowed legs when Ain was 19. When Ain was in medical school, he had done a rotation at Children's under Hall's supervision. In his letter to Hall, Ain asked what his chances would be of getting into an orthopedic surgery residency. Hall was encouraging, and Ain applied to two residencies. He was considering a third, but the chairman at that program told him, "There's no way you're going to get in. You should be quite happy doing pediatrics," Ain recalls.Mary Kaitlyn Hadley with her surgeon Michael Ain and todayBut the chairman at Albany Medical College did not see it that way. Richard Jacobs, who is now retired, told Ain, "If your record is as good as everybody else's, you'll get in. It doesn't matter whether you're 4 feet 3 inches or 6 feet 3 inches. We will take you." After examining Ain's record, Albany accepted him.In entering the ranks of orthopedic surgery, Ain was indeed standing certain assumptions on their heads. Of all the specialties, orthopedics has a machismo reputation--not without some justification. It takes a fair amount of strength to push and pull fractured bones back into place. When a patient has dislocated a hip, for instance, an orthopedist has to lift the patient's leg and push against muscle and soft tissue to force the hip back into the socket. The tools of orthopedic surgery are bold and serious affairs. An orthopedic cart parked in the Hopkins operating suite resembles a medieval hardware store: drills, saws, reamers, mallets, hooks, rods, and screws--tools for cutting bone, reducing fractures, drilling holes for screws.During his five-year residency at Albany, Ain proved he could do the job, says Allen Carl, an associate professor of surgery at Albany who was one of Ain's mentors. "He's just a wonderful person who exudes the positive," notes Carl.While at Albany, Ain also began dating a nurse named Valerie Frinks, who, at 5 feet 6 inches, is of average stature. They married and now have a 2-year-old daughter, Alexa. Their daughter is a little person, says Ain, and he does not want to discuss her size in any more detail than that. "She is the most delightful, beautiful person," he adds.At first, Ain thought he might become a hand or joint surgeon. He never considered specializing in bone disorders such as achondroplasia. "It's the last thing in the world I wanted to do because it's like looking in the mirror every day," he says.That feeling changed one day in the operating room, when Carl mentioned to Ain that he had read a newspaper article about a couple from southern California who had an achondroplastic daughter. The parents were worried about the limitations their child would face. (After all, notes Ain, "Where do you see most little people? On TV, at the circus.") But the father had been encouraged when he met a physician at a party who was an achondroplast. If this man could become a physician, the father reasoned, then his daughter could have many opportunities in her life.Ain suddenly realized that he was the physician at that party.An improved outlookToday, physicians know a lot more about some of the more serious complications of dwarfism than they did a decade ago, when 8 percent of children with achondroplasia died before age 5. Many of these children died suddenly, and the cause was a mystery. But researchers now suspect that undersized bone structure set the stage for many of these deaths, says Hopkins's Michael Wright. The culprit appears to be an opening at the base of the skull, called the foramen magnum, through which the spinal cord connects to the brain. In some achondroplastic babies, the foramen magnum is so narrow that it clamps down on the spinal cord where it meets the brain stem, compromising the nerves that control breathing. In the worst cases, babies stop breathing and die.Through a surgical technique refined by Hopkins pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson, many of these babies are now spared. Carson enlarges the foramen magnum to make more room for the spinal cord. It appears that the improved surgical technique, in addition to better diagnosis of babies at risk for foramen magnum compression, is saving more babies, says Wright. Today the mortality rate for achondroplasts under age 5 is just 1 percent.Ain and Hopkins neurosurgeon Daniele Rigamonti perform a similar surgical procedure on the lower portion of the spine, where undersized vertebrae can impinge on the spinal cord. This condition affects adult dwarfs more than it does children, causing back pain and in the worst cases preventing mobility.--MH"So at that point, without sounding corny," says Ain, "I thought, there are a lot of good hand and joint surgeons. If I could have an effect, help people, or be able to sympathize and understand certain issues, then maybe that's why God wanted me to become an orthopedic surgeon. Maybe this is it."So Ain applied for a fellowship in orthopedic surgery at Hopkins, where director of pediatric orthopedics Paul Sponseller was eager to build a program in skeletal dysplasias. Sponseller had no hesitation about hiring Ain. "We thought Michael would be a good candidate," says Sponseller. "I was reassured to my satisfaction by people in his residency that he was capable of doing surgery."AIN SEES PATIENTS at the Hopkins orthopedic clinic on Mondays. One recent Monday, at least 30 patients visit the fifth floor clinic in the Outpatient Center. Anything that could possibly go wrong with a bone--breaks, infections, wasting conditions--is seen in the clinic's warren of examining rooms.Ain's patients include a 7-year-old child with a leg problem known as Perthes avascular necrosis that is dissolving the head of her femur; a chubby 5-year-old named Jason who fractured his tibia and femur in an auto accident several months earlier; a young boy with an arm fracture that is healing nicely; a 2-year-old girl whose cerebral palsy freezes movement in her left leg; and a toddler who was born with club feet that Ain surgically realigned several weeks earlier.In this age of sophisticated medical technology, an orthopedist's hands are still an important tool. One of Ain's patients in clinic this day is 5-week-old Emma, a pink-cheeked, healthy looking baby. Clasping one of Emma's legs in each of his hands, Ain gently moves them from side to side, sensing through his touch whether Emma's hips are properly aligned. Emma was born with developmental dysplasia of the hips, meaning her legs slip in and out of the hip sockets. She is wearing a special harness over her legs and tummy that is designed to fix her hip joints in place over the next several weeks. The baby's mom asks Ain why her daughter was born with this condition. He replies that for some unknown reason, developmental dysplasia of the hip occurs most commonly among first-born girls who are breech babies, as Emma was. "It's the way God smiled upon her," Ain says.Ain gently teases nervous children and their parents, and sharpens the edge of his banter when the target is a colleague.Occasionally, a child will ask him why he is so short, says Ain. His standard reply: "I never grew as fast as everyone else." Most adults do not remark about his height."I really have a lot of confidence in him," says Jackie Scott, the mother of one of the patients Ain sees that day. "He is personable and funny and does put you at ease. He doesn't make you feel he's pressed for time and has got to go. That's very important."One of the last cases of the day is the most complex. Two brothers and their sister have OSMED syndrome, a rare genetic form of skeletal dysplasia reported in only a handful of cases. The children, along with their parents and a sister who does not have the disease, have come from the United Arab Emirates to be seen by a retinue of Hopkins experts.The children have abnormally weak collagen, which contributes to a slew of medical problems including cleft palate, knobby joints, and a dip in the chest that could pose a danger if it presses on the heart. They are small for their age, though within the normal range.Even on the craziest days, Ain loves what he does. "I'm able to foster caring for people," he says. "I like the immediate gratification of surgery."The syndrome is not life threatening, but it predisposes them to premature arthritis and scoliosis. It also impairs hearing. The three children with the syndrome are wearing hearing aids. They have developed their own sign language and gesture to each other while waiting for Ain to examine them. When Ain enters the examining room, they stop gesturing and look at him timidly."Hi. Hello," says Ain, looking around as though he doesn't know where to start. "From an orthopedic point of view, what are your concerns?" he asks the children's father."Their joints. All. They are painful sometimes. And will they grow?" the children's father replies through an interpreter.One by one, Ain examines each child, asking gentle questions as he goes. The process is tedious, involving two sets of translations, from sign language into Arabic, and from Arabic into English, and vice versa.Ain orders an extensive set of X-rays for each child, then tells the family he'll see them in a few hours after the films have been taken.Back in his office, he shuffles through patient files. "I have a headache," he tells a nurse. "A huge headache." The family with OSMED syndrome has pushed his schedule way behind. In the meantime, there are two more patients with complex cases of skeletal dysplasia waiting to see him. He needs to see X-rays of another patient, but that patient's HMO refuses to cover radiation charges incurred outside its own offices. Frowning, Ain picks up a patient file from his desk and walks into the next examining room.The next day, Ain apologizes for being irritable. "That's about as cranky as I ever get," he says. Even on the craziest days, says Ain, he loves what he does. "I like being at Hopkins. It's a center of excellence. I like working with the people I work with. I'm able to foster caring for people. I like the immediate gratification of surgery." He has arrived, he says, where he wanted to be.For a long time Ain saved all the rejection letters he had received from medical schools. Perhaps one day, he thought, he would write back to those schools to tell them that he had defied their odds. Over the years, however, his anger faded. He mellowed and lost track of the letters. It's no longer important to tell people he can do the job. Now he just shows them.Melissa Hendricks is the magazine's senior science writer.people.comThe Little Couple TLC Star Dr Jennifer Arnold is no longer seeing patientsThe Little Couple - Wikipedia

Why was New York State, despite being one of the 13 original colonies and also despite historically being one of the richest and most powerful states, nevertheless one of the last states to establish a state university system?The simple answer for New York State was NEED.Note: New Jersey was technically LAST (1956) to establish a state university system, while PA waited to form a Pennsylvania State System of 14 independent schools of higher education in (1983). Penn State, the institution with 24 campuses, is Pennsylvania's only land-grant university conceived in 1855, but not established until 1862. All very confounding!Back to New York:New York State, even today, is remarkably empty. Its population density is highly localized in cities like New York, Albany, Buffalo, Yonkers, Rochester, Syracuse, etc. each with a remarkable number of early private colleges, academies, and universities. This is especially true of New York City, which is 40 times more populous than any of the other major cities previously listed. (see below)There were eleven major colleges established in America during the colonial period chiefly through the efforts of private parties or sectarian religious groups. Among those in the Northern and Middle colonies were Harvard (1636), Yale (1701), Princeton (the College of New Jersey, 1746), the University of Pennsylvania (1751), Columbia (King’s College, 1754), Brown (1764), Rutgers (1766), and Dartmouth (1770). In the Southern colonies there were William and Mary (1693), Hampton-Sydney College (1776), and Transylvania College (1780).The first colleges were established privately, with some arising from local seminaries (not necessarily religious — as in academies). Yet zeal for an educated ministry prompted the founding of many other colleges. The College of William and Mary was established in Williamsburg, VA in 1693 to serve the youth of both Maryland and Virginia in order to advance their learning, promote piety, and provide for “an able and successive” Anglican ministry. Ironically, many of the faculty at William and Mary in the latter part of the 18th century were themselves graduates of Princeton. Then known as the College of New Jersey, Princeton was a popular destination for many of the children of southern planters, yet its influence was not really felt until after 1745, propagating the Presbyterian faith and providing academic instruction. Many religiously oriented institutions resisted conglomeration into state educational systems.New York state had a long history of supported higher education prior to the creation of the SUNY system. The oldest college (Potsdam) that is part of the SUNY System was established in 1816 as the St. Lawrence Academy. In 1844, the State legislature establish a NYS Normal School at Albany as the first college for teacher education. The state ultimately established teacher training programs in one college in each of it state senatorial districts. In 1865, the privately endowed Cornell University was designated as a New York land grant college.Many of the colleges in New York followed the establishment of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the growth of population center along its route. The lesser-known Champlain Canal that connects the south end of Lake Champlain to the Hudson River and New York City to Canada thereby, the Rochester Canal, and other tributaries were built soon after to interconnect with the Erie System.The state canal system transformed New York City into the young nation’s economic powerhouse, and thereby provided the economic status of the State. These canals were also served as arteries of intellectual promise. Historically, this region served as the foundation for a number of new Christian sects. The region was known as the Burned-over District in the 19th century because of the large number of converts to evangelicalism that had been made there. Millerism and Mormonism were founded there. Lake Chautaugua just southwest of Buffalo was one of the most sought after vacation destinations for Methodists of the Industrial Age. Where the religious revival was related to reform movements of the period, such as abolition, women’s rights, or utopian social experiments, central New York was important to them.Cornell was founded in 1865 in Ithaca among the Finger lakes, also on the Erie Canal route. The State University of New York College at Geneseo (between Buffalo and Syracuse) was founded in 1871 as the Wadsworth Normal and Training School 75 years before it became a state liberal arts college in 1948. Following WWII, many state universities were merged with smaller institutions to achieve economies of scale in administration and also to raise the prestige of the degrees granted by some smaller institutions. Today the Western NY Consortium of Higher Education consists of 21 world class colleges and universities (including SUNY Erie and SUNY Buffalo) located in eight core and four subsidiary of the westernmost NY counties. The State University of New York is the largest such system of universities, colleges, and community colleges in the world.Yet SUNY has competed for students in the most populous parts of New York with an equally vibrant New York City University system (CUNY), the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven senior colleges, seven community colleges, one undergraduate honors college, and seven post-graduate institutions. Its constituent colleges date back as far as 1847. Founded by Townsend Harris (the man who opened Japan to US trade), it was fashioned as "a Free Academy for the purpose of extending the benefits of education gratuitously to persons who have been pupils in the common schools of the city and county of New York." know now as City College, it was the first free public institution of higher education in the United States. The CUNY system — noted for teacher education and mechanical and chemical engineering — was formally established in 1961. The college has graduated ten Nobel Prize winners. George W. Goethals, a graduate of City, is best known for his administration and supervision of the construction and the opening of the Panama Canal. (I am a prideful graduate. Go, Beavers!)There remains significant debate about which institution or institutions are the oldest public universities in the United States.The University of Georgia is the country's first chartered public university, established on January 27, 1785 by an act of the General Assembly of Georgia. However, the University of Georgia did not hold classes until 16 years later in the fall of 1801.The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, while chartered four years after Georgia in 1789, was the first state university to hold classes.Castleton University in Vermont is the oldest state university in New England, chartered in 1787, but was not determined a "state university" in the modern sense of the term for many decades.​​​​​Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education was established by statute on July 1, 1983, although the 14 institutions that are part of it have a much longer history dating back to the 19th century.Many state universities were founded in the middle 19th century supported by the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Acts of 1862 and 1890.Some states have more than one state university system. Texas has six state systems plus four independent public universities; and California has two plus a community college system.The case for the "first" or “last” is further complicated by the case of New Jersey's state university system. Facing the embarrassment of being the only state left that had not established a state university, the New Jersey Legislature decided to commission an already existing private university as its state university, rather than build one from the ground up, as other states had done. Rutgers University, which had previously been a private school affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church, was designated as a state university by acts of the legislature in 1945. Rutgers was chartered in 1766, nineteen years before the University of Georgia, but did not become the State University of New Jersey for another 179 years.Young women also made striking gains in education during the post Civil War era. The first public high school for girls had opened in Massachusetts in 1824. By the early 1870’s, girls constituted the majority of high school graduates. Many female students attended coeducational public schools, a far less costly alternative to single-sex academies (seminaries). Between 1850 and 1870, the number of public high schools attended by both boys and girls in the United States had more than doubled, from 80 schools to 170 schools.The expansion of women into secondary education fostered greater access to higher education. By 1870, nearly one-quarter of college students were women. Many women attended newly created women’s colleges including Vassar, opened in 1865; and Wellesley and Smith both opened ten years later. Other women attended previously all-male schools. Boston University and Cornell opened their doors to women during the late 19th century, joining Oberlin, Antioch and Swarthmore as coeducational institutions. Additionally, eight state universities opened under the Morrill Act admitted women. The number of coeducational colleges and universities continued to grow through the remainder of the century.See:Amazon.com: Blow Ye the Trumpet in Zion: Religion in the Civil war Era (Traditional American History series Book 12) eBook: Volo, James M.: Kindle StoreMore than war

I think NASA and the IPCC scientists know what they are doing when they indulge in deception about the data and the purpose of their work. Some alarmist academics and scientists admit they have an alternative economic agenda and they do not hide this truth. What is happening is not about smarts it is about politics. When scientists work for the government bad things happen to the validity of their work. Scientific integrity goes out the window and political advantage with the end justifying the dishonest means comes in the door.Christiana Figueres (Executive Secretary, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), the woman in charge of the drive to impose global warming policy, said just couple of months ago, “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution…”The Fraud of Climate Change And the Drive for Control - American Policy CenterCan their goals be any clearer?“Unfortunately, climate science has become political science…: “It is tragic that some perhaps well-meaning but politically motivated scientists who should know better have whipped up a global frenzy about a phenomenon which is statistically questionable at best.”” Award-winning Princeton physicist Dr. Robert Austin, member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, speaking to Senate minority staff March 2, 2009.Dr. Willam Gray, Colorado State Univ. noted AGW is “the greatest scientific hoax of all time.”“Global warming is indeed a scam, perpetrated by scientists with vested interests, but in need of crash courses in geology, logic and the philosophy of science.” Prof. Martin Keeley, University College of London, cited from Newsmax Magazine March, 2010, p. 52Dr. Patrick Moore, an ecologist and the co-founder of Greenpeace, also has said “We are dealing with pure political propaganda that has nothing to do with science,” while Dr. Will Happer physicist at Princeton Univ, who has stated “Policies to slow CO2 emissions are really based on nonsense,” at a Texas Public Policy Foundation meeting. Happer, Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT and others at this meeting said claims of the hottest year on record are “nonsense” because there’s so much uncertainty surrounding surface temperature readings — especially since scientists often make lots of adjustments to weather station readingsIn 2014, famed astronaut Walt Cunningham went to that year’s global warming UN climate Summit and called the whole AGW gambit “one of the biggest frauds in the field of science.”Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, a leading Swedish meteorologist, withdrew from membership in the Global Warming Policy Foundation, citing unbearable group pressure to conform to the AGW hypothesis, which threatened his ability to work and even his safety. Similarly, climate statistics professor Dr. Cliff Rossiter wrote in the WSJ that global warming was “unproved science,” he was terminated form his 23 year fellowship at the liberal Inst. for Policy Studies (see article by Climate Depot, http://tinyurl.com/p6otgd9.NASA and NOAA, which get a half billion dollars a year from the government, “have been systematically fiddling the worldwide temperature for years, making ‘global warming; look worse than it is.: Joe D’Aleo, American Meteorology Society fellow, http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/noaa_2010_report.pdfDr. Anastasios Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said the global temperature “has flattened and is actually going down. We are seeing a new shift toward cooler temperatures that will last for probably about three decades.”“The difference between a scientist and propagandist is clear. If a scientist has a theory, he searches diligently for data that might contradict it so that he can test it further or refine it. The propagandist carefully selects only the data that agrees with his theory and dutifully ignores any that contradicts it. The global warming alarmists don’t even bother with data! All they have are half-baked computer models that are totally out of touch with reality and have already been proven to be false.” Martin Hertzberg, a retired Navy meteorologist with a PhD in physical chemistry“If temperatures continue to stay flat or start to cool again, the divergence between the models and recorded data will eventually become so great that the whole scientific community will question the current theories.” Dr. Nicola Scafetta, Duke University Heartland Inst. confirms this by noting “The IPCC’s climate science assessment is dominated by a small clique of alarmists who frequently work closely with each other outside the IPCC process.”“ Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized things are far more complicated than the story told to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media.” Dr. Nir Shariv who also notes that “solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th century global warming” and greenhouse gases are largely irrelevant to the climate, stating if the amount of C02 doubled by 2100, it “will not dramatically increase the global temperature….” And “Even if we havle the C02 output, and the CO2 increates by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant” Dr. Nir, Shariv, top astrophysicist and assoc. professor at Hebrew Univ.“Dr. Harold Lewis, on resigning from the American Physical Society stated about ClimateGate (exposing the outright fraud behind AGW), said he “found fraud on a scale I have never seen” and stated the money flood has become the raison d’etre of much of physics research. He concluded “The global warming scam with the (literally) millions of dollars driving it… has carried the APS before it like a rogue wave.” http://tinyurl.com293enhl“‘There is this mismatch between what the climate models are producing and what the observations are showing,’ John Fyfe, Canadian climate modeler and lead author of the new paper, told Nature. ‘We can’t ignore it.’ And echoing this in a related blog post, “‘Reality has deviated from our expectations – it is perfectly normal to try and understand this difference,’ Ed Hawkins, co-author of the study and United Kingdom climate scientist”“I do not accept the premise of anthropogenic climate change, I do not accept that we are causing significant global warming and I reject the findings of the IPCC and its local scientific affiliates….I would happily debate the science with any member opposite but I know they are too gutless to take me on.”– Dr. Dennis Jensen, only science Ph.D. in Australian parliament(Note: William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology also disagrees with the global warmers)“Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.”– Former Czech president Vaclav Klaus, in Blue Planet in Green Shackles“I want to …talk about … the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. … “Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results…“There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. … .” … Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E = mc². Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.”– Dr. Michael Crichton in a speech at the California Institute of Technology, cited from http://fuelfix.com/blog/2014/10/05/the-corruption-of-science/– Atmospheric scientist Dr. Chris Walcek is a professor at the University at Albany in NY and a Senior Research Associate at the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center who studies the relationship of pollutants within the atmosphere. Walcek is also a skeptic of man-made global warming fears. “10,000 years ago we were sitting under 2,000 feet of ice right here. It looked like Antarctica right here. And then over a one to two thousand year period, we went into today’s climate and the cause of that change is not, well, nobody has a definitive theory about why that happened,” Walcek said according to an article. In a separate interview, Walcek expanded on his climate skepticism and accused former Vice President Al Gore of having “exaggerated” part of his film. “A lot of the imagery like hurricanes and tornados. And as far as tornados go, there is no evidence at all that tornados are affected. And a recent committee of scientists concluded that there isn’t a strong correlation between climate change and hurricane intensity. A lot of people are saying we’re going to see more Katrina’s and there’s just not much evidence of that. We have had strong hurricanes throughout the last hundred years and we’re probably going to have strong hurricanes once in a while,” Walcek said. “We are over-due for an ice-age if you look at the geological records, we have had a period of not having a thousand feet of ice sitting here in Albany” New York, he added.Atmospheric scientist and hurricane expert Dr. Christopher W. Landsea NOAA’s National Hurricane Center who served as a UN IPCC as both an author and a reviewer and has published numerous peer-reviewed research noted that recent hurricane activity is not linked to man-made factors. According to an article in Myrtle Beach Online, Landsea explained that “the 1926-1935 period was worse for hurricanes than the past 10 years and 1900-1905 was almost as bad.” Landsea asserted that it is therefore not true that there is a current trend of more and stronger hurricanes. “It’s not a trend, it’s a cycle: 20-45 years quiet, 20-45 years busy,” Landsea said. He did say that a warming world would only make hurricanes “5 percent stronger 100 years from now. We can’t measure it if it’s that small.” The article said Landsea blamed Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, for “persuad[ing] some people that global warming is contributing to hurricane frequency and strength.” Landsea, who was both an author and a reviewer for the IPCC’s 2nd Assessment Report in 1995 and the 3rd Assessment Report in 2001, resigned from the 4th Assessment Report after becoming charging the UN with playing politics with Hurricane science. “I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns,” Landsea wrote in a public letter. “My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy,” he continued. “I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound,” Landsea added.Meteorologist Justin Berk asserted that the “majority of TV meteorologists” are skeptical of dire man-made global warming claims. Berk said in an article in The Jewish Times, “I truly believe that global warming is more political than anything else. It’s a hot topic. It grabs people’s interest. As a meteorologist, I have studied this a lot and I believe in cutting down pollution and in energy efficiency. But I have a hard time accepting stories how we as individuals can stop climate change. It has happened on and off throughout history. We produce pollution but that is a small piece of the entire puzzle.” Berk continued: “There are cycles of hurricanes and we had a 30-year cycle from the 1930s to the 1950s. Then from the mid-1960s to the 1990s there was low hurricane activity. We knew there would be another round of higher activity in hurricanes and now it’s happening. [But people have] latched onto this topic and it’s been distorted and exploited. I know that a lot of scientists, including the majority of TV meteorologists, agree with me. In the mid-1970s, climate experts said we were heading for an ice age. Thirty years later, they’re saying global warming. If you look at the big picture, we’ve had warming and cooling throughout history. It’s a natural cycle. We haven’t created it and it’s not something we can stop.”CNN Meteorologist Rob Marciano compared Gore’s film to “fiction” in an on air broadcast. When a British judge ordered schools that show Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to include a disclaimer noting multiple errors in the film, Marciano applauded the judge saying, “Finally, finally.” Marciano then added, “The Oscars, they give out awards for fictional films as well.” Marciano specifically critiqued Gore for claiming hurricanes and global warming were linked.Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review:Briggs, a visiting Mathematics professor at Central Michigan University and a Biostatistician at New York Methodist Hospital, has a new paper coming out in the peer-reviewed Journal of Climate which finds that hurricanes have not increased in number or intensity in the North Atlantic. Briggs, who has authored numerous articles in meteorological and climatological journals, has also authored another study looking at tropical cyclones around the globe, and finds that they have not increased in number or intensity either. Briggs expressed skepticism about man-made global warming fears in 2007. “There is a lot of uncertainly among scientists about what’s going on with the climate,” Briggs wrote to EPW. “Most scientists just don’t want the publicity one way or another. Generally, publicity is not good for one’s academic career. Only, after reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri’s asinine comment [comparing scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears to] Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet,” Briggs explained. “It is well known that weather forecasts, out to, say, four to five days, have skill; that is, they can beat just guessing the average. Forecasts with lead times greater than this have decreasing to no skill,” Briggs wrote. “The skill of climate forecasts—global climate models—upon which the vast majority of global warming science is based are not well investigated, but what is known is that these models do not do a good job at reproducing past, known climates, nor at predicting future climates. The error associated with climate predictions is also much larger than that usually ascribed to them; meaning, of course, that people are far too sure of themselves and their models,” he added. Briggs also further explained the inadequacies of climate models. “Here is a simplified version of what happens. A modeler starts with the hypothesis that CO2 traps heat, describes an equation for this, finds a numericalapproximate solution for this equation, codes the approximation, and then runs the model twice, once at ‘pre-industrial’ levels of CO2, and once at twice that level, and, lo!, the modeler discovers that the later simulation gives a warmer atmosphere! He then publishes a paper which states something to the effect of, ‘Our new model shows that increasing CO2 warms the air,’” Briggs explained. “Well, it couldn’t do anything *but* show that, since that is what it was programmed to show. But, somehow, the fact the model shows just what it was programmed to show is used as evidence that the assumptions underlying the model were correct. Needless to say—but I will say it—this is backwards,” he added.Meteorologist and hurricane expert Boylan Point, past chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s broadcast board, a retired U.S. Navy Flight meteorologist with Hurricane Hunters and currently a forecaster with WSBB in Florida, dissented from the view that man-made CO2 is driving a climate disaster. “A lot of folks have opinions in which they have nothing to back them up with. Mr. [Al] Gore I think may well fit into that category,” Point said in an interview on WeatherBrains. “To lay the whole thing [global warming] at one doorstep [CO2] may be a bit of a mistake,” Point explained. Point is a pioneer in the study of hurricanes, having logged thousands of hours flying through the storms taking critical measurements during his U.S. Navy career.