Gerald Buckberg Quotes

[T]he simplicity of nature is, you find it if you look for it, and you find a commonality, and there's something that goes from one thing to another.

Torrent-Guasp was a Spanish cardiologist and artist who wrote a book [Anatomia Funcional del Corazon] about how the heart was formed, and nobody listened... because he deviated from society. ...He showed the ventricle had reciprocal spirals. ...[H]e looked at a pine cone because a pine cone has the same reciprocal spirals that the heart does. It's part of nature. A heart is just a part of a grand design and the design shares things everywhere. ...He says "Nature is simple, but scientists are complicated."

Creation... is filling an empty room with new ideas. Testing them with ongoing change as you learn. It's a process. It's never an event. It's a process... ask questions and you begin to answer them.

[A] cathedral... has the principle of a and a . ...There's the heart. It's exactly the same thing. ...There's ...an iceberg. The iceberg and the heart are the same [form]. Imagination is that you have to see what is, not what you want to see. ...[T]he hurricane and a heart have exactly the same direction. They whirl in the same way. [T]he galaxy... it's exactly the same concept.

[A] normal heart... is twisting and it's very happy. But... a sick heart... it's dilated and not very efficient. ...What you have to make, is a basketball into a football. ...[A]s you do this operation, it's... not very complicated. Here's the dilated ventricle with the scar in it. We basically open the scar, put a little stitch in there, bring the edges together, throw a patch in there and fix the ventricle. ...The job is to make abnormality normality... restore nature, restore the natural form.

[I]f you look at the diseases we see... a narrowing in the coronary artery... a valve becomes leaky, either the or the , or people who have muscular disease. The heart changes from an ellipse to a sphere. In a sense... from a football to a basketball. ...[T]here's alteration in the fiber direction of the ventricle.

Our job is to restore the helix... because congestive heart failure is the major killer in the world today. ...[T]he thing that makes the heart very effective is the way the spiral of the ventricle is formed. ...The minute you ...stretch the ventricle... the tranverse part... in the basal loop, it doesn't contract as effectively.

[I]t's really amazing... you look at a calcium coil that is the calcium ions... It spirals... and you look at the single calcium ion and see a spiral. So it's everywhere. So what we really have, in a sense, are gargantuan relatives. They're ionic and they're cosmic.

[I]f you look at the helical heart, you see a hidden harmony of spirals. You see the DNA... the blueprint... You see the ventricle... You see that you have ejection and suction with the spirals going in different directions, with the spirals within spirals. You see it in the microscopic structure of the heart, the different forms of the heart called the , , , <nowiki>[</nowiki>]... It's all the same. It's a reproduction of what is normal and very efficient.

[I]t was thought many years ago that no one could understand the heart. The heart was called the .

[N]ot only does the fingertip have a spiral, but [there is] the spiral at the tip of your heart. Perhaps the tip of your heart is your apical fingertip. ...The ventricle, which is the beating part of the heart, has a spiral... it goes from inside-out, and outside-in. That spiral is very typical. It goes down to the apex of the heart, the tip of the heart, which is a vortex. The thing that really makes the heart a part of an active way of living.

If you pick the heart up and look at the bottom... there are s... a spiral going inside-out, and outside-in. The same reciprocal spirals happen in flowers. ...[T]he circles get bigger as they get further outward. ...[T]hat increase in size is the secret of growth. ...[T]hese beautiful reciprocal spirals... are not just in daisies, but you see this in seashells... you pick the tip of the spiral... or the shell up... it becomes a , just like the heart... or the horns of an eland. ...Inside the horns ...are spirals within spirals. ...[T]he spirals... go into the... blueprint of life...in DNA between the sugar and the s. The use of the same reciprocal spirals exist in the microscopic way, just as they exist macroscopically in the galaxy. ...We all have spirals in our fingertips... But your finger is different than somebody else's finger, and that's because there is harmony in variance.

[Y]ou think about knowledge and university. The student is often wrong, and always in doubt. The Professor is sometimes wrong and never in doubt.

The spiral formation within the helical heart conforms nicely to the mathematical description of spiral described by ... [A]fter manual dissection of the ascending segment from the descending segment... [t]hese lengths have a harmonic proportion, and... conform... to the ratio Pythagoras described within the golden section: the small is to the large as the large is to the whole. ...[A] hidden harmony of spirals... [that] starts with the master plan of DNA, a double helix...

The classic view of cardiac anatomy relates to contracting and relaxing, or more specifically, constricting to narrow and eject, and dilating to widen and fill. This sequence was defined by William Harvey. However, the predominant motion of the heart is... rather shortening and narrowing. There are four fundamental motions... narrowing, shortening, lengthening, and widening... a downward twisting of the muscle fibers... shorten and thicken and thereby make the heart eject. This twisting or torsion was described by Borelli, in the 1600s, to simulate the wringing of a rag. ...[P]rogression of contraction into the ascending segment ...results in twisting and thickening in an opposite direction. This sequence is followed by relaxation to allow the ventricle to fill during the remainder of the diastolic phase. ...[T]he heart twists to eject and reciprocally twists to fill in a clockwise and counterclockwise manner... twisting and untwisting of the conical heart muscle in reciprocal directions. ...[T]he predominant action is shortening and lengthening, rather than narrowing and widening... ejection during shortening and suction to fill during lengthening...