JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Retinal identification is here, and it is in the future; it was in the past's version of the future in the P.K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968 which was turned into the film Blade Runner in 1982. But long before any of this was Carleton Simon and Isidore Goldstein, who figured out that everyone has a unique display of veins in their retina. Of course this is not exactly as obvious as fingerprints, but evidently it was a whole new thing in 1936--highly interesting. ANd what struck me was the "retinal protractor" which was like a grid placed on the photograph of the retina onto which the veins would be plotted, from there it went to another step to assign numerical values.
Source: Carleton Simon. The retinal method of identification; a new system of classifying retinal patterns. Presented at the annual convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police at Kansas City,Mo.,September 21st to 24th, 1936. 11x8.5" cover/title, followed by 4 leaves of photographs showing the sections of the retina, examples of the veinous patterns, and a retina protractor explaining the sections of the retina in a common language for placement.
Dr. Simon--"Criminologist of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, New York Association of Chiefs of Police..." is the Simon of Simon & (Dr. Isidore) Goldstein, whose groundbreaking paper1 introducing the uniqueness of the patterns of retinal blood vessels and their use in identification, was published on September 15, just a week before this address. This publication may have been a handout for the address--it consists of one page of cover text and a separate four leaves of retinal pattern photographs with a cover sheet.
Notes:
1. "One of the most accurate techniques for human identification is based on the uniqueness of the retina blood vessels pattern. The unique structure of the blood vessels in the retina pattern was first introduced in 1936 by Simon and Goldestein" . Simon C,, Goldstein, I., "Retinal Method of Identification", New York State J Med. 1936 Sep; 15-- noted in "Retinal Identification System using Fourier-Mellin Transform and Fuzzy Clustering" Hadi Jafariani and Hamid Tabatabaee, Indian Journal of Science and Technology, Vol 7(9), 1289–1296, September 2014.
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