“For instance, my injury cost me my savings I had accumulated up through the middle of my senior year in high school. I had visited an eye surgeon who was as cold as a pump handle and he assured me rather slickly that there was a good chance he could restore an appreciable amount of vision to my blind eye. Twenty years later I was told by a top surgeon in New York that this prognosis was absolute venal nonsense and that nothing was possible for this eye, which remained true until recently. The operation was the most miserable failure conceivable and I spent two weeks in the hospital, the first of them totally blinded to keep my eyes still. The idea was to design an early version of a contact lens but this proved thickish and painful to install and wear and more importantly I couldn’t see a thing except a vague perception of the colour green. I threw this plastic gismo into the swamp outback of our house and quite naturally entered another depression, this one more dangerous as it has the tinge of the suicidal.” (

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Ginkgo is one of the most common herb supplements consumed in many parts of the world. The ginkgo tree is remarkable as it may grow as high as 40 m and live for more than a thousand years. Ginkgo fossils have …