If I'm to think about a common theme that runs throughout my work and even stems from
my childhood, it's the idea of being unafraid to connect across broad disciplines and to
not concern oneself with how that's perceived at first, that you might be ahead of the curve,
that it's going to face a certain amount of resistance, but eventually if you persist,
perhaps with any luck you can derive a new field, a new language, a new way of communicating.
I grew up in the north of England in the Lake District, a region of mountains and lakes.
It was exposed to nature at a really early age and was given a ton of freedom actually
to explore that, unimpeded, because my parents' backgrounds have a sense of difference and
freedom that allowed me to explore. I remember being allowed to go out and just paint, paint
flowers, paint trees, rivers, mountains, and there was no bias in terms of what I did, whether
it was interested in nature because of nature's sake or because of nature, because of beauty
as a potential artist. I think it set up this conversation in my mind that there were no
boundaries, that you could be whoever you wanted and do whatever you wanted with care.
I think that in part has led to this more sort of parametric view of life and the art
and science and nature and beauty and technology or what.
What I'm most interested in as a scientist is creating new languages and connections
to break down these boundaries, which I think are absolutely essential for the emergence
of new fields where we can actually do something really profound together.
We established MedStudio at Jeff about two years ago. We made a rule within that studio
that the artist, architect, and scientist would be treated equally. And the point there was
to imbue the curriculum and the culture with design sensibility. And we think design, which
is a very human-centered activity that considers the end user consistently, is a valuable tool
in helping to establish that new mission, which is one of increasing empathy, creativity,
and connectivity.
I think if we pay attention to maintaining that process in parallel with a traditional
medical curriculum, that it will allow those clinicians to remain in contact with the patient
and to remember that they are the end user.
And one of the things I'm very fascinated by is the power of spaces to heal. So when
we walk into hospitals, we actually consider the lighting, the floors, the walls, the colors,
the sound. They're not great places to get better, even though they try their best. Can
we create environments for patients to make them feel safer, whether it's even chemotherapy
or whether they're in a waiting room, staring at a blank wall and hearing things around them
that they shouldn't really be listening to. The chaos, the sound, the worry, the confusion,
as we're trying to make them better.
This really sparked my interest again in thinking about how medicine could imbue an entire city
if it was designed correctly with parks, grass, trees, flowers, pollen, all of these things
we probably crave for. We're often starved of, especially in cities.
The moment when the rain hits the heart, dirt, in summer and you get this astonishing, almost
euphoric sense of life. What's that about? Well, it turns out that actually in dirt,
there are bacteria that we are constantly inhaling. If we put our hands in them, they
cover our hands, we breathe it in, and these bacteria turn out to have positive effects
on our serotonin system, so they actually make us feel good. We've evolved and co-evolved
with dirt, to have our hands in it, to nurture it, to feel good about being in it.
A couple of years ago, I was at a dinner with Michael Gardner and Liz Maley, who were board
members at the Friends of the Rail Park in Philadelphia, and they started talking about
this wild project to convert this three-mile strip of abandoned railroad much bigger than
the Highland in New York, broader, longer, because underground and underground.
We crawl through the brush and you end up on a viaduct and you can see the entire city
in front of you, and then in either direction, the rail park extends through 22 neighborhoods,
50 city blocks, and immediately you can see the potential of, could we, through co-designing
or having a voice in that, start to think about how health could be actually designed
into the park.
One of the things we'd like to do at the educational level is to have this as a space where children
can maybe learn about nature and discover science and the arts and humanities in that
way, so the park becomes classroom.
Time connects people and exposes people to difference.
Not connection without difference, how do you innovate?
