By Theresa Rogers

Q:What’s interesting to you in science right now?
A: Science is just so fascinating, all branches. I think what I really like and what I speak to students a lot about is the crossover and in designing any type of new research work, people have to be very flexible and very agile and the only way they can do this is if they have a number of the traditional disciplines under their belt and in their heads to be able to see research opportunities. In the interim, people are getting much better at tapping into other people’s brains, assembling teams where people can makeup for an individual’s lack of diversity across disciplines by having other people from other disciplines. The difficulty, of course is we always end up with human interactions and people have to really respect another person before they can really respect their views. So we’ve got a whole bunch of human behaviour in there and I think we’ll see that in space stations… on space station there’s been some political difficulties because of funding. We have it down here on Earth, it’s now gone into space… If I were to say anything about the excitement of research, it’s the ability of humans to overcome differences, either in the way they approach a scientific problem, the way they view another person’s role, the way they view other scientists and it’s extremely important I think for anything to do with space and that includes the space station, but I think beyond the moon. I look at the space station as maybe trying some concepts out but it’s very expensive, very time consuming and very heavily loaded toward human interaction, still. Things can go wrong and the whole experiment is wiped out. I think the exciting thing for me in research, getting back to your question is looking at the moon for research laboratories and things that can be done long-term. What happens when we have long-terms planning, of course, is we end up being able to develop research programs with more finely tuned protocols and if we’re going to be moving beyond the moon to look at other places – whether it’s geologic exploration, human to robotics or human beings actually doing it on the surface – whatever the discovery, voyaging, adventure-kind of things we have in the future, they’re going to be based very much on how solid the foundation is and the space station is to me not the most solid foundation for doing research work. It started being built back in the early 1990s, and 17 years later and we’re now just getting enough solar panels on there to power the space station to have more people up there to actually do the experiments. The whole issue of humans is space is crucial to the way people relate to space experiments. Very few people can relate to putting telescopes on the moon unless they’re using pictures for screensavers but they don’t understand, me included, some of the basics of astronomical theory and physics but we are tuned very much to ourselves and life here on Earth and if we can look at things that improve our understanding of human physiology and disease processes, then that’s extremely exciting and we can’t do that in little bits and pieces on the space station. We need to have longer-term facilities in a more stable structure on the moon… human physiology for the moon and coming back to Earth, human adaptation is extremely exciting. Right now we see, in the experiments that I’ve been involved in, how much the human body changes in space flight… but what about when you come back to Earth? Some people don’t realize that some astronauts when they come back, will continue to lose bone and that when we come back from space, we share the symptoms of people with various types of diseases but we recover… now we can look at the process of recovery. We’ve been very poor at looking at recovery because our constants are all based on animal models to give people the equivalent of that disease. Space provides this very exciting opportunity in terms of human physiology and that’s what I believe very strongly in so I think that as we go past the space station and to the moon, we will see the maturation of ideas with a crossover of those creative human beings that people who have a focus on one small piece of the puzzle, but people who have a broad background can see applications of other sciences or other arts to constructing experiments, to constructing labs, to thinking critically through experiments and all those things are very exciting.

Q: Much has been said recently about today’s children and the amount of TV they watch, product placement, the construction of toys where there is only one “right” way to do something which leaves nothing to the imagination… there’s been a change in the way children play and learn when they’re young. Is that of concern you?
A: It certainly would be. I spent my childhood, like a lot of people who grew up in the 50s having to build our recreation and build creative ideas and we had very supportive parents. There are a couple of issues here. One is the availability for that occur in society today but there is also the responsibility of parents and educators to not give people the answer because when people have an answer to something, they never think of what’s involved in solving a problem so actually problem solving abilities should be encouraged in the very young whether it’s giving someone a box of Legos and saying, ‘here’s an instruction manual’ rather than giving them the toy that’s finished… so I think that when we look at young people going through, one of the things we did as chair of the working group to strengthen conservation and the environment in elementary and secondary school systems is work with a bunch of educators from different walks of life and say, ‘how do we go across the board with critical thinking, not just about the environment or science, but about life in general.’ So if parents come through and they have not been in critical thinking themselves about what this toy will mean to the child’s critical thinking, then it won’t happen… we can’t put young children into one place. It’s very scary when parents do that. The parents think that by giving kids computers, just because they’re whizzes on computers, that’s all they should be doing. That’s incorrect. You can’t do everything on a computer. A computer does not socially interact the way human beings do so we end up not only with people who can’t critically think, but can’t socially think and can’t relate to no just new ideas and creativity and innovation, can’t relate to other people and their issues and problems and develop respect. It’s a very complex social structure and it would be very scary if children were only involved in a finished product rather than trying to see all the difficulties and trying to appreciate all the angles that one has to see in order to solve a problem. It’s that familiarity with things that don’t go right. It’s that familiarity with the pleasure of, ‘oh, this is really how I do it.’ All those kinds of things are very important to a skill set that a young person develops and to be able to move from there to doing research… or law, or anything in life, the ability to understand perspective is so important and you can’t understand what perspective is unless you’ve come at it from a different place, where you’ve hit the wall on something and you’ve had to find a different path. The ability to find a different path and know you have to find a different path is as important as taking a straight path to success because that does not build a person’s strength of inquisitiveness or curiosity and it doesn’t build character and it doesn’t build the kind of person that our very complex society needs where we have a huge global economy, a knowledge economy and the global interactions that occur: culturally, politically, socially… I think the success of research depends very much on our ability to communicate with each other on a human level so that we can develop good things, we can respect people, we can talk about ethics in research… I firmly believe in lifelong learning for everyone because the world evolves, subjects evolve, new knowledge comes in, new ways of approaching problems and we have to be flexible. The actual training of a young mind to be flexible – when people are just given things as a fait accompli, will never be able to understand that there are parts involved and the difficulties involved in trying to get to the endpoint.

Q: Do you find that things have changed since 1992 in science? There’s so much about biotech now.
A: Yes, certainly science never stays the same and that’s the great things about science: evolution of theory, change of theory and replicating experiments… if I was to pick one area, I would pick biotechnology, I would pick the crossover and application of bio to technology, the application of two formerly distinct disciplines – that whole melding and developing a new way forward for various things that we have speaks highly of how human brains can adapt. When we look at genomics for example: the way that we can use genetics to modify organisms to make them more resistant to disease, more resistant to drought, all those things are very important to the survival of human beings as a life form on the planet… not even develop new widgets, but develop new and better ways of dealing with our existence on the planet and I think those are critical… the corporate ethic responsibility actually I think has changed because of science. Some people would say sociology is the underpinning of society. There’s no questions cultural things change the way we view things but science very much teaches us we have to have sanitation. It teaches us we have to wash our hands, things about the outdoors and the safety of food. It teaches us stuff at every level. With out science and without these advances that we continue to make, society certainly, would flag.

Q: In Feb. there was a lot of talk about the federal budget and what most scientists seem to feel is a great lack of funding. What do you think? Does Canada support its researchers enough?
A: [not familiar with how pie is cut now and would have to look at per capita funding] … I think the one thing that we don’t fund well enough is education and education also deals with research. Education is important because once people understand concepts and why we do things a certain way and understand why it’s important to us, people put pressure on political systems to say, ‘Hey, we need to fund this research more.’ When we start getting into religious biases, philosophical biases, let’s put it that way, cultural biases, politically, people start dividing the pie differently… but I do believe that governments who are irresponsible about scientific research and who slowly and incrementally get rid of chief scientist positions, as I do believe the current government has done, then it is not serving the country well. Not just short-term issues but one cannot build up this kind of strength quickly and the lack of vision forward is something that we hope our politicians do not have. We hope they can see past four years but with silent lobbies going on, especially if people are not from a scientific background, if they do not have a critical thinking mode, if they don’t see Canada’s potential in the world to integrate, then they’re failing the country and they’re people that should not be in a position to decide budgets. My bias is that we fund education, we fund scientific research but we don’t put all the money into one pot and create a mega university for example, that is the only place in Ontario where research is done because there are communities that have various strengths in types of research and niches and I look at the move among some places to have research funding only in one type of institution which I think is dangerous because there are very small niches that have developed in places where there are small universities and also in those communities they have the industrial strength to support it and have partnerships… it has so many components to it but I think socially people have to understand what the money is doing and I think if we don’t have education at all levels, first and foremost, we will never understand anything about research. We can’t be a world player, we can’t help other countries and that’s one thing Canada has been able to do with its strengths in science in go to other countries and help them with water quality… when we talk about funding research we have to understand what we do well and without chief scientists, without people involved at that kind of level to provide good counsel to the government, one should not expect that the government in turn would have any kind of critical thinking in this area.

I don’t think I realized until I came to work here how political science is.
Very.

Q: Would you agree Canadians are on-side? Science is everywhere in the media, etc.
A: I think so. I think people see that the future of our children is inter-disciplinary, it is across disciplines. It is looking at this new sphere called biotechnology because people are looking to develop creative solutions to problems that they are now becoming aware of what they’ve caused. It’s not because people don’t want to know. It’s that there’s no path for them to know. There’s no path unless journalists write articles or unless there’s some educational program on television that features something that’s related to something the kids are doing in school. Think of how people are going to be educated after they leave grade eight, after they leave highschool, after they leave whatever post-secondary institution they’re at. This ability to continue to learn is extremely difficult and these are the people who vote and how can they vote if they don’t understand? How can they understand the concepts if they don’t have people and programs that make it as exciting as it is to people? We are not doing a good job in our society. Yes, the stuff is accessible. Anyone can go on Wikipedia, anyone can go on the Web and look something up, but what would they look up? Unless they have a question, there’s never a solution.

Q: Do you miss space? Is it in your blood?
A: No, what’s in my blood is adventure, curiosity, I think to formulate new questions so it would drive me to develop answers. I think being in space was a reality check for me about being a human being, a reality check about where we are in understanding the universe philosophically. I think it was extremely important to me in terms of my photography and looking at the planet and looking at the wide perspective but I think overriding that, I think the actual build-up to the space flight and what occurred after was instructive. The actual mission of just over eight days was scientifically rewarding because we 75 or 80 per cent of the work properly. It was a successful flight considering everything that can go wrong but the thing that I remember most was not actually doing the science. It was looking at the planet and thinking about the way forward for me. It was thinking about coming back to the planet and exploring it. It wasn’t a wistfulness that I may never get up here again. I’m on a planet and I’m an astronaut and you can’t take the astronaut out of my blood but the astronaut part is the same as being a doctor or being a scientist or being a photographer. It all involves curiosity, it all involves setting goals and trying to understand something in a different way than anybody else possibly could, not as an ego thing, rather, as a life form that has many experiences trying to rejuvenate society, trying not to recreate somebody else’s idea but draw inspiration from that person and pull all these things together and draw inspiration from that person. I look at myself and say how innovative can I continue to be throughout my life? How creative can I be? I have one life… what I can do is do stuff that changes the way I think.

Q: Which magazines do you subscribe to?
A: I get everything from Business Week to Discover magazine. I get National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, and Canadian arts magazine, I get Up and Beyond which is a travel magazine for the Arctic airlines, I get Outdoor Photography. I get a broad spectrum of things plus I some online journals. I get Wired magazine, I get Fast Company, I get Canadian Business. I’m a scientist but I get all these other magazines because they help me in terms of science policy, it helps me in terms seeing where businesses are doing science when they fail but also looking at global experience. I do speak a lot to corporations, organizations and I do custom talks for each one of them. The other day I had to give my whole list of talks and the types of areas I can speak in and I had to stop at 6 completely and distinctly different areas from golf fitness injury to space exploration to change and adaptability but that’s the same whether I’m dealing with my science, photography, golf, anything. It all deals with us wanting to have challenges because we never know who we are unless we get challenged to do something differently and those magazines I get reflect all that. I now do speeches on the environment and golf. I look at how people are trying to use biotechnology to make better golf courses, to look at groundwater issues, to look at all the things people didn’t think about before but now we have the science, a social construct and more of an ethical approach.

Q: One more question. Do you have a favourite moment in the lab?
A: There are probably two. One involves me personally as the subject and one involves me as the investigator. The one of me as a subject was related to the space program because I was head of an international scientific research program that dealt with how the brain regulates blood flow and how that changes in space flight and we worked with the people in NASA who dealt with the cardiovascular aspect. What we did to try to look at it – astronauts when they come back, if we’re not careful they can actually pas out because of the changes in blood volume and how the body uses and pumps blood throughout the body, especially the brain. We actually make people try to pass out by putting them on a tilt bed. Usually what happens is a person lies down for 10 or 15 minutes and they either stand up or you tilt the table. Instead of tilting the table on my flight we did the stand test so they laid me down after my flight and they had all these measures on me including blood flow to the brain. My colleague was examining me and I looked at my data as they were examining me and I could see my heart rate going through the roof, I could see my blood pressure dropping, I could see the blood flow in my head dropping, the room was getting clouded, they were looking at me like there was almost no cardiac output and I’m looking at this data and thinking, ‘These are going to make great slides!’ I’ve seen all the data and we’ve never had someone who had pushed themselves where we need to get them to see how the system works and I think that was one of my best experiences in science was doing that and pushing myself to the limit. That will be a huge moment that I will never forget. I will never forget that moment and the way my mind was thinking, ‘This is not about being macho, this is about getting the data.’ The other one would be I worked with people at the ? Deaconess Medical Center which is one of the teaching hospitals attached to Harvard Medical School. There was a gentleman there that was one of our co-investigators. We took the same experimental technique with the astronauts post-flight and used them on patients that had problems with their blood pressures when they stood up: Parkinson’s Diseases, spinal cord injuries, and these patients would volunteer to come in because they were so debilitated that they would do anything and to feel that they were contributing to the NASA program to help astronauts explore planets and to go into space and return safely, they felt even if it could not help them, they wanted to have a contribution to scientific research work and the way forward and these people were incredible. I would pick those two as the most wonderful examples I have had in my experience as a scientist and I have had many right through my undergraduate days doing insects right through to something as sophisticated as that. It was quite remarkable seeing these people who were so debilitated knowing that they were having a contribution to the future. It was amazing.