When recent figures showed that the U.S. government’s multi-decade, multi-billion dollar fight against cancer had barely changed cancer survival rates, Anna Barker – the deputy director of the US National Cancer Institute – took an unusual step. She called physicist Paul Davies, and asked him for his help. Not so much because she needed a physicist, but instead because she was looking for “a disruptive agent”.
[H]is naivety sometimes makes biologists grit their teeth. (“Aaargh! Physicists!” wrote Paul ‘PZ’ Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, in a blog response to Davies’ proposal earlier this year that tumours are a reversion to primitive genetic mechanisms that pre-date the dawn of multicellular life.) “But his critics don’t appreciate the value of a disruptive agent,” says biophysicist Stuart Lindsay, who works closely with Davies at the ASU physics–cancer centre. “It takes someone like Paul, constantly nagging, asking disruptive questions, to get people to take a fresh look at their assumptions.”
Love that concept of embracing the disruptive thinker (to a degree, obviously), and Paul Davies is certainly one who will ask some interesting questions. I have a number of his fascinating books right behind me on my bookshelf, discussing everything from the origins of life to the ‘mind of God’. His most recent book is The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence (Amazon US or Amazon UK), and last year Davies spoke to BigThink about the concepts in the book, as well as his more recent involvement with cancer research. I’ve embedded the complete interview below (43 mins); alternatively you can can go to the BigThink site and watch individual questions/episodes as you please.
For more interesting news and articles involving Paul Davies, see the links below.
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