THE OPEN SOCIETY

I am having a fantastic time in London. Details later, but what struck me the most was the incredibly encouraging friendliness, helpfulness, and most importantly open-mindedness of everyone we met. A large group of people whom we met consisted of doctors and clinicians who are directly involved with cancer patients. I was surprised and very happy to see that these people, with little to no experience with organic synthesis or molecular modeling, were extremely open to collaboration including both these disciplines.

This is exactly the kind of culture we need to see to fight cancer and other ailments, where everyone from doctors to modelers to synthesists to materials scientists and engineers seamlessly work together and are open to collaboration. Also, nobody but a doctor can truly understand what impact a new treatment can have on a disease. One of the doctors we met had just seen a patient, a young lady not more than 35. He told us that he did not expect her to live much longer. Faced with morbid scenarios like this on a regular basis, it should not be surprising if doctors are willing to try anything and everything to make a new treatment available to patients. And yet it is rare to find people having an untrammeled vision of collaboration, which made our experience a truly pleasant and encouraging one.

This sort of reminds me in a different sense of that saying which says that strangers are simply family members who we have yet to meet.