Alan Lightman’s Response to “Imagining the Future of Medicine” Commentary

Abstract

Alan Lightman, is a novelist, essayist, physicist and educator, who from an early age, was entranced by both science and the arts. Lightman received his AB degree in physics from Princeton University in 1970, Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, and his PhD in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1974. Lightman’s essays, short fiction and reviews have appeared in the American Scholar, the Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, Harper’s Magazine, Harvard Magazine, Nature, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times and many more publications. He has lectured at more than 100 universities nationwide about the similarities and differences in the ways that scientists and artists view the world. In his scientific work, Lightman has made fundamental contributions to the theory of astrophysical processes under conditions of extreme temperatures and densities. In particular, his research has focused on relativistic gravitation theory, the structure and behavior of accretion disks, stellar dynamics, radiative processes and relativistic plasmas. He was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities. Lightman is currently Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).