Interviews, opinions, and stories from the world's top academics.
So we had these lunchtime talks and this guy comes in and he tells a story and he says hypotheses are, maybe I’ll exaggerate a little bit what he says, that hypotheses are useless and they encourage you to be wrong and stick by your original ideas. His example was if you take a telescope, or some sort of imaging device, that you point it at the sky and it says “Is the sky red?”...
So for a person in a biotech company to say that they are going to be able to extend the human lifespan without any negative consequences implies that they think they know more about human biology than anyone in fact does. My guess is that once in a while we will get away with it, but many times we won’t, and that the way we will find out is probably going to involve some human suffering and possibly even death. It’s a high-stakes game...
LC: I think a lot of people know about Darwin’s work about 150 years ago, but little about what’s happened in evolutionary biology since. What have been the accomplishments of the field since, what are the major landmarks?
The first sign now Professor Stephen Stearn’s was fascinated with organisms involved four-year-old Stearns chasing an adult male parrot fish in the waters of Mahukona off Hawaii’s big island with his mother racing to catch him. A small kid bullied in elementary school, Stearns retreated into science...
LC: I read that there was a report a few years ago about the student to PhD ratio in the school that you co-authored, and there was a goal to increase the number of full professors with PhDs in the coming years. Is that going well?
PC: I think that a good leader surrounds themselves with people who are better than them at lots of things. So if I surround myself with Deputy Vice Chancellors and Principals who are better than me in doing all of the things that my office has to do, and then you take that down to their level--they surround themselves with people who are better than them in the administration. And then you take it down to the next level, you’ve actually got the very best people, the most skilled and talented at the bottom of your organization. So it’s all about believing in those people and investing in those people.
PC: Rwanda is putting a lot of emphasis on knowledge based economies, but it’s also putting a lot of emphasis on future drivers for growth and human capital. If you look, most of the people in this country will be alumni of the University of Rwanda, they graduated from one of the former institutions. And a lot of people promoted to government positions are promoted from the UR. So we are able to have quite an influence.
LC: So can you tell us a little about the University of Rwanda?
PC: So in September 2013 the University became a legal institute, which meant that all the former public universities ceased to exist. At that time, we merged the seven public universities to create the University of Rwanda. There was a task team working for six months to create the University of Rwanda, writing the laws and some of the early protocols.
Philip Cotton grew up in South London before attending the University in Scotland. He went to Saint Andrews University before studying medicine in Glasgow. He began as a junior doctor in Glasgow, and continued to do his special training, master’s, and doctorate there--“So quite a boring person really,” he claimed. As a medical student, he… Continue reading Philip Cotton — Bio
LC: I wanted to get into one more big concern with the advancement of technology, which is that it causes and sustains wealth inequality. At some global forum in November of 2017 Bill Gates said that technology has a massive ability to accentuate the divide between the rich and the poor if we let it, and I was sort of shocked—hasn’t it done that already? How big is that man’s bank account? So what do you think is the key? What is tech’s role in wealth disparity and how do we tackle this cycle?
