GUEST COLUMN
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August 2008
Meet Our Featured Guest Columnist:
Dr. Bernard Lown
Dr. Bernard Lown co-founded the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War with Dr. Evgueni Chazov, a Soviet cardiologist. The organization won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.
Q: How did you first get involved in health and human rights issues?
A: In 1961, I had invented a new way of restoring a normal heartbeat, the defibrillator, and I was riding on a crest of a wave. At this point, a friend of mine asked me to go listen to a Brit, a professor from Britain, Philip Noel-Baker. I said, "Why do I want to listen to Philip Noel-Baker?" He says, "He won a Nobel prize." So I said, "In medicine?" "No, in peace." So I laughed and I was not interested, but he pushed me hard and I went to hear him talk. That talk was chilling. He said that humankind has no future. There will not be any civilization by the year 2000 if we do not tame the nuclear beast. His talk had an enormous effect on me. I mean so profound; here in my career, I was working on sudden cardiac death, the leading cause of fatality in the industrialized world. And now I realized that sudden death will not be cardiac but nuclear. So, I called together a group of people... and the more we learned, the more we were horrified at the criminality, at the immorality, at the injustice of it. So, we began to talk and we founded an organization, Physicians for Social Responsibility. But our major contribution, which made a profound impact, was to carry out a study of the effects, the medical effects, on Boston of a thermonuclear strike, and this was extraordinary; I mean extraordinary even now. When I reflect all these years later, it sends a chill through my body because a thermonuclear bomb dropped on Boston at the time would have killed two-thirds of Boston population. Two million would have been dead within about 24 hours. Half a million would be fatally injured. Of Boston's 6,000 physicians, 5,000 would be dead; 1,000 would be left to take care of casualties more than the mind could imagine and they had nothing to offer. There were no medicines, no appliances, nothing. So the doctor had to conceive a new role, a role of euthanasia. If he was a humane figure and so indescribable suffering, what is his duty? But society did not bequeath him with the responsibility or the legality or the power to do away with human being, nor is that the calling of a physician to kill people; but, that's the only thing left to him. We wrote it up and we published it in the New England Journal of Medicine. It occupied an entire issue and the next there were headlines all over the world and we changed reality. We also helped stimulate such studies all across the world, the same model that we used of study, the same scientific analysis was utilized in Germany, in Holland, in Britain, in Cleveland, in Pittsburgh, in San Francisco. So we created a dialogue and the most important thing in a democratic society is an informed citizenry that engages in dialogue.
A: In 1961, I had invented a new way of restoring a normal heartbeat, the defibrillator, and I was riding on a crest of a wave. At this point, a friend of mine asked me to go listen to a Brit, a professor from Britain, Philip Noel-Baker. I said, "Why do I want to listen to Philip Noel-Baker?" He says, "He won a Nobel prize." So I said, "In medicine?" "No, in peace." So I laughed and I was not interested, but he pushed me hard and I went to hear him talk. That talk was chilling. He said that humankind has no future. There will not be any civilization by the year 2000 if we do not tame the nuclear beast. His talk had an enormous effect on me. I mean so profound; here in my career, I was working on sudden cardiac death, the leading cause of fatality in the industrialized world. And now I realized that sudden death will not be cardiac but nuclear. So, I called together a group of people... and the more we learned, the more we were horrified at the criminality, at the immorality, at the injustice of it. So, we began to talk and we founded an organization, Physicians for Social Responsibility. But our major contribution, which made a profound impact, was to carry out a study of the effects, the medical effects, on Boston of a thermonuclear strike, and this was extraordinary; I mean extraordinary even now. When I reflect all these years later, it sends a chill through my body because a thermonuclear bomb dropped on Boston at the time would have killed two-thirds of Boston population. Two million would have been dead within about 24 hours. Half a million would be fatally injured. Of Boston's 6,000 physicians, 5,000 would be dead; 1,000 would be left to take care of casualties more than the mind could imagine and they had nothing to offer. There were no medicines, no appliances, nothing. So the doctor had to conceive a new role, a role of euthanasia. If he was a humane figure and so indescribable suffering, what is his duty? But society did not bequeath him with the responsibility or the legality or the power to do away with human being, nor is that the calling of a physician to kill people; but, that's the only thing left to him. We wrote it up and we published it in the New England Journal of Medicine. It occupied an entire issue and the next there were headlines all over the world and we changed reality. We also helped stimulate such studies all across the world, the same model that we used of study, the same scientific analysis was utilized in Germany, in Holland, in Britain, in Cleveland, in Pittsburgh, in San Francisco. So we created a dialogue and the most important thing in a democratic society is an informed citizenry that engages in dialogue.