Transcript

Are the scientists creators? Lluis Masana at TEDxReus

[Music] Bon good afternoon well I know I'm the boring part of this session I don't have funny videos I I don't know JS I don't know how to draw I don't I'm not singing so I've been asked to address the question on the relationship between creation process and science creation process and Science and I put a title to my talk which is are the scientist creators in fact after listening my the previous speakers I now I would like to change the title I will put what is doing someone like you in a place like this but anyway what do you think about this this question would you include a scientist in a group in the concept of creation what do you think about can you raise hands those of you thinking that a scientist could be considered a Creator please okay I have a lot of job to do today well I must admit that my first opinion about this question was a clear no I thought there is nothing to do between a Creator like a master like uh Mr Aldo mahu is one of the best sculptures from bre and a scientist and I based my conclusion in a couple of points one of them is the meaning of the word creation creation is a process that's starting from nothing from scratch from a very primitive materials at the end of this process you have something you have produced something you have an object and I thought well are the scientists doing things like this well in fact scientists what we do is just observing we observed the world we observed the nature we observed the life elements like cells and we want to know exactly the basic of this life we try to discover discover something that is already there we are not producing anything new we are discovering we're trying to understand something that is hidden inside of these materials we want to know don't worry about this slide which are the pathways maintaining the healthy state of an individual which Pathways get wrong when someone is ill we want to know all this so somehow we could face the concept of creation as something a process producing something new and the process of science trying to discover something that is already there we are not producing new things we are just trying to discover things that are in already in the place the second aspect that I consider makes differences between creation and science was about the methods and creators and we have had some examples this afternoon creators need some let's say esoteric uh forces supporting the process creators use things like inspiration like improvisation geniality they need some drops of geniality and the and the set of all these things all together at the End Produce the master Works they produce at the end the pieces of art music like Johan re uh poetry uh any kind of literature uh fashion or paintings m Master works like this one that this year we could observe in our city what about scientist well scientists we have to balance probably some part of creativity but of course we have to balance the creativity with a lot of credibility we have to work using methods that must be accepted by the scientific community we could not say I discovered this because I had an inspiration and the Musa came to my brain and then I said well this is the solution of cancer for example so we have to balance our methodology using those methods that have been homologated by the scientific Community otherwise our results will not be avable the frame containing all these rules of our methods are defined by something referred to the scientific method scientific method was a methodology that was defined about two centuries ago and all the scientists used this kind of approach to the uh processes and when I arrived to this point I changed my mind I said well why scientist are not creators because we have to use a very specific methods well what about musicians for example to produce their Works they have to use a limited number of musical notes written in a five lines of a pentagram and with these tools they create an opera for example a concert so everyone has limitations in the way they work so from this I thought well probably there are more points in common between science and creativity and I said yes of course and the first one is a very important one scientist and also any Creator starts his work from the idea so the beginning of any scientific or any creation process is an idea and this is common between creation any creation process and Science and where we take these ideas from I am in the field of biomedical Sciences I'm physician and of course that my ideas come from the observation of my patients and from the observation of the diseases of my patients when we see our patients with their problems what we want is to improve his ha quality of life his health so we obtain the ideas from the observation of our patients I am involved in cardiovascular prevention I try to understand how the heart attacks are produced trying to avoid them and my approach to this question is through the analysis of molecules circulating through our blood that get get stuck into attach into the uh inner part of the arteries these red tubes are arteries the arteries conduct our blood across the body and there are molecules that go there blocking and occluding these arteries avoiding the pass of blood through these tubes of course at the end of this artery with no blood we will have a problem a patient with a problem a heart attack if this happens in the heart so we have seen our patient we have identified the problem we have a question to answer then we put together our team to work designing the whole process of research the process of research is constituted by a series of elements at different uh chain pieces that are composed by the disease which is the first aspect that we consider from the disease we obtain we obtain the idea we uh have our question there we have to study a lot then because otherwise probably we we will be studying things that have been already uh discover or studied we launch our hypothesis we enunciate our objectives we enumerate them we design how to approach these objective the methods that we will use we perform the experiments we obtain the results after the results we analyze the results and then we obtain a conclusion in all this process I would like that you think in how many of these stages of these steps creation takes part I think that many of them so there is something common with the creators at the end when we get the the the the conclusions if we are lucky we we will contribute to increase the knowledge in the field if we are very very lucky probably we can obtain something that could have some applicability to our patients and this is a very important point I'm going to show you an example of one of these process I'm not going to use any of my experiments experiments from my lab I'm going to use an experiment that was performed 100 years ago we are now celebrating the first century of an important Theory the theory that lipids fat can produce heart attacks and this observation was made 100 Years Ago by this individual that you can see here in the picture who is uh who was a military physician from Russia Nikolai anov this uh physician knew that some of his colleagues had observed that some animal models from the lab rabbits in this case when they were fed with several with different uh Foods develop a lesion in the artery and had heart attacks and he was interested in knowing which elements in this foot could produce the development of the problem so he defined many objectives he designed all the scientific work and was testing all the hypothesis and he observed that finally the candidates were the X the X when when they uh gave egg to the rabbit the rabbit had heart attacks but he did more than that he separate the egg in the components in the white part and the yolk of the egg and observe that was the yolk the Yellow Part what produce the process we know that the is plenty of cholesterol so the theory that cholesterol is bad for arteries and produce heart attacks was defined 100 years ago experiments similar to that after years have defined the fact that the heart attacks that the health of the heart is altered by not just one single thing but by multifactoral things so the heart attack is produced not just by by by lipids by cholesterol but also diabetes tobaco overweight sedentary hypertension and nowaday all this knowledge all put all together allowed us to give recommendations to our patients to prevent cardiovascular events so this is a task that has been produced long years just adding experiments plus experiments to give us the final the final Theory at the end of our work when we finish with all our conclusions what do we produce well in fact the final product in general is the communication of our results to our colleagues and we produce as scientific publication this is very important because we are evaluated according the number of scientific Publications and the level of these scientific Publications however these things are changing and now although these scientific Publications are important to increase the scientific knowledge it's important also for any researcher look for the applicability of their results and now we are seeking things that could improve the care of our patients for example developing a new diagnostic test or for example describing a device that can be used to improve uh a disease or uh discovering a drug that can cure some uh patients so at the end of our activity we are not just contributing to to signs but trying to produce something that has applicability direct applicability to our patients and this way of thinking is addressed to improve the quantity and quality of life of our patients and has been already adopted by those institutions that are involved in research now University's Research Institute that won the the the researchers contribute to increase the knowledge Etc now are moving to use their facilities the researchers to produce something that can contribute to wealth in the world to increase the productivity to produce money to have some impact into the society at the end of this process if we activate the economy we activate the money that is moving in our society probably we also could collaborate increasing the number of jobs available and this is one of the aims of many of the uh sources that are uh given to researchers to do research so this is my final my final Slide the like this little train this is the train that goes to the Nua Monastery uh the way so the the the scientific the scientific process is long is difficult but as this trip is very interesting very nice from the starting point to the end thank you very much for your attention