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Office: |
Faculty of Health Sciences, Michael DeGroote Centre for Learning and Discovery – 3300H |
Email: |
chari@mcmaster.ca | |
Phone: |
905-525-9140 ext. 21559 | |
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Dr. P.K. Rangachari is Professor (Emeritus) of Medicine, who returned to Arts & Science in 2019-20 to teach ARTSSCI 4CT3 / Medical Humanities Inquiry.
Recent events throw into sharper relief the value of a program such as Arts & Science, which gets students to savour the wisdom of the past and prepares them for exciting yet uncertain futures. When COVID surfaced, the word “unprecedented” , thrown around like confetti, made me cringe. It showed how an abysmal ignorance of the past coupled with an excessive reliance on ephemeral tweets can confuse, frighten, and muddle, giving license for profiteering to flourish. Plague, cholera, smallpox, and polio have evoked precisely that combination of fears, hopes and untruths that COVID did. Nothing new. Collective amnesia reigned. What was needed was a good dose of healthy scepticism, an awareness of the past and the skills to sift grain from chaff—much of that provided by this program.
I am acutely conscious of the past. Mine was foreign in more ways than one. I was lucky that I grew up in India, a statement that may raise serious concerns about my sanity but is nevertheless true. I did not suffer summer camps, obligatory sports clubs, or orchestrated social activities. Only a delightful sense of freedom. I doubt if I would have survived a North American childhood without serious counselling. I was a true JD. At the age of 10, I found myself wandering parks rather than attending classes; no truant officer cross-checked my whereabouts. My parents summoned by the school principal were seriously concerned, but fortunately that delinquent phase passed, and I quickly morphed into a bookish nerd just as I reached high school.
I drifted into a medical school, though I had little or no social skills, had no desperate desire to help people, save the world or do good to man or beast. A series of muddles derailed my attempts to get into a chemistry program at Delhi University, pushing me into a pre-med course. Fortunately, I got into the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi (1966), the best medical school in the country which had marvellous teachers with stellar records, who showed me the excitement and fascination of scientific research.
Following my internship, I went to the U of Alberta to complete my Ph.D. in Pharmacology. Though not the most inviting of places, I had excellent mentors. With a Ph.D. in hand, I went onto the Cardiovascular Research Institute (CVRI) in San Francisco. The Nixon-Kissinger-Watergate years were exciting times to live in the US, particularly in California and the research atmosphere was exhilarating. But in those days a J-1 visa was a limiting factor and my wanderjahrs continued—Hopitaux Necker and Bichat, Paris, Delhi University, Beth Israel Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston till I finally landed at McMaster University in 1981, for a single year that stretched to more than half my professional life. Till then, I had worked in research institutes for over 15 years, with little or no contact with students. My professional life underwent a phase transition when I saw problem-based learning in practice and got involved in teaching in a variety of programs, undergraduates (life sciences, health sciences, Arts & Science), medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, pharmacy, and biomedical engineering
I have taught in the Arts and Sciences Programme since 1989, almost continuously, with several hiatus years. The different courses (The Curing Society, Discovery, Molecular Physiology, Medical Humanities) tried in diverse ways to bridge the two cultures (the sciences and the humanities) by encouraging students to express their learning through more creative outlets (conversations, stories, plays, poems). Courses in other Programmes (Health Sciences, Biology-Pharmacology) linked toxicology with creative writing, taste receptors with anthropology, and students have used archival material to deconstruct the antecedents of medical technology.
Teaching has been both enjoyable and rewarding (3M Fellowship, OCUFA award, President’s Award from McMaster University, Claude Bernard Lectureship from the American Physiological Society, IUPHAR-Teaching Award, several MSU awards, including one given by the Arts & Science students).
It is vital that Universities foster sciences and the humanities since both are expressions of human endeavour. As Auden so eloquently noted: “As biological organisms made of matter, we are subject to the laws of physics and biology: as conscious persons who create our own history, we are free to decide what that history shall be. Without science, we should have no notion of equality; without art, no notion of liberty.” This passage from his After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics echoes that sentiment: “This passion of our kind/For the process of finding out/Is a fact one can hardly doubt/But I would rejoice in it more/If I knew more clearly what/We wanted the knowledge for/Felt certain still that the mind/Is free to know or not.”
I have spent decades working on isolated tissues, cells and membranes. The living cell is an marvellous creation and well could be a role model for our behaviour. It is well structured, the multiple organelles spatially organised in a labile but flexible environment to work effectively in concert. Above all the membrane discriminates finely, maintains ionic balance allowing cells to battle the inexorable dynamic dissipative universal laws and be “cheats in the game of entropy”. My research on membranes and ion transport involved using Ohm’s law daily. The essence of that law is the linkage between driving forces, flows and ease of flow. So, I am sensitized to think in terms of fluxes. Heraclitus elegantly captures that sentiment in the expression—panta rhei, or “everything flows.” Social pressures drive actions and institutions either simply help or hinder.
The pandemic has exposed some fault lines and whether Universities as we know will exist is moot. We should simply follow Hamlet’s wise counsel: defy augury. The readiness is all.
Some random thoughts on teaching and learning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N7Y3UBy48I)
https://linktr.ee/pkrangachari
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1HGGhyCCBtSslu2QjydW1k?si=f161b9fca63849aa