Bonds of Society and Science

I was, once upon a time, a minor knight of the periodic table — I spent a good deal of my early 20s thinking about bonds. At the same time I was learning about chemical bonds in school, I went long on British literature and read and reread Jane Austen novels. To this day, I’ve probably read Pride and Prejudice more times than any other book, except maybe Huck Finn. Both are essentially books about the nature of our social and family bonds, including the freedom and oppression in those relationships. Our national conversation has returned to these questions in subtle and overt ways that challenge the work of clinicians and scientists to improve how and how often we talk with our neighbors about everything from chemical bonds to the necessity of ineffable bonds between patients and their clinicians.

Effective health care depends on a complex network of social connections. At the most essential core of health is our relationship with our own bodies. Then we depend on the social bonds that bring us wholesome air, water and food — whether those bonds are between us and our gestating mother, or between our community and companies and governments of the economy. Way downstream, the clinicians enter the fray, leveraging everything from the bonds of the patient–
clinician relationship to the latest technology managing when and how the hydrogen bonds between base pairs release.

Let’s pay attention to the bonds of society and science as we move through the next few years. The great experiment of the Enlightenment is not over, and the links between our neighbors and our institutions will be the key to the next discovery and the ability of a first-generation college student to afford a clinical education. We are here for those connections and those conversations.