Name: Vic
Location: St. Gallen, Switzerland
I’m also a researcher, more a generalist than a specialist, though I have a lifelong interest in the study of life.
I’m a lecturer and researcher at the university in St. Gallen. It’s a small, but influential school in St. Gallen, Switzerland, I’m not sure how many people in America are familiar with it. I teach mathematics to graduate-level students. Most of my students will go on to work in tech, though, of course, not all of them, some will go on to research or themselves, teach. We’re fortunate here, many of our students go on to become very successful business people, which means we get to see and influence these students at a critical point in their lives. As you can imagine, that relationship often becomes reciprocal once those students have established themselves in their careers, which feels a little declassé to mention, but is essential to our work. Even successful schools in Switzerland have limited budgets for research, believe it or not. I’m also a researcher, more a generalist than a specialist, though I have a lifelong interest in the study of life. I’ve always been fascinated by life. How living things actually live, how they’re born, how they age, how they die, what happens once they’ve died. To be truthful, that’s my passion, though, the math is incredibly useful in the pursuit of those studies.
Think about it: what’s more interesting than life? The science is fascinating, and the research is never-ending, we’ll never reach the end of researching life. But setting aside the science, what is life? How and why does it start? How does it continue? Why does it have to end? Does it have to end? These are the questions I’ve spent my career asking myself and trying to answer. Even as a boy, I was fascinated by life. Have you ever seen a sail swallowtail eclosion? I grew up in Genoa, where swallowtails are common, and as a child, I used to capture little green caterpillars and raise them in my little glass enclosures. I was fascinated by how they could transform through multiple stages of life, from caterpillar, to pupa, to imago. I still am, I have a small tank in my lab that I will occasionally fill with caterpillars to raise and release in the spring.
Day-to-day, the job is pretty routine, I imagine it’s very similar to other lecturers. I usually lecture twice a week, and hold office hours on Fridays. I don’t know if you know very much about graduate students, but they typically have many questions, and they’re difficult questions to answer. At this level of their education, my students should be able to answer the easy questions themselves, which means I often have to research their questions on my own, or may have to do some work myself in order to help them, which takes up much of my time. I enjoy it, I love the opportunity to teach and to help my students, but it does, sometimes, take up more of my research time than I would like. I could probably transition to researching full-time, but I believe that my interactions with my students help to keep me fresh. It also helps me identify potential lab assistants, my current assistant is a young German who wasn’t the best student, but he is a very dedicated worker who works very hard to complete the tasks. He’s truly impressive in that regard, he has a disability which makes carrying heavy items difficult for him, but he never complains, he simply throws it over his shoulder and does what is asked of him.
What could be more important than researching life itself?
My research is, without question, the most important part of my work. What could be more important than researching life itself? As I mentioned before, we have many students here who go on to great success in business. You may have even read about one of my students, who is currently exploring the possibilities of life extension. At great cost, he and his team have explored many different methods of life preservation. Recently, he completed a full plasma transfusion, which I believe may show truly promising results over the long term. As a disclosure, I have advised he and his team from time to time, but I’m not a member of his staff. He’s contributed financially to my research, but my focus and his are different. He’s focused on extending his own life, which I find a noble goal, but, for myself, I feel it’s probably a little late for that. I am, however, entranced by the idea of extending the lives of others, maybe even beyond death.
I don’t think we can defeat death.
My research hasn’t been peer-reviewed, and I think you should be skeptical of my claims without having seen my work, but I’ve been able to observe some truly remarkable results in some of my experiments. I’m fortunate in that my subjects, as they were, are already deceased. This work would be much harder, and, to be frank, much more heavily regulated if I had to work with live subjects. But I’m exploring the possibilities inherent in stimulating cortical function in dead tissue using electrical nodes. The possibilities here are really remarkable, and the results, while early, are very promising. Just think — what if death wasn’t the end, what if we could reverse it, or overcome it? We’re a long way from that now, my results are preliminary, and there’s still so much work to do. But just imagine the possibilities! What if death wasn’t the end? Maybe more importantly, what if new life could spring from it? We observe this in nature, but what if we could enhance that, what if we could bring new, sentient life from death, maybe even in the same vessel? Many of my colleagues are studying ways to defeat death, but they’re on a different path than I am. I don’t think we can defeat death. But — and, again, my results are very preliminary — but what if death were just another phase in our lives? What if we could go on living afterward? Isn’t that exciting to think about?
Editor’s Note: RIP, Teri Garr, you were one of the best to do it.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE 