Last week, on 5 October, I received a morale-boosting email saying, among other things: ‘I like your word unmindfulness’. This wonderful comment from Lord Rees of Ludlow, Astronomer Royal and Professor of astronomy at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK. I had written to Lord Rees after reading a feature in the Sunday Times of 5 September that the following day, on Monday 26, the Astronomer Royal, Lord Rees of Ludlow, would launch the Longitude Prize for dementia.
Some years ago, I read Longitude. The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His time, by Dava Sobel. Published in 1996, it was reviewed in the Sunday Times by Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal – later to become Lord Rees – who said of the book:
In this tale, embracing basic astronomy, navigation and the science of clocks, the reader is swept along on the epic voyage of the mind and the globe. (1998 paperback edition by Fourth Estate, London)
The blurb on the back cover of the book said ‘The longitude problem was the thorniest dilemma of the eighteenth century’. Sailors were literally ‘lost at sea’, journeys across the globe would take inordinate length of time because no instrument existed to measure longitude. An international prize was launched for anyone to invent an appropriate time keeping instrument for navigation. The perfect time-keeper was indeed constructed by John Harrison, a lone, maverick Yorkshireman ‘obsessed’ with clock-building all his life.
On reading the announcement in the Sunday Times, on September 25, of a Longitude Prize for dementia, I wanted to know how exactly ‘technical solutions’ could contribute to solve the 21st century’s ‘most pressing problem’. The headline in the Sunday Times was typically sensationally captivating:
Maverick genius may solve dementia
I always feel a kind of sadness and frustration on reading press headlines that sensationalise, and, frankly, trivialise the seriousness of a condition that is a syndrome and not a disease. At times I feel angry at the apparent brazenness of editors whose sole aim in writing headlines is one of grabbing the attention of the reader.
The short article went on to say that the Longitude Prize for dementia was launched as a ‘challenge to find technological solutions’.
My immediate reaction was: how can technology solve a mental impairment – called dementia – caused by different diseases? Will these unknown future mavericks focus on the different diseases or the multitude of symptoms categorised as ‘dementia’?
So I wrote to Lord Rees, asking these questions. To my immense surprise, he responded very quickly to explain to me that the focus of this competition would be to ‘extend the time for which people with progressive mental impairment (I like your word ‘unmindfulness’) can remain in their homes by unobtrusively monitoring their safety, offering them personalised reminders, triggers to past memories of sounds and images’.
This, of course, makes perfect sense and I hope that someone with creative minds and technological know-how will rise to the challenge and offer some appropriate ‘solutions’. I wish Lord Rees success.