大象传媒

A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with Rabbi Julia Neuberger

Good morning.

Back in 1896, the American doctor Emile Grubbe was allegedly the first clinician to use radiation treatment for breast cancer, less than a year after Wilhelm Roentgen had discovered the Xray. Roll on 130 years and we're all familiar with Xrays, CT scans, MRIs and other forms of imaging. Doctors can see what鈥檚 going on inside us as never before, but we still use radiation therapy, though in a much more sophisticated way, for treating some breast cancers.

Those final decades of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth were scientifically extraordinary. Take syphilis, for example. The organism was first identified in 1905 and the first effective treatment, Salvarsan, was produced just 5 years later in Paul Ehrlich鈥檚 lab in Berlin. Insulin was discovered as a treatment for diabetes in 1922. Science was seen as the pursuit of great thinkers and optimists, who believed you could change things for the better. And, despite the horrors of World War One, with its huge slaughter on the battlefields followed by Spanish flu killing millions afterwards, that optimism remained in place.

And it still does. These days, new forms of science, engineering biology, gene modification, immunotherapy and others are changing how we treat disease. Great minds are focused on how you can use nature鈥檚 own properties to heal and to cure. I chair two London hospitals and work closely with research scientists and doctors; I'm bowled over by the combination of humility and excitement I encounter every day. The advances we make are for the whole of humankind. May we be grateful for this new knowledge and celebrate the hope science is bringing to humanity.