A Nigerian doctor, a professor of
paediatric surgery, Oluyinka Olutoye, has been in the news lately, the world
over. He has been the toast of the world
of medical research. He has been
interviewed on BBC and has been written about widely. All the accolades are well-deserved. What he did was as close to a miracle as you
will see science come to.
He was the attending physician in a case
in which a foetus early in its development was found to have a rare cancer on
its tailbone that was sure to be fatal if not excised. But what to do. There were no precedents. He led the team that took the foetus from the
mother’s womb, cut out the cancer, and put the foetus back. The baby was born after full gestation.
I add my voice to the congratulatory
messages that are being sent to the good doctor from all corners of the
globe. May he continue to prosper in his
work and life.
Then, as if on cue, our parliamentarians
must find a way to turn the occasion into an “Ówàḿbẹ̀ party”.
I saw on Nigerian television, with sadness, their giving a standing
ovation to the good doctor who, of course, was not there. Then, again on cue, the next thing is
“Ìwúyè”—the conferment of chieftaincy titles.
At least, that is how I read their enthusiastic suggestion that the
Buhari administration give Professor Olutoye national honours. It is this idea that has provoked the
reflections in this piece.
Needless to say, Olutoye will decide
whether or not that is an appropriate way to honour him. And it is not clear to me what getting a
national honour has to do with celebrating a singular scientific, academic
achievement. It strikes as another
example of how we cannot break from an outmoded past in which conferment of
chieftaincies were in line with the kinds of endeavours that dominated our
societies and lives back then. New modes
of living require new and more appropriate honorifics. It is why the French and Germans abolished
royalty and substituted membership of their respective intellectual academies
as relevant honours for academic and intellectual attainments, generally. Many prestigious prizes are endowed to
recognize the likes of Olutoye, not meaningless “honours”.
Moreover, methinks, given some of the
riff-raff on whom national honours have been frittered in recent memory, it
would be infra dignitatem to bring the good doctor down to their level.
You want to honour Professor Oluyinka
Olutoye? I have an alternative
suggestion for you. I would like to
offer it by way of a comparison.
It was 2009. There was this Korean-American scientist who
was doing such path-breaking work in his specialty—cell biology—that a year or
two earlier, he had been named amongst the top 40 scientists under the age of
40 in the United States. That year,
Princeton, Yale, and University of California at Berkeley were in a bidding war
for his services; they were all recruiting him for their faculty. A Korean university joined the
competition. They knew that sentiments
and patriotism were nothing; his constituency was humanity, no less. Just like Olutoye.
The reason he was so attractive to the
competing institutions was the quality of his laboratory, yes, his
laboratory, how many Ph.D. candidates and postdoctoral researchers were
collaborating with him there and what quality attached to their output from
this laboratory. South Korea was not
going to lose out.
The Korean institution involved was
willing to build him a brand new laboratory, provide all the tools to work with
to ensure that moving to Korea would not lead to any diminution in the quality
of his research output. There was yet a
stumbling block: it was the case that in Korea only full professors were
tenured and the gentleman concerned was still an associate professor. Even with all the material requisites
provided, he was adamant that he would only move from a tenured position in the
United States to a tenured equivalent in Korea.
Remarkably, he did not ask to be elevated to full professor; just
tenure. At the end, the Koreans made an
exception to accommodate him and the package to get him to move came to almost
$2 million [at that time, the Korean Won was exchanging at 1000 won to
1US$]. The tenured associate professor
was hired to enhance, in a big way, Korea’s ability to do big science, maybe
even to attract that rare Nobel prize for science.
Of course, I didn’t read a word of Korean
but I did not see in the English-language press any intimations of crazy-ass
partying with overflowing, skin-lacerating, starched brocades, funny hats and
lots of noise in the name of entertainment.
More important, there was no way his
return home would have been possible if the university system in Korea had been
under the thumb of a killer of all things quality called the National
Universities Commission—by the way, the new resting place for expired vice
chancellors—with no support infrastructure run by people for whom being
professor, much less associate professor, is not enough; they must be dean,
vice chancellor, and other irrelevant, distracting, real career-killing
diversions.
As the Yorùbá might put
it, Ọgbọ́n ọlọ́gbọn ni kìí jẹ́ ká pe àgbà ní wèrè. So, here is my suggestion. You want to honour Professor Oluyinka
Olutoye? Create just one
university and an atmosphere in that university where the good doctor can come
to spend just one year and not suffer a catastrophic decline in the
quality of his research with appropriate levels of doctoral students and
postdocs, and so on. That, I trust,
would be a recognition worthy of his attainment offered by a giant worthy of
its name.
For now, keep your aṣọ ẹbí
and don’t distract a worthy intellect serving humanity in the ever bustling
ambience of Houston, Texas, U.S.A.
