A Livable Future: A Conversation with Robert S. Lawrence

This year’s Dodge Lecture was a little different from its previous incarnations, formatted as a fireside chat with the Center’s co-founder and emeritus adviser, Bob Lawrence, and three conversation partners. As the Center nears its 30th anniversary, it was a fitting moment to invite Dr. Lawrence to share stories from what he called his “zig-zag career” and to ask him to reflect on the past and the future. Several members from the Dodge Family were in attendance. 

It is almost difficult to fathom how Dr. Lawrence has packed so many professional experiences into one career—a career that spans medicine, human rights, and food systems. 

He took his audience on a highlights tour of his 60-plus years career, beginning with the dinner conversation he had with his father when he was a sophomore in high school. His father, a preacher, told him and his brother to “do something socially useful.” When the brothers asked their father to define his terms, his father said, “Yes, it’s very simple, you can either become doctors or preachers.” 

Dr. Lawrence began college as a history major, but he became interested in missionary medicine. He did a residency, and he then went into the Epidemic Intelligence Service. From there, he and his wife Cynthia went to El Salvador for two years. 

“And while we were there, my world changed in several ways,” said Dr. Lawrence. “First, I was confronted with abject poverty for really the first time in my life. Secondly, we were there when Martin Luther King was assassinated and then Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and we looked at each other and we said, ‘We've got to go home.’” 

From there he worked in rural health in North Carolina for several years, and they then returned to Boston where he became chief of medicine at Cambridge Hospital. He was also a founding member of Physicians for Human Rights, which shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its work as a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. 

From treating illness, to preventing illness, he became interested in confronting the food systems that affect health. Thirty years ago, with Al Sommer and activist Henry Spira, he came up with a novel idea for approaching the intersection of food and public health—a systems approach that examined the connections between ecosystems, public health, diet, and food production. With support from a generous donor, the Center for a Livable Future was born. 

When asked for guidance for navigating the roads ahead, he said, “We live in difficult times, to state the obvious.” 

Dr. Lawrence underscored the need for the world to re-embrace the international order devoted to solving problems, which was developed after World War II. “We need to regain our footing and work together for a common cause,” he said. 

“The Red Cross or Red Crescent does not signal protection,” he said. “And every day whether it’s in Ukraine or Gaza or Myanmar, we’re seeing health care and health care workers targeted. So that’s bleak, but I’m thinking that maybe we’re reaching the bottom of the trough, and we’ll begin to climb out of that.” 

In terms of decision-making, he emphasized fairness and mercy. Paraphrasing the British poet John Donne, from Holy Sonnet 9, he said, “When in doubt, come down on the side of mercy.” 

Erring on the side of mercy seems to be a practice that has infused Dr. Lawrence’s career. During the conversation, he spoke often of the need to make things so fair that even the “worst” lot would be pleasing to anyone who might be assigned to it. 

When asked what he is most proud of in his career, Dr. Lawrence hesitated. As a self-described “PK,” or “preacher’s kid,” he is constitutionally humble. After taking a moment to reflect, he responded. “I’m most proud that my zig-zag career has zagged in good directions because I was responsive to things that I’d learned before [about] the underlying principles of equity and fairness. For the first 20 years of my career, all of my clinical settings were poverty settings.” 

He concluded the conversation with this thought: “I was just daily reminded that I could do the most brilliant diagnosis, could provide the latest medications and the latest diagnostics, but I couldn’t undo 50 years of living without dignity, of living in shabby quarters, not always having the right diet… And so, I think the fact that I’ve been able to internalize those experiences and try to translate them into a research agenda and advocacy agenda is what I feel good about.”