Moshe Solomonow (http://www.uchsc.edu/ortho/bioeng/faculty.html) stands out as perhaps the most interesting personality among the top scientists at the FRC. Look at the number of published research papers this guy has: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=search&db=pubmed&term=Solomonow%20M[au]&dispmax=50
I cannot speak to his science, having read little and understood less – though he has a pioneering reputation and a fierce dedication to good science and he is the world’s expert on ligamentous creep and hysteresis (that doesn’t sound good, does it?). A large and imposing man whose light brown suits cover a good 20 stone with a high balding dome and a deeply-carved face of a Levantine merchant that can go from haughty to twinkle and back again without warning.
In the first conference Moshe played the heirophant to the point of being papist – ‘just read my research, it’s all there’ . I didn’t feel he was entering the field of inquiry with the right attitude, and he quite put me off with his sniffiness and lordly manner. How different was my reaction this time! How different was he this time, marching to the microphone at the end of someone’s presentation, and how the presenters must have braced themselves when they saw him coming.
Some people’s backs were still put up by his attacks, sometimes quite forceful and occasionally bordering on belligerent, against the weakness in the science he saw presented in some of the sessions – and even at that he seemed to be restraining himself.
Seeing his large body slope toward the microphone, coattails flapping, would bring us all awake and bring the speaker to an autonomic sweat. Though the tone of the questioning could be a little badgering, the questions were always salient and often brilliant, looking around corners to the next steps in related research, finding the holes in the way the data was collected that no one else could see, or suggesting a new approach to the problem the research was meant to address.
Last time Solomonow was a brooding presence, who struck me as self-important and not open to new ideas. This time, he seems increasingly like a godsend, our Socrates of the Fascial Research Congresses; I hope he will stay in his position as the Court Jester, in its original sense of the only one who can bring the king down to account. Moshe Solomonow may seem a bit abrasive to some or even cut the figure of the Fool to others, but to me this man seemed key: showing the willingness to engage constructively with other scientists, to risk critical feedback in hopes of improving our knowledge and making more straight the zig-zagging course of scientific progress in our field.
Moshe is a sailor, I found out when I sat with him for a bit, who had a boat in New Orleans until Katrina blew it away. So, to honor his honesty and edginess and his hand on the tiller, my next post will attempt to speak to my group of practitioners in the same way.
Moshe has so totally earned his right to grandstand; the same does not apply to the clinicians.