About the work I’m doing

I am an epidemiologist, engineer, and physician who helped develop the legal strategy for suing tobacco companies for uncompensated healthcare costs, which played an early role in the attorneys general Medicaid lawsuits that ultimately led to the Master Tobacco Settlement. I was enthusiastic about using that strategy as a general approach to corporate accountability until I recognized that corporations don’t make enough profits to pay for the social costs they impose.

For over three decades since then, I have been working on a more nuanced analytical theory that explains why the human body became such a successful platform for the development of thought and civilization and how humanity might emulate its workings and abilities in our civilization. A multicellular-like emphasis shifts the focus of progressivism from toxic exponential financial growth to preservation of common interests and development of collective capabilities, as a substrate for biomimicry. A Sierpinski fractal model of life and civilization suggests how the problem-solving paradigm can be redirected from adaptive markets to awareness of common interests and responsibility for developing civilizational capabilities, as building blocks for emulating human functions and abilities. Since nature and life work in parallel with civilization within fractal blocks to determine outcomes, humanity should not violate their rules or else common interests will weaken and collapse, bringing down all collective capabilities at higher levels.

Recognizing democratic principles as the recurring theme at all fractal levels of human civilization suggests new ways to develop cooperation as a universal phenomenon. Instead of 2-agent interactions that predispose to competitive stasis, 3- and 4-step processes can sustain cooperative developmental phenomena. For example, granting the disadvantaged independent influence as a separate political constituency could heal the past while progressives nurture the present and enlightened conservatives invest in the future. Co-ops could form to address common interests and corporations could convert to develop collective capabilities, as harmful industries would be held to limited accountability to provide steady funding for those higher-level efforts. Those newly-forming trends, analogous to embryogenesis in a developing advanced multicellular organism, could establish a segue toward absolute corporate accountability that would end all externalities and establish a lifelike developmental dynamic for human civilization.

I have been developing these ideas in isolation for almost 25 years and am just at the brink of publishing them. I seek colleagues who can help develop them further and start a public discourse on the subject.