When master of ceremonies Greg Lundgren introduced Dr. Mark Roth at a lecture Wednesday, he couldn’t help but hype the cell biologist’s work.
“There is a little bit of a mad scientist in it,” Lundgren said. “It’s a little bit Frankenstein.”
When Roth got up in front of the microphone to deliver a talk titled “Altered States: Can we control time?”, he didn’t disappoint.
The longtime Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center scientist was speaking at the third lecture of The Goodship Academy of Higher Education, a new salon series run by marijuana edibles company The Goodship in partnership with the Stranger. It’s billed as “a heady lecture series under heady influence” and attendees are encouraged to arrive “pre-boarded” — i.e., stoned.
Roth, not under the influence himself, started Wednesday’s discussion with his own heady ideas.
“Time is really change,” he said. “If we don’t have any change, time is meaningless. In fact, there is no time for things that do not have change. So hold that in your head, if you can.”
In the next 30 minutes, Roth went on to touch on many historical concepts of time and consciousness, from those of Einstein to Newton and his own research on suspended animation and preventing death from heart disease.