It’s the new year – and one of my resolutions is to focus on the positive, especially on people who create goodness and bring beauty into the world, be it through art or by innovation.
The painting The Futility of War, by Gerald Siegel, is based on Spanish Civil War photos taken by legendary war photographer Frank Capa and by Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.
Most situations can have an optimistic outcome. However, twisting positive stories out of war zones is no easy task, but just as talented artists can give meaning to a canvas with his brush, everything is in the eye of the beholder.
Wars are ugly, no matter how you paint it, but scientists in North American and Israel are working to protect soldiers from harm’s way, as well as to help them lead normal lives after life-altering injuries.
Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have developed an ultra-strong impact-resistant material with nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale. This material created by nanotechnology is about four to five times stronger than steel and about six times stronger than Kevlar, a popular material today for bulletproof vests.
The company, ApNano, which is producing the material, is also using the same technology to make products to enhance the performance of personal safety items such as helmets, as well as protection products for vehicles and aircraft.
So while world leaders disagree and wars break out, scientists at Weizmann as well as innovators around the world are working to protect men and women in uniform.
American inventors such as Dean Kamen, CEO of DEKA, whose inventions include the Segway, a two-wheeled, self-balancing electric vehicle, are working for the United States Pentagon on a project called Revolutionizing Prosthetics.
Four years ago, the Pentagon approached Kamen to create a prosthetic arm for soldiers who had lost their arms in wars. It needed to be computer operated and sensitive enough to pick up a raisin or grape without crushing it. Current prosthetic arms, created decades ago, are so dated, they still have a hook at the end.
The Pentagon invested $100 million in the project, and now the DEKA arm is undergoing clinical testing. The goal is to have the robotic arm available soon to the nearly 200 arm amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Dean’s invention is not a classified military weapons system, so it turns into an advancement in medical technology. So while wars wreak havoc, they also force creativity and inventions that will ultimately benefit people worldwide.
Inventors are not the only ones who have taken the evils of war and made something positive out of it. Artists often do the same, taking the revulsion we feel about wars, and recreating the truth, showing no matter how just and needed a war might be, the ultimate result is that people die, leaving behind families who have to figure out ways to fill the void left by a lost loved one.
The topics of artist Gerald Siegel’s paintings include Sept. 11, Kristallnacht and the Holocaust. “Art gives one a method of expressing the total horrors of war,” he said.
He uses the experience of tragedies and translates them into works of art in order to educate, with the hope that his works might inspire some to carefully consider their actions.
Great upheaval and misery often force people to create, innovate and invent products that ultimately change the world for the better. The jet engine, synthetic rubber for tires and the beginning steps to the computer all came out of Word War II.
So when certain events are out of our control, perhaps the best way interpret the situation is to be like a painter, who sees it as a situation in black and white but paints with colour.