Professor Starson’s Refusal

I met Professor Starson in the summer of 1990, in London, where he was attending the second Physical Interpretations of Relativity Theory conference at Imperial College. I was working through the summer at the College’s Summer Accommodation Centre, whose job it was to let out rooms in the student residences to delegates, tour-groups and stray vacationers. Besides his slightly implausible name, the man’s appearance and demeanour also raised an eyebrow or two: he was immaculately-dressed, and perfectly-groomed, always clad in a sharply-creased suit, it seemed, with not a hair out of place. He carried a shiny black-leather briefcase, and there was an evangelist’s gleam in his eye. I’d met enough physicists to know that this was no typical example. I don’t recall how I ended up with a copy of the paper he meant to present to the conference, but this was a curiosity that I kept with me for years thereafter: a seemingly crankish patchwork of outlandish theorising that, if I remember correctly, touched on other dimensions, ball-lightning, anti-gravity and time-travel. I wish now that I never threw the thing away.

I met many other colourful individuals that summer, but the Professor stood out in my memory as maybe the second-weirdest of them all. A couple of months ago I googled a few of these names, of which Starson’s was the only one to bring up a sigificant number of results, all of which pertained to a then on-going legal battle he was at the centre of. Checking again a few days ago, I saw that Starson had won his case, an appeal to the Canadian Supreme Court…

In June 2003, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a patient’s right to refuse medical treatment. The case involved 47-year-old Scott Starson, who has bipolar affective disorder … a combination of schizophrenia and manic depression. The condition causes behavioural outbursts and has had him in and out of psychiatric wards since 1985.

Starson is ‘an exceptionally intelligent man,’ according to the courts. Without formal training, he has pursued work in physics, specifically in the areas of anti-gravity, the theory of relativity and the measurement of time. In 1991, he co-authored an article with a Stanford University physics professor, who describes Starson’s thinking in the field of physics as ‘10 years ahead of its time.’ - Owen Wood, CBC News.

To glance at the headlines about this case one might assume it a victory for individual rights against the legal-medical establishment. Starson’s mother, however, has deplored the court’s decision, and her view is supported by the Schizophrenic Society of Canada. Their opinion is that forced medication offers Starson’s only hope that his condition might be stabilised. Indeed, most of the available sources seem to agree that his mental state is worsening.

Starson has gone more than five years without medication and remains involuntarily confined in a mental hospital. As predicted, his condition seems to have deteriorated. In a bizarre interview with a reporter following the Supreme Court ruling, he talked about his plan to marry Joan Rivers, whom he has never met, and confided: ‘Pope John Paul II works for me now.’ - Rory Leishman, London Free Press.

Starson, if there remains any doubt, is not really a professor at all, and his given name was in fact Schutzman, which he had legally changed in 1993, for the simple but mad reason that he believes himself to be a son of the stars. Despite all this, it seems that his ideas genuinely did impress some of his fellow-delegates at the PIRT II conference, and the paper he co-wrote with Stanford physicist H. Pierre Noyes is real enough, if perhaps out at the more speculative end of the research spectrum.

This case bothers me, as there seems no good resolution to it. In Starson’s mother’s place, I would want what she wants, for the courts to recognise that her son does not know what’s best for him, that the medication is the best chance of her getting him back. But in Starson’s place, I would probably want what he wants: to be free to decline a sanity, that, he feels certain, would be worse than his madness.

‘I'm leading the edge. I'm trying to define physics that will eventually enable us to build a starship. Okay? That's what antigravity is all about,’ […] ‘I have the perfect scientific mind. Only you people say I have an illness.’ - Professor Starson, as quoted by Margaret Wente.