An Interview with Les Roberts

ePulse: You were with the Center for Disease Control?

LR: Centers for Disease Control. A colleague from CDC, Brent Burkholder, and I traveled around in central Bosnia and people kept telling us all of these absurd rumors. For example, the Bosnians kept telling us the Croats were buying German castration devices to castrate [their] boys. And another rumor we’d heard was that snipers would shoot children in the legs as bait. And in times of war these rumors run wild. So Brent Burkholder and I went to the Main hospital in Sarajevo (it’s called Kosovo Hospital) and we went through the recovery or surgical ward. In a city where only a tiny fraction of the people were children because the children had all been sent off to live with other relatives, more than half the people in that surgical ward were children and they had almost all been shot in the legs. I realized that this rumor that we had scoffed at was true.

About a year before, my boss had written an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle essentially saying how inhumane and unacceptable this war was and in particular [in reference to] the actions of the Serbs in this war. As a scientist, when I read his op-ed, I thought that it was stretching beyond science. But then I saw these little kids and just thought of the notion that systematically soldiers were being trained to shoot little kids in the legs as bait. That wasn’t an individual wacko, this was a national strategy for a military. I realized that when you start witnessing events like that, like my boss had a year earlier, that it is incumbent upon you as a human to translate that exceptional horror in a way that the public can respond appropriately. Because we don’t have good ways of quantifying horror. But in public health, horror is one of the things we encounter and record.

I think that’s when I fully understood the need to step beyond peer review journals and statistical analyses if you are going to do effective public health work in times of war.

ePulse: From limited exposure to your work and from meeting you, I have the sense that you are sort of a full-time advocate at this point in your career. That it’s kind of your job.

LR: I think so, and well, I think that’s because we are here in a place where I have come to speak. If you met me in the middle of a war in Africa, I would seem like this sort of busy, boring guy who is focused on getting numbers.

ePulse: But that would still be, I guess what I am saying is that, that is ...

LR: ... that’s all part of the package.

ePulse: Yeah, being in the middle of a war in Africa, that would be the activism portion, I guess. Your career is ...

LR: Peace and justice.