Only humans have agency, empathy and are truly creative: these cannot be outsourced to silicon.
Baroness Susan Greenfield has taken the same question – what makes us who we are? – through research, broadcasting, public institutions and now Alzheimer’s therapeutics.
Susan Greenfield arrived at Oxford intending to study philosophy.
The question that interested her – what makes us who we are? – eventually pulled her towards experimental psychology and neuroscience.
It became a career-long subject.
Her research focused on brain physiology, while her public work took neuroscience far beyond academia. She became the first woman to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and later directed the institution itself, alongside writing and broadcasting extensively about the brain.
Then she crossed another boundary.
In 2013, Greenfield co-founded Neuro-Bio, moving from academic research into the commercial and translational challenge of developing diagnostics and therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease.
That means accepting a different kind of uncertainty. A scientific idea must survive not only intellectual scrutiny, but the long process of proving whether it can become something clinically useful.
After decades studying the mind, Greenfield is still pursuing the question that first took her away from philosophy – only now the stakes are different.
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