Is there a God? Weiner ’66 probes life’s big questions
Harvard University professor Howard Weiner ’66 discussed his documentary "What is Life? The Movie" in Filene Auditorium on Monday.
By Corinne White
Published on Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Most doctors are pretty busy with their day jobs. But when Howard Weiner ’66 isn’t in the lab researching cures for diseases like multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s, he’s traveling around with a video camera asking people life’s big questions.
What happens when you die? Why is there evil? If you had one day to live, what would you do?
Weiner — director of the Partners Multiple Sclerosis Center at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a neurology professor at Harvard Medical School — presented his documentary film “What Is Life? The Movie” to the Dartmouth community on Monday in Filene Auditorium.
Weiner pulled out his questions after the screening. Everyone in the audience received remote controls to key in their responses. When asked the question, “Do animals have souls?,” for example, the majority of attendees responded yes — even cockroaches and trees.
At times, Weiner asked only those who belonged to a particular category to respond — Democrats versus Republicans, men versus women. More women than men, it turns out, think people have soulmates.
“I’ve found that when I talk about these questions with people, they become very excited,” Weiner said in an interview with The Dartmouth. “I hope it triggers them to think about these questions for a longer period than when they see the film. It’s something that everybody in their own mind has to figure out.”
In “What Is Life? The Movie,” Weiner interviews people from all walks of life — from rabbis, atheist physicists and students to Holocaust survivors, children and terminally ill patients. His subjects came from Israel, Brazil, Vietnam and other nations.
Joe Coleman ’11, philosophy professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and religion professor Ehud Benor were among the Dartmouth personalities Weiner interviewed.
“I would be traveling for my medical work, and I would arrange for film crews to be there so I could film wherever I traveled,” Weiner said.
It took Weiner four years to gather all his interviews and put together the film. He said he had been interested in film since his days at Dartmouth as a philosophy major. He made his first attempt at film while a student at University of Colorado at Boulder Medical School, where he made a music video to the Beatles song “Run For Your Life.”
Weiner’s dual professional lives as doctor and filmmaker may seem very different, but he contends that they relate to each other quite well.
“As a doctor, you’re confronted with life’s big questions all the time because you see illness in people,” he said. “It puts life into perspective.”
A particularly poignant moment in “What Is Life?” occurs when Weiner interviews the husband of one of his patients, a woman with multiple sclerosis.
Most subjects responded to the question, “If a magic genie came and could answer any question, what would you ask?” by asking, “Does God exist?” or “What is the purpose of life?”
The husband of the multiple sclerosis patient, however, replied, “I’d ask him how to cure MS.”