Jörg Matthias Determann

The Science Fiction Writer in the Medical School: Isaac Asimov and Interdisciplinary Education

Jörg Matthias Determann

Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar

jmdetermann@vcu.edu

Isaac Asimov is best known as a writer of science fiction. However, he also enjoyed a long tenure as associate professor of biochemistry at the School of Medicine at Boston University. Combining these two roles, he was an early and major advocate for teaching science with science fiction (SF). An author of hard science fiction himself, he argued that SF should have a strong basis in facts of nature. The best works were thus not only entertaining, but also had much educational value. This presentation tells the biography of the famed writer with a focus on his role as an educator. Long before earning his doctorate at Columbia University in 1948, he was already critical of stories that violated the laws of science; for instance, by featuring giant insects. Once he secured a faculty position at Boston University, he contributed regularly to the Journal of Chemical Education, covering such topics as the radioactivity of the human body and protein isomerism. Subsequently, he moved away from academic journals and dedicated himself to writing popular science. Through hundreds of books and almost innumerable contributions to magazines, he developed a reputation as a great explainer. In 1968, he also published a seminal article in The Physics Teacher entitled “Try Science Fiction as a Teaching Aid.” The following decade saw a boom in the teaching of science fiction across schools and universities, and his works were studied widely for their academic merits. Although Asimov himself only gave occasional lectures at Boston University at this point, he remained a towering figure in SF for the rest of his life. In many reviews, he dissected the science fiction blockbusters of the day, including Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. While seeking to separate fact from fiction in these works, he also bridged the two cultures of the humanities and the sciences. As such, he was also a significant proponent of interdisciplinary education.

BIOGRAPHY

Jörg Matthias Determann is Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. He also serves as Associate Editor of the Review of Middle East Studies and as Book Review Editor of the Journal of Arabian Studies. Previously, Determann worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Zentrum Moderner Orient and the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He also taught at King Saud University and was a visiting scholar at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He holds a doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and two master’s degrees from the University of Vienna, Austria. In 2013, he was a joint winner of the BRISMES Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize for the best doctoral thesis on a Middle Eastern topic at a university in the United Kingdom. He is the author of the following five books: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Astronomy; Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life; Space Science and the Arab World; Researching Biology and Evolution in the Gulf States; and Historiography in Saudi Arabia.