What is Health?

Dr. Peter Sterling has devoted his life to social activism and science and is devoting the latter part of this career to championing a radically new vision of what is health. Sterling is a distinguished professor of neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania whose book Principles of Neural Design is one of the definitive texts in that field. His research has focused heavily on the micro-neural pathways from the retina to the brain. However, Dr. Sterling has been a social activist throughout his career.

As a twenty-year-old Cornell student, he left his studies to head to Mississippi in the summer of 1961 as a Freedom Rider where he was arrested and jailed. That experience shaped his life and over the subsequent decades he has sought ways his work in science might shed light on the “impacts of racism on the African American community in the US”. His recently published book—What is Health?: Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design is the culmination of years of reading and research and his effort to answer this question. This conversation focuses on his life and work and the major arguments of his latest book.