Social engineering

29 January 2011

Heinz Wolff’s latest and most ambitious experiment might just solve the problem of care for the elderly

Heinz Wolff has been offered Maidenhead by the government as the laboratory for his next and boldest experiment, but it is not enough. ‘They should give me the Isle of Wight,’ he cries, domed cranium pulsing beneath his Branestawm specs. ‘All of it. It’s perfect for my purposes.’

As seasoned film audiences know, when a scientist starts making territorial demands in a strong German accent, it’s generally time to confiscate his Bunsen burners.

But at the age of 82, Emeritus Professor Wolff — the father of bio-engineering, the beaming genius of television’s The Great Egg Race — is through with science. It is now, he announces from his office in the Heinz Wolff building of Brunel University, ‘irrelevant’. ‘It has taken us as far as it can. Our biggest problems have no technological solution. We have come through the industrial age, the information age. Now we need to prepare ourselves for what I call the human engineering age and address the relationships which enable societies to work.’

The professor has turned his remarkable brain to a still largely unexplored field of study, old age. He wants a revolution in the way society looks after its elders, those who find it hard to shop, cook or clean for themselves. Their numbers are increasing, at just the time when the number of volunteers — good neighbours happy to take grandpa to bingo or nip out for his groceries — is falling.

‘So who is going to get breakfast for the old and infirm?’ he says. ‘The state can’t do this: everyone wants breakfast at the same time, remember. Who is going to help the elderly man down the road replace his canary when it dies? I am not talking about insulin injections or medical care, that is for the NHS, but about comfort care, the little things which make an independent life just about possible.’

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