Gardenias in the Greenhouse and the Future of Medicine

In the depth of winter, the gardenia at my home seems about to bloom again. Over the past week or two, many buds have appeared one after another. A month ago, this pot of gardenia was nearly frozen to death outdoors in Beijing. Over the New Year holiday I brought it home and placed it near the radiator.

There the daylight is good and the temperature can reach 20–30 degrees. After watering and fertilizing, the gardenia put out new shoots again, and recently it has even begun to produce a great many new buds.

This is the first time my northern-grown gardenia has set new buds around the Spring Festival. Given how it looks, this pot may well bloom during the holiday, and presumably it will bloom again in summer.

It is a fascinating thing, letting me observe very directly how the environment affects living things. With ample sunlight and nutrients and suitable temperature and humidity, a gardenia thrives even in winter.

It naturally leads me to wonder: can lives that have withered from disease likewise be renewed by changing their growing environment? We often use “flowers in a greenhouse” to describe people with little resilience to setbacks, but if we look at the question from another angle, we find that the greenhouse is precisely the best growing environment for crops.

If human beings are raised in an environment that fits their developmental laws, perhaps they too can grow better—healthier in body and mind, and more intelligent. Some diseases might also be cured by changing the patient’s living environment. Perhaps in future we may significantly extend the average human lifespan by further improving our living environment, while also enabling each person to develop better.

Medicine is, in the final analysis, a discipline inseparably bound to life, and life itself is a systems engineering project. The medical knowledge we currently study seems only to address human physical and mental health one-sidedly.

Although medicine has recognized it must move toward a “biopsychosocial” model, this systematic medical concept has so far remained largely on paper; not many people have seriously pursued research in this direction.

Take oncology: medicine still has no very effective answer to malignant tumors. Over recent decades, new tumor-related technologies have appeared one after another, but in the end each can solve only limited problems, and most have gradually vanished from practice because their efficacy was simply poor.

So is it possible that, in future, by changing the entire living environment of cancer patients, we might achieve a complete reversal of carcinogenesis? Since many tumors arise under environmental influence, the possibility exists in theory, though such an idea is probably not easy to put into practice.

If one day this unlikely idea became reality, such a medical model would surely be the most successful one.