American actor and science communication advocate Alan Alda applauded the "fascinating" advancements at Western University's Robarts Research Institute during a tour on Thursday.
Alda, who is best known known for his role as Captain Hawkeye Pierce in the TV series M*A*S*H, toured the institute's lung imaging facilities, and received an inside look at new innovative technique for treating chronic lung diseases.
With this new cutting edge technique, patients with chronic lung problems are tested by breathing in a "gas contrast agent," while laying in an MRI machine. The MRI can show health professionals where the gas has gone in the lungs, and where is can't go because of problems with the patient's airways.
"You couldn't do that before. This is a wonderful advance, because now you can just treat the part of the lung that's diseased and not the whole lung," said Alda. "I was kind of astonished to hear before that if you were going to do radiation, you had to radiate the whole lung... Now you can go right to where the problem is."
On Thursday, Alda was also the keynote speaker at Western's Leaders Innovation gala, which celebrated excellence in the field of chronic lung disease research.
"This work here at Robarts is a wonderful example of taking what's known in one field and tweaking it so you can do things you couldn't do before," said Alda. "It's fascinating, it's exciting... That's why I want to get the public to understand more about science, not just that we need everybody to understand the world we live in, but it's so exciting -- it's like music or sports or novels."
Alda is a visiting professor at Stony Brook University in the state of New York, where he is a founder of a centre that works with the next generation of scientists to communicate more effectively with the public.