When Robert Buchanan was a boy, his father would ask him the same question every night at dinner: “What have you done to justify your oxygen intake today?”
It was a question that inspired the philosophy of service in Dr. Buchanan, now 82 and a resident of Westminster Place in Evanston.
The former General Director of Massachusetts General Hospital, Buchanan is a founding member of the Board of Trustees of Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan. He has been working with the institution since its inception in the early 1980s to bring education and Western-quality health care to the developing world. The university now comprises a medical school, nursing school, and a 560-bed teaching hospital, as well as clinical labs, safe and ethical pharmacies, and facilities for educational development to improve teacher training.
Buchanan is currently working with the university to establish a teaching hospital and medical research center in Nairobi, as well as Arts and Sciences campuses in Pakistan and Tanzania. The goal, always, is to make quality education and care services more accessible.
“His Highness is a great believer that the only way to get a stable, civil society is through education. The thing that separates us most is ignorance. I happen to see it that way,” Buchanan says. “I thought, this could be fascinating. This could be meaningful. This could justify my oxygen. So I did it.”
