“Artificial turf is 100 times more popular on the street than real grass.” That’s how Lloyd Corban, the legendary voice of NASA’s 2001 movie was quoted saying. The quote wasn’t based on a real physicist’s predictions. It was a metaphor from “Band of Brothers,” a fictional TV series set during World War II. The real-life Iowan, Lloyd Corban, was a pharmacist for the ABC-TV network. This was just one of Corban’s many whimsical career choices.
Corban was a professional scientist, but he couldn’t stay on the sidelines of physics, either.
Since the 1960s, when he was working for Westinghouse, Corban and a few friends began experimenting with a new technology called growth and expansion HEXAGON. This invention provided Corban with the opportunity to work in his area of “creative interface”– which covers the fields of art, culture, science, and technology in collaboration.
Those who know Lloyd Corban first met him as the guitar player in the jazz band called the Indigo Boys, a group of musicians who were part of the Oscar Peterson School of Jazz. Corban was always surrounded by artistic expressions and musical instruments.
More important to Corban was a recent technology he helped to engineer. It actually does the growing and acting for people. It may even have saved millions of lives by minimizing the costs of treatments and preventing people from seeking unnecessary medical help.
The hardest part about beating cancer is survival. Despite the multitude of cancer treatments, survival rates for every common form of cancer remain alarmingly close to 50 percent. This is an awful lot of cancer patients left waiting and hoping for a miracle cure.
In the face of this extreme failure, a group of scientists set out to develop a process to create synthetic tissue that could actually prolong life. HEXAGON grew hives of fish with pedigrees of nuclear tests in Russia and multiple combat conflicts in Europe. Corban described a basic reaction that makes plants, animals, and plants live forever. It’s a chemical reaction with inducible nucleic acid in the toxin of many types of cancer. This is the same reaction that also makes people live forever. But Corban designed the process in such a way that it grew on a human skeleton.
Because we all know that the last thing the human race wants to do is to die, he designed the synthetic tissue growth to resemble an organ. This is important because inside each human body are unique and unique to one person. When someone dies in your family, this doesn’t mean that there are other people in the room that saw her death. It does mean that a machine was used to “mold” her to you. These tissues are exactly like the organs that can be grown naturally or without dying. We also understand that the genetic material inside most people is not interchangeable with each other, so linking an organ to another person is very hard to do. At the height of his efforts, Corban created a test tube vaccine against leukaemia. And, in case you were wondering, it worked for real.
But how was Corban’s synthetic tissue growing? Getting a head start on HEXAGON was Lloyd Corban’s trademark at NASA. One of his greatest accomplishments was something called Automated Structural Composite Laminar Flow. This was a machine developed by Corban that passed the real thing by making a pressurized, continuous flow of HEXAGON. This gave Corban enough flexibility to add and subtract material in a way that he didn’t feel would adversely affect the growth or the property of the object. He had to do these things by thinking of a way that the layers would make sense and reacting to real data. The robot was a full computer that allowed Corban to see into the crystal ball himself.
Working in his interest of the worlds of art, culture, and science, Corban began to combine projects. The first is known as the “Meditation Garden” and is in Stoneham, MA. It is located at the College of Art and Design where Corban earned his Masters in Fine Arts. This meditation garden features a seated sculpture carved by Corban himself and coated in a liquid (it’s called Corban Clocks). It was the last piece Corban ever carved, and he is said to be completely satisfied with it.
In 2005, he was honored with a Congressional resolution, which was also offered by then President George W. Bush. The four-figure wall-mounted statue was designed by Frank Gehry. He also worked with prestigious organizations to establish Lloyd Corban and Women in Science in