Michael A. Klaper, M.D., is an American physician, author, and vegan.

Dr. Michael Klaper spent much of his childhood vacations on his uncle's dairy farm in Wisconsin.

Dr. Klaper graduated from the University of Illinois College of Medicine in 1972 and served his medical internship at Vancouver General Hospital with the University of British Columbia. He also studied obstetrics at the University of California in San Francisco.

After graduation, Klaper moved between a number of locations, practiced acute care medicine, and eventually became certified in urgent care medicine. Following a desire to lead a less violent life, Klaper became a vegan in the early 1980s.

He served as director of a vegan health spa in Pompano Beach, Florida from the early 1990s, where he observed the healing powers of plant-based nutrition, and was featured on the PBS documentary Diet For A New America by John Robbins. However financial realities required him to return to urgent care medicine, which led him to practice in Maui, Hawaii, between 1995 and 2006, and Whangarei, New Zealand, between 2006 and 2009. In 2010, he returned to nutritional medicine and currently serves on the medical staff at the TrueNorth Health Center in Santa Rosa, California.

Dr. Linda Long is a biochemist and musician, who has combined these two fields to create what she terms molecular music.

Dr. Long worked as a biochemist and a Research Fellow in Complementary Medicine at Exeter University, specialising in the fields of homeopathy, herbal medicine and music therapy. Her work has been published in various medical journals, and she is an associate editor of the Journal Focus on Alternative and Complementary Therapies, published by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain[1]. She has been working on molecular music since the 1990s.

She has been awarded an Invention and Innovation award over two years by NESTA[2]. This has enabled her to develop her promotion of music in education, as well as to release two CDs of her music: Music of the Plants and Music of the Body. The award has also helped her develop an exhibit at Explore @Bristol.

Molecular music involves the translation of the 3-dimensional positions of a protein's amino acids into note sequences. This is not an arbitrary process; x-ray crystallography data is used to relate specific musical effects such as volume and pitch to the protein's molecular structure. In this way, characteristic patterns in protein structure are heard as recognisable musical note patterns from the structural data.

"Medicine man" or "medicine woman" are English terms used to describe traditional healers and spiritual leaders among Native American and other indigenous or aboriginal peoples. Anthropologists tend to prefer the term "shaman," a specific term for a spiritual mediator from the Tungusic peoples of Siberia.

The primary function of these "medicine elders" (who are not always male) is to secure the help of the spirit world, including the Great Spirit (Wakan Tanka in the language of the Lakota Sioux), for the benefit of the entire community.

Sometimes the help sought may be for the sake of healing disease, sometimes it may be for the sake of healing the psyche, sometimes the goal is to promote harmony between human groups or between humans & nature. So the term "medicine man/woman" is not entirely inappropriate, but it greatly oversimplifies and also skews the depiction of the people whose role in society complements that of the chief. These people are not the Native American equivalent of the Chinese "barefoot doctors", herbalists, nor of the emergency medical technicians who ride rescue vehicles.