Théodore Harney MacDonald (25 November 1933 – 2011) was a Canadian polymath, professor of mathematics and health, and human rights defender.
One obituary says that he was captured by North Korea but defected to them at the end of the war in 1953, aged twenty, travelling by ship with East German allies and settling there to complete a medical degree.
In 1960, MacDonald participated in organized, nonviolent protest against racial segregation in the US southern states led by Martin Luther King Jr. and was eventually exiled from the US (he may later have studied at Columbia and Santa Clara),[9] probably because he also began visiting Cuba and was known to authorities as a communist.
[11] In all he spent over a decade in Australia, then relocated to London in the early 1980s, eventually settling in Littlehampton, on England's south coast, where he completed several books after retirement.
He was married to Elizabeth Scammell (1936-2016) between 1962 and 1980 and adopted her two daughters, Lynda and Anne, from her previous marriage and was legal parent to her son Ross, but was estranged from him from the mid-1980s.
[citation needed] His broader normative agenda was to reform global finance and international trade, linked to the looming environmental crisis.
The liberalization of trade, he argued, led to the privatizing of global health care, with negative outcomes for those living in poverty.