Why can't we solve global hunger?" In other words, while his wife says that medical technology has an unfortunate stranglehold on the way we die, Robin longs to claim the mantle of medical science for his attempt to avoid death altogether.
Added to this is the stranglehold of technology.
Western capitals have suddenly grown worried over China's near monopoly, which gives it a potential stranglehold on technologies of the future.
A stranglehold of proprietary technology, slow phone networks unsuited to Web data and a paucity of applications conspired to make WAP irrelevant.
But network and cable television's big hedge against insurgent technologies has always been its stranglehold on programming and talent.
In the case of 3D printing, for instance, long-held strangleholds on the technology are slowly being broken.
Optimists point to the green movement in Iran, when the reformist campaign showed the power of new technologies to organise resistance and to break the stranglehold of censors on information; but the episode also showed that technology alone is not enough to secure democratic change.
But he wonders whether silicon will retain its stranglehold on the world of high technology.
And Masiyiwe understands that this model -- renewable power for the poorest -- is the key strategy to breaking the stranglehold of expensive, dirty fossil fuel technologies which in Africa keep the poor even poorer, because most of the continent must rely on expensive, imported coal, oil and gas.
A market of more than a billion people, rapidly modernizing industrial and technology sectors, and a government that over the past decade has loosened its stranglehold on business for China, that recipe has meant a tremendous economic boom in the past year, and American investors have capitalized.
Apple tried to break that stranglehold but this week a US federal judge ruled that the technology giant violated US anti-trust law by orchestrating a conspiracy to raise ebook prices with five big publishers.
