Robin Williams in “Awakenings” introduced me to Oliver Sacks - the introduction changed the image of the sterile, clinically kindly heroic physician into a human being with more or less the same chimp DNA as me - an everyday normal sort of person who generally makes progress despite all obstacles and bumbling. My Williams/Sacks encounter became Dickensian in nature, awakening to the world of life science - a Scroogey transformation tearing back the window curtains on a morning of reflections and realizations to see a fresh personal biography begun.
Plane Crash and a Graduation: Metaphor
From a fatal plane crash and a graduation around-about the time I turned 40 arose a personal quest toward nothing in particular. It felt abstractly purposeful - a tenuous proposition for a fresh start even though fraught with so many unformed and intangible possibilities. The first, born of a drama typical of my father while doing his 45+ years-long job as a crop duster; the second, my youngest child beginning a quest of his own after liberation from high school. The one-two combo opened a strange portal to anonymity and wearing what I felt a clever freelance graphic designer guise in San Francisco, my escape from a former well-frayed fabric of reality seemed to be working.
Ahem - Excuse me…
The youth hostel surround seemed just the place to go unnoticed. Intruding upon my attention in musings on an immanent trip to India, I was half-heartedly plinking out designs for a project, desperate to finish it up. It was then a voice in the periphery of my morning coffee in a nameless cafe sounded; someone was trying to get someone’s attention.
“What’re you working on over there?” It could have been directed to anyone. It sounded again…and a third time. I turned to see where the voice was coming from. Its mouth was interrupted by a nose that ran up to eyes looking at me. “What’s it you’re working on you look so serious about over there?” “Shit,” I thought. Begrudgingly, I answered. My habit of being too amiable had betrayed me. In answer, shortly after, I found myself on a flight to Frankfurt, Germany with a sweet contract in hand to work with a biopharmaceutical company on things I knew nothing about.
At first it amounted to mindless, rapid iteration, checking off a list deliverables for anyone on the clinical training team who asked for something. It wasn’t long before collaborations scaled into large and elaborate patient care trainings for clinical teams working on a worldwide, late-phase anti-infective drug trial. Working with researchers was like university turned up a few notches - a deluge of new information with mists of nuance, daily slaking my parched brain’s thirst.
If my efforts to extract life science secrets from scientists and physicians drove them crazy it didn’t show - the BIO of OLOGY, was a living, breathing thing for them and I was a sponge soaking up their stories for a dozen years - stories that spanned domains in infectious disease, dentistry, ophthalmology, pulmonary disease, CNS disorders and CRISPR technology.
A Telling Shift and Other Omissions
It’s a telling shift above - from matters of ‘knowledge’ to those of ‘story.’ Learning from walking, talking tomes of life science must be something like what early human communities experienced from the likes of a traveling minstrel or bard! To fully appreciate what sort of feat it is for non-scientist like me (and there are many), to grasp the breadth and depth of meanings held within complex science, visit the National Institute of Health (NIH) website some restless night, pull up most any peer reviewed scientific paper, and start reading. If you’re a determined sort, you’ll find yourself a week later still attempting to decipher this unruly and esoteric content, that for the uninitiated, seems an alien language.
Surrounded by scientist storytellers in my professional life, grocking such papers in their original form have been mostly unnecessary. That's because the brilliance of these folk apparently isn't satisfied to stay beningly put - their heads seem inherently leaky from desire to share the wonders they are privileged to encounter. Easy and and eager conversationalists, they exude an infectious glee (and patience) in passing on their knowledge as if translation magicians pulling sense out of an empty hat to the ooohs and aaahs of an audience, making the difficult to grasp feel familiar and a perfectly natural thing. That fact added to those experiences have made me a better science communicator and also set me on good footing to help make science come to life with meaningful under and overtones for how the world works.
But matters of biological science are a mere fraction of a fraction of the story about the openings and insights in this burgeoning research world I’ve entered. In putting the pieces of the research narrative together, I’ve noticed a common denominator regularly missing like the piece of an equation needed for a measurable and meaningful solution. A guiding assumption often seems to me to be at work - one you could liken to an expectation of numbers, apart from mathematics, to function as more than mere artifacts on display for viewing purposes only - infinitely colored, shaped and organized this or that way, but to no discernible affect.
Simple Math
Dr. Sacks did a simple thing…he scrawled a number below some atop it. Exact, unavoidable and necessary dependencies resulted in a solvable equation where outcomes acquire balance. The number he entered was the name of a critical participant in a life science drama. That’s the story bioscience desperately needs to exude the life they traffic in. The story is an equation made up of equivalencies of life; big, small and inseparable.