Robin Williams in “Awakenings” introduced me to Oliver Sacks. It was then that the sterile, clinical caricatures of doctors etched into my psyche of old busted. The shift in perspective to physician as someone with whom I share chimp DNA appropriately makes them seem more everyday normal, holding glorious and inglorious humaness alongside me. The Dickensian proportions of my Williams/Sacks encounter has been palpable and having imbued life science with a Scrooge-like awakening a fresh personal biography began.
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 though fraught with so many unformed and intangible aims. The first, born of a drama typical of my father while at 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 two had opened a strange portal to anonymity and wearing what I felt a clever freelance graphic designer guise in San Francisco, the escape from my former well-frayed fabric of reality seemed to be working.
Ahem - Excuse me…
The youth hostel surround seemed just the place to go unnoticed. As I half-heartedly plinked out designs for a project I was desperate to finish up before a trip I had booked to India, a voice in the periphery of morning my coffee musings 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. Reluctantly 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 ‘knowledge’ to ‘story.’ Learning from these walking, talking tomes of life science was and still is a delight! To fully appreciate what had to happen for a non-scientist such as me to grasp such complex knowledge, click on over to the NIH wrestless night when you’ve got nothing better to do, 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 esoteric content, that for all practical purposes for the uninitiated, amounts to an alien language. I didn’t make such trips except on rare occasions when the easy access I had through the gracious stories told me by scientists needed a boost.
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 real 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.