triathlons, finishing in the top three in her age group, 40-45. One article had a blurry picture of her crossing a finish line, but her face was covered with a ball cap and it wasn’t possible to tell what she looked like. There was a feature article from 2009 on the lab itself; Oliver was pictured, and Wray spoke movingly about her lifelong quest for better answers to the problem of infertility.
Benjamin Goldstein didn’t turn up in any news at all other than his appointment to the lab.
The Welsh authors were a different story. David Hughes and Marc Llewellyn had been researchers at a similar lab at Oxford until mid-2003. They had also published a series of papers, but none of them were breakthroughs. The papers had been published in decreasingly prestigious journals, until their last article, the one cited by Dan in his letter, had appeared in the Welsh Medical Journal. The funding for the lab dried up, and it was closed. Neither man had ever published again. Interestingly, the existence of Hughes and Llewellyn’s lab overlapped in time with Tristan Oliver’s years at Cambridge. Oliver might have known Hughes and Llewellyn. It wasn’t unusual for researchers with a narrow specialty to be professionally incestuous. Everyone in a unique subspecialty knew everyone else, whether it was Celtic warrior queen Boudicca (the subject of my doctoral dissertation) or stem cell fertility research.
The most surprising information about Hughes and Llewellyn was that they were both dead. David Hughes had died in 2006 of a heart attack while on his morning jog. He had been in his 60s. Marc Llewellyn had died in 2003, not long after the publication of his last article, in a horrific car crash on the M40 outside Oxford. I flinched involuntarily; I’d been on that stretch of road many times. The accident had been a hit-and-run; one car, driven by Llewellyn, had been nearly destroyed. The other was never found, and there were no witnesses, so the investigation had gone nowhere. Llewellyn wasn’t killed outright, but suffered severe head trauma and passed away the next day.
I considered what I had learned. Two articles, three dead men. Was it just bad luck? It didn’t seem to be bad luck for Oliver et al. They were doing just fine. Hughes’s death seemed ordinary enough, and on the surface, so did Dan’s. Llewellyn’s car accident was likely just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The article titles made more sense now. It was as I’d originally thought. Hughes and Llewellyn hadn’t been successful with their research, so they’d published their last article and given it up. Oliver had probably become aware of Hughes and Llewellyn’s work when he was in Cambridge, and had come back to the U.S. to continue the research in his own lab. A few years later, with better technology, Oliver and Wray figured out how to make it work and published their article. The breakthrough had brought the money pouring in, and the doctors were now reaping the rewards of their hard work. And Oliver and Wray had probably hired Benjamin Goldstein to give themselves more time away from the lab to raise money and host parties and compete in triathlons.
It all made perfect sense, except for one thing.
What had Dan wanted me to find out?
It was time to go home, and I still hadn’t done anything with the statistics in Oliver and Wray’s article. I wasn’t going to start anything now. Maybe I’d work on that over the weekend. I still didn’t have the Welsh article, so there wasn’t anything else to do until I got it. I decided to go home.
I was dragging as I walked across campus. What a week. It was only four days, and it felt like forty. I was exhausted.
There weren’t a lot of people around, even though it was early evening and still fully light. As I passed the intramural fields, it registered that someone was behind me. I didn’t think much of it until I crossed Gayley and the guy was still with me. It
Benjamin Goldstein didn’t turn up in any news at all other than his appointment to the lab.
The Welsh authors were a different story. David Hughes and Marc Llewellyn had been researchers at a similar lab at Oxford until mid-2003. They had also published a series of papers, but none of them were breakthroughs. The papers had been published in decreasingly prestigious journals, until their last article, the one cited by Dan in his letter, had appeared in the Welsh Medical Journal. The funding for the lab dried up, and it was closed. Neither man had ever published again. Interestingly, the existence of Hughes and Llewellyn’s lab overlapped in time with Tristan Oliver’s years at Cambridge. Oliver might have known Hughes and Llewellyn. It wasn’t unusual for researchers with a narrow specialty to be professionally incestuous. Everyone in a unique subspecialty knew everyone else, whether it was Celtic warrior queen Boudicca (the subject of my doctoral dissertation) or stem cell fertility research.
The most surprising information about Hughes and Llewellyn was that they were both dead. David Hughes had died in 2006 of a heart attack while on his morning jog. He had been in his 60s. Marc Llewellyn had died in 2003, not long after the publication of his last article, in a horrific car crash on the M40 outside Oxford. I flinched involuntarily; I’d been on that stretch of road many times. The accident had been a hit-and-run; one car, driven by Llewellyn, had been nearly destroyed. The other was never found, and there were no witnesses, so the investigation had gone nowhere. Llewellyn wasn’t killed outright, but suffered severe head trauma and passed away the next day.
I considered what I had learned. Two articles, three dead men. Was it just bad luck? It didn’t seem to be bad luck for Oliver et al. They were doing just fine. Hughes’s death seemed ordinary enough, and on the surface, so did Dan’s. Llewellyn’s car accident was likely just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The article titles made more sense now. It was as I’d originally thought. Hughes and Llewellyn hadn’t been successful with their research, so they’d published their last article and given it up. Oliver had probably become aware of Hughes and Llewellyn’s work when he was in Cambridge, and had come back to the U.S. to continue the research in his own lab. A few years later, with better technology, Oliver and Wray figured out how to make it work and published their article. The breakthrough had brought the money pouring in, and the doctors were now reaping the rewards of their hard work. And Oliver and Wray had probably hired Benjamin Goldstein to give themselves more time away from the lab to raise money and host parties and compete in triathlons.
It all made perfect sense, except for one thing.
What had Dan wanted me to find out?
It was time to go home, and I still hadn’t done anything with the statistics in Oliver and Wray’s article. I wasn’t going to start anything now. Maybe I’d work on that over the weekend. I still didn’t have the Welsh article, so there wasn’t anything else to do until I got it. I decided to go home.
I was dragging as I walked across campus. What a week. It was only four days, and it felt like forty. I was exhausted.
There weren’t a lot of people around, even though it was early evening and still fully light. As I passed the intramural fields, it registered that someone was behind me. I didn’t think much of it until I crossed Gayley and the guy was still with me. It
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