tuxedo-clad, distinguished fame. Or perhaps respectful adoration more aptly described it.
By senior year in high school he was an encyclopedia of facts about obscure winners, like Gabriel Jonas Lippmann, winner of the 1908 prize in physics for a method of color photography based on the phenomenon of interference that became known as the Lippmann plate.
By college he realized the odds of winning a prize were miniscule. No one ever set out in life to win the prize like some do for becoming president of the United States or winning on American Idol . The usual winner spent a career pushing the horizons of a phenomenon they had stumbled onto early. Only years later, sometimes even posthumously, did the Stockholm committee call with the good news. Winning depended on happenstance and a lot of luck. Like Bill Gates and Microsoft.
On the other hand, there were tangible things one could do to increase the odds of being recorded in the annals of history. Like the lottery advertisements preach, you can’t win if you don’t buy a ticket. For starters, one should be in a likely field. High school English teachers don’t win a Nobel Prize in medicine. So Wyse narrowed the choices. Not being able to handle complex math made chemistry and physics out of the question. Medicine became the only realistic option. Not that that was a chip shot either.
The subject that interested him most was memory, but that particular topic had been mined too many times to still hold Nobel-winning potential. So, if the prize was out, the next best road to fame was to have a disease named after him, like Alzheimer did. Another option was to devise a kick-ass treatment like the Whipple procedure. But, he didn’t have an inventive gene in his body.
He figured no one became famous by being a family doctor working thirty hours a day in Butt Fuck, North Dakota. You needed to specialize. And do so in a big city. Although he started med school without a specialty interest, he knew it’d be some sort of surgeon. The simplicity, glamour, and adrenaline rush of trauma appealed to his naive sense of drama, as did neurosurgery’s cachet as an elite specialty.
And there was the answer: Combine the two. Become a trauma neurosurgeon.
Sure, medicine held a fascination, but not as much as business. Market opportunities, especially. He had a knack for that. Making it a natural to combine neurosurgery with business.
Perfect. But where was the opportunity, the untapped disease?
Spinal cord tumors? Tragic, but not a big enough market to consider.
Lumbar disc disease? A huge market but already trampled to death by med-tech companies.
Head trauma? Profit margins too thin.
Posttraumatic stress disorder? Whoa, that was huge. And the really appealing thing was, there weren’t any effective treatments. So there it was: his calling.
Numerous times when asked why a neurosurgeon would devote a career to a nonsurgical problem he spouted some drivel about the personal agony PTSD inflicted on its victims, but the unstated answer was, he would make it a surgical disease. The concept was amazingly simple: The memory of the traumatic event triggered acute symptoms. Localize that specific memory within the brain and remove it, thereby removing the symptoms. Exactly the approach neurosurgeons use to treat some forms of epilepsy. Wyse believed in the elegantly simple logic. And guess what? Most great ideas appear so simple that the moment one hears them, one says, “Why didn’t I think if that?”
And now McCarthy was sticking his nose into the medical history of two of his patients. Given enough information, McCarthy would figure it out. Once that happened, that bastard would try to destroy his one big chance at fame. Wyse would make sure he never got the chance to interfere.
8
D OCTORS H OSPITAL
M CCARTHY HEARD THREE rapid thumps quickly followed by a deep guttural groan behind him. He stopped crawling to listen harder, expecting to hear movement from Washington.
By senior year in high school he was an encyclopedia of facts about obscure winners, like Gabriel Jonas Lippmann, winner of the 1908 prize in physics for a method of color photography based on the phenomenon of interference that became known as the Lippmann plate.
By college he realized the odds of winning a prize were miniscule. No one ever set out in life to win the prize like some do for becoming president of the United States or winning on American Idol . The usual winner spent a career pushing the horizons of a phenomenon they had stumbled onto early. Only years later, sometimes even posthumously, did the Stockholm committee call with the good news. Winning depended on happenstance and a lot of luck. Like Bill Gates and Microsoft.
On the other hand, there were tangible things one could do to increase the odds of being recorded in the annals of history. Like the lottery advertisements preach, you can’t win if you don’t buy a ticket. For starters, one should be in a likely field. High school English teachers don’t win a Nobel Prize in medicine. So Wyse narrowed the choices. Not being able to handle complex math made chemistry and physics out of the question. Medicine became the only realistic option. Not that that was a chip shot either.
The subject that interested him most was memory, but that particular topic had been mined too many times to still hold Nobel-winning potential. So, if the prize was out, the next best road to fame was to have a disease named after him, like Alzheimer did. Another option was to devise a kick-ass treatment like the Whipple procedure. But, he didn’t have an inventive gene in his body.
He figured no one became famous by being a family doctor working thirty hours a day in Butt Fuck, North Dakota. You needed to specialize. And do so in a big city. Although he started med school without a specialty interest, he knew it’d be some sort of surgeon. The simplicity, glamour, and adrenaline rush of trauma appealed to his naive sense of drama, as did neurosurgery’s cachet as an elite specialty.
And there was the answer: Combine the two. Become a trauma neurosurgeon.
Sure, medicine held a fascination, but not as much as business. Market opportunities, especially. He had a knack for that. Making it a natural to combine neurosurgery with business.
Perfect. But where was the opportunity, the untapped disease?
Spinal cord tumors? Tragic, but not a big enough market to consider.
Lumbar disc disease? A huge market but already trampled to death by med-tech companies.
Head trauma? Profit margins too thin.
Posttraumatic stress disorder? Whoa, that was huge. And the really appealing thing was, there weren’t any effective treatments. So there it was: his calling.
Numerous times when asked why a neurosurgeon would devote a career to a nonsurgical problem he spouted some drivel about the personal agony PTSD inflicted on its victims, but the unstated answer was, he would make it a surgical disease. The concept was amazingly simple: The memory of the traumatic event triggered acute symptoms. Localize that specific memory within the brain and remove it, thereby removing the symptoms. Exactly the approach neurosurgeons use to treat some forms of epilepsy. Wyse believed in the elegantly simple logic. And guess what? Most great ideas appear so simple that the moment one hears them, one says, “Why didn’t I think if that?”
And now McCarthy was sticking his nose into the medical history of two of his patients. Given enough information, McCarthy would figure it out. Once that happened, that bastard would try to destroy his one big chance at fame. Wyse would make sure he never got the chance to interfere.
8
D OCTORS H OSPITAL
M CCARTHY HEARD THREE rapid thumps quickly followed by a deep guttural groan behind him. He stopped crawling to listen harder, expecting to hear movement from Washington.
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