to see Eckert. William was old-fashioned; he believed that bad news should be delivered in person. It showed character. Being able to accept blame was more important than being able to accept praise, he told Manny repeatedly. Manny stewed for an hour longer in the lab and headed home for what would surely be a night of fruitless research.
He arrived at his studio apartment, grabbed a beer from the fridge, turned on the coffee pot, ordered himself a pizza, and settled in for his long night. It was just after midnight when his vision began to flutter and his temples began to throb. He had been staring at the screen of his laptop for nearly six hours and doubted if he had even blinked in that time. Manny pounded the flimsy breakfast table in his kitchenette, which sent his coffee mug teetering over the edge and shattering to the floor. The thick, syrupy brew blotched the floor in brown pools. He was jittery, and his stomach was upset from lack of sleep and the immense amount of caffeine he had ingested. Reluctantly, he cleaned up the mess and poured himself another cup.
He was just about to break from his research when he came across a short paper, one discussing the possibility of creating a synthetic cloak that could act as a delivery device for pharmaceutical treatments. The author, a young researcher from MIT, had shown some tantalizing results in her early stage research and though it was intriguing, she stated that she had undertaken the work out of pure scientific curiosity and not with a goal in mind, other than to see if it could be done. Her paper concluded with the hope that someone in the future might discover a useful application for her research, but that she currently saw none.
Manny was now wide awake! He found Dr. Mayfield on her social media accounts and messaged her at 1 a.m. To his surprise, Dr. Mayfield was awake in Boston and responded immediately. Within minutes, Manny was speaking to her about his problem and how he believed that her research could prove useful.
CHAPTER 11
Karen Mayfield held three PhD’s in Bioengineering, Computational & Systems Biology, and Computational Science & Engineering from MIT. She was twenty-five years old and feeling a little long in the tooth. She’d spent the last two years working on the same problem, but had not come close to its solution. Though she had achieved success on her other research during that time, which had resulted in some thirty patents, and a few pharmaceuticals that had sold like gangbusters, she was not satisfied. Her employer was pleased with her production, and so she was given ample latitude to crack the nut of her pet project. She was living any young researcher’s dream, having a lab of her very own, at an unheard of age. Her work was so revolutionary that she’d hardly had time to finish her dissertations. The university’s administration was forgiving. They loved that one of their own was so lucrative. They bestowed the degrees anyway. Karen’s bona fides were undeniable, so degrees didn’t matter. To her, they were worthless pieces of fancy paper and she treated them as such. They were probably crammed somewhere with her other junk occupying the dusty boxes in her one-bedroom, Cambridge apartment closet. Problems and their solutions were the only things that occupied her mind—and her butterflies of course.
Today, her mind spun circles around her greatest challenge, one she’d been working on for over a year since Manny had first contacted her. The solution was somewhere here, but she could not figure it out. It was always somewhere just out of her grasp. The coding was wrong. Her algorithms were wrong. The conventional wisdom had been to let the computers code it themselves, but she could not let it go. She pushed herself to find the solution. She blamed herself for not being able to find it. She knew that scientific successes were oftentimes the product of dumb luck and randomness, but she refused to believe that she
He arrived at his studio apartment, grabbed a beer from the fridge, turned on the coffee pot, ordered himself a pizza, and settled in for his long night. It was just after midnight when his vision began to flutter and his temples began to throb. He had been staring at the screen of his laptop for nearly six hours and doubted if he had even blinked in that time. Manny pounded the flimsy breakfast table in his kitchenette, which sent his coffee mug teetering over the edge and shattering to the floor. The thick, syrupy brew blotched the floor in brown pools. He was jittery, and his stomach was upset from lack of sleep and the immense amount of caffeine he had ingested. Reluctantly, he cleaned up the mess and poured himself another cup.
He was just about to break from his research when he came across a short paper, one discussing the possibility of creating a synthetic cloak that could act as a delivery device for pharmaceutical treatments. The author, a young researcher from MIT, had shown some tantalizing results in her early stage research and though it was intriguing, she stated that she had undertaken the work out of pure scientific curiosity and not with a goal in mind, other than to see if it could be done. Her paper concluded with the hope that someone in the future might discover a useful application for her research, but that she currently saw none.
Manny was now wide awake! He found Dr. Mayfield on her social media accounts and messaged her at 1 a.m. To his surprise, Dr. Mayfield was awake in Boston and responded immediately. Within minutes, Manny was speaking to her about his problem and how he believed that her research could prove useful.
CHAPTER 11
Karen Mayfield held three PhD’s in Bioengineering, Computational & Systems Biology, and Computational Science & Engineering from MIT. She was twenty-five years old and feeling a little long in the tooth. She’d spent the last two years working on the same problem, but had not come close to its solution. Though she had achieved success on her other research during that time, which had resulted in some thirty patents, and a few pharmaceuticals that had sold like gangbusters, she was not satisfied. Her employer was pleased with her production, and so she was given ample latitude to crack the nut of her pet project. She was living any young researcher’s dream, having a lab of her very own, at an unheard of age. Her work was so revolutionary that she’d hardly had time to finish her dissertations. The university’s administration was forgiving. They loved that one of their own was so lucrative. They bestowed the degrees anyway. Karen’s bona fides were undeniable, so degrees didn’t matter. To her, they were worthless pieces of fancy paper and she treated them as such. They were probably crammed somewhere with her other junk occupying the dusty boxes in her one-bedroom, Cambridge apartment closet. Problems and their solutions were the only things that occupied her mind—and her butterflies of course.
Today, her mind spun circles around her greatest challenge, one she’d been working on for over a year since Manny had first contacted her. The solution was somewhere here, but she could not figure it out. It was always somewhere just out of her grasp. The coding was wrong. Her algorithms were wrong. The conventional wisdom had been to let the computers code it themselves, but she could not let it go. She pushed herself to find the solution. She blamed herself for not being able to find it. She knew that scientific successes were oftentimes the product of dumb luck and randomness, but she refused to believe that she
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