Read Online The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men by Bill Shore - Free Book Online
Authors: Bill Shore
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unsaid. His name invariably left an invisible but palpable tension in the air, like one of those high-energy transmission towers that can be valuable or dangerous, depending upon your point of view.
Without knowing anything else about him, I could sense that Hoffman was a complicated man, someone who challenged others’ comfort zones and vigorously protected his own, whose ideas were too radical to simply accept, but grounded in too much experience to casually dismiss.
Fifty-six years old when we first met, trim and muscular, Hoffman had the guarded and intense demeanor of a competitor watching the game clock run down before his victory
is secured. He is skilled at political positioning but lacks the politician’s gift for small talk aimed at surfacing any patch of common ground that can serve as the basis for a relationship.
He first agreed to see me after receiving a brief e-mail that I’d sent without benefit of introduction from any third party. By coincidence, we’d both graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and his lab was in my neighborhood. Other than that we had little in common.
Once we met, though, I began to feel some vague but unarticulated kinship with Hoffman, notwithstanding the fact that our personalities were very different. We had both made the transition from long government careers to long-shot start-up enterprises. We’d both worked in institutions—the navy and the U.S. Senate—that afforded resources, prestige, and access to almost anyone or anything one might need. We’d both traded that away for the pressures and headaches, but most of all the freedom, that comes with a start-up enterprise housed in crowded, makeshift offices and financed paycheck to paycheck.
I couldn’t walk through his crowded and cluttered lab without thinking of Share Our Strength’s first days in the sub-basement of a Capitol Hill townhouse that had been converted from an electroshock therapist’s facility, complete with sound-muffling egg cartons glued to the walls. I remembered that feeling of having the kernel of a half-baked idea that the rest of the world had yet to hear about or understand, but that, once developed, tested, and refined, might prove to inspire and mobilize others.
I certainly didn’t put Hoffman’s odyssey at the center of this story because I had the foresight to be sure he would succeed. Indeed, the odds of him reaching his goal are long, if not forbidding. We won’t know the full measure of Hoffman’s success or failure, or that of any of his competitors, until the passage of time has had its way. Many years will be required for conducting and assessing clinical trials. Even if his vaccine makes it through those hurdles and a successful vaccine is put into wide use, the malaria parasite could evolve to escape defeat, as it always has in the past. There are an infinite number of variables, ranging from climate change to African infrastructure, that may have more to do with whether the vaccine works on the ground than anything Hoffman does or doesn’t do in the lab. And there are other possible breakthroughs on the horizon that could blow Hoffman’s ideas out of the water. Scientific discovery, by its very nature, stands still for no man.
But the trajectory of Hoffman’s life and career so clearly parallels and illuminates our society’s changing approach to solving social problems. He began as a doctor doing what doctors do, helping one person at a time. But as he became interested in tropical diseases like dengue fever and malaria, he came to see that the scale of the problem and the enormous number of people affected was far greater than what any one doctor could handle. It was greater even than what all the doctors in the field of tropical medicine could handle. And the problems were not just medical, they were economic and political.
When he realized it would take the resources of government to solve the problems he cared about on the massive scale on which they
Without knowing anything else about him, I could sense that Hoffman was a complicated man, someone who challenged others’ comfort zones and vigorously protected his own, whose ideas were too radical to simply accept, but grounded in too much experience to casually dismiss.
Fifty-six years old when we first met, trim and muscular, Hoffman had the guarded and intense demeanor of a competitor watching the game clock run down before his victory
is secured. He is skilled at political positioning but lacks the politician’s gift for small talk aimed at surfacing any patch of common ground that can serve as the basis for a relationship.
He first agreed to see me after receiving a brief e-mail that I’d sent without benefit of introduction from any third party. By coincidence, we’d both graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and his lab was in my neighborhood. Other than that we had little in common.
Once we met, though, I began to feel some vague but unarticulated kinship with Hoffman, notwithstanding the fact that our personalities were very different. We had both made the transition from long government careers to long-shot start-up enterprises. We’d both worked in institutions—the navy and the U.S. Senate—that afforded resources, prestige, and access to almost anyone or anything one might need. We’d both traded that away for the pressures and headaches, but most of all the freedom, that comes with a start-up enterprise housed in crowded, makeshift offices and financed paycheck to paycheck.
I couldn’t walk through his crowded and cluttered lab without thinking of Share Our Strength’s first days in the sub-basement of a Capitol Hill townhouse that had been converted from an electroshock therapist’s facility, complete with sound-muffling egg cartons glued to the walls. I remembered that feeling of having the kernel of a half-baked idea that the rest of the world had yet to hear about or understand, but that, once developed, tested, and refined, might prove to inspire and mobilize others.
I certainly didn’t put Hoffman’s odyssey at the center of this story because I had the foresight to be sure he would succeed. Indeed, the odds of him reaching his goal are long, if not forbidding. We won’t know the full measure of Hoffman’s success or failure, or that of any of his competitors, until the passage of time has had its way. Many years will be required for conducting and assessing clinical trials. Even if his vaccine makes it through those hurdles and a successful vaccine is put into wide use, the malaria parasite could evolve to escape defeat, as it always has in the past. There are an infinite number of variables, ranging from climate change to African infrastructure, that may have more to do with whether the vaccine works on the ground than anything Hoffman does or doesn’t do in the lab. And there are other possible breakthroughs on the horizon that could blow Hoffman’s ideas out of the water. Scientific discovery, by its very nature, stands still for no man.
But the trajectory of Hoffman’s life and career so clearly parallels and illuminates our society’s changing approach to solving social problems. He began as a doctor doing what doctors do, helping one person at a time. But as he became interested in tropical diseases like dengue fever and malaria, he came to see that the scale of the problem and the enormous number of people affected was far greater than what any one doctor could handle. It was greater even than what all the doctors in the field of tropical medicine could handle. And the problems were not just medical, they were economic and political.
When he realized it would take the resources of government to solve the problems he cared about on the massive scale on which they
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