DISCOURAGEMENT

Probably an early anniversary

When we went to dinner, I left the hat at home

So much to learn, so little time!

In an effort to broaden my horizons, my daughter Karen has begun to ply me with worthwhile contemporary fiction.  First she introduced me to  Ahab’s Wife, which turns out to be a captivating but spectacularly implausible  story, served up with some prose that I find irritating at times, but fascinating on balance.  I have nearly given up, on it twice, but here I am – half way through – with the book next to my favorite chair and a bookmark still in place.   And smiling at me from the coffee table is another of Karen’s suggestions – All the light we cannot see. 

The trouble is, when I am reading fiction I feel like I am wasting time.  Something deep inside me nags: you ought to be learning more about cancer research, it insists.  This has been the case for years.  My usual response is to have two books going at once, one light and frothy, and the other deep, serious and, often, really, really dull.  That’s what I am doing now:  I just started The Transformed Cell, by Stephen Rosenberg and John Barry.  Rosenberg is a famous cancer researcher – almost a demi-god in the field of immunotherapy, and Barry is a well-known and much-published science writer.

Boy is this book anything but boring!.  I don’t dare read it tonight for fear of lost sleep; I think I will read about Ahab’s wife’s shopping trip to Boston instead.

But I did want to mention something I find very disturbing.  The Transformed Gene was written in the early 1990s.  In the forward, Rosenberg relates what must have been some of the earliest applications of immunotherapy.  He writes, quoting Pasteur, I am on the verge of mysteries, and the veil is getting thinner and thinner.

That was nearly 30 years ago.