Naturally, my professors were not enthusiastic about my skipping so many classes, but since I always did well on my tests and papers, there was little they could do to punish me but deliver lectures on how my lack of discipline would all but ensure mediocrity in my professional life. I didn’t doubt their seriousness or their sincerity, but neither did I allow myself to worry about my own future; even then I knew that I was bound to have the sort of adventures for which I would not be best or usefully equipped by a perfect attendance record.
I do not wish, however, to idealize what was at least partially a fit of tiresome and immature disrespect for my professors and the institution. Now, in retrospect, with my career and legacy being what they are, I suppose it is all very easy to say that I knew everything would resolve itself in my favor in the end and that my lack of ambition was genuine. Though if I am to be honest, I suppose I should acknowledge too that I was even then so eager for a certain sort of greatness, the sort that seemed both possible and yet so distant, a blurry-edged dream on the periphery of my vision, that at the time it seemed easier to pretend to all and to myself that I did not care for a spectacular future at all, lest I come to think that my time in medical school — and my successes or failures there — might become a predictor for the rest of my life, something that might determine the chances of that shimmering image coalescing into something more vivid, or not.
But it was in my third year of medical school that things really changed for me, or rather, that I really changed things. This was the year that Gregory Smythe extended to me an invitation to work in his lab. You will now understand why this was so surprising, and indeed, for many years I was asked about my time there with some regularity.13
I would be lying if I said I was not initially flattered. Nowadays, a mention of Gregory Smythe is greeted (if it is answered with any sort of recognition at all) with ridicule, the sort of self-assured, self-satisfied smirk that is always girded with both relief and fear, the kind of response the mention of many of today’s most highly regarded scientists’ names will no doubt provoke a generation or two from now. But back when I was in school, Smythe was considered an important mind, a visionary, the sort of doctor and scientist it was expected one wanted to become.14
Smythe was also something of an unusual figure on the campus and in the scientific community. For one, he was involved in what was widely acknowledged as some of the more interesting medical work at the time. Today it is very easy to laugh at the sorts of misguided notions and theories that were once considered groundbreaking, but there is no denying that the 1940s were, in their way, a period of great scientific expansion. As wrong (and there is no gentler way to state it) as many of Smythe’s and his colleagues’ theories were eventually revealed to be, his generation also possessed an admirable degree of curiosity, and their thirst — motivated by any number of things, but undeniably genuine — resulted in the foundation of what we recognize today as modern science. Without them, there would have been nothing for you or I to refute, nothing for us to dispel or debunk. I sometimes think, looking back at Smythe’s work, that his most important legacy was identifying the sorts of questions that would occupy the scientific community for the next half-century, even if he was ultimately unable to provide the correct answers.
I knew of Smythe before I had even met him. One of the most popular theories in the mid-1940s was that cancer was caused by a viral infection. This theory had been proposed decades earlier, but it had been aggressively promoted by Smythe, who had spent much of the early part of the decade trying to prove that cancer (which, for all scientists knew back then, was caused by demons or sorcery) was not only tidily explainable but also eminently treatable: if, the thinking went, you could isolate the viruses that caused cancer, you would then be able to develop a vaccine to kill it, thus eradicating cancer forever. Like all the most pleasing theories, it was inspired but disciplined, as well as neat, logical, and satisfyingly plausible. It was also accessible, and Smythe’s theory (which became known in the popular press as “Smythe’s conceit,” as if it were the Pythagorean theorem or the theory of evolution, or as if Smythe were the Aristotle-like author of some ancient, semimystical, heavily allegorical philosophy) soon made him a quite famous (and, inevitably, much envied) man in both academic and popular circles.15
But I will return to him later, which seems fitting, as it was only after I had been working in his lab for several months that I actually met Smythe. Unsurprisingly, given my grades, my attitude, and my general unsuitability, I was rather a nonentity for almost the entire time I was there; my colleagues never spoke to me, and my tasks were the most menial. I felt no resentment, however — students such as myself were, it seemed, continually arriving and departing, there one day and vanished the next to someplace else, a presence as temporal as the monkeys we were responsible for feeding, the mice whose water bottles we changed, the dogs with terrified eyes we injected, until one day they too vanished from the lab, taking with them their sounds and smells.
There were usually around fifteen of us — and Smythe, of course — in the lab at any time, and although I had been somehow, romantically, anticipating a free and creative exchange of ideas and theories (I was that naive), it was in truth strictly hierarchical; although a controlled environment and peopled with only a very narrow sliver of society, it hewed slavishly to the formalities and distinctions of rank of the outside world. At the top was Smythe, and what he said — or what his immediate inferiors said he said, which was more often the case — had to be followed without questions or debate. But Smythe was a less and less frequent presence by the time I arrived, more interested, it seemed, in giving interviews to the New York Times and to Edward R. Murrow.
The next most important people in the office were the two chief residents, Walter Brassard and Monroe Fitch, both M.D.’s and both (as they managed to remind you every week or so) handpicked by Smythe to run his lab. It was their job to supervise the experiments, write first drafts of Smythe’s research papers and handle them through their eventual publication, and administer the daily goings-on at the lab, which included the hiring of medical students and undergraduates. Both of them disliked me, Brassard more than Fitch, but I had been hired directly by Smythe, and so they were forced to tolerate me. Both of them — again, Brassard more than Fitch — were not unknown in their own right; at school I had heard professors speak of their brilliance and promise. They were sometimes called “the Turks,” and it was thought that they would be the scientific minds who would succeed Smythe and in the meantime carry his projects to fruition. The two of them rarely spoke to each other and, I saw, were quite competitive. Each disdained the other for the supposed inferiority of his education (a curious thing, as they had been classmates from prep school through medical school), his intellectual vivacity (again, both seemed equally unimaginative to me), and, it became clear, for his relative favor with Smythe at any moment.