Chapter 1 – What to Do With One Year To Live?
This is a profound philosophical question with a very practical solution. Hadrian learns that his brain tumor will kill him in a year or so, so he realizes that he was placed in a consequence-free situation. Even if he gets caught, he will die in prison soon while receiving good health care. As a parting gift to cancer research efforts, Hadrian decides to kill the director of the Prince Harry Cancer Research Center, where he works. He keeps finding justifications for his action throughout the book and hopes that his action will give him publicity to address the scientific community.
“Famous or infamous, a war hero or a war criminal… it is pretty much the same; it just depends on who is judging. What if one can (due to his misfortune) live in a somewhat consequence-free world? Canada doesn’t have the death penalty. The courts can take forever to reach a decision. Medical care is pretty good even for criminals. So even if a clumsy criminal ends up behind bars before cancer eats him up, it wouldn’t matter. Life is like a stadium where everyone yells at the same time. No matter what you yell, nobody really cares unless you get the microphone. He wanted to do something and get that microphone.”
In these chapters, Hadrian thinks of his peers – people who are doing science for a living. Scientists are just like all other people in all other professions. People are motivated by different things, and they go about achieving their goals (or lack thereof) in their own unique ways.
“While Hadrian was upset and going against the grain with the system all the time, she had a different attitude. She was thinking within these lines: “I am going to put my butt on that chair for the next 10 years and pretend that I am working. In the meantime I will earn pension.” Sadly, she won. Looks like the best way to beat the system is to change the expectations. Zero-expectations brings in the most rewards but you have to be a zero-ambition person as well.”
Toronto is big, yet despite the apparent ethnic diversity, it offers little diversity when it comes to the mindset of the guys Hadrian meets. Trying to match both physical and intellectual qualities and failing miserably, he ends up choosing to date a guy who is not very bright but has a great body.
“They met online, had coffee, then went to Johnny’s place for another one and then had breakfast the next morning there. Simple. Now that they started with sex first, it would be nice to get to know each other. Hadrian’s boyfriend of two weeks had showed up. He was a tall cute Filipino. Pretty dumb, but that was not obvious right away. People usually assume that when they hear someone talking at a slow pace that it is a sign of wisdom and calm personality. In this case it was a sign of a slow mind trying to express thoughts at the pace most suitable to the speed at which the thought process was happening.”
Hadrian and Johnny take the subway to Church street, the gay district of Toronto for Halloween fun. Sitting on the train, he immerses himself in thoughts.
“This same train is full of people every day, yet they don’t talk to each other, don’t laugh and don’t approach other people. They silently go about their business, and possibly judge silently. Most of those people are either going to work or coming back home. When they go to work people go to a place where fear lives. There is fear of not performing well and losing a job which inevitably leads to the fear of losing the house. There are children to feed, clothe and school. It seems that most people take on life projects that make them stretch themselves close to the breaking point. How many people go to work happy? How many people come home not tired? Subways carry an army of fearful, tired and sedated people twice a day. Society counts those in the lucky group. They have a place to sleep, food to eat and a soul to trade for mere existence. Is this how we should all live? Most people are like that, but sanity in numbers is a twisted category. We are an obedient, blackmailed flock that accepts rules that rarely work in our favor. This night, the tired and unhappy ones stayed at home.”
Here the author comes up with a fictional character called Check Neck, who has climbed high in the cancer research community. It was so much easier to make discoveries 40 years ago; hence, he is old as he had been building his career for decades. The author combined several stories about stolen scientific discoveries and explained the process by which scientists steal each other’s ideas. It is done through the process of reviewing scientific results that are supposed to be published. People usually help each other at that stage, but sometimes it is quite the opposite. In some cases that editors of journals can’t avoid, competitors stall each other whenever they get a chance.
Due to the fact that the institute director built his fame on the finding that he made by burring some other lab working on the same problem, Hadrian feels less guilty targeting this person.
“On top of that pyramid was Check Neck. He might not have been at the top regarding organizational issues and fundraising, but was certainly pushed forward as he was the golden goose of the Prince Harry Foundation. Check Neck represented everything that Hadrian despised. The pyramid consisted of 20 full professors. Each professor had a lab of about 10 students on average, so there were 220 people under his direct command. Full professor is like a leader of a country. There is no direct boss except for the director of the institute, who has an administrative role. Check Neck was both the director of the institute with the administrative role and also their direct boss in regards to research. Everyone reported to him and everyone’s discovery was attributed to him. “It is easy to be productive when you have 220 people doing research in the direction you order,” Hadrian was thinking.”
The chapter is based on a completely true and tragic story. An exchange high school student from China got sick with what was thought to be food poisoning. He was diagnosed with leukemia! Justing was rushed to the cancer hospital and got the first round of chemo, but it was unclear whether the insurance would cover anything. In addition, the only people who cared for him were total strangers. It turned out that the insurance decided to cover both the first and second rounds of chemo! God bless Canada! He was sent home with a great prognosis, as young people respond well to chemo. All that was needed was to repeat the same procedure.
The boy’s parents couldn’t afford the Chinese hospital capable of repeating the procedure he received in Canada, so he was placed in a cheaper hospital and received a different kind of treatment. He died within months.
“Acute Myeloid Leukemia is a curable disease. Justin was lucky, as young people respond to treatment better than older patients. The bad news was that Justin was an exchange student from China. He had some health insurance but nobody expected that he would need multiple rounds of chemotherapy. Canada of course is not nearly as bad as the US when it comes to financially destroying sick people. Ontario Health insurance Plan (OHIP) covers treatments and doctor’s visits but not prescriptions. Justin had something from school but no one knew to what extent he would be covered and where chemo is classified in regards to insurance. One round of chemotherapy can cost around 50K. Nobody gets better after only one round, not to mention that many people don’t get better no matter how many rounds of chemo have been administered.”
In this chapter, the author is trying to push some boundaries, even though for a person accustomed to personal growth, there should be no controversy in this chapter whatsoever. The author goes philosophical about what regular people, conditioned by the media, consider acceptable and what is considered shocking. While trying to analyze and defend the brave souls who only want to be themselves in a society that does not accept them, the author comes up with a shallow character that is nothing like what Hadrian expects. There are many layers to this story. One message is that sometimes people who push boundaries are not philosophers or die-hard activists, but rather people who only want to change themselves for any deep or shallow reason. In the end, whoever dares to make the change in his or her own life living in a society that doesn’t “take kindly” certain things is a “self-hero,” but doesn’t necessarily deserve a medal from other people.
“There are so many people in this world who grow up unhappy with some physical feature and maybe even go through their entire adult lives feeling that something is wrong. It must be totally devastating to feel that everything about one’s body is wrong. A person who goes beyond that must be spiritually strong to constantly face the judgment of society. It is funny though how certain things bring judgment so easily, while crimes against humanity are tolerated and not perceived as such. Making a decision to willingly sacrifice thousands of young lives for some profit agenda in the deserts of the Middle East is perceived as patriotic. Apparently this is something that just had to be done to protect the country from a threat 5000 miles away. Most people can’t comprehend that the person who issues the “executive order” is working for the interests of big capital, yet taken as a respectful leader of a country. There will be some who will see that person for what he truly is, but they will be either silenced or ignored to oblivion. Hippies don’t get to change the world. The world is populated by sheeple, so the real power is in the hands of shepherds. On the other hand, there are people who feel that their brain is not in sync with their bodies and once they muster the courage to change something, society will judge and make their lives miserable. Why? Why is this part so difficult to accept while killing from distance in the name of capitalism and democracy is not abhorred equally? Hadrian was totally on the side of the brave. It takes balls to wear a skirt.”
Hadrian needed a dog to commit the murder. It was supposed to provide camouflage of “non-threat” as he walks down Check Neck’s neighborhood in order to find the best moment for assassination.
Hadrian mistreats the dog, or better say he doesn’t treat it as well as other people do. He gave the dog food and shelter and after the assassination part he plans to dispose of the dog “humanely” just like other species are humanely slaughtered.
“North America is a great place for dogs. In the part of the world with the largest meat production and consumption that inevitably leads to the mass slaughter of meat animals, dogs and cats have a special place in human hearts. Those hearts are otherwise completely desensitized to pain and suffering of other species. Is this right? Of course not. Is it acceptable? Absolutely. Human beings are not logical. We pride ourselves in our ability to use logic but that logic fails us on so many occasions, to our own demise.”
The main character finally manages to hit his target. He kills the man, justifies the deed, or at least tries to, then moves on to getting rid of the dog. The author hopes that he will succeed in evoking emotions in readers not by the assassination of the man but by the way the dog was dealt with. It represents the metaphor for all those gentle souls that gave 100% of themselves yet received little or no appreciation. Life is not fair.
This is the most important chapter in the book. The whole book can be considered an excuse for providing an introduction for this chapter. These are the true thoughts of the author on the subject. However, the chapter is “dry,” and not everything could be conveyed in this style, hence the decision to come up with a fictional story that would make reading the book more interesting and provide more information by following the life of the main character.
“Dear Fellow Scientists,
In brief, we suck. Although this statement is accurate, and pretty much summarizes everything I want to say, it is not very informative, so please allow me to elaborate. It may take a while, but you are probably not going to settle for the short version of my assessment. At the same time, you will get bored by the the long one. Either way, you will not be happy, so I guess it is better to tell you what I think, regardless of what you think of me. The days of curious passionate people looking for a cure for some disease out of noble motives or pushing the boundaries of what is known for the pure pleasure of discovery are gone. Now, scientists are just like other people working and thinking within the lines of consumerism, striving to come up with something patentable, beat everyone else in the race, get the glory and get the cash. People don’t seem to be motivated to do something noble. The current system creates despair, dishonesty and dissent. What I would like to address is so complex that it is best if I break it down into segments. I have divided the problem into the following components: 1. Making of a scientist, 2. Employment situation, 3. Research conduct and metrics, 4. Research direction, 5. Funding situation and 6. Solution to the current mess. There is a loss to science at each of these segments, whether through the loss of people who give up along the way, or the loss that comes from the broken system itself.”