On showing up when there is much to be done
I am back to writing The Healthiest Goldfish after a few weeks during which time I finished my upcoming book, “Why Health?” (more on that later), and took some time away, which was restorative. Naturally when one takes some time away, it creates an opportunity for some reflection, a chance to read a bit more broadly than usual, and to think, to look ahead. This was no different, and for that I am grateful.
As I was shuffling through my mental slide deck, I came upon a vivid memory: attending a lecture in October 1991 — I looked it up, it was October 24, to be precise — at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto. It was the Gairdner Foundation International Award Lecture, and the speaker was someone I had never heard of: Kary Mullis. I was then a medical student, and I went because it looked interesting.
Mullis, as I would come to learn, had developed polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a method that would revolutionize molecular biology, diagnostics, and forensic science. He was just a year away from winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in 1993 at the age of 49. But on that autumn day in Toronto, he was just a quite-evidently eccentric American scientist with a surfer swagger.
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