Publish and Perish, part 16: Youthful Optimism?

[Context: read the previous part or start from the beginning. TW: bad amateur fiction!]

Gerald was back on the stage of the shrunken theater, but this time it was just him and Morris.

“I feel as though I’ve been given a second chance to straighten out my life — as if by a deity,” Gerald said. “But I don’t know what to do with it! I think I might be wasting it!” At the moment he felt bewildered as much as anything else.

Morris nodded. “Is it fair to say,” he said, “that this worry is what has caused you to seek therapy?”

Gerald considered the proposition. “Yes,” he said.

“OK,” said Morris. “Now, would you say that this worry, or this fear, rose up suddenly after your accident? Or was it there before too, perhaps building up gradually?”

Gerald took a contemplative breath. “Looking back now,” he said, “I can see that I’ve been in denial about some of this stuff for quite a while. Like, I’ve felt my youthful optimism — with respect to general research goals and such — I’ve felt it fading for some time, and I’ve been troubled by that in a vague sort of way, but I didn’t really confront it; I just let it simmer on the back burner.” He decided to stick with the metaphor. “The front burner just being whatever shorter-term projects can be wrapped up in a few weeks or months.”

Morris leaned forward. “Can you still conjure up that feeling of being young and idealistic? If you concentrate?”

“Oof,” Gerald said. “Well… I remember some of the things I used to say, more or less, that kind of represented my attitude at the time.” He explained, “I recently reconnected with one of my first thesis students, so I’ve been thinking back to some of those old conversations.”

“Oh?” Morris seemed to pounce on this small revelation.  “Do you … Do you think you could recreate one of those conversations here and now?” He added, semi-apologetically, “I know that’s an odd request, but, given my approach to therapy…” He extended his hands and looked up in acknowledgment of his tiny theater. “…You knew this sort of exercise would happen sooner or later, right?”

“Yes, that’s fair,” Gerald said. Having played back these conversations in his mind, he felt relatively ready to reconstruct them for Morris. He rose from his chair and walked to the middle of the stage. It was a short walk — only about two steps.

“This would have been in the early 2000s, so I’m only half-remembering it, at best,” Gerald noted. “But I’m pretty sure Lois asked me, right when she joined the lab — or maybe even before she had committed — something like, ‘So, Dr. Cutler, do you really think we can contribute to a new cure for malaria?’ It was a polite question — Lois was always polite — but it had an edge to it.” He paused. “I’m not sure where we were when she said this — maybe my office, maybe the lab, maybe the hallway. So I’m not sure how to, uh, block the scene, if that’s what you call it.”

Morris giggled. “Yes, good use of theater lingo. OK, just assume the two of you are hanging out in the hallway.”

“OK. Here we go… Gee, Dr. Cutler, do you really think we can contribute to a new cure for malaria?” Gerald said this in his normal voice. “Sorry, I don’t think I can do Lois’s voice.”

“That’s OK,” said Morris. “Continue!”

“…Well, Lois,” Gerald continued, now swiveling around to represent himself, “that’s a great question. And the honest answer is that I don’t really know. Drug development is really hard; even giant pharmaceutical companies fail at it a lot of the time, and the odds are even worse for a small-college lab and its merry band of collaborators. But the way I think about it is, is this an important problem worthy of our effort? And to me the answer is obviously yes. Malaria, for example, kills something like a million people per year, and disables even more. So we take our best shot, even if success is not the most likely outcome.”

Gerald swiveled back toward the Lois side. Now as Lois: “So…for elusive scientific goals like that, what do you do? Do you inch forward carefully for as long as you can? Or do you intentionally put up some Hail Mary passes?” He mimed a quarterback rearing back to throw long, commenting to Morris: “She made that motion, as I recall.”

Gerald swiveled back to be his younger self. “That’s another great question, and I don’t think there’s a consensus even among the scientists I look up to. For me, this is where science becomes an art. You take one part history — what has worked before? — and one part logic — what seems most likely to work? — and one part intuition — hunches that you can’t fully explain — and maybe you get somewhere. Of course, some people are more risk-averse than others…”

He swiveled back to the Lois position. “And what about you, Dr. Cutler? What’s your scientific disposition like? Are you a gambler?”

As Gerald, he was momentarily unsettled by the question. “Let me put it this way: I am only in my second year in this position, and I do not have tenure yet. Do you know what that means?”

As Lois: “I think it means that you’re on probation for another four or five or six years, and there’s a lot of pressure on you to prove yourself as a scholar and a teacher.”

As himself: “Um, yeah, that’s pretty much it exactly. So, in that position, will I take lots of risks? No. I need to get some research published, soon, whether or not it leads to new drugs.” He pointed to his left, explaining, “I’m pointing to a research poster I would have had hanging up at the time.”

As Lois: “So…maybe get tenure first, then cure malaria after that?”

As himself, now smiling: “Yeah. Something like that. And hopefully do a bunch of cool science along the way.”

As Lois: “All right then. Let’s see what we can do in the next year, eh?”

Gerald swiveled back to the Gerald position, then realized he had nothing more to add. He took his seat, shaking his head at the memory of Lois as an undergraduate, already poised and incisive, and also fluent in football. “So, what do you think?” he asked Morris.

Morris rubbed his forehead thoughtfully. “I think Lois must have been one hell of an undergraduate researcher,” he said, getting Gerald’s nonverbal confirmation. “That aside, when you look back on these things that you said at the time, do they still ring true for you? Or do they now seem, say, naive, or misguided?”

Gerald blinked a few times. “I certainly believed what I was saying,” he said. “It wasn’t just, like, a pitch to get students into my lab. I had plenty of student interest, mostly from premeds, but also from people like Lois.” He sighed. “The thing is, now that I have tenure, I kind of give students the same spiel about high risk and high reward. But the students don’t interrogate it in the way that Lois did, and my heart isn’t in it as much anymore. I make these statements about my research goals and philosophy, but now I just feel like… I don’t know….” He thought back to their exchange a few minutes earlier. “This was an issue even before the accident, but it’s been gnawing at me more lately.”

Morris nodded repeatedly. “OK, Gerald,” he said, now sounding more authoritative. “Here’s your assignment for this week. Think about this youthful optimism that you used to have. Try to trace out, as well as you can, when and why it faded. And then we’ll try to distill some of that into a scene with Cissy and Hector. OK?”

“OK,” said Gerald.

[Update: the story continues with part 17.]