Publish and Perish, part 22: Neglected Diseases, Neglected Spouses

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

When Gerald arrived at Cafe Nation, Cissy already had a table and appeared to be busy on her laptop, with her beverage in one hand and her mouse in the other.

“I hope I’m not interrupting any lyrical breakthroughs,” Gerald said as he approached.

“Ha!” she said. “There is no chance of that whatsoever.”

“Because you don’t have lyrical breakthroughs?” he asked. “Or because you’ve already had so many breakthroughs that the rap is already done?”

“The first option,” she said.

“OK,” said Gerald. “To be honest, I couldn’t tell from our email exchange whether you were actually interested in writing a rap, or whether you were just humoring me.” He added quickly, “Either of which would be totally fine, by the way.”

“To be honest,” she said, “I do not want to write or perform a rap, with you or without you” — Gerald’s eyelids flickered — “but I do want to run a different collaboration idea by you. But do you want to order something first?”

“Sure, let me take care of that,” said Gerald. “I order like Sally in the movie When Harry Met Sally… so it may take a minute.”

He strode briskly to the counter. He kind of wanted to back up his comment with an extra-complicated order, but all he really wanted was a grande mocha, so he ordered that, then hovered awkwardly until it was ready.

“OK, so what’s your non-rap collaboration idea?” Gerald asked upon returning. He tried to sound casual, though he was dying to know.

“All right,” said Cissy. “I don’t know all that much about your research, but it relates to drug discovery for neglected tropical diseases, right?”

“Right. That’s a very good encapsulation.”

“OK, good. Can you tell me more?”

“Sure. How much biology do you know, or want to know?”

“Well,” said Cissy, “my ex was a biologist — and still is, I suppose. Anyway, he used to provide me with regular refreshers and extensions of my Biology 101 knowledge.” She gave a half-smile. “He was a very good lecturer, you see.”

Gerald, titillated by the mention of an ex, tried to match her half-smile. “I’ll bet,” he said. “But was he also a good listener?” He quickly backpedaled. “Sorry, no need to answer that; it’s none of my business.”

“No,” she said, “it’s OK. I’d say he was…” She seemed to be trying to be fair. “…not good enough,” she concluded.

“So,” said Gerald, “it seems like you actually know a fair bit of biology, but….” He took a shot at playfulness: “…you might also hate biologists?”

Cissy’s eyes twinkled. “I don’t hate them,” she said. “I’m just disappointed in them.”

“Ouch!” he said. “Anyway, moving right along… When I set up my lab here, I decided to focus on a couple of simple undergrad-friendly techniques that we’d be able use over and over to make progress with limited resources. In brief, we use bacteria to produce enzymes from various parasites, and then we purify those enzymes and measure their catalytic activity and see whether they can be inhibited. The practical goal is to find enzymes that can be inhibited by safe and selective drugs, killing the parasite and curing the infection. So far so good?”

“Yeah,” said Cissy. “Sounds fantastic! So how many diseases have you cured so far?”

“Uh, zero.”

“Hmm. Disappointing,” she said with a slight smile.

“Yeah, the biologists are letting you down again, I’m afraid.”

“Yup. But,” she added perkily, “let’s not dwell on that.”

“As you may or may not be aware,” she continued, “my own research interests include the effectiveness of public-private partnerships, which seem to be backing a lot of the drug-discovery work for neglected diseases.”

Gerald nodded, declining to explain that he had been googling her a lot lately. Where is she going with this?

“And our colleague in Anthropology, Stephanie Hurd, has expertise in cross-cultural views of medicine and so forth. So it occurred to me that we might have a good nucleus for starting some sort of campus Center for Global Health. A program where students could do interdisciplinary research with multiple advisors. So I wanted to run that idea by you and see what you thought. Sorry for luring you here under false pretenses, though!”

“No worries,” Gerald said. “I appreciate you luring me out of my sad little office. Anyway, my first reaction is … I think it could be great! It could be a way of jumping on the interdisciplinarity bandwagon and the global health bandwagon, but in a good way. The administration would probably love it, and students might love it too.”

“Yes, I agree. But, Gerry, would you love it?”

Gerald emitted a short laughter-like sound.

“You mean, like, would I want to be involved as a core faculty member or something? Boy, I don’t know. I mean, I am kind of sick of my research right now, and I’ve been wondering if I should move in a new direction…. But, I don’t know, collaborating with social scientists? I suppose that could be … fun …” He trailed off noncommittally.

Cissy leaned toward him. “Would you like to say more about being sick of your research?” she asked.

“Oh, you know, it’s mostly what we’ve been talking about with Morris,” he said. We work so hard to get things done, to get things published — but to what end? I feel as if what I’ve done in the end is proven that I’m smart enough and persistent enough to get the thing published — as opposed to the publication actually being useful to others.”

“Yeah.” Now Cissy looked sad on his behalf.

“It would be melodramatic and over-the-top to say that I sacrificed my marriage for my career,” he added, “but that’s at least partially true. So I can’t help but wonder, sometimes: was it worth it?” He coughed. “I’m sorry for oversharing.”

“Hey, I started it,” she noted. “By bringing up my non-listening ex.”

“Yes, that’s true,” said Gerald. “But we’re even now.”

[Update: the story continues with part 23.]