Seeds of Change by John Joseph Adams

Author:John Joseph Adams [Adams, John Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2013-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

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Afterword

Most of my stories have multiple origins that slowly combine over time. The first spark of “Endosymbiont” came from an article in Science about Carsonella ruddii that revealed its amazingly short genome and examined its implications on horizontal gene transfer and the evolution of organelles. In particular, I was fascinated by how in the serial endycytosis theory of prokaryotic evolution, the progenitors of mitochondria and chloroplasts would have had had to sacrifice their independence to become endosymbionts. I saw this as kind of the opposite of placental motherhood in which a mother has to sacrifice to give her child independence. Underneath it all was a question about whether there was a cellular basis to our conception of mother and daughter. I put on my sci-fi thinking cap and began to wonder if perhaps there might in the future evolve a new kind of creature, perhaps involving artificial intelligence, that would provide a new mode of motherhood.

But it wasn’t until my first semester in medical school, when I began to meet patients on the ward and in the classroom, that the story matured. My biochemistry professor, an oncologist, presented a fascinating case in which a middle aged patient, through doctor error, had been given a massive overdose of cisplatin—an exceedingly toxic chemotherapeutic agent that uses platinum ions to poison cells. The result had put the patient into a coma, destroyed her kidneys and done massive damage to her liver. When she woke from the coma, the patient found herself in agony, blind, deaf, and without a sense of taste or smell. Through the Herculean efforts of the professor, the platinum was removed from the patient’s body. Slowly her vision returned, and her hearing recovered enough to be functional with hearing aids. She had to suffer through dialysis for three years before she received a kidney transplant.

But the truly, absolutely shocking thing about this seventy year old woman was her character. When interviewed in front of the class, she alternated between joking with the doctors and scolding them for their “newfangled” manners. When the medical students got to ask questions she only called on the “handsome boys” and reminded us all that she was single again. I’ve rarely laughed so hard and never laughed so hard in a biochemistry class. Here was a woman who had suffered more pain—and pain unlike anything I could even imagine—and yet was not in the least bit bitter. When I asked her how she avoided bitterness and how she could stand to be presented to a whole class of medical students when doctors had failed her so profoundly, she grew serious and said something like “It’s a struggle. There were some very long and agonizing and lonely nights. And when you face the dark times and think about what had been done to you…well, you have to choose to face it and then refuse it."

Somehow this patient’s irrepressible character and her struggle to avoid bitterness meshed with my previous thinking about prokaryotic evolution and motherhood.

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