David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell

Author:Malcolm Gladwell [Malcolm Gladwell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Psychology, Social Psychology
ISBN: 9780316204385
Google: OkxUrypdTa0C
Amazon: B00BAXFAOW
Publisher: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

9.

Does this mean that Freireich should be glad he had the childhood he had? The answer is plainly no. What he went through as a child no child should ever have to endure. Along the same lines, I asked every dyslexic I interviewed the question posed at the beginning of the previous chapter: Would they wish dyslexia on their own children? Every one of them said no. Grazer shuddered at the thought. Gary Cohn was horrified. David Boies has two boys who are both dyslexic, and watching them grow up in an environment where reading early and well counted for everything nearly broke his heart. Here were one of the top producers in Hollywood, one of the most powerful bankers on Wall Street, and one of the best trial lawyers in the country—all of whom recognized how central their dyslexia was to their success. Yet they also knew firsthand what the price of that success was—and they could not bring themselves to wish that same experience on their own children.

But the question of what any of us would wish on our children is the wrong question, isn’t it? The right question is whether we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma—and the answer is that we plainly do. This is not a pleasant fact to contemplate. For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what they have been through. There are times and places, however, when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences.12 Freireich had the courage to think the unthinkable. He experimented on children. He took them through pain no human being should ever have to go through. And he did it in no small part because he understood from his own childhood experience that it is possible to emerge from even the darkest hell healed and restored. Leukemia was a direct hit. He turned it into a remote miss.

At one point, in the midst of his battle, Freireich realized that the standard method of monitoring the children’s cancer—taking a blood sample and counting the number of cancer cells under a microscope—wasn’t good enough. Blood was misleading. A child’s blood could look cancer free. But the disease could still be lurking in her bone marrow—which meant that you had to go through the painful process of gathering bone marrow samples, over and over again, month after month, until you were sure the cancer was gone. Max Wintrobe heard what Freireich was up to and tried to stop him. Freireich was torturing the patients, Wintrobe said. He was not wrong. His was the empathetic response. But it is also the response that would never have led to a cure.

“We used to do bone marrows by grabbing their legs like this,” Freireich told me. He held one of his giant hands out, as if wrapped around a child’s tiny femur. “We’d stick the needle in without anesthesia. Why no anesthesia? Because they’d scream just as much when you gave them an anesthesia shot.

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