A Medical Revolution Too Late for the Man Who Started It
When I finally met Sanjiv “Sam” Gambhir in person—last November, after months of planning—I knew he was dying.
Gambhir knew it, too. Seated in his small, bland office at the end of a warren of hospital hallways in Palo Alto, he was visibly depleted from the cocktail of treatments, some highly experimental, that were being deployed to save him from cancer. But Gambhir, a titan in the field of diagnostic medicine, wasn’t interested in dwelling on his own fate. Instead, he wanted to reimagine reality.
Well known among his colleagues for his “What if?” thought experiments, Gambhir took the occasion of my writing about the end of his life to reflect on the limits of writing itself. “I see writing as a primitive form of communication,” he declared in his commanding nasal voice. If Homo sapiens had evolved from the beginning with modern-day video and audio technologies, he surmised, there would have been little need to perfect written communication—and we’d be all the better for it today.
The moment was classic Gambhir. His riff was admittedly absurd, but it was meant as provocative speculation. He had made a career out of spinning outlandish visions into realities. Working at the nexus of medicine, physics, and engineering, he had spent nearly 40 years masterminding ways to see and study the infinitesimal biochemical and cellular events in living people—something that had never been done before.
The goal of his research: cancer detection. Over some 700 scientific papers and 40
