Do Not Run For Cancer

By Nenad Cicmil

Hadrian is a junior cancer scientist who is diagnosed with brain cancer and given one year to live. He knows that a miracle drug is not coming any time soon, so he decides to speed up drug discovery process by shocking the corrupt system. He kills the director of the Price Harry Cancer Research Center in Toronto where he works. The center is a monster consuming huge amount of funds while providing little, if any, benefit to the hopeful donors and patients. Since Hadrian has nothing to lose, he decides that it is better to use that last year to bring a positive change to the world, even through murder that he tries to justify. He is an intelligent person and a compulsive thinker. The book is full of thoughts on all subjects Hadrian encounters during the process of planning and executing the murder. Even though readers will be presented with a lot of info, the book is not boring. Readers should decide prior to opening these pages whether they prefer a cheerful-fluffy-politically-correct text or the content found here. To make this novel easier to read, "heavy" chapters are counterbalanced with some life issues we can all relate to.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nenad Cicmil
• Release date: May 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393335139

Nenad Cicmil

Nenad is a big critic of the current research environment. He was blessed (or cursed by whatever entity is in charge of making us grow through adversity) with the innate curiosity and the constant need to question the status quo. Although these attributes are officially put forward as desirable for a researcher in some utopist perfect world, in the real world, it is not the case. He felt that in high school and then at the university in Serbia, after which the feeling of misfit followed him to the graduate program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then finally to Princess Margaret Cancer Hospital at the University of Toronto where he conducted his postdoctoral work. The book is a way to voice his opinion on how the current research environment is NOT conducive to discoveries. “He who has ears, let him hear.” – Matthew 13:9

Book preview

1. THE IDEA

HADRIAN WAS A MAN OF many ideas, few friends, and a shrinking number of options. Just last week he was diagnosed with type II glioma, a common brain cancer. Apparently there is no rule. Vegan lifestyle, no smoking, zero alcohol and no drugs could not help him avoid this curse. To make things worse he was a cancer scientist. Graduating at the top of his class, spending 10 years working in cancer research, he got disenchanted with the way science is being conducted.

The days of scientific pioneers working tirelessly having only a noble idea to guide them are over. Modern day science is different. It is made up of an army of unhappy people who toil day and night while the guy at the top of that pyramid is guided by the idea of fame and profit through patent rights. Hadrian knew the help was not coming from research and that from now on he would have to depend on the inferior minds to cure him, or more likely make his life comfortable while he slowly withers away. Damn those MDs, he thought. He knew so many of them. His Korean friend in grad school was an MD/PhD student. During the first week of grad school he asked his friend: Why do you need an MD besides a PhD? His friend said: What do you think? and made that clear gesture with his thumb rubbing against the three fingers that could mean only one thing.

At least he was honest. Well, honest and also messed up. Never got laid by the age of 27, probably even later, he was only after tall blonde white girls. They also needed to be of a certain shade of blond. Not all blondes were good enough. He used to spend hundreds of dollars of his father’s money per night on strippers and even said once: I did not get laid in the classical sense, but I have done everything else with the strippers, if you know what I mean. Ironically, he specialized in gynecology. His friend is now licensed to deliver babies. OMG! There will be people depending on him! In fact 99% of MDs that he knew didn’t give a crap about people. They are in for the money. Period. I may run into someone just like him, but without knowing them personally, anyone can pass as trustworthy in a clean white coat, with a calming voice and appropriate demeanor. How could he possibly trust them?!

What would one do with one year to live? Travel the world? Enjoy the last days with the family or try to do something by which he can be remembered? He was an artistic soul. A musician and a sculptor. Funny enough, he had already composed requiem that existed in obscurity in one rarely visited YouTube channel. Looks like the requiem will come in handy.

As for the sculptures, they are out there as elaborate signet rings decorating the hands of soldiers, pastors of churches and pretty much everyone else who likes to shoot guns. If a gun compensates for a small wee-wee, what does the ring compensate for? Well, the art is there but the artist is already forgotten by those who commissioned the art. So, what now?

How does one immortalize his existence? Most people do it through children. The children will cultivate the memory of their parents, good or bad, but if one doesn’t have children and wants to do something on a larger scale, he needs to touch many lives. Do all the actions have to be good? Good people do bad things and bad people do good things, although usually inadvertently. It is so much easier and faster to do a bad thing and touch many people’s lives. It is like climbing a tall tree. It may take hours to make it to the top as the result of all those good steps and only seconds to fall down after only one bad step. If memory is the only thing that one is after, then the bad is actually the thing to go for.

Famous or infamous, a war hero or a war criminal... it is pretty much the same; it just depends on who is judging. What if one can (due to his misfortune) live in a somewhat consequence-free world? Canada doesn’t have the death penalty. The courts can take forever to reach a decision. Medical care is pretty good even for criminals. So even if a clumsy criminal ends up behind bars before cancer eats him up, it wouldn’t matter. Life is like a stadium where everyone yells at the same time. No matter what you yell, nobody really cares unless you get the microphone. He wanted to do something and get that microphone. The solution was simple: He will kill some individuals who deserve to die and use that to get attention. Then, people will listen. They may not agree, but the message will be out there and many people will receive it.

2. HEAVEN AND HELL

IT IS SIMPLE, HE SAID to himself. There is no heaven and there is no hell. All religions are wrong. In fact, they could not be further away from the truth. We live in a messed-up world. When we were little, we had parents or someone else who was older and wiser to tell us what is good, what is bad and set the rules. Life made sense back then. Everything was clear cut, black or white. As we grow older, all those clear divisions start to merge and we end up dwelling in an endless universe of gray. Life makes less sense, but the need to separate the right from wrong and the need for direction are still there. Where do people turn to? To the department of soul-guidance, or the religious institutions, of course. Well there is a problem, an obvious one. While everything is being re-invented and questioned, and even the laws are physics are possible to bend with other, stronger laws, the department of soul-guidance claims to hold the patent to absolute truth that was given to mankind in the time of burning bushes and flying mares. God however is something else.

God could be the collective consciousness and since collective consciousness is made up of mostly small, viscous, and above all fallible minds, this explains quite well why God allows bad thing to happen. God doesn’t allow or forbid, God is like electricity, apparently the one of lower voltage and frequency, as the majority of minds that make up God are in the lower range of things. At least this collective consciousness thing is pretty much what the Buddhists think of God. They don't talk about God as an entity like Christians. So what happens when we die?

That was the question that puzzled Hadrian for a long time, until he accepted the most plausible explanation of all. The explanation came from a person who had been doing out-of-body experiments for over 40 years. In a way, he was there. When we die our consciousness is not dead (at least religions got this one right), but we don’t go to a pre-set heaven or hell based on our deeds, rather everyone goes to the reality that one creates for himself. That means that jihadists do get their 72 virgins after they die, Christians finally get to meet Jesus, and don’t need to only imagine him any more, and everyone is happy! The die-hard atheists who don’t believe in anything after death may indeed experience the dark nothingness that they have been talking about all their lives.

This sounds like an idyllic  portrayal of the afterlife. Other people have already named it Consensus Reality. It simply means that multiple people who have the same idea of what heaven should look like tend to congregate in that place. The halal-heroes end up in one consensus reality where animals are tortured properly before death, while the fruitcakes get their cruise ship to drink and party on for eternity. In any case, there is no punishment after death, meaning that Hitler is probably still enjoying his Juden-frei land.

Looks like afterlife is much less crowded than this life. What is the purpose of this life then? Apparently, the purpose of life is to help us learn how to control our thoughts.

Imagine an untrained mind in a place where thoughts become an instant reality. It is better to spend some time training in a place that we cannot easily change with our thoughts, before moving on to a thought-responsive place. These were the thoughts that haunted Hadrian for some time and somehow he became desensitized in terms of lifeand-death issues. That was a great thing for a dying man as it could bring inner piece for the next chapter, but a chilling reality if one decides to kill some before he dies. That was exactly what he set his mind on. He took a piece a paper and made a kill-list:

• Check Neck

• Bankers

• MDs performing abortions

• X-Factor Judges

3. THE LAB

A NEW WORK WEEK BEGAN. This Monday morning felt exactly like that: Monday. Hadrian woke up to the sound of a truck backing up downstairs. Some large metal objects were being unloaded and they produced that loud and irritating metallic clanging noise. There was construction going on nearby. In fact, every inhabitant of downtown Toronto can say that there is construction going on nearby. The whole city became one big construction site.

Developers were fighting for every square foot of free space to build more hip and progressively smaller condos that are always only steps from shopping and dining or conveniently located right next to a highway, if they are in the middle of nowhere. No matter where one manages to squeeze a building, there is always some excusatory object close enough to say that the new building offers some sort of convenience. There was practically no grass left downtown.

If one steps in dog shit on Queen street you need to walk 10 minutes in any direction to find a piece of grass to wipe off your shoe. Hadrian lived 5 minutes from work because it was ... convenient. He woke up unhappy and started preparing to go to the lab. It would have felt much better if he believed that at the end of the week he would accomplish something at work. In the next five days he will run around the lab growing bacterial cells, crushing them, and purifying engineered proteins that will be used for crystallization. This will theoretically lead to determining the three-dimensional structures of molecules involved in cancer metastasis, theoretically lead to better understanding of how things work on the molecular level and theoretically lead to a cure. Practically, it was just tons of redundant work that needed to be repeated endlessly in order to get any sort of useful data.

Scientists are like soccer players who need to run across the whole field and shoot at the goal. In 99% of cases they will miss because the wind is strong and changes direction. Only those who get to score get noticed, while everyone else is never acknowledged. The only path to glory is to score a couple of times when a fellow player passes you the ball (too much trouble to run through the field all by yourself) and then finally become a coach. Then, everyone knows your name. In science, coaches take the most credit when their players score goals. Luckily, work time was flexible in the lab.

It was already 9:30 and he was about to leave the apartment. At the long and well-lit hallway he bumped into his neighbors’ special little angel who could barely walk and unable to speak. His caretaker was able to walk, but unable to speak. What a match! It was technically impossible to make small talk while waiting for the elevator so Hadrian decided to check Facebook. Someone must have posted a picture of a cute kitten. Oh no, his meat-eating friend posted a picture of cute doggy. He hit like. Now life makes sense and universe has a meaning, he said to himself ironically. One person in the elevator couldn’t hear it because he was deaf, the other one didn’t understand it because he was special. Same thing as if he was alone in the elevator. Interesting... He just said something but it was not registered by other people except for him. Reality needs consciousness. If there is no consciousness to observe something, did it really happen?

It’s easy to say: Yes, we just have no proof. It may no be so. He walked out the building into the street from where he could already see the hospital where he worked. It was on the other side of the crosswalk 200 meters away. Not much of a commute.

When he started working at the Prince Harry Hospital in Toronto, Hadrian was happy. A new city, a new country and a chance to make a difference. He even told to a coworker that sharing the elevator with patients on chemotherapy makes him more motivated to do research. That was a year ago. There was no motivation left. The hospital was the saddest and darkest of all the hospitals that made up the Downtown Wellness Network. Maybe some people he shared the elevator with that day were diagnosed with cancer. Some of them were visiting a family member and some were on their way to the 16th floor. That was the floor where people check in, but do not check out. The euphemistic name for that place was palliative care.

He walked into the lab passing by the vacuum centrifuge used for drying DNA samples. Hadrian loved that piece of equipment. It demonstrates what kind of non-inquisitive minds do science for a living. Every molecular biologists has dried DNA at least once, many of them do it every day, yet how many of those scientists and technicians think of the vacuum of space while drying their samples? Apparently the vacuum of space is strong.

According to Wikipedia, the air pressure at 100 km (62 miles) up in the air where atmosphere becomes space is 0.032 Pascal. Standard atmospheric pressure that we are comfortable with is 101325 Pascals. According to physicists and astronomers, we do not lose atmosphere because Earth’s gravity is fighting this powerful vacuum.

Earth’s gravitational force or g-force for an object that is sitting still at the Earth’s surface is 1G. As we go up the force gets weaker. Water boils at 100º C at standard pressure.

Hadrian saw a problem with this. When we dry DNA, the machine produces centrifugal force that overpowers gravity at least a hundred times over. The sample is sitting in artificial gravity that is at least 100 times stronger than Earth’s gravity at sea level!

Vacuum laboratory pumps can achieve a vacuum down to about 10 Pascals, yet people are able to evaporate solvents like DMSO (Dimethyl Sulfoxide) that boils at 189º C! So, why are we able to dry a liquid that boils at a point almost twice as high as water under vacuum that is 300 times weaker than the vacuum of space and under g-force that is over 100 times stronger than what we experience at sea level? We are not supposed to heat the samples, but rather keep them cool, so heating is not the factor that helps much, as one may think. In theory, the Earth’s pull is weaker as we go up, so that g-force is not even 1G.

There is a big problem here! We have an experiment that has been repeated daily for over 50 years showing us that something is wrong with the theory that says gravity can fight off the vacuum of space. Most of us can’t go up to check for ourselves. Isn’t it more logical to trust the experiment that everyone can reproduce, than believe in theory that somehow found its way into textbooks? How does this affect Einstein’s theory of relativity that relies on space being a vacuum? That celebrated small-natured man mistreated his first wife (Mileva Maric) who did the math for him! Being a women she was never allowed to step out of his shadow and finally he discarded her when he didn’t need her any longer. Nazis were evil, but wish they had their way with him. The world would have been spared from one delusion.

With these thoughts Hadrian entered the small office at the end of the lab. It was 9:45 and, as always, out of 7 people only one was there. It was Vincent. A middle-aged Chinese lab tech who had picked a westernized name for himself. He was tall and on the chubby side. Everyone would be on the chubby side if they had a chance to try Vincent’s wife’s cooking! He had Hadrian’s admiration regardless of the fact that Vincent was a devout Christian. Well, it went both ways. Hadrian had Vincent’s respect even though he was gay. True Christians don’t judge; they just want to help. The help usually consists of inviting the troubled soul to church and helping him accept Jesus in his life, but hey, they are at least trying to help!

A father of three, Vincent was the only breadwinner. He commuted 3.5 hours one way and yet he was never late. The commute was not long due to traffic but because he lived 200 kilometers away! That was the only place where he was able to buy a decently big house to raise his family.

Not everyone is spoiled with convenience and square-shaped heads that fit better into their tiny condos. Good morning. How was your weekend? Vincent asked.

It was good, Hadrian replied. What did you do? he asked again. Nothing just rested, how about you? My family and I went to Algonquin Park to hike. That was a good way to spend a weekend, Hadrian thought. OK. Here he is sitting at his desk. The magnificent exploratory work should begin. He opened his laptop and started reading the news from the Fatherland.

Hadrian was no Anglo. His was born as Vladimir Zaulovic in the mid 70s, but picked a different name in order to sound more westernized. He failed miserably. One Hello, how are you was enough for people to ask him the famous Where are you from? question. This is the question that Asian people born in North America particularly like. Most people don’t realize that an accent is composed of two components. The first component is based on what part of the mouth one uses to produce sounds.

For example English R is actually a vowel. It is very difficult to grasp the concept for those who grew up rolling their Rs. Coming from a Slavic country, Hadrian also had a problem with H and with L. The H was Slavic and it sounded very similar to the way Anglos pronounce K. In English the H was supposed to come from the lungs with no obstructions. The L was particularly tricky. Slavic people have only dark Ls. Any Russian speaker or an actor portraying a Russian character will put a huge emphasis on this dark L. Unfortunately for Hadrian Hello, how are you? had all three problems in one short sentence. How did he know all that? He paid an accent coach from across the world as it was convenient to do it over Skype, so distance didn’t matter. The coach was an aspiring filmmaker who apparently hasn’t made it yet.

Hadrian now knew what makes his accent but it takes time to re-train the muscle memory involved in speaking. The second part to an accent is diction. That one is tough. The best way to deal with it is to treat one’s speech like music. Words are not important, melody is. While he was thinking of his accent, one of the two WASPs walked in. Hadrian had a good laugh when he learned that WASP stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. It was supposed to be offensive; he just didn’t understand how.

His colleague Matthew was a relatively interesting character. He was quite competent in the lab, tall, blondish and a heavy drinker. One could not hear any philosophy or thoughts about life or anything else of that matter from him. His only interests were hockey game results, Internet memes related to beer and work-related talk. He did mention one interesting thing: He had a special reason to date only short girls. Hadrian was quite confused with that particular fetish since he had quite the opposite preference (on the other side of the fence though). Apparently it was not a fetish but some kind of practicality as Matt’s tall girlfriends were not impressed with the less visible parts of his physique.

Unlike Matt, the other WASP, Brett never captured Hadrian’s attention in a positive way. He was all talk, on top of the latest hockey happenings, and with no competency regarding lab work. He was able to compensate for the air-filled personality with a deep confident voice and a serious, almost mean look, but it worked only with people who did not know him. Brett and Hadrian didn’t get along, although during one less-than-friendly exchange Hadrian gave him a sort of a compliment. I can’t believe how beautiful your eyes are! They don’t suit your personality! The response was awkward silence.

Why do the least interesting people have names that end on a double consonant? Hadrian was thinking. Jeff, Brett, Matt, Scott ... does the name make them that way, or their parents couldn’t have done a better job? Well, Vladimir probably sounds just as stereotypical to them. Maybe I should do some work. This life philosophy is draining me, he said to himself. He needed to do one more round of experiments that would inevitably fail. They failed before, so a reasonable person would expect the universe to be consistent. However, his boss disagreed. The results were supposed to show that a protein created in the lab previously by someone else is going to kill cancer cells better than the original natural protein. Well, it didn’t. The lab also had an antidote for a food toxin that Matt discovered a couple of years ago. It was supposed to protect the cells once mixed with the toxin. Well, it didn’t. Hadrian never doubted Matt’s results. There must be some other explanation for this particular experiment. He had been doing that experiment for about two months now and he kept getting consistently negative results. A different result was needed.

Another colleague who recently left the lab would never have that problem. Fatima would not even bother doing the experiments. Why do the work once everything is presented in Excel anyway? If the reality is not behaving, she could easily move some dots on the graph and fix it. It was so much less work for her and so much more rewarding. She published a nice paper, got the supervisor’s recommendation and landed a well-paid job with a huge pharma company. It is not her problem anymore that some losers from Germany kept calling our lab asking us for help with reproducing the results that she published. They said they were following the protocol step-by-step and yet failed to obtain the same results! Poor suckers, Hadrian thought. But who is in the worse position, them or him? He keeps producing unpleasant-to-see results. They cannot be published. He will either be labeled as incompetent or unproductive and eventually fired.

It would be so much easier to move those dots in Excel and have the God-damn graph look the way the boss wants. Modern-day research is sick! The emperor is naked, but people don’t want to say it. Everyone is pretending that everything is fine; that they are productive, while they know how minuscule their contribution is, and that over 70% of reported results in the literature cannot be reproduced. Hadrian had to suck it up. Being an immigrant on a work permit, he depended on his supervisor’s signature each year to extend his visa and stay legally in Canada. Once every year, he would knock on his supervisor’s door, and ask if he could get a letter to send to the immigration office so his work permit would arrive before the one year contract was up and the new contract signed. The boss would first look at him cluelessly, not because of Hadrian’s specific request, but because he always looked that way if anyone asked him something unrelated to science. In fact, whenever Jack travels, nice people on the street approach him and ask: Are you lost? Do you need help?

It was a very difficult situation to be in. It is OK to submit to someone whom you respect and who can guide you. A smart person should always do that. It’s the shortcut to success.

It would be nice to have a boss with balls bigger than mine, Hadrian thought. That is why he had so much trouble as a graduate student back in the US subjecting himself to the whims of a Chinese supervisor. Now, being in Canada, Hadrian would need a written confirmation that he was staying with the group for another year and that letter was used it to extend his work permit for that year. Of course, he was applying for permanent residency. That was actually the reason why he chose to come to Canada after completing his PhD in the US. For about 20 years, Canada had a relatively simple immigration procedure. A degree from any US university and a job in Canada would guarantee permanent residency. Then Stephen Harper came...

Three months after Hadrian’s arrival, Harper’s government changed the law. Hadrian had already sent his documents based on the requirements that were in place for decades. He got a negative response stating that there had been a change and that he needed to re-apply under the new conditions. That hurt. He did apply again and after about a year or so he got another negative response. The language was more sophisticated but the essence was the following: Dear applicant – Screw you! You can’t get permanent residency unless you have a permanent job offer. The professions that do not require permanent job offers are plumbers, bricklayers and strippers (but only in Alberta). Hadrian went to see a lawyer and the lawyer confirmed it. The Federal skilled worker program is not working any more. What was he supposed to do in the lab when there was such a pressing administrative issue? Fight for scientific truth? It was interesting how absolute truth had to be temporarily neglected and then forgotten when a simple and transient bureaucratic rule is so much more important in our lives. He could have argued for the sake of science and got kicked out of the country or just keep doing what he was told until some fat white ass with a high school diploma somewhere in the god-forsaken frozen wasteland of Nova Scotia grants him permanent residency. His permanent residency this time would be based on two years spent on a non-permanent job. This was called Canadian Experience Class.

His plan was within the lines: Let’s do the redundant experiments, keep quiet and then, when the situation is better, start a small business. It made sense. His boss Jack was not bad at all. Even though other people in the lab had complaints, Hadrian had seen much worse. Jack was by far the best supervisor he ever had! His first boss was an old hag when he was a grad student back in the fatherland. The main issue there was that the old hag had a daughter who was looking for a boyfriend. The mother had a lot to say as to whom her daughter should date. Hadrian fit the bill. Nobody knew he was gay, so everything seemed fine. He would have played along, but the girl, even though otherwise OK-looking, had a unibrow. That was difficult to disregard. The girl was unhappy, the mother was unhappy, so Hadrian eventually got fired.

The second boss was a young Chinese man who lured him into his lab promising a paper in the journal Science within three months. Later on, Hadrian figured that the main reason that he wanted him in his lab was because he was the only non-Chinese person there. Diversity worked in his favor here apparently. As for the Science paper, that was all Hadrian’s fault. Once you believe such crap, you deserve to bear the consequences of being naïve or stupid or both. The Chinese changed his name to a nickname from a computer game he played as a grad student. It was the name of a bird! The most memorable quote from his grad school supervisor was: People HAS to be educated! He said it in 2004 while commenting on the upcoming presidential elections.

There were two other bosses, but only for a short while. One was a Russian peasant, the other a speech-impaired Japanese guy. The thing with the Russian peasant didn’t work after Hadrian would not submit to his management style and embrace the deodorant-phobia that ran rampant in that lab. Oh yeah, there were 12-hour work shifts and invitations to come to the lab on the weekends because there is not much to do in the mountains of Pennsylvania anyway. That lab was not his choice. The Canadian embassy would not issue work papers fast enough for him to move to Jack’s lab. It took months, and therefore he needed to work somewhere to maintain his status in the US. The Japanese guy was just a way to preserve that status after he left the Russian lab.

Compared to all these colorful (and smelly) folks, Jack was a jackpot! Although a little bit off the ground and absent-minded when it came to practical things, Jack had great ideas that he gladly shared with the US Army and one big pharmaceutical company. The army took his idea and probably employed their own researchers to work on it without funding Jack’s lab as the reward. The big pharma company took Jack’s and Matt’s invention for testing for about a year or so until their provisional patent application expired and then practically stole the idea by modifying it a little bit and filing a new patent. Jack’s only downside was that he trusted people too much. His best side was the fact that he gladly shared a lot of info that helped Hadrian a great deal to commit the murder he planned.

4. ZORA THE GREAT

THE LAB WAS QUITE SMALL but full of equipment and disorganized clutter. There was no point in clearing the mess because once there was more space, someone would always have more stuff to put right there. It is always difficult to share space with people with no clear boundary of each person’s individual space. The only way to maintain things in order was to have a separate lab away from the one on the seventh floor of Prince Harry Hospital.

One lab member had that privilege. It was Zora Smolenska-Dolittle. Her lab was on the 10th floor. It