Out in Palo Alto, John and Peggy knew that real estate prices were riding on a bubble, the Silicon Bubble. Markets in Asia crashed in the fall of 1997, and the older Heywoods prayed in Crescent Park: Stay up, stock market! Stay up, stock market! The bubble quivered but it did not burst.
At Advent, almost as soon as Jamie began to look around, a businessman he liked made him an offer: a position in an air-conditioning company. Jamie thought the offer was potentially lucrative but not exciting. A friend of his, David Edelman, called his father, the Nobel Prize–winning biologist Gerald Edelman. Gerald Edelman had spent years at Rockefeller’s old institute, now called Rockefeller University. There he had run a sort of biological think tank devoted to studies of the brain. He had moved his think tank to La Jolla, California, where he ran it in the spirit of the old Rockefeller. It was called the Neurosciences Institute.
That year, with Wall Street in love with science and technology, Edelman was looking for someone to handle what is known as technology transfer. He wanted a young entrepreneur to study the new ideas and gadgets that his scientists were inventing, and find ways to bring them into the marketplace. The institute’s share of the profits would be plowed back into the research.
People at the institute called Jamie. It was a Wednesday. Jamie told them that he was signing a contract with his new employer on Monday. They told him to get on a plane right away.
The Neurosciences Institute is on Torrey Pines Mesa in La Jolla. The place keeps a low profile and it has a very small sign on the road. The first time I went to visit, my cabdriver drove right past it. In designing the place, Edelman tried to capture the feeling of Rockefeller University, which seems, when you step through the stone gates at 66th Street, like a secluded world. The central marble esplanade was planned by one of the nation’s greatest landscape architects, Dan Kiley, to suggest a cloistered courtyard and to inspire the scientists who walk there to reach inward, where other public spaces urge people to reach out. The esplanade is lined with sycamores instead of stone columns because Rockefeller University is devoted to the study of life. Kiley loved the sycamores because “their high, open-branching habit” was “appropriately erudite,” he wrote, and contrasted nicely with the “stark habit” of the gingko trees. He wanted the scientists and doctors who strolled there in white lab coats to think “of ancient walled gardens founded upon the notion of paradise on earth.”
When Jamie walked into the Neurosciences Institute, he found himself in a postmodern version of that esplanade, an open space full of irregular and angular concrete forms and courtyards. The walls were faced with stainless steel, glass, and a beautiful sandstone studded with fossils. The central plaza was paved with terrazzo concrete and serpentine, and it was ornamented with moving water, bamboo, eucalyptus, Torrey pines, cycads, melaleuca, and native grasses. Edelman had included architectural reviews on the institute’s Web site. The critic at the New York Times had called it “a magnificent piece of work.” The critic for the San Diego Union-Tribune had said, “This is as good as architecture gets.”
The Neurosciences Institute, like Rockefeller, is a not-for-profit research center. Edelman describes it as a scientific monastery. It is supported strictly by private money, and Edelman keeps its staff small because he wants scientists there to do “high risk–high payoff” research. For that kind of work, he thinks small is best. Rockefeller is tiny, but it has been the incubator or the home of more than twenty Nobel Prize winners besides Edelman, who won the prize for research on the workings of the immune system.
Even back at the Rockefeller, Edelman was concerned about the design of his institute down to the smallest detail. A friend of mine there once told me that Edelman used to agonize over rug swatches. There was something absurd about a Nobel Prize–winning immunologist worrying about the pattern in the carpet. But places like that did not just happen. The attention to detail was important, like the attention to detail in cathedrals. Such a beautiful place sent messages about biomedicine to everyone who entered it. Scientists were building on the work and working in the spirit of those who had lived in the millennia before, and they were making a model of reality for those who would live in the millennia to come; and all this was conveyed by a combination of allusions to the monasteries of the past and the space colonies of the future.
Edelman was trained originally as a concert violinist by a classmate of Jascha Heifetz from Leopold Auer’s school in St. Petersburg, before he found his way into medicine and then into research. As a Nobelist, he stands for what he likes to call, with light self-mockery, “the religion of Sweden.” In his institute above the Pacific he was still walking Rockefeller’s esplanade. The word “esplanade” comes from the Latin explanare, to flatten out, explain, make plain. Edelman stood for the Path of the Explainers.
After doing his fundamental work on the immune system, Edelman had isolated molecules called N-CAMs, which help nerve cells adhere and bind to other nerve cells—electrical tape for the wiring of the nervous system. From there, Edelman had turned to the workings of the brain, hoping to solve the mystery of consciousness. Like many other biologists, he thought of the brain as the next great frontier in science. The brain is everything in human experience: our awareness, our feelings, our ability to make and create and speak and understand the thoughts of others; a source of health and sickness; a carpenter’s ability to hammer a nail or look at a wreck and see a gem that could be built in its place.
So much that we take for granted can go wrong so quickly with the brain and lead to so many illnesses, from alcoholism and anorexia and Alzheimer’s to depression, paralysis, paranoia, schizophrenia, xenophobia. In the United States alone, illnesses that begin in the brain have damaged tens of millions of lives, and every year these diseases end the lives of hundreds of thousands. The cost of treating disorders of the brain in this country is more than six hundred billion dollars a year. No other group of illnesses costs us so much money, to say nothing of the anguish they bring to the afflicted and to their families, which is incalculable.
The U.S. Congress had declared the 1990s “The Decade of the Brain.” By the last years of the decade more scientists were working on the brain and the nervous system in the United States and around the world than on any other aspect of the science of health. More was learned about the brain and nerves of the body in those years than in all the rest of human history. Yet in many ways the brain remained as mysterious and difficult to treat as ever, because of its extraordinary complexity. Scientists still could not explain the nature of a thought, a memory, a dream. That is, they did not understand the nature of the mind in health, much less in sickness.
Many scientists hoped that the time was right at last for great advances: for basic understanding and for the curing of the incurable. In biomedicine the focus had turned from the curing of germ-borne diseases to the curing of nerve-death diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. In the United States today the number of Americans with a debilitating neurological disorder is one in five. As the Neurosciences Institute’s Web site points out, that number is going to rise as the number of old people in this country rises. In every country rich enough to benefit from the medical advances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nerve-death diseases may become the biggest health problem of the twenty-first, as more and more of the well-off live long enough to die from them. International pressure to find cures for these diseases is enormous. In the world’s wealthiest countries, sometime in the twenty-first century the number of people who suffer from an illness of the brain or the nerves may be one in two. What scientists can do now will affect hundreds of millions of families. It may touch the fate of nations. This is a place where a young scientist can hope to save the world.
Gerald Edelman met with Jamie Heywood for a few hours. Jamie was very impressed by him: a tall man, and highly charismatic. To Jamie, he seemed almost intimidatingly confident of his personal powers and the power of neuroscience. Edelman had revolutionized the study of the immune syste
m, and now he told Jamie that he and the scientists at his institute were revolutionizing the study of consciousness.
Edelman liked what he saw in Jamie, too. Jamie still looked very young that year, but at the turn of the millennium, especially in the think tanks of California, youth was an infinite asset. Jamie did not know biology; but many of the scientists at the Neurosciences Institute were trying to understand the workings of the brain by experimenting with computers and robots. One team had built a robot called NOMAD, which was slowly learning to wander around a playpen. As director of product development at Advent, Jamie designed and built robots for venture capitalists. He was intelligent and hungry, and he could learn to turn ideas into products for the Neurosciences Institute.
Edelman assigned another neurobiologist, Ralph Greenspan, to show Jamie around and court him over lunch. Greenspan is a more gently charismatic man than Edelman, also tall, also a great talker, but soft spoken, with graying wavy hair. He had worked at Princeton, at New York University, and at the pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche. Greenspan told Jamie that he had joined the institute because he wanted to pursue extremely edgy studies of the sleeping, waking, and possibly conscious brains of fruit flies. The institute gave him the freedom to do that. Over lunch, he worked on Jamie pretty hard. You can always go into air-conditioning…
Jamie listened and looked around him. He was impressed by the institute’s dining room, where the lunches are served by waiters. Here again Edelman was building on Rockefeller, Greenspan explained. That was one of Rockefeller’s traditions from the turn of the twentieth century. Lunches there were events, and dinners in the president’s house were often served by waiters in black tie. Scientists sometimes made fun of the place for that, but the most extraordinary things had been achieved at Rockefeller: Nobel Prizes, discoveries that transformed biomedicine.
After Jamie left, Edelman talked over the hire with Greenspan. They decided that Jamie would be a good person to figure out how to package the think tank’s ideas and turn them into money. He would be their tech-transfer guy, their money guy. His title would be Director of Technology Transfer.
Jamie himself, when he thought it over, did not see his role as just a money guy. He saw himself as joining a high-powered team in one of the greatest team projects he could imagine.
“I got on a plane on a Thursday evening, interviewed on Friday, was offered the job on Saturday, and accepted it on Sunday,” Jamie says. “It was less money and it was less everything but it was the sort of thing you can’t let slip away. When someone asks you what you do for a living, and you can say, ‘I’m working as an air-filtration executive,’ or you can say, ‘I’m trying to find the biological basis of consciousness’—which would you choose?”
Five
Stephen’s Claw
After Christmas of 1997 Stephen was too busy to think about his tired hand. He would rest it when the house was done. Everyone in his family pitched in with woodworking, painting, gardening. In February of 1998 the weather turned apocalyptically bad because of El Niño, which is named for the Christ Child because it often appears around Christmas. It starts with a flow of strangely warm water off the coast of Peru; but everything in the weather system is connected, and the Child troubles the weather around the world. El Niño has come to the Pacific more and more often in recent years, a trend that may be driven by global warming, which is a problem that John Heywood was thinking about that year as he wrote his book about two-stroke engines. If John could improve the efficiency of the world’s two-stroke engines so that they burned less oil and gas, he might help slow down global warming—and in that way he might even hope to do something about the weather.
Peggy clomped around in the mud, landscaping the front and the back yard with plants and vines. They had found some sod. The Mexican craftsmen her sons had hired sat on the roof in the rain and watched her. They laughed to see Peggy slogging through the garden with plastic trash bags wrapped around her legs up to the knees. They called down to her from the roof.
Excuse me! Don’t you have an academic degree?
On February 19, the real estate section of the Palo Alto Daily News ran a feature about the new house for sale on Forest Avenue: “This week’s Daily News Open House has been a labor of love for two brothers who have spent almost two years taking a Palo Alto house apart—salvaging windows and antique brass doorknobs—and creating something entirely new.”
The reporter praised the custom details that Stephen and his family had added, from the fine terra-cotta fireplace to the outlets in the upstairs bedrooms, which were wired for cable and eight phone lines—vital details in Silicon Valley. The cottage was now about to be offered for $925,000.
The paper ran a photograph of Stephen and Peggy in the new kitchen, standing in front of the cherrywood cabinets with tiny built-in lights, designed by Peggy and built by Stephen. The caption reads “A Family Thing.” Stephen has his arm around his mother and his right hand rests on her shoulder. Even in the photograph the hand looks strange. It is too thin, delicate, and spidery for the hand of a big man. The fingers curl inward. Everyone in the family had noticed the change in it by then, and the three brothers joked about it while they worked. They called it Stephen’s claw. Whenever the trigger of his power drill felt stiff, or the nail gun kicked in his palm, Stephen yelled, “Damn this claw hand! Damn this claw hand!”
He stayed as good humored as ever, but all sorts of fine jobs, like turning the screws of C-clamps, were getting harder for him to manage. To open the front door now, he jammed the key between his right thumb and his palm and rotated his whole forearm in a semicircle, turning the key with his arm instead of his wrist and fingers. His handwriting was getting bad, but then, it had always been bad. These were all minor inconveniences. He and his brothers were still young and sunny enough to feel that aside from the usual Generation X angst, nothing horrible had ever happened to any of them. Stephen’s right arm was still very strong. He could swing a hammer without a problem. Lifting the nail gun was nothing, even though he had trouble pulling the trigger. “We were working so hard that I just figured, well, geez, this could be anything,” he told me later. “It could be exhaustion, it could be a pinched nerve, carpal tunnel—you know, who cares what it could be? It doesn’t really matter.”
By now, all of the Heywoods were possessed by the house. Stephen’s baby brother Ben screamed into the phone at the roofer and threatened him with his nonexistent lawyer. (The roofer tiled the roof.) Their mother labored out in the yard from sunup to sundown, as if she were back on the farm. Stephen himself worked gracefully under pressure. He kept his perspective even in the last emergencies. When one of his apprentices laid a window on the ground, took a step forward, then a step back, and put his foot through the old rippled glass, Stephen barely flinched. He consoled his apprentice.
One afternoon that month, Stephen was walking across City Hall Plaza in Palo Alto, swinging his arms, when he happened to bang his right hand against a mailbox. He glanced down at his hand. Then he did a double take. He held up both palms and stared from one to the other. Something was wrong with the shape of his right palm. He stood in the sidewalk looking back and forth between his hands.
Holy shit.
Between the thumb and pointer of the human hand, there is a muscle that allows the two fingertips to meet. It is the most important muscle in the hand because it makes possible the quintessential human movement of the opposable thumb, drawing the tip of the thumb to oppose the tip of the pointer. According to evolutionary theory, the opposable thumb may be the piece of equipment that made the difference for Homo habilis, or Handyman. From the opposable thumb to caves and flint axes; and then to Homo sapiens, Man the Wise; then villages and statues, cities and bridges, roads and engines, vials and syringes, keys and locks.
Stephen held up his left hand with the fingers together, the thumb pressed up against the pointer. In a normal human hand, the muscle makes a bulge, a small, fleshy, wrinkled bulge, right in the crook at the
base of the thumb. This bulge is known to anatomists as the thenar eminence. Stephen did not know what it was called, but standing there on the sidewalk he could see that his right hand had lost it. His right hand looked as if the crook between the thumb and the palm had been carved away with a jigsaw.
This is serious. It’s not just exhaustion. Something is wrong here.
The weekend before the house went on the market, the Heywoods did a last tremendous burst of work to get ready for the big open house. You opened a house in Palo Alto the day before it went on the market, and it always sold in a day. On Forest Avenue, it was an Amish-style finishing. The whole family was racing together. The night before the opening, Stephen, Jamie, and their father put up the banister at the head of the stairs.
On February 28, 1998, the house went on the market, and it sold the same day for $975,000, fifty thousand over the asking price—almost a million dollars. Jamie thought it was probably the highest cost per square foot in Crescent Park. His brothers had paid $325,000 for the place, so they made a gross profit of roughly 300 percent.
The Heywoods celebrated together. Peggy asked Stephen if she could be his partner on his next house. If Stephen could find one to renovate in Boston, she would put up the money, and he could teach her to work with her hands.
As soon as the house was sold, Stephen went to see a doctor, although he still did not feel terribly worried. “Stephen is not one to go to the doctor. If he has a gash in his hand two inches deep, he’ll sew it up himself. A doctor’s the last thing on his mind,” Ben explained to a television reporter long afterward, when the story of the Heywood brothers had become famous. “And Stephen was carrying the whole house around in his head. So he was mentally fatigued as well as physically.”
His Brother's Keeper Page 4
