Science Fictional, Medicinal
So second year is already in full tilt boogie. We are already pre-clinical masters of the kidney and halfway through the GI track—in the first third of the small intestine to be precise. Second year provides much more opportunity to see what practicing medicine actually involves. I was assigned to the Palo Alto VA for a little clinical exposure and did a full history and physical on a Vietnam Vet. Great guy, has a problem list longer than my leg and involving every organ in his body, but still laughs about the world and still loves his wife—who sat in on my H&P, injecting snarky comments about her husband’s healthy habits along the way. After that I was fortunate enough to shadow a pediatric ophthalmologist (read: eye surgery on children) and was fascinated by how much can be done to restore failing vision in children and prevent blindness. Given how passionate I feel about preventing and treating childhood disability, I am going to have to take a good long look at peds ophtho.
On the writerly side of life, a tad more exciting news: I’ve completed an application for a grant to write science fiction. I’ll restate that in different words: I’m asking Stanford Medical School to give me thousands of dollars to write medical science fiction. If funded, the project will be titled “Science Fictional, Medicinal.” The application took a lot of doing and a wee bit of begging, but I am very excited about the result. The wonderful reviews for “Endosymbiont” have helped a lot, and (though I’m knocking on wood as I write this next independent clause) I think my chances of getting the grant are very good.
I’m including the abstract for the grant proposal below. The final draft isn’t due for two weeks, so if you’ve got any advice from either the medical or the SF side of things, please please pipe up!
“To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.” So wrote Ernst Fischer, an Austrian writer and activist of the last century. I would add that fictions must also seek to inspire greater understanding of the human condition. By imagining other lives, we expand our ability to sympathize and so become more compassionate and active members of society. The most important revolutions begin quietly; the perception of suffering must precede any action against it.
That is why, after encountering several cancer survivors last year, I wrote a science fictional novelette about possible advances in oncology and neurology and the ethical dilemmas they might present. The novelette was published in the Seeds of Change anthology by Prime Books. Though I cannot claim to have influenced a large number of readers (Prime being an independent press), I am proud to report that the reviews have been positive and that Prime matched my donation when I gave my advance to the American Cancer Alliance.
I write now to propose a Medical Scholars Project that would produce more short stories about advancing medical technology, the frontiers of medical ethics, and the evolving nuances of the patient-doctor relationship. The primary goal of the project is to write one publishable short story (5,000 to 7,500 words) per 50% funded quarter that raises awareness of biomedical issues that our society may one day face. In this way, Science Fictional, Medicinal seeks to emulate Frank Herbert’s famous words, “The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.”
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