Table of Contents

1. Life Update

2. Everyone Should Have a Hero

3. Epilogue

Life Update

I visited Lisbon, Portugal, this week.

Not a vacation.

A conference.

Specifically, it was about proteomics.

In short, it’s the study of all the proteins you have in your body.  Proteins that can tell you what actually happens in the body.

And I gave a keynote lecture on our work on decoding the immune response to cancer therapy. Specifically, how to predict which treatment will actually work for a given patient.

I think it went well, since there were a lot of questions afterward.

Questions can be frightening when you’re up on the stage 😱, but I really like them. Questions make me think… 🤔

Anyway, after my talk, I was having a VERY interesting conversation with a great scientist about my research.

A kind of conversation that makes all the hustle of flying to a conference worth it.

And out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a student. Standing a little off to the side. Waiting.

I didn't want to cut the conversation short. It mattered too much.

So I told myself she would wait, the way people do at these things.

A few minutes later, I looked up.

She was gone.

I don't know what she wanted to ask me.

Maybe nothing important. Maybe something that would have mattered to her for years.

I was her, once.

Standing off to the side, waiting for someone busier and more experienced than me to finish, hoping they would notice.

Sometimes I got the conversation.

Sometimes I didn't.

But I always tried again. And again.

So, to the dear student I never got the chance to talk to:

If you're reading this: I'm sorry. I really did think you'd still be there.

Number 161!

Everyone Should Have a Hero

That student is still on my mind.

Because watching her wait outside the hall, I was really watching myself.

Twenty-years-younger-Shay.

Standing off to the side of a conference, hoping the person I wanted five minutes with would have five minutes to give.

🔵 The Keynote Talk That Changed Everything

I got my 5 minutes.

I was sitting in a keynote, listening to a researcher I'd followed for years talk about how the immune system responds to cancer treatment.

I was mind-blown.

I knew, right there and then, that this was my destiny.

I found my department chief and told him where I needed to be next. Two years later, I was his research fellow, on the other side of the world.

My dear wife and kids back home, chasing a feeling I got from forty minutes of someone else's talk.

And he's still in my head, almost every day.

Not as a voice giving advice.

More like a reflex.

When a result doesn't make sense, when a grant proposal gets rejected, when I have to decide whether a treatment idea is worth chasing or worth dropping - some part of me asks what he'd do.

I don't call him to ask. I don't need to. I already know, because I watched him do it enough times.

He's not the only one in there.

🔵 The One Who Isn't Here Anymore

My PhD mentor passed away a while back.

Standing at his funeral, I realized how many things I do, I learned from watching him.

How I make research relatable enough that a 10-year-old could follow it.

How I help colleagues without expecting anything in return, because I watched him do exactly that when our lab had no money to spare.

I never wrote any of it down at the time.

I just absorbed it.

He's gone. But I'm still running on what I absorbed.

This is the part that surprised me most about having a hero. They don't have to be alive.

And they don't even have to know they're one.

But their guidance keeps working.

So when I saw that student waiting outside the hall in Lisbon, I knew exactly what she was hoping for.

The same five minutes I once hoped for.

The same shot at a sentence that might reroute the next twenty years.

I don't know if she got it somewhere else that week, with someone else.

I hope she did.

Here's what I'd tell her if I could:

You don't find a hero by waiting for one to show up.

You find one by getting on the plane, sitting in the room, sending the email, standing off to the side until it's finally your turn.

It takes daring.

The keynote only rerouted my life because I acted on it that same day, not a week later when the feeling had faded.

And once you have a hero, the hardest decisions get a little easier.

Not because the answer becomes obvious.

But because you're no longer deciding alone.

Epilogue

That's it for this issue.

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See you next week!

Shay

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