Stephen Gallup
Before his birth, something disastrous happened to my firstborn son. As a baby, he lived in distress. Growing older, he experienced enormous difficulty acquiring basic skills. As an adult, he leads a blighted life. His condition remains undiagnosed and unexplained.
A secondary but persistent question is why health care providers showed almost zero professional curiosity in understanding what happened, the mechanism for how it affects him, or how to help.
The current presumption is that his problems originated with a genetic error. However, no such error has been identified. If the answer lies in that direction, the error is going to be very, very subtle, in comparison with known syndromes and disorders. The story of its pursuit could be geeky, depending on how an author handled it.
On the other hand, maybe genetics is not the answer. It's just the latest of many unproven possible explanations that have seemed plausible at one time or another over the years.
When people cannot explain an inescapable problem like this, there has often been an impulse to look for spiritual causes—karma, nemesis, divine retribution, that sort of thing. A story with that kind of resolution could be written at any time.
But I'm holding out for something more anchored in the reality we know.
A secondary but persistent question is why health care providers showed almost zero professional curiosity in understanding what happened, the mechanism for how it affects him, or how to help.
The current presumption is that his problems originated with a genetic error. However, no such error has been identified. If the answer lies in that direction, the error is going to be very, very subtle, in comparison with known syndromes and disorders. The story of its pursuit could be geeky, depending on how an author handled it.
On the other hand, maybe genetics is not the answer. It's just the latest of many unproven possible explanations that have seemed plausible at one time or another over the years.
When people cannot explain an inescapable problem like this, there has often been an impulse to look for spiritual causes—karma, nemesis, divine retribution, that sort of thing. A story with that kind of resolution could be written at any time.
But I'm holding out for something more anchored in the reality we know.
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