If you asked me, having talked to a lot of patients in the middle of the night, before people really confide in their nurse it helps to establish a connection between patient and caregiver beyond the aspects of care. My habit at night is usually to ask what kind of work the patient does/did, where they’re from, that kind of thing? If he or she is capable of responding. It’s pretty important to know a little about the peeps you’re taking care of—like their education level. Possible environmental exposures for example, sometimes even home life, actually, because the minute someone is admitted to the hospital the nurse is supposed to start planning the patient’s discharge. That’s what they teach us in health care. And for that you need to know what kind of circumstances he or she will be returning to.
So, like, once in a hospital that employed me as a staff nurse, my responsibility for a few nights was to take care of a famous University of Texas researcher. To set the scene. He was a scientist, an electrical engineer. So, like, at the patient’s bedside, even emptying the urinal in the nurse’s absence, was a Chinese graduate student. To set the scene again.
The same student or his girlfriend was always there, as in 24-7, dayshift too per report of the day nurses although the patient’s family was also present during the day. This Chinese grad student’s girlfriend, who was there on duty when her boyfriend was not, was also from the People’s Republic and this is not totally relevant, but she was smoking hot, a Shanghai girl, again not that that’s important here. So, like, my theory on hot Chinese women—as an aside—if you’re interested? Taiwanese girls dress better but mainland women are hotter, actually, which means that Communism can’t be all bad, as seen through a historical lens. Rule by the Communist Party has led to better looking women. It’s hard to argue with science, bro. And that is what this is about, science.
Anyway, one or the other of them, the Chinese graduate student or his hot squeeze was at bedside every fucking minute, while the important researcher’s family was not there at night, at least not on my shifts. At least not on the nights that he was my patient, which was three or four shifts in total. Nor did they need to be there because this electrical engineering guy was not critically ill or anything. The Professor was doing okay after a medical procedure or whatever and the grad student dealt with his pee-related needs in the absence of the nurse and the nurse’s aide, the Chinese guy doing tasks which mostly entailed emptying the urinal. Nothing exceptional was going on in the room in other words. The patient was stable. The point is that if you’re a grad student—whatever the university—you’re there to work. In selected cases that may involve pee, in the lab or in the hospital room. In Confucian societies like China, also btw, teachers are revered and the scene in the hospital isn’t as weird as it sounds. The famed researcher flat on his back may still have some ideas to convey, the presence of the student makes sense in that respect.
There’s an old anecdote that just before Einstein died he said something in German that has been lost to history because his nurse didn’t understand the patient’s mother tongue. But pouring pee? Hmmm. How many white, black or brown Longhorn kids would do that? That’s my point. That’s why, if you were to ask me, in the struggle between the East and the West, my money is on the Chinese. Especially when you consider the mainland’s hot chicks because hotness leads to successful procreation, right? Ipso facto, bro. So, like, me and this soon-to-be Nobel laureate talked during the time we were together. That’s what you do at night in a hospital, especially with elderly patients because a lot of times they can’t sleep. And, you may not know this, but nursing school teaches us that the R.N. is the “patient’s historian,” that we’re there to speak for him or her, the patient in the bed, you know? But to tell the patient’s story you have to hear it first and this patient’s story was about lithium, as it turned out. Like in cell phone batteries?
And also about great sums of money.
Having been forewarned in change of shift report by the day nurse that my patient was an important scientist at the university, at some point during the night my question to this professor was—in order to connect with him on a human level—what’s your area of expertise? Have you invented something famous, yada yada? And he said that his work was on the lithium batteries that power cell phones.
The Professor was a big guy, looked like, although he was lying down and height can be kind of hard to judge until you stand the patient up. Which never happened with him, actually. But he was tall, at least as tall as my own six feet, that was my estimate seeing him in the bed. Grey hair, a good-looking and authoritative older man, with what used to be called a Roman nose. He had a quick laugh and was kind of the opposite of what you expect of a nerdy scientist because the Professor was not at all nerdy. He had an easy smile and a quick laugh, actually. He was more the kind of guy you could imagine sitting down at a bar to have a beer with.
The Professor said he had been born in Germany, like Albert Einstein actually, although he didn’t mention the relativity guy, and had studied in the U.S. and U.K. Kind of a cool older white cat, not to repeat myself, older than me, he was already in his mid-90s when we met in the hospital. Having taken care of a few scientists up to that point in my healthcare career, many times they’re tap tap tapping on their computers when you walk into the room, if they’re able to tap tap tap, or he or she is thinking great thoughts or whatever. If he or she is alert and “with it,” which can be a big caveat.
A few doctors have also been assigned to me through the years. My experience is that it’s hard for many M.D.s to make the transition from standing at bedside to being in the bed, you know? A lot of physicians can’t deal with the loss of control, that someone else is writing the medication orders now and they themselves are suddenly at the mercy of nurses telling them what to do, instead of vice versa. Nurses on the other hand are okay as patients because they seem to be more than happy to be off their feet for a while and to have someone catering to their needs. Doctors usually volunteer that they’re doctors but nurses often don’t say anything about being nurses, because we’re in a selfless and self-effacing profession, not to go all saintly on you. Lawyers usually volunteer that they are lawyers. Scientists usually say they’re scientists if you ask.
The Professor was my first Einstein-like patient though and you could tell right away that he had seen a lot in his life and that he had not just knowledge but wisdom, which is something different altogether. Maybe even like Einstein himself. So, like, this University of Texas professor said that he had done some of the groundbreaking work on lithium batteries used in cell phones and God-knows-what-else. And my question, for whatever reason, was if he had worked alone or if he had been part of a team?
Why that was my question is a mystery to me now, a few years later, but it was the kind of logical follow-up you ask a patient to keep his or her mind off whatever your task is at the moment, like giving a shot or starting an IV or whatever. With kids in the hospital you talk to them about their dogs or about video games or, back in the day, Power Rangers—or Teenaged Mutant Ninja Warriors—but with adults the conversation is usually work-related. Or about sports. Or it’s about their families, their kids or spouse or whoever. You talk politics only at extreme risk of pissing the patient off, especially since my politics are to the far left of Karl Marx and this is, you know, Texas, where Das Kapital is not exactly a bestseller.
The Professor volunteered right away that a Japanese researcher had also done some of the work on lithium batteries although it was unclear if the Professor and the Japanese scientist were working together or in parallel. Not that it matters here. But that point is where it became possible to establish a connection with the Professor and his work, without knowing shit about electrical engineering. “You mean, like, lithium from the Atacama Desert?” That was my next question and it turned out to be fucking brilliant, bro, not to unduly credit myself.
The Professor looked up from the bed. And you could tell right away that he was not just impressed, but also happy, at 2 a.m. or whenever it was in the middle of the night. Because that was exactly what he meant, like from Atacama, which was his life’s work, actually, lithium like what comes from Atacama. And that’s how we established a connection that would lead him to talk about his career, and something that irked him about scientific success—and scientific invention—involving money, actually, not lithium.
The whole conversation began with me telling him about my trip to the Atacama Desert back in the day, like 30 years before our meeting in the hospital. To set the scene. Today visiting the Atacama salt flats is on a lot of people’s bucket lists but back in the day we didn’t have bucket lists per se. Atacama hadn’t been on my South American itinerary because my South American itinerary didn’t exist. Backpackers at the time weren’t as scheduled as they appear to be today. Atacama wasn’t even known to me as a place until me and my fellow bus travelers were already there, stopped in the desert one day. Today young people have all these lists of destinations and they check them off as they go but back during my young black manhood, backpackers just kind of drifted, blown by a cosmic wind. Not to sound all spiritual because my goals were actually pretty earthly. Mostly if you were a young guy on the road you were looking for weed, wine or women. Back then, the prevailing wind had simply taken me to Chile which was not really my destination but was instead a way to reach my real goals, which involved weed, wine and women.
In case you don’t know about Atacama, and you may not, it was part of Bolivia or wherever but the Chileans took it during a war or something? History is not my best subject. At the time of my visit nobody was talking about lithium, actually. Atacama was better known strategically for guano, which is bird shit, literally, used for making gunpowder or explosives because it contains nitrates or whatever. Chemistry is not my best subject either. At the time though none of that was important to me, guano or lithium, to tell the truth. My itinerary included Chile only by accident. My plan was to catch a train from the Chilean capital Santiago to Mendoza which is in the wine country of Argentina, where my intention was to get fucked up on cheap but good Argentinian wine and try to get laid if possible. That was my “bucket list” although we didn’t say bucket list at the time.
So, like, at the Chilean border—this was just a couple of years after Chile had transitioned from a rightwing military dictatorship governed by General Stroessner, do you know your fascist history? You may not know that Chile’s legitimate president Salvador Allende was elected but got overthrown by the CIA. That may be before your time, actually. Anyway, the Chilean border guards searching my backpack were more interested in the books in my backpack than the possibility that there was a gun or drugs hidden among my things. They read the titles of the paperbacks, mouthing the words, and thumbed the pages—no shit—like they were checking for verboten ideas or whatever, even though they didn't speak or presumably read English. That was the Stroessner effect which was still in effect in Chile then, after President Allende got whacked. But we digress. This is about lithium not politics. It’s about Li+ batteries and vast sums of money.
After mentioning my familiarity with Atacama, sans the Stroessner effect, and after establishing a connection with my patient, the Professor told me something critical to know about tech guys and girls who have achieved great things, like my patient himself, actually. The Professor was a wise guy, literally. He had an understanding of people and one of the purposes of money that is often ignored and had nothing to do with his own scientific specialty, electrical engineering.
“So,” was my next question, “did you make a lot of money from lithium battery technology?”
“Very little money,” he said, and you could tell he was not happy about that. Bitter is too strong a word but disappointed is not strong enough. The Times would later say in the Professor’s obituary that he cared nothing for money. That’s not exactly correct. He may have cared nothing for what money can buy but he did have an appreciation for a big stack of cash as a symbol of achievement.
You might think that the Professor should have been happy with little money, that his satisfaction should have come from intellectual accomplishment and from helping society by inventing something as important as the power source for the ubiquitous cell phone upon which society pretty much fucking runs today. You might think that the Professor had poor values or was just greedy. You’d be wrong. And for the same reason you would also be wrong to think of greed in the context of Elon Musk or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, or the ex-Stanford University guys at Google, Sergey and Larry. That’s my theory. The Professor kind of proved it for me, in the middle of the night. We’re giving these tech bros a bad rap, especially Elon.
Elon Musk may be a douche bag, in other words, but not because of money. Or not because of all of his fortune, only part of it, you know?
Sometimes in order to tell your patient’s story you need to have a foundation of knowledge yourself. Not just having traveled somewhere—like to Atacama—but also knowing something about how the world really works, in order to provide the context that your patient may not provide when he or she tells you about his or her life. This job gives you that opportunity because you meet all kinds of people in a hospital. So, like, a few years before my meeting with the Professor, and a few decades after my trip to Chile, during a period of time working at a hospital in San Francisco, there was an encounter with another tech guy. He was a wealthy software engineer from Seattle, and he explained to me what the Professor didn’t say.
In his earlier career the software guy said he had known Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who at the time of our conversation was the richest person in the world, pre-Elon. And being a jealous wage-slave myself, just like 99% of the world, my comment to the Seattle tech guy was that Bill Gates didn’t need any more bread. Not another dollar, bro. What was he going to do with the next few billion, considering that he would never spend the money that he already made? The word “greedy” may have escaped my mouth, actually. And this tech guy, this software guy who knew the founder of Microsoft, said something critical.
“Bill Gates doesn’t care anything about money,” he told me. “Bill just wants more of it than anybody else.”
For people like Bill Gates, who are super-competitive and who at the same time feel—rightly—that they have done something great in the techosphere, a big pile of cash serves asrecognition. It’s not about the purchasing power, although that can be nice. But especially for the guys who will never win a Nobel Prize, or who haven’t won one yet, like the electrical engineering Professor at the time of our meeting, the amount of money he or she receives is a big deal, not the purchasing power itself. When Elon Musk asks for a $59 billion salary from one of his companies, what’s he’s really asking for is recognition, no irony intended.
That was the message from the Professor. Who was already pushing 100 years old when we met and was not wanting or needy, materially, and even had a highly-educated graduate student at bedside to empty his urinal. It wasn’t about the money, bro, it was about the recognition. Money can do that, yeah, by showing a person’s value to society, even if the person himself isn’t greedy. Elon Musk may be greedy but to prove it you’ll have to look beyond his efforts to get a big payout. Elon is probably never going to win a Nobel Prize, for one thing. A principal concrete measures of his greatness will include a dollar figure. Just like for Bill Gates. Ipso facto. The Professor died last year. He got the Nobel though, shared with the Japanese professor and a British scientist who also worked on lithium ion batteries. That was his recognition and it replaced the money that he didn’t get.
When the Professor won the Nobel the university Board of Regents voted him a big increase in funding for his lab, even though the Professor himself was already pushing the century mark. The obit in the Times noted that he died at 100 but at age 97 became the oldest Nobel laureate in history. The Times, which had interviewed him in anticipation of one day soon publishing his obituary, reported that he gave away his grant money to other scientists and the newspaper made a point of saying that he cared nothing about money. Yes and no. This is coming from someone who talked to him in the middle of the night when there aren’t many secrets between patient and nurse.
“A devoted Episcopalian, Dr. Goodenough kept a tapestry of the Last Supper on the wall of his laboratory,” the obit reported. “Its depiction of the Apostles in fervent conversation, like scientists disputing a theory, reminded him, he said, of a divine power that had opened doors for him in a life that had begun with little promise.”
He got his recognition in the end but it wasn’t money. He was also the kind of guy you might want to have a beer with. How cool is that?
