Sorry, But I Can’t Help You

Newsweek, November, 2007

One study found that, in doctors, the brain circuits associated with empathy were suppressed.

How would you like to cure cancer? Careful, it’s a trick question. You might win a Nobel Prize, along with the gratitude of countless strangers who will owe their lives to you. But you’ll need to explain to people along the way that you can’t save everyone’s life. Some of them might be your friends. Are you prepared for that? It never crossed Mark Davis’s mind back in 1996 when he decided to take a crack at the most intractable problem in medicine. He wasn’t a doctor or a biologist, but a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech, with a specialty in nanoparticles: assembling molecules into microscopic three-dimensional structures. He also had a wife with breast cancer, who...