Dear John

By Steve Boneham

For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to be a scientist. While friends’ heroes were footballers and astronauts, mine was always Charles Darwin. The story of how he devoted his life to proving an idea inspired me. I knew that’s what I wanted to do and somehow many years later I found myself getting the chance. It was 1990 and I was just starting work on a PhD, trying to produce a vaccine against HIV, I felt like I was part of something important, something that could make a difference to the world, but something went wrong. I loved working in the lab, and I finally felt like a real scientist doing proper experiments but all I produced was data. I read lots of papers on HIV but they only talked about viral loads and molecular receptors. HIV was something I knew lots about but I didn’t really understand. That’s when I met John. He was 38, the age I am now, but he wouldn’t live more than six months after our chance encounter. John had late stage AIDS and was suffering from many of the symptoms I had only ever read about. It was a humbling experience to look into his eyes and talk to him about something that I thought was a big part of my life and suddenly see I was just treating it as a job. This was his life and no matter what anyone did, it would take it from him. He’d accepted that long ago and faced it with more courage than I think I could. His concern was for the future and helping others and that’s what he talked to me about when he asked about my research. Standing there I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt that I’d let myself lose sight of the real reason why science is important. Not for the intellectual challenge or the pursuit of knowledge but to help people. I might not be able to change the world but I did have a chance to make it better for some of the people in it. Sadly, I’m still not sure if I can claim to have achieved that, but every time I wrote a patient’s name on a test tube I thought of John. Every time I saw data on a graph I would see his face and every time an experiment failed he reminded me why I needed to try again; for John and the millions of people like him that I’d never meet. I no longer work in science but the lesson I’ve learned will stay with me for the rest of my life. I will always feel like I failed John, but maybe he saved me.