This basic concept emerged from a conversation I had while on vacation last week, and I played around with it in several different forms before writing this in one burst and liking it the best, even though it’s only kind-of sci fi, really. I find it very interesting to write different versions of a concept and really try to make them different from each other. One thing I may try in the future is returning to an old story concept and trying something fundamentally different with it. Anyway, enjoy!
The Specialist
His father is a small-town doctor who sold short his own intellect so he could show up at home in time for dinner at least six days a week. He appreciates the childhood it gave him, but when he decides to become a doctor, in fifth grade, and starts studying anatomy charts and organic chemistry principles, he swears to himself that he will not settle in the same way his father had. He will work at the forefront of the field, right at the edge of what is possible, and he won’t stop until he gets there.
He goes to Yale for undergrad, Harvard for medical school, and then Johns Hopkins for a PhD in Computational Genetics. He studies deeply the causes of cancer, and decides to become a research oncologist. He does a second PhD at Stanford in Applied Biochemistry. He learns about Gene Sequencing, and RnA editing, and mitochondrial regeneration. Yet he never feels like he has reached the edge of the field. There is always more work waiting to be studied, more papers to be read.
In between school years and classes taught, he returns home to the small town where his parents still live. He no longer relates to his family or the people of that town, but he is a dutiful son and has no family of his own to which he might transfer that loyalty. His father gets cancer, Intraocular Melanoma, and the entire town rallies around them. He stands in the front window of their house and reads the sheaf of cards from well-wishers, and all he can think is that every moment he stands here and reads these cards instead of reading white papers, the frontier of medicine recedes from him, and he loses ground.
He studies gene therapies and writes papers about the possibility of virally-induced DNA editing. He makes recruiting visits to Neuralink and JPT and The Amazon Institute, all of whom try to hire him, but he doesn’t yet feel he is ready to leave his studies. The edge still feels out there, waiting to be reached.
One day he sits down and calculates how fast papers are being written, and realizes that even if he includes only high-quality papers, they are being released faster than he can read them. The edge is receding all the time. He becomes depressed and anxious, and shuts himself in his apartment, eschewing all formal engagement with the academy in favor of spending every waking minute reading.
His mother and father comes to intervene, imploring him to return to his office and his students, or to give that all up and come home with them to get well. His father is very ill. The eye cancer has metastasized despite heavy doses of chemo, and he realizes that he has shirked his duty as a son by allowing his father to face these treatments without his support. Yet he feels trapped by the call of the edge. Having sacrificed so much to this goal of achieving true mastery, he cannot imagine giving that up for something smaller and more achievable.
He consents to return to his regular hours and teach students again. At the college he is known for him brilliance and erudition. There is no question among his colleagues that he is at the forefront, familiar with every obscure idea in a half-dozen fields, yet all he can feel is entropy. All his knowledge is slipping away into errata every moment. Even when he reads, two things are being written.
There was a time when his desire for mastery was instrumental to actually doing great work, to making breakthroughs. But as he learned more, his intuitions about what subjects were worthy of true energetic investment dulled instead of sharpened. The intellectual landscape became flattened around him, and the landmarks began all to look the same. Then there was only the chase for the edge itself, the desire for completeness, mastery itself as the endgame. He no longer knew why he was obsessed; it was a question that no longer resonated with him.
He keeps one of the cards some church ladies had written to his father when he first got sick. The card reads “Heard you weren’t feeling Whale”, and it has a picture of a whale in a hospital gown on it. He doesn’t know why he keeps it. He thinks it’s stupid, but he takes it out to look at it sometimes, when the hour is late, and he thinks of his father’s wasted ambition. Something about the insipidness of the card brings a smile to his face, and there aren’t enough things that do that anymore.
He quits teaching and goes back to school. He gets a PhD in Organic Chemistry and writes a thesis on “Enantioselective organocatalytic cyclopropanation of enals using benzyl chlorides”. His advisor recommends expansion and publication, but he is already deep into applications for another PhD. He knows it is ridiculous, and he keeps expecting to get rejected for further study, but the fields are advancing so fast that he is always able to propose new research topics that get professors interested, in spite of the fact that he is 37 years old and should be teaching, not studying.
That summer he returns to his hometown. His father is in remission, and there is much celebration. He still carries the “Heard you weren’t feeling whale” card with him, like a talisman. He receives another acceptance letter; he will start his fourth PhD at Johns Hopkins that fall. While at home he sits all day in his old room, reading white papers on his laptop. Since he now holds PhDs that touch half-a-dozen different fields, he feels obligated to keep up with all of them, which takes up almost all of his waking hours.
When he arrives at Johns Hopkins that fall, it is the beginning of the A.I.-researcher phenomenon. Suddenly, there are self-improving agents connected to language models that are capable of generating and testing original hypotheses, then writing and publishing papers.
Within a month, journal submissions are up 500%. Within a year they are up a further 300%. New journals started and edited by A.I. provide a publication venue for this new influx of research. It does not, however, make him any faster at reading. It’s now hopeless to consider keeping up with the state of the art in even a single field, much less six. He has no other interests, but reads in the news that this same thing is happening with movie production and novel writing and political advertising—the saturation of all possible attention with content, good enough in quality that it can’t simply be ignored.
He goes into a deep depression. He shuts himself inside his apartment. He sweeps everything off his desk and onto the floor beside him, except his computer and the “Heard you’re not feeling whale” card, which is now dog-eared. He is, indeed, not feeling whale. His PhD acceptance is rescinded as the department “reevaluates our emphasis on publishing in the light of new societal developments of which we’re all aware.”
He goes home once more, not stopping on his way anywhere else, just going there to stay for the foreseeable future. His father’s cancer is back, not treatable this time, but they have some months or perhaps a year together, and he resolves to take advantage.
He begins to go to church with them, and meets the ladies who gave his father the “not feeling whale” card, and shows them that he still carries it around. They ask why he does and he doesn’t have a coherent explanation, but they don’t seem to mind, just happy that he’s carrying it at all.
His father dies five months later, and he attends the funeral along with several hundred of the townspeople, who take turns telling stories about his father and speaking words of gratitude. He is humbled by the realization that what he thought his father had stifled of ambition was really just a different kind of ambition, local and emotional rather than global and intellectual. It was an ambition to mean something specific, to be not just talented but accomplished, not just knowledgeable but indispensable, something that the cutting edge cannot provide. The people of the town had moved towards his father; the edge only recedes.
After the funeral, he moves into his father’s office and begins to practice family medicine. He is the most educated family doctor in the history of the world. He is not good with people the way his father was, but he learns and does the best he can. He puts the “not feeling whale” card into a frame and displays it on his desk, and admits to everyone that he can’t put its significance into words, but sticks by the fact that it means a lot to him anyway.
Johns Hopkins calls, and Yale calls, and they want him to come back. They appeal to his intellectual vanity and offer him access to the most cutting edge A.I. as a research assistant. He cannot believe when the words come out of his mouth, but he turns them down flat. He cannot imagine wanting to leave this town anymore, no matter what is out there, for he knows it would only be a mirage. The world already contains more knowledge than one human lifetime can circumscribe, and it is expanding in all directions faster than the human eye can look.
There is no mastery. Only the picking of some particular thing and the sticking with it through good times and bad. Four PhDs and he had to come home to learn that. Finally, he does feel whale.
END
Thanks as always for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please help me out by liking, commenting, or sharing with friends. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday!
A great, heart-warming story.
I liked this Owen. His transition was believable. You say a lot in just a few paragraphs.