Template:POTM/February 2015

When Marissa said, "Maybe we should see other people," Nicholas decided to give her cancer.

Nicholas, like many geniuses, had his great obsession. The root of his monomania wasn't hard to trace. After all, he'd lost both his parents to cancer by the age of thirteen. He bore mute witness as they wasted away, leaking mucilaginous fluids onto crisp white hospital sheets. Colon cancer (father) and lung cancer (mother) had followed in quick succession.

Outwardly, he remained stoic; inwardly, he was a roil of emotion. First debilitating grief, then rage at his parents for abandoning him. Followed by searing guilt. Guilt at surviving. Guilt at having done nothing to save his parents. Certainly he'd been young when it all happened, not even of legal age; still he suffered lingering doubts that if only he'd asked the right questions, insisted on different doctors or courses of treatments, spoke out for his parents when they'd been unable, things might have gone differently. For years he prayed that cancer would take him too.

Seven months after he'd watched his mother's casket lowered into the ground alongside his father's grave, and one week after he turned thirteen, Nicholas matriculated at Harvard. By the age of sixteen he'd graduated summa cum laude with a degree in biology. At twenty-five, he'd already published half a dozen groundbreaking studies, was a full professor at his alma mater and an M.D. His goal was nothing less than the Holy Grail of cancer research: a magic bullet to cure all cancers. (Read more...)