This month I’m posting excerpts from earlier drafts of Jellyfish Have Eyes that feature the relationships between Ricardo Stzein and other key characters in the novel. The last two sentences of this excerpt are the most impactful. In a completely fictional, partly cynical way they capture a major theme of the book supporting basic research. It makes me wonder which of our efforts for improvement, never approaching perfection, would have been better spent elsewhere.

Ricardo started his jellyfish work with his close friend and colleague, Dr. Benjamin Kindle. Ricardo was amused by Benjamin’s last name, Kindle. It was another example of his wife’s astute observation that names reflect personalities. Benjamin was indeed a kind man whose love of life often kindled great fires of enthusiasm. Benjamin was a Professor at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at the UCLA School of Medicine when they met; Ricardo had known Benjamin for over twenty years before they started their joint studies on jellyfish. They were a good team, Ricardo and Benjamin. Ricardo was the idealist, broken with reality as would later emerge during the trial. Benjamin was an enthusiastic pragmatist who, nonetheless, was always eager to venture into uncharted terrain. Benjamin, like Ricardo, had immigrant roots. He was a native Israeli and had been an enlisted man in the Israeli army in the 1956 Suez war against Egypt.

Fortunately for Benjamin, he spent much of the war in the Sinai waiting in case reserve forces were needed for the final occupation of enemy land. Like many Israelis whose education was delayed for nationalistic reasons, Benjamin had not entered science formally yet. However, Benjamin’s intelligence drove him to spend his abundant spare time to consider cacti as he waited patiently in the scorching desert. Benjamin’s curiosity and boredom led to his picking the stickers off cacti near his tent, one by one, testing how firmly they were attached to their native plants. He noticed that some came off readily, while others remained anchored regardless of how ferociously he pulled. This difference led to his theorizing that individual stickers had a defined lifetime and were ultimately shed, but due to circumstances and wandering interests Benjamin never tested this idea. Occasionally the cactus stickers punctured Benjamin’s skin. On one such occasion his mind, not being burdened by other matters, made an intuitive leap. Benjamin wondered whether the cactus thistles might have balancing potentials for pleasure and pain. Initially this thought was born of playfulness, an exercise toying with associative ideas in his spare time, which was abundant. The idea became relentlessly nested in Benjamin’s brain, as only original thoughts can be.

Benjamin’s responsibilities at the Jules Stein Institute were to study eye diseases when Ricardo first met him. Benjamin had acquired an outstanding reputation for his research in this area and was amply funded by the government since his investigations met comfortably the national priorities. It remains to this day, sixty years later, a mark of historical interest and irony that Benjamin received the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology for his pioneering work, all done on weekends and evenings, on cactus stickers. Benjamin had found that the painful toxin in the thistles of the particular cactus that fortuitously was in the Sinai in 1956 was able to provide unparalleled and indescribable euphoria to sleeping individuals under anesthesia. Even more extraordinary this toxin, coined originally Benjajuice and then switched to Cactein, also permitted patients undergoing surgery and given a certain anesthetic, to communicate telepathically with loved ones.

This discovery revolutionized surgery and eliminated all fear for this invasive procedure. It also led directly to the discovery of a new sensory area in the human brain combining pleasure and communication. It transformed the field of psychiatry by providing the first clear link between depression and a specific location in the brain that, when affected, limited the ability to make intimate contact with other individuals. All this because the Israelis and Egyptians were at each others’ throats, because Benjamin was bored in the Sinai, and because no one had enough interest in Benjamin to tell him what to think about during the long hours of the day and the silence of the night.