Searching for Answers

When we have a vaccine. When we have a cure.

Do you find yourself saying those words? I'm longing for the day I read in the paper, in gigantic font, VACCINE DISCOVERED!

We're all beginning to come to terms with the hard truth: as much as we long to hug friends, to be in crowds again, to walk unafraid into rooms, until that day, we'll be living in this new and dismal 'normal'.

The scientists are going to - we hope - lead us out of the darkness.

So this week I want to take a peek at the men and women behind the microscopes.

It's not something people talk about, really, but you've benefited from their work all your life. Those people behind the microscopes and in the laboratories have been your silent friends, walking beside you, unnoticed. Over hundreds of years, each one of them has worked in their own way to add another room to the skyscraper of our knowledge - knowledge that, today, eases your pain, protects you from illness, treats your maladies and prolongs your life.

Think of it as walking with a crowd of guardians before and around you.

They were there at your birth, when you were brought safely forth into gloved hands, and your mother was cared for and protected from infection.

They hovered by you when you felt the first prick of a vaccine that would spare you the horrors of polio, smallpox, scarlet fever and rubella.

They're there when you reach for a pill to ease a pounding headache, or receive a shot of Novocaine in the dentist's chair.

If you've ever been eased into unconsciousness for an operation, rather than enduring the agony of a surgeon's scalpel, or gone through chemotherapy or radiation and been declared cancer-free, say a silent thank you to those guardians.

Just a few hundred years ago, people had no idea why they got sick. Were they being punished by God? Had someone put a curse on them? So they carried some herbs in your pocket, or mixed up some ghastly brew, or, failing that, sent someone to bring the doctor to cut a vein and let the bad blood out.

We were fumbling in the darkness of our ignorance, groping for answers.

But in every generation there are a few healers, a few seekers. They're the ones with questions: Why do we get sick? Why do some get better? How can I help?

It took centuries, with one slow discovery after another, and the careful construction of an experimental method, but with every observation and every word written, the light grew.

Let me introduce you to a few of your guardians:

Here is Andreas Vesalius, bent over a table, carefully drawing the muscles of a cadaver. His work in the 1500s revolutionized our understanding of the human body, and made the study of human anatomy a science.

Here's Anton Van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch amateur scientist, peering through one of the first microscopes in 1683, staring amazed at a living bacteria cell - the first person ever to witness microscopic life.

Here's Dr. Edward Jenner, inoculating a child with cowpox, a mild relative to smallpox. On that day in 1796, the first vaccine was born. The scientific community ridiculed his theories, but today he's considered the father of immunology.

Here's Louis Pasteur, thoughtfully studying a petri dish. His work on the 'germ theory' in the 1800s laid the foundation for sterile surgery. He also developed the process of pasteurizing milk, as well as the vaccines for anthrax and rabies.

And here's Marie Curie, holding an x-ray; she discovered the element radium, and used it to make early x-rays much more accurate; she also developed portable x-ray machines to use in ambulances on the battlefields in World War II.

Of course, there have been thousands of others, more than we could begin to know, and there have been false starts and blind ends along the way. But still, they kept working. And slowly, with each discovery, they cast a little more light into that darkness.

If and when the day we long for comes, when you and I can walk into a doctor's office and bare our arms for the prick of a needle to save us from this disease, it will be thanks to the work of a host of men and women, not just today, but over hundreds of years.

Right now, all around the world, there are heads bent over microscopes and computer screens and printouts, and labs filled with urgent conversations and tired faces. There they are: our new generation of guardians.

So here's to them all: the curious, the brilliant, the stubborn, from Hippocrates back in ancient Greece to the lab assistant working late into the night on the next DNA test. Thank you, all of you. We owe you our lives.