An earnest day

It’s been a busy week. Lots of reports, summaries and data to analyse, but also lots of meetings, because people come back from the holidays, which holiday season lasted in fact more or less since Thanksgiving! But today was a bit special. I didn’t expect this day to be so special but it was very touching.

I had to give a presentation of my team and our services. It was the first time I presented my work since I arrived so I had to gather some slides about the center, rewamp some others and add on my personal touch. Quite a lot of work to do as compared to the last presentations I gave these years.

But the most curious is that I didn’t give a presentation at a conference. I did present our facility to 4 people: 3 persons from my workplace, with whom I collaborate often, and one customer. A special customer. A father of a little girl diagnosed with a rare genetic disease.

This client is CEO of a company, and I don’t know the details but I believe he is investing his savings in research as he wants to successfully develop a gene therapy for his daughter.

I really didn’t imagine I would interact so closely with someone like him. I met already people who have such serious family history, in particular members of Foundations, who are usually concerned by the disease that the Foundation supports. But I never discussed so deeply specific scientific projects with somebody like him; somebody who is trying to create an animal that will mimic his daughter’s symptoms in order to understand better the underlying genetic and molecular mechanisms and eventually investigate the outcomes of therapeutic strategies. When we talked about human symptoms he could give details of situations that are not described in books or publications. It was more than real.

The second thing that struck me was the high level of expertise of this person, who, according to my knowledge, was not a scientist at all. I was (once more) astounded by our capacity to learn whenever we think it makes sense, whenever it is needed. This person was talking like a Professor, his knowledge was from scientific publications, not from Foundations newsletters. He was listening to us, trusting us but at the same time asking tons of challenging questions and providing additional comments for us to reflect on it and improve our service even better. Our discussion was very fruitful and led to big improvement in the development of the project.

Maybe I made it up about his background level, maybe it is not so extraordinary, maybe he is desperate, maybe this is not the drama movie with a happy end. But this was still a big lesson to me: never let go, instruct and educate yourself, find strength in serious problems, and play down other situations. And even if that sounds a little bit familiar, it is not too much to get some pinches of reminders sometimes, just to feel that again, take some distance, and remember that we should live our live the best we can, with what we go through…. This may be one of the most rewarding days I had at work, one of these days I’ll remember, one of these days when you think you may be participating to make a little but significant difference in this world.