We went to see the new play “Ether Dome” at the Huntington Theater Company the night before last, and I found the answer to an important question in my life: Why did I choose to become an anesthesiologist?

The short answer to this question is: Despite its unquestioned importance to humanity, nobody ever won the Nobel Prize in anesthesiology.

“Ether Dome”, besides depicting many of the machinations and events surrounding the development of nitrous oxide and ether as anesthetics, also chronicles the ambitions and ultimate demise of dentists William Morton and Horace Wells, and surgeon Charles Jackson in their quests for anesthesia fame. (The story of surgeon Crawford Long, another legitimate claimant to the discovery, is not touched upon in this treatment.)  All three men died penniless, miserable, and addicted to inhalational agents.  Morton’s only consolation (postmortem) was his gravestone, which was inscribed “Inventor and Revealer of Anaesthetic Inhalation…Since Whom Science Has Control of Pain”.  The play reveals otherwise, that Morton had more in common with a huckstering snake oil salesman than a scientist, and that the others were not much better.

What does this all have to do with me and my quest for the Nobel Prize?  Well in 1970 I was recognized as one of the top 115 high school students in the United States, and honored with a Presidential scholar medal conferred by President Richard Millhouse Nixon and Vice President Spiro “Ted” Agnew.  At the time I clearly remember one of the speakers (probably a politician) telling us “I hope that you don’t think that this is the pinnacle of your career, and that you can take it easy and not accomplish anything else.”  At several points in my life I have feared that his words had come true for me.  (Sad, isn’t it Jennifer?)

To skip through a troubled and brief college career, I stumbled into the elite and new (I was in its third class) Harvard-MIT Program in health sciences and technology, and from there into the laboratory of Dr. Walle Nauta, one of the three greatest living neuroanatomists. (Norwegian Alf Brodal and Czech Janosz Szentagothai were the other two)  and I shared with other members of the lab the secret desire to become famous by solving the puzzle of the brain.  We all followed in the footsteps of neuroanatomy’s single Nobel laureate. Spaniard Santiago Ramon y Cajal, whose exhaustive atlases of the mammalian brain won him the Prize in 1902.

The failure of any succeeding neuroanatomist to win the Prize may be explained by one of Nauta’s “nauta-isms” as we called them, “An anatomist is not likely to find the gold, but he can sure tell you where to look for it.”  The Prize was much more likely go to David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, neurophysiologists who recorded electrical activity in the thalamus and cortex after stimulation of the retina in cats, than to the anatomists who described these pathways.  The Prize was awarded to James Watson and Francis Crick for the chemical structure of DNA, when the heavy lifting (generating the data leading to the structure) was done by Rosalind Franklin.  As recounted in his book The Double Helix, Watson & Crick stole a glimpse of the data and used logic and inspired reasoning to infer the structure. (Rosalind’s boss Maurice Wilkins was made a co-awardee.)  Several of us were amused to hear Crick present at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, as if such an intuitive approach could crack the much harder problem of the workings of our baby, the brain.

Perhaps the paucity of Prizes in neuroanatomy was part of the reason that I was drawn to the field.  We nauta-ites often spoke in whispers, wondering if in the twilight of his career he would be awarded the Prize.  And if he were not chosen, then how could we hope to be chosen ourselves?  One of my colleagues, post-doctoral fellow Miles Herkenham accused me of “wanting to be famous” and then went on to the National Institutes of Health with another Prize-seeker, Candace Pert, who pointed out that, like Rosalind, she had been spurned in the awarding of the pre-Nobel Lasker award to her boss, Sol Snyder, for the discovery of the opiate receptor.

Was it possible that, subconsciously, working in a nearly Nobel-free zone took off some of the pressure that I felt from my dad’s asking me if I could win the Prize?  And then a few years later, when I had the choice between continuing in neuroscience research and becoming a clinical anesthesiologist, my choosing the latter?  At some level I must have gleaned that the highly structured environment of the operating room, like the structure of my childhood home, might be a better way to curb my penchant for grandiosity than the free-form world of science.