I was having a small existential crisis when I arrived in Professor Huke’s Biology of Parasites class at the beginning of the winter quarter. I wish I could say that I had scoured the course guide looking for a class that would take me to a new intellectual plane. In fact, my adviser had sent me an e-mail the previous week pointing out that I had not yet completed my laboratory science requirement. I had a keen interest in graduating, and I was running out of terms to finish my electives, so I decided to sign up for a lab science class. There were two choices. (Actually, there were six choices, but four of them either met before nine a.m. or were held in buildings that would have been a nose-hair-freezing walk from my dorm during January and February.) It had to be Bio 3 (Biology of Everyday Life) or Microbiology 32 (Biology of Viruses and Parasites). The Biology of Everyday Life was a known “layup,” meaning that anyone who put in a modicum of effort could count on an A- or better. The bulk of the course consisted of collecting samples of living things and looking at them under a microscope. Other than the week on “bodily fluids,” which was apparently pretty cool, the course was an embarrassment to the Ivy League. Still, three hundred people enrolled every time it was offered—most of the humanities and social sciences majors on campus—because it was an easy way to boost the GPA and fulfill the lab science requirement at the same time.
On a Thursday night in the first week of the quarter, I had a conversation in the basement of a fraternity that changed my life trajectory, like a boulder dropped into a stream that sends the current coursing in a new direction. I ran into Sloan Hill near the beer tap in the Alpha Delta house. We talked for a while. One can draw a straight line, or series of lines, from my conversation with Sloan that evening to the Oval Office, where I would spend hours huddled with the President of the United States a decade later.
5.
SLOAN AND I APPROACHED THE BEER TAP FROM DIFFERENT directions and I offered to fill her cup. She was effortlessly cute: gray-blue eyes, short blond hair, no makeup to speak of, and a killer smile, especially when she was a little tipsy. Sloan squinted when she smiled, and that was cute, too. She was also “wicked smart,” as we liked to say in New Hampshire, even in a sea of overachievers. She worked hard enough; the work came easy to her, as it did to a lot of those high school valedictorians wandering around campus. But what set Sloan apart were her impressively eclectic intellectual interests. While the rest of us complained about too much work, she found time to read for fun, even fiction. Her RealNews blastbox was filled every day with writers who ranged from counterculture to intellectually unhinged. (“We all need to know what they’re saying,” she explained to me once.) I explicitly remember her citing a column in the Jerusalem Post one day in the context of some meandering discussion on the Middle East. Who in New Hampshire reads the Jerusalem Post unless it is assigned for a class? (Even then, most of us tried to cut corners on the assigned reading.) I remember seeing Sloan at the bus stop one Friday afternoon, waiting for the Dartmouth Coach. She was headed to New York to wander through museums all weekend. “I just need to recharge,” she said, looking comfortably alone with a small duffel at her feet.
Sloan was the student that we all should be, the student that our parents probably thought that we were. She took classes that interested her. She worked hard but was indifferent to grades. She visited her professors during office hours to talk about concepts in the class, rather than to haggle for more points. Sloan lived in my freshman dorm, just down the hall. We had become friends before she disappeared to date older guys and pursue different campus activities. Still, the bonds of freshman year are deep, and I really liked her. She was one of a handful of people whose opinions I valued. To my credit, I did not really spend a lot of time obsessing about what other people thought of me. I did care what Sloan thought.
As I filled Sloan’s glass with beer from the tap, she asked, “So, what are you taking this quarter?”
“Monetary Policy,” I said. “And a writing class that looks pretty good. I’m still shopping for a lab science.”
“You’re not taking Bio 3, are you?” she asked accusingly.
“No way,” I said. It was the truth, as of that moment. Yes, I had sat in on Bio 3 twice that week, and it fit perfectly into my schedule, but once Sloan asked me that question, in that tone, I was not going to take Bio 3. “I’m thinking about that parasites course.”
“Really?” she said, with more than the usual amount of enthusiasm for a desultory conversation in a fraternity basement. “Were you there this week? I didn’t see you. I’m doing my Presidential Scholar thesis on the anthropology of contagious diseases, so I’m sitting in on the class.”
The next morning I signed up for Microbiology 32. I could fulfill my lab science requirement; I also entertained visions of sitting next to Sloan every day in class, sharing notes, studying together. Sometimes I imagined that we would work together late into the night, and then when the readings no longer made sense, and we had grown punchy from too little sleep and too much coffee, I would lean over and kiss her. And she would kiss me back, because the bond developed over weeks of studying together was inexorable… There were a lot of variations on what happened next, though invariably we had sex in some public study space and then went on to ace the exam, after which we became a prominent campus couple.
Only the part about acing the exam had any approximation to reality. I worked hard in the class, for a bunch of reasons, one of which was to impress Sloan. I was never going to have sex with her in the rare books section of the library if we did not at least get to the studying part. And to get there, I would have to add some value to the study sessions. I went to class. I did the reading. I even went to see the optional documentary during the X-hour. I sat next to Sloan as often as possible, while still trying to make it feel like happenstance. Along the way, something else happened: I fell in love with pathogens, with their stunning evolution and adaptation, even the most awful among them.
I learned right before the midterm that Sloan was not taking the course for credit. We never did study together. Still, my career was launched. My path to the White House began with a drunken conversation in a fraternity basement and was nurtured by salacious thoughts of wild sex with my study buddy. Sad but true.
6.
“THE MARBURG VIRUS, WHICH IS CLOSELY RELATED TO THE Ebola virus, causes a hemorrhagic fever. After a brief incubation period, it attacks the body’s major organs, the spleen, the liver, the pancreas, the testicles, the eyes, the spinal cord. In some cases, the victim will hemorrhage—bleed profusely—from all of the body’s orifices. Somewhere between a quarter and ninety percent of human Marburg victims will die, and that’s when the virus reveals how beautifully adapted it is.”
That was how Professor Richard Huke began his first lecture in Microbiology 32. He did not call roll; he did not pass out the syllabus. He just started talking about the Marburg virus. I am paraphrasing him, but I remember the details vividly. I am certain he used the word “beautiful,” because when someone describes humans bleeding out of every orifice and then goes on to speak admiringly of the organism responsible—well, that is something you remember. Huke had a point. The Marburg virus is spread through bodily fluids—blood, saliva, vomit, and so on. When humans die from Marburg, they become “disease bombs” (another Huke phrase). A single drop of blood from a Marburg-infected corpse can contain five million viruses. Remember, the victim dies bleeding from all those orifices. So his or her last act, post-death, is to infect the next of kin, like an uncapped oil well spewing viruses.