“Dr. Ralph M. Steinman, a cell biologist who was named one of three winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday for his work on the human immune response [in dendritic cells], died Friday in Manhattan.”
~
In high school, we didn’t know you.
We had never heard your name.
Your work helped millions,
and at Seventy North Avenue, we had no idea.
We always ran
in the halls, scoffed and stickied up the floors.
We didn’t care, we had thoughts twisted
like spaghetti. Our lives saturated
by petty problems, we burst
from classrooms like fireworks, quietly
fading into dark niches of the hub we called
school. Halls hummed with indistinguishable
messengers. Sixteen hundred heralds,
a nexus of crawling ants carving
mechanical pathways while
you researched, unraveling knots
of cell messengers, disentangling and delving
into the seemingly identical. You
found identity in the atomic and
I remember gazing out of a classroom window,
feeling expendable. It must
have been before graduation; I wanted to distinguish
myself from the tangle. I had to unstitch myself,
the messenger, from the indefinable pathways
on North Avenue,
just as you had, sixteen-hundred feet
outside my window.[1]
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