It appeared bloody and throbbing. I had finally begun to realize the raw power I held in my shaking hands. For all my planning, for all my ambition, for all of the hours of painstaking research, I never truly understood that my intervention was quintessential to this man’s survival. Yet as I looked through my microfocol glasses I could see the cancer cells thriving inside his pancreatic duct and realized that I must eradicate them. I had simply come too far and worked too hard to fail this great man.

Looking back, I can finally see the irony of my situation—that at the moment of my epiphany, when I had broken through the screen of my own ambition, everything fell apart.

I had just injected the inflamed pancreas with my million dollar virus, “The Great Curatio,” I had named it, which was created by drastically mutating the Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Normally, HIV targets the powerful CD4+T white blood cells and then causes other white blood cells to attack the CD4+T. However, for the last two years I had been genetically altering the virus, causing it to produce more CD4+T cells with an altered genetic code so that rather than cause white blood cells to attack CD4+ T cells they would attack cancer cells. While most doctors had been trying to kill the cancer cells on their own I recognized that the human body itself was the strongest defense and all I had to do was teach it how to fight.

The moments following the injection were the most frightful of my life; then suddenly his white blood cell count began to soar. The numbers were off the charts and in seconds the cancer cells that had ravaged his pancreas for nearly a year were dead. The virus had worked.

My heart was pounding, my thoughts incoherent, somehow against all odds I had prevailed. But then his body broke out in spasms and blood spewed from everywhere. In my horror I peered through my glasses and saw the cells had continued to attack the body. His white blood cells were killing every thing in their path.

My medical team and I tried for the next few minutes to stop the bleeding and use chemospray to kill the cells, but there was nothing we could do—he died that day. The greatest man I even knew was gone in a flash before my very eyes. I spoke to the family and we cried and grieved together, since it was clear to all that I was more than his doctor. I told them that it was my own fault and of course they attempted to console me. They didn’t understand what I had done, the strings I had pulled and connections I had made to persuade the FDA to give me permission for this procedure. How could they ever know what I was thinking when I was alone in my lab for hours staring at the disgusting virus that murdered their patriarch. They do not, nor will they ever, for if they did they would despise me. They would understand that it was more than the cure that I had dreamed of. It was the fame, the fortune, the immortality. Before I had accomplished anything I had already dreamed of being remembered forever as the man who had cured cancer, the greatest killing machine of our age. My fatal flaw, as it has always been, was my ambition.

Even now in my old age this memory burns. But rather than bury it somewhere deep inside of me, I have worn it as an emblem for the rest of my life. When internal conflict has raged inside me and my ambition has all but won, I have thought back to this moment and conquered my vanity. Because I know that the great man who I failed once would not want me to fail again. He would want me to persevere and never forget the effect of one’s own narcissism because that was the type of man my grandfather was.