Paterson, New Jersey, Tuesday & Wednesday…

Dr. Kalidas Metropolis looked at her afternoon's work on the computer screen and was satisfied. To a casual observer it might be just another journal article, yet to her it was a labor of love and a personal triumph. It represented five years of hard work, mostly done late nights and weekends in the lab or at home. It would be her crowning achievement as a scientist. Hey, Jose, I'm still pretty good at 67, no matter what they say upstairs. I make them rich, yet no one will remember what I did for the company. But now I can retire with the personal satisfaction that I actually did something worthwhile for the human race. She told the computer to submit the preprint. It was 7:49 pm and time to go home. Tomorrow it would be on the journal's preprint board and she would see the reaction of her scientific colleagues to her work.

She had always been fascinated with the body's genetic evolution and the interplay of random mutations and inherited genetic change. In high school she had won a science fair and a full scholarship with her first project on the theme. Fifty years and two doctorates later, she believed she was close to a universal solution to the transplant rejection problem. In twenty years the business of finding matches for liver transplants and so forth would be over if she was correct. Jose will be happy. She hadn't had any matches and had died. It was in high school that some people began to call her Kali. Especially one girl. Josefina Botero took her to both the junior and senior prom. Kalidas didn't particularly like the shortened form of her name, and generally found Jose's constant use of it annoying. After high school they didn't see much of each other until Kalidas entered grad school and Jose's father passed away. A long courtship during which Jose became a pediatrician and Kalidas became a well known research scientist ended with a marriage that lasted until Jose died of liver cancer at fifty-eight. Kalidas threw herself more into her work after that.