I am on sabbatical leave at McGill University. After a severe infection affecting my right arm turned into having to deal with the flesh eating disease. I was hospitalized at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal for three weeks. Afterwards reviewing the whole experience, I came to the following conclusion. Basically being given intravenous antibiotics saved my life. Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered, who introduced antibiotics into general usage, saved many, many lives, including me. I wanted to honor Fleming somehow. I wanted to make a contribution with the magnitude of Fleming, to ultimately help people. Yet I didn’t know what my passion would be, where or how I could make a difference. Like Steven Jobs starting off in his garage-I had a dream. I took my first leave from McGill twenty years ago. I telephoned then McGill cardiologist Duncan Stewart who was an expert studying the clinical effects of nitric oxide, a signalling gas that does an incredible amount of different things in nature. I offered my services for free. Kind of like how you stage with a famous chef in his kitchen. The next day I had a lab spot in Stewart’s lab. I was treated like a regular apprentice by Dr Stewart in his lab. I started reading and reading in the medical literature about nitric oxide, how this gas molecule behaves, how it functions. I found myself totally fascinated to be finally doing something that was grabbing me in the gut, with this WOW feeling for nitric oxide gas signalling. My real education was starting. I felt alive. All those years before being so busy in a research lab at the Montreal Neurological Institute was certainly rewarding. But this new direction was what made me ache, I was happy in this new venture.
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