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ramifications could be huge. Holding a mouse on its back, Marion accidentally pinched the loose skin of its neck. The mouse's eyes bulged, its mouth popped open, exposing sharp white teeth. The animal's pink face started into a tiny mask of surprise.
    “I don't think there's anything here,” Marion said.
    “I doubt it,” Feng agreed.
    “We'll observe them, in any case,” Marion said. “We'll watch to see if the cancer grows again, or if for some reason tumors on other mice decrease. We can see if anything more happens here.”
    “I don't think anything will,” Feng said cheerfully. When it came to nonchalance and scientific pessimism, he outmatched even Marion. The difference was, Marion's pessimism had been earned, while Feng was a natural.
             
    Marion arrived home to find Jacob playing speed chess at the kitchen table with their son, Aaron. Jacob pushed his knight forward and slapped down the button on his side of the time clock with his hand; Aaron countered with his bishop, then slapped the clock in turn. At fourteen, Aaron had his father's lanky body, messy brown hair, and craggy nose. He was a nationally ranked chess player in the under-eighteen category, but his father still beat him on occasion. Although Jacob no longer practiced seriously, he was a wily competitor.
    Marion's husband had been that rarest of creatures, a child prodigy. Growing up in Cincinnati, Jacob spoke late, but his first word, according to family lore, was “delicious.” He could read A. A. Milne to himself at the age of four, Dickens by six and a half. At seven, he made his concert debut, playing Mozart's second violin concerto with the local youth orchestra. At age nine he matriculated at the University of Cincinnati. He graduated with a degree in biology just before his bar mitzvah, and then stayed on for his doctorate. By the time he was seventeen he had left home for a postdoc with Franz Applebaum at Columbia. He arrived with glowing recommendations from all his professors, and three publications. Like an academic red carpet, his future seemed to unroll before him.
    In Applebaum's lab, however, Jacob's apparently inexorable path toward scientific glory took a startling turn. Away from home, with only the minimal supervision for which Applebaum was famous, Jacob began, for the first time in his life, to reflect critically on the nature of his accomplishments. As he solved myriad minor problems in cell biology, and studied the scientific literature—as he watched Applebaum direct his lab, choosing investigative paths, deciding where to invest his time and experimental energy—Jacob identified in himself a fatal inability to generate new problems. He mastered techniques and processes, absorbed methods, systems, languages with amazing speed, but he could not derive systems of his own. With the tremendous clarity of his seventeen-year-old mind, Jacob recognized this deficiency. Applebaum gave him the run of his lab, and yet Jacob found himself incapable of devising his own investigative program. In short, Jacob realized that he was not creative.
    This was the most important discovery of Jacob's life, and characteristically, he made the determination with ruthless accuracy. He had been groomed to think of himself as the next Pasteur—if not the next Heifetz. He had been raised by a science-mad rabbinical father and a pianist mother to understand that life's glory lay in molecular structures and medical research. Now he realized, for the first time, that he was not one of the chosen few; that he was probably incapable of anything more than incremental advances. He lacked the second sight to shape new paradigms and shake up the world with revolutionary propositions.
    The discovery shocked and saddened him, and yet with the newfound understanding of his limitations, he also felt profound relief. Young as he was, Jacob had been exercising his mind since babyhood. And now, suddenly, he saw that he could stop. He could simply