Page 28 - The Love Hypothesis

Her heart skipped a beat. Then it started galloping. Then it slowed down

to a crawl. And then she felt her blood pulsate in her eyelids, which
couldn’t be healthy, but— Yes. Yes! She had a taker. Almost. Probably?
Maybe. Definitely maybe. Tom Benton had said “good.” He had said that it

sounded “good.” It had to be a “good” sign, right?
She frowned, scrolling down to reread the email she’d sent him several

weeks earlier.

July 7, 8:19 a.m.
FROM: Olive-Smith@stanford.edu

TO: Tom-Benton@harvard.edu
SUBJECT: Pancreatic Cancer Screening Project

Dr. Benton,

My name is Olive Smith, and I am a Ph.D. student in the
biology department of Stanford University. My research

focuses on pancreatic cancer, in particular on nding
noninvasive, affordable detection tools that could lead to
early treatment and in crease survival rates. I have been

working on blood biomarkers, with promising results. (You
can read about my preliminary work in the peer-reviewed

paper I have attached. I have also submitted more rece nt,
unpublished ndings to this year ’s Socie ty for Biological

Discovery conference; a cceptance is pending but see the
attached abstract.) The next step would be to ca rry out

additional studies to determine the feasibility of my test kit.
Unfortunately my current lab (D r. Aysegul As lan’s, who is
retiring in two years) d oes not have the funding or the

equipment to allow me to proce ed. She is enco uraging me
to nd a larger cancer research lab where I co uld spend the

next academic year to collect the data I need. Then I would
return to Stanford to analyze and write up the data. I am a

huge fan of the work you have published on pancreatic