After a forty-five minute drive, I approached the walled complex of the research center where Roger Navarre worked. Looming above the barbed wire was a sign displaying the words UNETAT, S.A., the name of the French conglomerate that owned the biotechnology facility. Unetat was the hottest company in France that year. It had been privatized in the late 1980s and was devouring every high-tech business it could find. The company was headed by a charismatic man named Alain Peyron. The press said that he was making business “sexy,” which in France was a reliable proxy for success.

At the gate a uniformed guard asked for identification; after checking my name in his computer, he gave me a Unetat security pass. The French were obsessive about security, especially where technology was involved. I suspected they were flattering themselves—who would want to steal anything from France?—but it was part of the intense conservatism of that society. For all their supposed liberality, the French loved rules. Inside the building I was stopped again, asked once more for identification, and finally cleared to meet the press officer, a fussy-looking man who was dressed in a wool sweater, despite the warm spring day.

Navarre was waiting for me in his lab. He was dark and thin, with the bright eyes and sallow complexion of a man who lived indoors. He shook hands shyly, and seemed embarrassed by his keeper, the press officer, who was already blathering about how the doctor was “a miracle worker” whose research was going to save the world. When the press man began talking about Wall Street’s potential interest in the lab’s discoveries, the scientist raised his hand and cut him off. He was a gentle man who didn’t like being marketed. When I asked to see some of his experiments, he looked very relieved.

Navarre led me into an adjoining lab and pointed to several cages of mice along the wall. On their heads you could see the remnants of surgery—red wax sealing the holes that had been drilled in their skulls. “These are the miracles,” he said, gesturing to the rodents. “A few weeks ago, they had no memories. We had cut a pathway of neurons in their brains. They were like people with Alzheimer’s disease, who suffer degeneration of this pathway. They could not perform the simplest memory test.”

I jotted down some notes on my pad. I wanted him to think I was paying close attention, but my mind was wandering. His description of the mice with no memories reminded me of a visit I had paid to a nursing home in California several years ago to visit an aging aunt. All those faces staring up dumbly, shipwrecked in an eternal present. At first you wanted to smile or say something nice, but after a while you just wanted to get away.