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  63. Acknowledgements

The man, whose name he now remembered – Gessen, Dr Gessen – looked at him kindly. ‘Not quite, but we’ll get to that later.’

54

Gessen waited until Vidor was safely escorted back to his room before reading again the letter he’d received that morning. Another nail, apparently, in Vidor’s coffin.

Cambridge, UK
6 January 2009

Dear Dr Gessen,
I’ve been meaning to write to you for some time, but my life has been rather hectic these past few months, and in Professor Kiraly’s absence I’ve taken on a number of administrative tasks in addition to my own research. The rest of my time has been spent trying to convince the Home Office to allow me to stay in the country. It was just last week that I finally received the welcome news that my visa will be extended for another year. Who knows what will happen when it expires, but for now I can rest easier and return my focus to my studies.

When Professor Kiraly won last year’s Søgaard Prize, everyone was thrilled. It was a great achievement for him as an individual, but also a coup for the department and the university. There was much talk of him winning the Nobel at some point in the near future. But after the prize ceremony in Copenhagen and Professor Kiraly’s breakdown, some things came to light that made me question his contribution to the breakthrough which led to him being awarded the prize. Professor Kiraly received the award for his work on sensory processing, and communication between the cortex and thalamus. That’s also the area that Hisham had been working on under the direction of Dr Tritter. It’s not my own area of research, but it’s similar enough for me to have known it was in direct competition with the work in our lab.

About a month ago I was looking for reprints of a paper Professor Kiraly authored, and in the bottom of his desk drawer, shoved in the back, I found one of Hisham’s lab notebooks. Hisham mostly wrote in English, but this one had margin notes in Arabic. Quite a number, and many with exclamation points, so I take it Hisham was excited about some of his findings and wanted to keep them private. I don’t read Arabic, and as far as I know, neither does Professor Kiraly, so I took the notebook to a Palestinian friend of mine who’s a student in the Physics department. After he translated the notes, I was disturbed to find that much of Hisham’s data provided the key to solving the last piece of the puzzle Professor Kiraly had been trying to crack in his own work.