Theoxenia

Let's politicize Huntington's disease! It'll be fun!

Always be kind to travelers,
wandering near or far.
Always be kind to travelers…
ya don’t know who they are.

- Wanderer, by Leslie Fish

The Nazis tried, and failed, to invent the atomic bomb. One possible explanation is that one guy, Werner Heisenberg, made a math error. In calculating critical mass, he used the mean free path, the average distance traveled by a neutron involved in the reaction. He determined that to keep that average neutron from leaking out, you’d need a ton or more of refined uranium, which was effectively impossible. But the average neutron doesn’t matter. You just need one neutron per reaction to start another reaction. Only the shortest-traveling, fastest-colliding neutron needs to stay inside the sphere.

There are many competing narratives about this. Was that one mistake really so important or were there other factors? Was the mistake intentional or not? Did Heisenberg secretly know he was being bugged and fake the whole conversation? But no matter what, Heisenberg’s math error wasn’t the root cause of the failure. It’s that nobody was capable of checking his work. The leader of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was notoriously bad at math himself. That project succeeded anyway, because every calculation had lots of expert eyes on it.

Why the disparity? Well, there happened to be something many theoretical physicists had in common. Nazis had gotten rid of all their Jews, one way or another. The average Jew wasn’t too impactful on the war effort. But those Jews also included Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, who founded the Manhattan Project. The project recruited all the best theoretical physicists from across America, who met in Los Alamos and realized they all knew each other from high school in Budapest.

There’s a common trope in myth where a stranger who asks for hospitality turns out to be a god, or a messenger of one, in disguise. It’s sometimes called Angel(s) Unaware(s), after the King James Bible’s Hebrews 13:2. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. In the study of ancient Greek mythology, it’s called theoxenia (literally “god as stranger”). It shows up all over, though: the Morrigan does it in Irish mythology, Odin in Norse, Pele in Hawaii. Elijah does it in Jewish tradition, and al-Khidr in Muslim stories.

In these stories, the rule is almost always that if you show hospitality, you receive a blessing, and otherwise you receive a curse. The moral is, of course, that one should always treat hospitality as sacred, even when the visitor is a stranger. If you share your dinner on a hundred nights with a hundred travelers, 98 of them will thank you politely, one will steal your silverware, and one will miraculously cure your entire family of a deadly disease. Even to a sociopath, that’s a good trade. Sure, the average stranger isn’t a god. But if just a few are…

It doesn’t take supernatural powers to save a family from a deadly disease. You just have to be a little weird. This week, researchers announced preliminary findings that appear to show a highly effective treatment for Huntington’s disease, which would make it the first such treatment ever developed. The gene therapy, AMT-130, was developed by a smallish company called uniQure. Their R&D department, at the time, was run by an oddball named Ricardo Dolmetsch.

Dolmetsch cheerfully describes himself as “slightly off-kilter.” He came from a family of artists. As a kid, he was caught writing erotic poetry during typing class and suspended for a week. Stuck at home, he learned how to cook, which inspired him to become a scientist. The kind of scientist who campaigns for everyone in the lab to be given a pet goldfish, or experiments with pogo-sticking his way to work. (After two trials, he abandoned the idea as “terrible for my computer and possibly lethal for me.”)

I guess I can’t rule out the possibility that he’s a supernatural being in disguise. (His name anagrams to Lord Mithras Codec, so maybe Mithras?) But I think he’s probably a mortal, one who immigrated from Colombia to the U.S. as a teenager to attend Brown University.

As a non-citizen, Dolmetsch spent the start of his career ineligible for many grants and in danger of deportation if he didn’t find funding. So we don’t get a perfect hospitality score there. But we did well enough to get the blessing—the details are private, but presumably he was able to get one of the visas available to “aliens with extraordinary ability” with the help of Stanford University. He’s had a productive and distinguished career, and he’s still going strong today.

Back circa 1986, when he was applying for a student visa, the INS wouldn’t have known just how good a gift they were being offered. He was 17 years old, with few resources, coming from a troubled country. He wouldn’t have been easy to distinguish from the other 11,000 Colombian immigrants that year. To admit him, we needed to admit all of them too. A few of the other immigrants allowed to cross the border in the eighties went on to smuggle drugs or commit terrible crimes. All of them required some amount of support getting started. That’s the price we paid.

And Ricardo Dolmetsch, alone, was worth that price, if his leadership had anything to do with the invention of AMT-130. There are more than 30,000 Americans with Huntington’s disease. If these results pan out, their life expectancies quadruple. And, of course, we’ll get to tax uniQure as it sells the therapy to other countries, so everyone in America will benefit.

Even if we pretended, ridiculously, that everyone else from his cohort contributed nothing of value, it’d still be worth it.

Even if we pretended, ridiculously, that we had a sociopathic disregard for the lives of foreigners, it’d still be worth it.

I’m pretty sure we’re failing the hospitality test hard right now. Even before the administration announced its $100,000 charge to apply for H-1B visas, we’ve been doing an excellent job at scaring off scientists. If you’ve got an idea for curing cancer, take it somewhere else. We’re full. Anybody who hadn’t gotten the message surely got it from the treatment of the talented researcher Kseniia Petrova, a Russian dissident who fled to the U.S. in 2023, only to be detained for four months after failing to declare a box of frog embryos. She now faces criminal charges.

Some of our losses will be other countries’ gains. It’s a statistical certainty that in a few years, we’ll realize we’ve fallen behind in some critical field or other because the top talent went elsewhere. Other losses will be invisible, because they’ll be losses to the world. If Dolmetsch had been forced to return to Colombia, he says, he would’ve had to join the army. If he’d died there, we’d never have known what we missed out on.

I’ve tried to make the case, before, that the average immigrant is net-positive to society. I still, strongly, believe that. The idea that every human being has moral worth and deserves kindness has also been floated from time to time. But I know not everyone buys those ideas, so I want to emphasize that you don’t need to in order to realize Trumpism is a terrible mistake. Elites matter too, and you can’t just swap in native-born American elites for immigrant elites on demand. We have geniuses here too, but they’re not the same geniuses. You can’t turn Einstein away, then slap a white wig on a third-generation American and tell him he’s Einstein now.

In the Grímnismál, the Norse poem alluded to in Leslie Fish’s song, Odin travels to the realm of King Geirröth, dressed in a dark blue cloak, and refuses to give any information about himself. Odin’s wife, Frigg, had bet him that Geirröth was so stingy and inhospitable that if he thought he was receiving too many visitors, he would detain and torture some of them. She wins the bet. Odin curses Geirröth, who immediately trips and impales himself on his own sword. Watch your step.

Who is that gone down the road?
You never got his name.
He never said where he’s bound, or said from where he came.
What comes after, who can tell?
Earthly heaven, earthly hell –
But did you treat him ill or well, then you will reap the same.

-Wanderer, by Leslie Fish