Crashing Through by Robert Kurson

Salmon,” Wendy whispered to Jennifer, nodding across the boat toward a woman in her early thirties. “Is she real?”
    The woman seemed to have been assembled by a team of male pubescents. Her tiny waist gave way in one direction to a pair of tanned and taut legs that seemed taller than half the men around her, and in the other to a chest so full and eager that no bra could have contained it anyway. Her heels coaxed out unusually perfect calf muscles, while the strip of salmon-colored gauze she used for a dress coaxed out all the rest. Hers was the face of a 1940s movie star. Her long blond hair beckoned men from every era.
    “I’ve got to tell Mike about her,” Wendy said. “I’ve got to tell Mike about Miss Salmon.”
    “He’ll love it,” Jennifer said.
    Wendy pulled May aside and described the scene. She spared no detail. Jennifer could not discern most of the conversation, but every few seconds she heard her husband say, “Really?” or “Wow!” or “How do you know that?” And she could hear him ask her sister, “You can see all that just from sitting across the boat?”
    The next day, the families gathered in one of the hotel rooms to take a break from the sun. They checked the pay-per-view movie lineup and came across a film called
At First Sight,
starring Val Kilmer and Mira Sorvino, about a blind man whose vision is restored. It seemed a natural, especially as May had mentioned his chance meeting with Dr. Goodman to Jennifer’s family. He took a position on the king-sized bed, flanked on one side by his wife and on the other by her sister, as the movie began.
    Eyes rolled just a few scenes in. The main character seemed dull and frightened. He became derailed by everyday circumstances. He smiled goofily.
    “This guy is a downer,” May said.
    When the blind man’s girlfriend pressured him into pursuing a miracle cure for his blindness, Jennifer fidgeted and mumbled to herself, “Why would someone pressure another person like that? It’s so personal.”
    Halfway through the movie no one was paying attention.
    “I’d be back at the pool looking for Miss Salmon if I weren’t already sandwiched between two such beautiful women,” May said.
    The sisters asked if he was still watching the film.
    “Not much,” May told them. “The main character’s not a real person.”
             
    When May returned from this trip he asked his office assistant, Kim Burgess, to help him search the Internet; the speech-synthesized screen-reading software he used on his computers worked well for word-processing or spreadsheet tasks, but it bogged down trying to decipher complex Web pages. He told her he wanted to research stem cell transplant surgery for the eyes.
    At the same time, he submitted a query to an Internet newsgroup dedicated to issues that concern the blind, asking if anyone knew of such a procedure. He told Jennifer that he still expected to find nothing—if the minds at the universities he’d contacted knew nothing, if Dr. Fine had known nothing, he expected to come up empty on his own.
    Soon, information trickled in—a foreign Web site here, an e-mailed answer there. It appeared that there did exist a procedure involving stem cells and vision, one referred to as “corneal epithelial stem cell transplantation.” When May used that language on the Web and in queries, the information began to flow. Much of it was bound in the private vernacular of scientists and surgeons; they spoke of “limbal allograft,” “existing symblepharon,” and “cicatricial keratoconjunctivitis.” May panned the literature for colloquial nuggets and used a dictionary to machete through the rest. He determined this much to be certain about the procedure:

    • It was indicated only for very special cases—but a chemical burn was among them.
    • Its evolution was recent and its implementation rare—fewer than four hundred had been performed worldwide.
    • Very few doctors knew of the surgery, and almost