Tragedy Turns To Triumph

In August 1945, Miko Mori was seven.

All she saw was a flash of light that dimmed the sun.

The small wooden toys in her hand suddenly grew too hot to hold, and she dropped them. In the next second, birds, butterflies, trees, shrubs, flowers, and the houses around her in Nagasaki were a charred heap. The beautiful corn-blue cotton dress with tiny white flowers her mother had hand-sewn for the upcoming Obon festival was gone. The fabric had melted and fused with the skin of her body and face.

Neighbors, themselves badly burned, found her. They carried her to what was left of the road, and with other survivors, she was taken to Tokyo to the Imperial Hospital, which had become an emergency center. She was barely alive.

In September, after American aid arrived, several hundred of the most severely burned survivors were evacuated by ship to the United States, wrapped in surgical blankets with only holes for the eyes. Miko was among them. She was taken to Massachusetts, to what was then the only famous burns-treatment hospital in the country. She was placed in the care of renowned specialists.

To the amazement of those treating her, her tiny body showed resilience beyond what anyone could imagine. Recovery came in very slow stages after multiple reconstruction procedures to her body and face. First, learning to turn. Then to sit. Then to stand. Then, a few carefully placed steps, one at a time. Her new face was nothing like her old one. It had a new, hidden beauty to it, tinged with pain and grief, and with having borne extreme trauma.

She was adopted by a childless American couple in their forties, Dr. J. Forshey and his wife Dr. M. McLeod. Both had worked under the Manhattan Project at the nuclear materials center in Tennessee. They gave her love and quiet care. They never spoke of their work. Miko grew up, went to school and college, graduated in Biochemistry, and became a school teacher there in Tennessee.

At a gathering of Asian families living there, on the occasion of the Chinese Lunar New Year, Miko met an American-born Japanese scientist, Dr. Shioji Hasegawa, who was a researcher at that same nuclear energy center.

It appalled her. He had a name that sounded like her grandfather's. He spoke easily about his work with the very material that had killed thousands of her own people. She despised him for his ease.

For months, she had nightmares, reliving for the first time in years her childhood experience. She was sleep deprived, often jerked from her sleep, weeping uncontrollably.

Reluctantly, she would see Shioji at social events, at church, at public lectures. Out of politeness, they exchanged glances, then words. Shioji was a mature, understanding, almost philosophical young man. He did not defend the past. He spoke of how people everywhere could and should strive for their common good, about peace, about how each person could help turn what was meant for harm to good, if they can.

Gradually, those thoughts resonated with Miko. A gentle feeling of comfort developed between them. It turned to a muted romance, then love. Miko and Shioji married at a quiet ceremony, with both sets of parents present to bless them. Her adoptive parents had worked with the very material used for making the atomic bomb, and Shioji's father years ago served with the U.S. Air Force, responsible for inflicting death and destruction on Japan. None of that came between Miko and Shioji.

For once, they could rise above all that if there was something better for all humanity.

They had a son, their only child, Takashi. Shortly after his birth, Shioji accepted a teaching position at Harvard University, and the family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts - the very state where Miko had first arrived in the U.S., barely alive.

Takashi was a brilliant student, not only academically but in sports. He played the cello and organized community development projects. He won a full scholarship to Harvard, where he studied quantum physics, applied math, and biochemistry, earning a PhD in nuclear chemistry at the age of 26. Indeed, his parents' academic interests had rubbed off on him. He was now Dr. Takashi Hasegawa.

As one of Harvard's top students, he had offers from several institutions, among them a very attractive one from the very nuclear facility in Tennessee where his father and his mother's adoptive parents had worked.

Over the years, Takashi had extracted from his reluctant mother stories and details about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their aftermath, and most of all the horrific experience his mother had gone through as a child. Near dead, unconscious, or semiconscious for almost three months on total life support, Miko had somewhat overcome the hatred for those who had perpetrated that horrible crime against humanity on her native country and its people.

Takashi could not.

Whether he should accept work in that very center that had facilitated the creation of such a deadly device was a question he could not answer alone.

For the first time in his life, he grew uneasily restless, even losing sleep over it, as he pondered the haunting contradiction.

He went to his mother.

"How could you live with people who made it?" he asked her. "How could you marry Dad?"

Miko was quiet for a long time.

"In Massachusetts," she said, "I learned to turn over. To sit. To take one step. American doctors stood for hours rebuilding a face that was not mine. Their hands were American hands. It's the same country. I had to decide whether a hand is only what it once held."

Shioji told him, "I will not tell you what to do. Oak Ridge is not what it was in 1945. When your grandparents worked there, it made material for a bomb. When I worked there, we learned to make isotopes that find cancer in a child's body. That sterilize bandages so a girl like your mother does not die of infection. The same fire, different use. A hammer can be used to break down a building, but it can also be used to build a home.That is not forgiveness. That is responsibility."

Takashi accepted the position on condition he works in medical isotopes and targeted radiotherapeutics - using the atom to heal.

Years passed. Takashi led a small, stubborn team that developed a new way to attach a short-lived, highly precise alpha-emitting isotope to an antibody that sought out only the most aggressive, treatment-resistant cancers - cancers that had been called a death sentence. It was gentle on healthy tissue, and it worked where nothing else had.

The world held its breath as news of a miraculous cellular cure emerged from the shadows of the Oak Ridge laboratories. Rigorous clinical trials were launched across the globe to test the validity of this medical marvel.

Scientists at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the U.S. confirmed the eradication of malignant cells. Equally stunning validation came from the United Kingdom's Institute of Cancer Research, confirming the treatment's positive results.

The final triumph arrived when China's Shanghai Cancer Institute verified both the efficacy and safety of the cellular destruction treatment.

Leading global authorities officially declared the therapy verifiable, unlocking a historic era of relief, remission, and cure.

The ultimate validation culminated on an October dawn, almost a decade later, when the call came from Stockholm. Dr Takashi Hasegawa and his team were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "the groundbreaking discovery that profoundly advances our understanding and transforming medical practice to benefit humanity by the targeted eradication of cancer-causing cells."

Takashi took his mother with him to the award ceremony.

In the Stockholm Concert Hall, Miko Mori Hasegawa sat in the front row. She was seventy-eight years old. She wore a floral corn-blue kimono, the same color as the cotton dress her mother had sewn for Obon in 1945. Her son had it made for her.

When his name was called, Dr. Takashi Hasegawa walked to the podium. He looked at his mother.

He said:

"Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen.

I did not grow up wanting to work with atoms. I grew up insisting my mother told me about her ordeal. She was reluctant, it would cause hatred in me.

However, to satisfy me, she related a little at a time, about how she had to learn to turn over, to sit, to stand, to walk, step by step.

My mother was seven years old in Nagasaki. In one flash, she lost her home, her parents, her face, her dress for the festival. She was wrapped in a blanket with only holes for her eyes and sent across the ocean to a hospital in Massachusetts.

She was saved by American doctors. Raised by American scientists who had worked on the project that made the bomb that burned her. She then married a man whose father had flown for the air force that dropped it.

My family should have been a story about hatred. Instead, my parents taught me one sentence: what was meant for harm, we can turn to good, if we can.

This prize is not for me. It is for the team of chemists, biologists, and physicians who believed that the same energy that can destroy a city in a second can be taught to find a single diseased cell and spare a child.

It is for my mother, Miko Mori, who taught us that a body can be burned completely and still have the courage to heal and then to love.

Thank you."

There was silence, and then the hall stood.

Later, in the lobby, a Swedish journalist asked Miko, in her beautiful kimono, what she felt, seeing her son receive the prize for work born from the same science that had almost taken her life.

Miko smiled. Her face, rebuilt so many times, held its hidden beauty.

She said, "Fire burns, kills, destroys, but if we choose, it can be used to give us heat and to cook. What was meant for harm had been turned for good. That very device used to inflict tragedy and destruction can be harnessed to triumph over deadly disease and save lives!"