A leap of faith

“Soy un aventuriero en busca de un tesoro“

Pauolo Coelho, El Alquimista

During last summer, I’ve pursued a lot of things. I delivered a speech in Turin, after the screening of the documentary Unrest, about the OMF-funded research on the use of the measure of blood impedance as a possible biomarker for ME/CFS (video, blog post, fig. 1, fig. 2).

Then I flew to London to attend the Invest in ME conference, the annual scientific meeting that gathers researchers from all over the world who shared their latest work about ME/CFS. There I met Linda Tannenbaum, the CEO of the Open Medicine Foundation, whom I had the pleasure to encounter for the first time about a year before in Italy, and I introduced myself to Ronald Davis (fig. 3), the world-famous geneticists turned ME-researcher because of his son’s illness. I presented to him some possible conclusions that can be driven from the experimental results of his study on the electrical impedance of the blood of ME/CFS patients, with the use of an electrical model for the blood sample (R, paragraph 6).

In London, I was able to visit the National Gallery and while I was passing by all these artistic treasures without being able to really absorb them, to get an enduring impression that I could bring with me forever, I decided to sit down and to copy one of these masterpieces (I can’t draw for most of the time, and when I improve for a few weeks in summer, I usually have to carefully choose where to put my energies). I sat probably beside one of the least important portraits collected in the museum (Portrait of a young man, Andrea del Sarto, 1517-1518, figure below) and I started copying it with a pen. When I finished, the museum was closing, so that I missed all the works by Van Gogh, among many other things.

We were at the beginning of June, I was experiencing my summer improvement, a sort of substantial mitigation of my illness that happens every other summer, on average. But because of these travels, I elicited a two-month worsening of symptoms, during which I had to stop again any mental and physical activity: I just lay down and waited. At the beginning of August, I started thinking and functioning again and I almost immediately decided to quit what was my current project (a 600-page handbook of statistics that I commenced in 2017) and I started studying mathematical modeling of enzymatic reactions (figures 4 and 5).

I knew that these reactions were described by ordinary differential equations and that I could solve them numerically with the methods that I studied just before I got sick, about 18 years ago. I was interested in the metabolic trap theory by Robert Phair, an OMF-funded researcher. So I downloaded a chapter of one of the most known books of biochemistry and a thesis by a Turkish mathematician on metabolic pathways simulation and I started my journey, working on the floor (I have orthostatic intolerance even when I get better in Summer, so I can’t use a desk, figure 6). I ended up learning the rudiments of this kind of analysis, also thanks to a book by Herbert Sauro and to some suggestions by dr. Phair himself! Some of the notes I wrote in August are collected here.

At the beginning of September, I was absorbed by the problem of how to study the behavior of the steady states of tryptophan metabolism in serotoninergic neurons of the midbrain as the parameters of the system change. This kind of analysis is called bifurcation theory and I literally fell in love with it… In figure 6 you can also see a drawing: I was drawing a picture I have been thinking about for the last 20 years. It is a long story, suffice it to say that in 1999, just before my mind faded away for 18 months, I started studying the anatomy of a man who carries a heavyweight on his back (see below). That was my first attempt at communicating what was happening to me, at describing my disease.

Only recently I considered not representing the weight, which is a more appropriate solution since this is a mysterious disease with no known cause, and I made a draft (the one in figure 2) that I then used as a starting point for the drawing below. I finished this new drawing at the beginning of September, in a motel room of San José, in California, just in time for donating it to Ronald Davis (figures below) when I moved to the US to attend the third Community Symposium at Stanford (see here). In California, many surprising things happened: I met again Linda Tannenbaum and Ronald Davis, and yes, I encountered also Robert Phair! But this is another story…

In the following pictures, you can see how the drawing evolved. Notably, the figure in the center changed his face and some part of his anatomy. The three figures are meant to be a representation of the same figure from three different points of view. It is more like a project for a sculpture, a monument that is much deserved by these patients.

At Stanford, I had the chance to be face to face with one of my preferred sculptures ever: The Thinker, by Rodin, in both its version: the model molded first, on the top of The Gates of Hell, and the big one (crafted later), now considered the iconic symbol of Philosophy, but likely originally meant to be a metaphor for creative thinking (I say this because the original sculpture included in The Gates of Hell is a representation of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, depicted in the act of imagining his poem).

At the end of September, my mind started fading away again. I knew that would have happened, even though I had an irrational hope that this year would have been different. At that point, I was in Italy and I asked some friends to help me organize a trip to the southern hemisphere, in order to live another summer. It required more time than I would have hoped. I am going to leave Italy only tomorrow. My goal: Argentina. I have been able to do something, at a highly reduced speed, in October, though. I have developed a model for solar radiation at sea level, in function of the day of the year, of the latitude, and of the distance from the Sun (I have considered the actual elliptic orbit of our planet). The main problem has been the modeling of absorption and of diffusion of radiant energy from our star by the atmosphere, but I solved it. Part of these notes are here, but I want to self-publish the end product, so I keep the rest to myself. In that period, I was also able to find the exact solution of the improper integral known as the Stefan-Boltzmann law, something I tried to do in the summer of 2008, in vain, in one of my recovery-like periods. In figure 6 you can see one of the results of my model for solar radiation: the monochromatic emissive power at sea level in function of the day of the year, for the city of Buenos Aires.

My intention was to use that model to choose the perfect place where to move in order to have environmental conditions that closely resemble the ones that we have in Rome from June to September (the period in which my improvements happen). I also wanted to quantitatively study the effect of both infrared radiation and ultraviolet radiation on my biology. There are several interesting observations that can be made, but we will discuss these subjects another time, also because I had to quit this analysis given my cognitive deterioration. The video below is a byproduct of the geometric analysis that I had to pursue in order to build my model for solar radiation at sea level.

Dawn and dusk at a latitude of 42 degrees north, during three years of the silent rolling of the Earth on its silken ellipse. Three years of adventures, suffering, joy and death.

So, by November my mind was completely gone and my physical condition (namely orthostatic intolerance and fatigue) had worsened a lot. This year I have been able to try amphetamines: I had to go from Rome to Switzerland to buy them (they are restricted drugs that can’t be sold in Italy and can’t be shipped to Italy either). One night I felt good enough to take a train to Milan and then to take another transport to the drug store. And back. I managed to do the travel but I pushed my body too far and I had to spend the following month in bed, 22 hours a day, with an even worse mental deterioration. It is like having a brain injury. Amphetamines have been useless in my case, despite two studies on their potential beneficial effect in ME/CFS.

Right now, I am collecting all the books and the papers that I need with me in Argentina (figure above), in case I will improve enough to study again. But what am I going to work on?

1. I want to finish my model of solar radiation, with some notes on the effect of infrared radiation, ultraviolet radiation, and length of the day on the immune system. There is a mathematical model published recently that links the length of the day to the power of the innate immune system, and I want to write a code that calculates the relative activity of the innate immunity in function of latitude and day of the year. I would like to self-publish it as a booklet.
2. I want to finish my handbook of statistics.
3. I need to correct a paper submitted for publication (it has been accepted, but some corrections have been required).
4. I want to deepen my understanding of the bifurcation theory for metabolic pathways and to continue studying tryptophan metabolism with this new knowledge.
5. I want to complete my work on autoantibodies in ME/CFS (see this blog post) and to submit it to a journal. I have been working on that for a while, inventing new methods for the quantitive study of autoimmunity by molecular mimicry.

Should I improve again in Argentina, several avenues can be followed in order to understand the reason why summer causes this amelioration in my own case. I have many ideas and I’ll hopefully write about them in the future. Of course, I also want to read all the new research papers I have missed in the last months. I will bring with me my handbook of anatomy for artists because I hope to be able to draw again, and I won’t miss this opportunity to leave some other handcrafted images behind me for posterity, that can’t care less, obviously! I would really like to finish the drawing below because I feel that in this draft I have found a truly elegant (and mechanically correct) solution for the hip joint of a female robot.

Now I am useless, my mind doesn’t work and I am housebound. I can’t read, I can’t draw, I can’t do calculations, I can’t do coding, I can’t cook… This has been the quality of my life for most of the last 20 years. This is a huge waste: I would have used these years to perform beautiful and useful calculations and to pursue art. I would really make people understand how tragic this disease is in its cognitive symptoms, what we lose because of it. This is, in fact, the reason behind this blog post: I wanted to give an idea of what I can do when I feel better, and of what I would have done if there had been a cure.

I have lost most of my adult life, but I will never accept to waste a day without fighting back.