Derrick Bell, who died this week of NET–his obituary called it carcinoid cancer, yet another name for the same cancer–was not as big a name as Steve Jobs, but he was arguably every bit as important in shaping the world we live in.
Bell was a lawyer. During the early years of the Civil Rights era he was hired by the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. He was told he had to give up his membership in the NAACP because that was a conflict of interest.
He resigned instead.
He became the first tenured black law professor at Harvard. In 1990 he went on unpaid leave to protest the lack of tenured black women at the law school.
In the early 1970s he wrote Race, Racism and American Law–a text still used in law schools today.
The world we live in today racially bears Ball’s stamp every bit as much as the technological world we live in bears Jobs’ stamp.
Three lives: Steve, Derrick, and Jane. All three influential in their fields–in many ways far more influential than single human beings ever are.
And all three dead from the same virtually unknown, under-funded, miss-understood and miss-diagnosed disease.
What would any of them have done with another even ten years of productive life? How many more lives might they have changed?
Who else is out there with this same undetected or miss-diagnosed disease? What will we lose if we lose them?
My mind keeps going back to the young woman on the Marathon Walk. Less than two years out from major surgery she walked the entire length of the Boston Marathon. That bespeaks enormous will-power. What, given time, will she accomplish?
Her advantage is she knows what she has. But there are thousands out there who have no idea they have this deadly thing in their bodies. They have been told they have IBS. They have been told they have anxiety. They have been told they are menopausal. They have been told it is all in their heads.
But the timer on that bomb continues to tick and tick and tick.
We need better awareness among primary care physicians. We need better availability of the tests we have. We need better–more reliable–tests than the ones we have. And we need therapies that are better than the ones we have for those who are diagnosed too late for surgical intervention.
