When Californian teenager Jeff Henigson was diagnosed with brain cancer and given two years to live, a children's charity granted him the wish of a lifetime. But Jeff didn't choose to go to Disneyland or meet his favourite footballer - Jeff just wanted world peace.
In the summer of 1986, 15-year-old Jeff Henigson was riding his bike to the local electronics shop to buy the last part for a "super laser" he'd been building, when he was hit by a van.
"It's coming in the opposite direction and she doesn't see me and just smashes right into me," Jeff says. "And I'm launched, like a rocket, 10 feet backwards. I land on the back of my head."
Jeff wasn't wearing a helmet, and was knocked unconscious. A few hours later, he woke up in hospital. He seemed to be OK, though, so he was discharged the same day.
But within a few weeks Jeff began having seizures and he returned to the hospital, this time to have a CT scan of his brain.
If it had shown injuries from the cycling accident, Jeff would not have been surprised. But the news was worse than that - the scan revealed a tumour.
"Two things went through my mind," Jeff says. "One was a plan to lose my virginity that summer. And let's just say that did not work out. The second was to complete my laser project."
Jeff was an ambitious teenager, whose dream was to work for Nasa. He believed that the best way to impress them was to build "the most amazing laser" which could bounce a beam off of a reflector that had been left on the moon by Apollo 11.
But the laser was also a way for him to bond with his father, a distant figure, who had served with the US Navy in World War Two.
"I didn't know at the time if that was because of the war or something else. But my father was separate, emotionally, from the rest of us. And I thought, 'Here's this thing we have in common. This fascination with science. This fascination with space.' And that's why I pursued it." ทีเด็ดบอลวันนี้
Though Jeff's father never mentioned his experiences in the Pacific when the nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he would talk, at length, about nuclear weapons, the nuclear threat and the US's relationship with the USSR. And this seems to have had an impact on Jeff.
contact us Line ID: @ufa98v2
ความคิดเห็น
แสดงความคิดเห็น