Chapter 58
“Am I going to die?”
The medical team stared at Steve Jobs without saying a word.
He had undergone surgery for pancreatic cancer back in 2004.
But the cancer he’d thought was gone had come back, and this time it had spread to his liver as well.
In fact, even after the recurrence, he’d had more than enough opportunities for further treatment.
If he’d listened to the doctors and gone in for a quick second surgery early on, the outcome might have been different.
But Jobs had trusted his own intuition.
He believed diet, meditation, and alternative medicine could conquer cancer.
That had been a fatal misjudgment.
His attending physician, Dr. Raymon, spoke with a heavy voice.
“...Steve, I’m sorry, but yes. The cancer cells have spread too extensively throughout the pancreas and surrounding organs. At this point, surgery to treat it would be... meaningless.”
Meaningless.
Medically, it was no different from a death sentence.
Dr. Raymon privately expected Jobs to explode in anger.
The usual Jobs would have shouted, “You’re the hacks!” and “There’s no way my method is wrong!”
But he was strangely calm.
He stared blankly at his own palm and muttered, “...I was wrong.”
“Pardon?”
“I was wrong. I should have listened to you long ago.”
The doctors exchanged surprised looks.
Steve Jobs, that stubborn mule, admitting his mistake?
Do people really change when they’re at death’s door?
That thought crossed more than one doctor’s mind.
Jobs gave a bitter smile.
I always thought I was right no matter what.
He believed he was special.
He believed he could see what others couldn’t, and succeed even if he ignored the rules of the world.
For most of his life, that had actually been true.
He had been special.
But the string of events he’d recently experienced had changed his mind.
My body proved me wrong, and technology proved me wrong too. Another Technology showed me that.
The startup that had appeared, quite literally, like a comet: Another Technology.
They had openly released apps Apple had never even imagined.
FreeChat, Clear Cam, Ride Together, Crazy Bird, and even the search engine Search.
Without question, they were the ones using the ecosystem he’d built at Apple better than Apple itself.
This morning, the download count for Crazy Bird had already passed 18 million.
It was a number that seemed to laugh in the face of the early sales pace of Apple’s beloved iPhone.
Of course, you couldn’t directly compare the sales of an expensive iPhone to the downloads of a few-dollar app.
Still, that company isn’t just good at coming up with ideas. They have the technical muscle to make those ideas real.
Another Technology had solved push notifications, something Apple had been tearing its hair out over, with FreeChat almost effortlessly.
And they’d built Search, a search engine so far ahead of Google’s that it was almost absurd.
There really are people better than me. I was a frog in a well.
Once he accepted that, he had no choice but to acknowledge the arrogance that had ruined his own body too.
He had not been the best at technology, and he had been completely wrong about how to handle his own health.
“You said three months at most, right? That’s how long my liver can hold out.”
“...”
“So in the end, I die in three months?”
At that question, Dr. Raymon bit his lip for a moment before answering carefully.
“That’s not necessarily the case, Steve. You still have two options left.”
“Two?”
So there really was a reason they were considered the best doctors in the world?
Even in a situation this hopeless, they still had two options?
Jobs asked at once, “What are they?”
“The first is to get a liver transplant immediately and undergo chemotherapy at the same time. The second is to begin with chemotherapy, suppress the cancer cells, and then proceed with the liver transplant.”
“...You’re just changing the order, aren’t you? What difference does that make?”
Dr. Raymon continued his explanation calmly.
“It may sound like only a matter of sequence, but in practice it’s worlds apart. First of all, to receive a liver transplant, you must be given powerful immunosuppressants. That’s so your body won’t reject the transplanted organ.”
“Immunosuppressants? Can’t you just take them and be done with it? What’s the problem... oh.”
Jobs’ eyes trembled.
He’d spent so many meetings with doctors that he’d accumulated a fair amount of medical knowledge himself.
“...Exactly, Steve. Right now there are cancer cells circulating in your blood. But if we use immunosuppressants and bring your body’s defenses down—”
“Then the cancer would grow much faster.”
“That’s right. So even if the liver is brand-new after the transplant, the cancer could spread through your whole body and, in the end...”
Dr. Raymon swallowed the rest.
There was no need to say die out loud.
Jobs’ face hardened.
“Then what about the second option? Starting with chemotherapy.”
“That would be the ideal approach. First, we use a targeted anticancer drug to reduce the cancer cells in your blood as much as possible. Then, once you’re in a safe state, we proceed with the liver transplant. That way, even with immunosuppressants, the risk is much lower.”
“Then there’s nothing to think about. Let’s do that.”
“But...”
Dr. Raymon looked awkwardly at the colleague standing beside him.
Then another doctor placed a laptop on the table and spoke with a grave expression.
“The problem is time, Steve.”
“Time?”
“Yes. As Dr. Raymon said, your liver has at most three months. Before that, we need to find the right targeted therapy for you... please take a look at this. It’s the latest project our team has been developing together: a personalized treatment method through genome analysis.”
Jobs looked at the screen the doctors showed him and asked, “Genome analysis? You doctors wrote software or something?”
“That’s right. Our team and our assistants taught ourselves coding and stayed up all night to build it.”
The doctor added with evident pride, “The algorithm we developed decodes and compares the entire DNA sequence. We analyze the genetic material of normal cells and cancer cells to figure out which mutation caused your cancer. Once we identify the cause, we can administer the exact drug you need.”
“...”
“At this moment, there’s no treatment more perfect for you than this. But it’s still in the experimental stage, it hasn’t been approved by the FDA yet, and above all... the chance of successful analysis is extremely low.”
Tap, tap.
Jobs drummed his fingers on the table, urging him on.
“What’s the success rate? And how long will it take?”
The doctor swallowed dryly.
It was such a hopeless number that he could hardly bear to say it to a patient, much less to Steve Jobs.
“The success rate is 1.3 percent. We’re picking one or two wrong entries out of 3 billion data points, so I wouldn’t call it a low probability...”
If someone had said that in his own conference room, Jobs might have beaten them with an iPhone.
“And even if we run a supercomputer nonstop, it would take at least three months just to analyze your genome data.”
Jobs’ eyes widened.
“Three months? Just to do an analysis?”
“This isn’t just any analysis, Steve. We have to alternately compare 3 billion pieces of normal DNA data with 3 billion pieces of your DNA data, which means, mathematically speaking, checking 900 quadrillion comparisons.”
“...If you were analyzing 3 billion photos, I’d understand why a supercomputer would need months.”
Hoo...
Jobs let out a long breath and leaned back in his chair.
If he wanted to extend his life immediately, he’d need a liver transplant.
But to do that, he’d have to take immunosuppressants, which would be the equivalent of strapping wings onto the cancer cells and setting them loose.
And if he chose chemotherapy first, his liver would fail and kill him before the DNA analysis was even finished.
It was a perfect checkmate.
...So this is despair.
He hadn’t felt like this even when he’d been forced out of the Apple he’d created.
Just as Jobs was preparing to accept his fate in silence, one of the doctors said to him, “Um... Steve. To be precise, we’re not analyzing 3 billion photos.”
“Then what are you analyzing?”
“DNA base sequences, which means text. Thirty billion characters made up of the four letters A, G, T, and C.”
“...You’re saying it’s text?”
That changed everything.
Even if it was 3 billion data points, if they were text data, the total size would only be a few gigabytes at most.
“How big would those 3 billion characters be in terms of storage?”
“Uh... roughly 3 to 4 gigabytes.”
At that, disbelief burst out of Jobs’ mouth.
“...3, 4 gigs?”
“Yes, that’s right, but—”
“Are you kidding me? The small iPod I made years ago had 4 gigs. You’re saying it takes a supercomputer three months to analyze the storage space for a few hundred songs?”
The doctors’ expressions twisted.
No matter how Steve Jobs saw it, comparing a medical problem to the storage capacity of an MP3 player was absurd.
One of the researchers bristled and stepped forward.
“Steve, this isn’t about simply copying or reading a file...! We have to compare every string among 3 billion sequences, calculate all possible outcomes for how they’ll respond to different drugs—”
“So I’m asking if you’re kidding me.”
Jobs cut him off sharply.
His eyes were no longer the eyes of a patient.
They were the eyes of a genius solving a problem.
Jobs realized it instinctively.
The doctors in front of him might be at the peak of medicine, but in the world of software, they were complete amateurs.
No matter how many times you check, there’s no way it should take a supercomputer months to analyze 3 or 4 gigs of text if you’ve got a normal algorithm and code.
Come to think of it, the level of code these doctors had written was probably obvious enough.
It was likely a chaotic mess, littered with inefficient commands.
The kind of thing people called spaghetti code.
No matter how brilliant they were, they were still doctors, not computer engineers.
They probably didn’t collaborate properly with real computer scientists because they thought they didn’t understand medicine.
Just to be sure, Jobs asked, “You said you taught yourselves coding to make this program, right?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t bring in working programmers?”
“We didn’t. How could we involve people who don’t even know what DNA is? Computer engineers are the kind of people who take sleeping pills with whiskey.”
As expected.
What they were doing now wasn’t medicine, but advanced mathematics and programming.
And yet they had excluded the programmers from the process.
Anyone could write ordinary code.
But writing efficient code was not nearly as simple as outsiders liked to think.
“Explain the algorithm in more detail.”
“The algorithm? But you don’t have medical knowledge...”
“Forget that and explain it. What algorithm are you using to analyze 3 billion pieces of text? I don’t know much about medicine, but if I hear enough about the algorithm, I might be able to tell what’s wrong.”
Overwhelmed by Jobs’ momentum, the researcher hesitated before speaking.
“T-then I’ll explain it simply. First... we lay out a standard genome map. That’s a 3-billion-character text containing the normal DNA sequence without cancer cells.”
He swallowed dryly and continued, “Then we place the DNA text extracted from your cancer cells right next to it. And then we compare everything line by line, one by one, from the first row onward.”
“Compare what, exactly, and how?”
“So... for example, let’s say there’s a normal DNA sequence that should read ‘A-T-C-G.’ But cancer cells tend to change that. It might come out as ‘A-T-T-G,’ for instance.”
“So you mean you’re looking for where DNA that should be ‘A-T-C-G’ has turned into ‘A-T-T-G’?”
“If you put it simply, yes. Then we combine several anticancer drugs that act on that mutated gene and make the exact medicine for you.”
“...”
“It sounds simple when I say it like that, but because there are 3 billion characters, it takes a long time. And since we can’t immediately tell which part is wrong, we have to verify each one individually. We also have to check whether it’s actually wrong or whether there was an error in the screening process.”
The researcher kept emphasizing the “3 billion data points,” insisting it was an incredibly difficult process.
He wasn’t wrong. It was difficult.
But it still wasn’t the kind of task that should take a supercomputer months.
“So your program basically ‘compares’ data and ‘finds’ something wrong among enormous amounts of information, right?”
“Well... yes. If you put it very simply, yes.”
“Do you know what programmers call that?”
“...”
“A search engine.”
When Jobs said it with absolute certainty, Dr. Raymon asked back, “...A search engine? You mean something like Google?”
“Exactly. The algorithm you’ve made is fundamentally the same as a search engine. In the end, it’s finding the optimal result related to a specific keyword inside a database.”
“Steve, this isn’t some simple program. It’s not as if you type in ‘cat’ and get a few cat pictures.”
“If I explain it this way and you still don’t get it, then you may be geniuses in medicine but you’re definitely at the elementary level in computers.”
“...”
“Of course, making a search engine algorithm and improving its accuracy is very difficult. There are only a handful of people in the world—or companies—who can do it properly.”
Apple hadn’t been able to do it, after all.
—He swallowed the rest of that thought and shook his head before continuing.
“But comparing 3 billion characters is absolutely not a process that should take a supercomputer three months.”
“...”
“Since you brought up Google, let’s use Google as the example. Look at Google’s search engine. A user types a single word into the search box, and within seconds they search through hundreds of thousands of websites and spit out results—complex data that includes images, videos, and hyperlinks.”
Jobs’ gaze drifted as he went on.
“But your program is only searching text. Whether it’s 3 billion characters or 10 billion, whether you need to recheck it several times or not, if the algorithm is properly built, it should be able to do it in a matter of days at most.”
“...”
“And yet you’re saying three months? That’s not a problem with the amount of data. It means the search method, the algorithm, is wrong.”
At Jobs’ words, the medical team looked uncomfortable.
That was only natural; he was tearing apart the masterpiece they’d worked so hard to create.
Feeling the tension in the room, Jobs unexpectedly took a step back and said, “Dr. Raymon, I’m not trying to insult you.”
“...”
“It’s just that programming isn’t your field. I think it’s impressive that you turned biology and genetics—fields I don’t even fully understand—into an algorithm. Truly, I do. But there must be too many unnecessary steps in the algorithm you’ve made.”
Jobs said he wasn’t dismissing them, but he was clearly dismissing them.
Still, because what he was discussing now wasn’t medicine but computer engineering, the doctors couldn’t really argue back.
As Jobs had said, they were authorities in medicine, not experts in algorithm optimization.
After a brief silence, Dr. Raymon asked cautiously, “So... what are you suggesting? That we hand this program to Google and have them improve it?”
“Absolutely not. Google is my enemy.”
Jobs shook his head. It was a firm refusal.
“The moment they released Android, they became my sworn rival. Hand over my genetic data and my medical history to those bastards? They’d use it however they could to shake up Apple and profit from it. They might even try to blackmail me with my own life.”
“...”
“And besides, they can’t keep their mouths shut. The moment rumors spread that I’m terminal, Apple’s stock will become confetti.”
“Then what about giving it to Apple’s own engineers? Apple has the best engineers in the world.”
“That won’t work either.”
Jobs shook his head again.
“My condition is top secret inside the company too. No one should know except a few board members. The moment you hand the code to engineers, it’s only a matter of time before the rumor spreads through the internal messenger. Do you want to see the words ‘Steve Jobs is dying’ come out of my own employees’ mouths?”
Google was out because they were the enemy.
Apple employees were out because of security.
Then what was he supposed to do?
“Then how about computer science professors? Or their assistants?”
At one doctor’s suggestion, Jobs frowned deeply and dismissed the idea.
“Professors? Hah... they’d be even worse.”
He let out a dry snort.
“They’d look at your algorithm and immediately realize it’s similar to a search engine. They’re still experts in their own way.”
“Then we could ask them for help.”
“But the moment you ask them to fix the algorithm, they won’t be able to do anything. I know because I’ve worked with professors many times at Apple. They’re people who study theory; they’re almost never people who perform in the field.”
“...”
“And there’s no place sloppier than a university lab when it comes to security. The moment some professor starts bragging about a paper or one curious graduate student peeks at my data... my terminal illness will be on the front page of the New York Times by tomorrow morning.”
“...”
“Besides, don’t you people hate the idea of some other professor succeeding with the program you worked so hard to build?”
—Well...
—Hmm.
—That’s tru...
The doctors couldn’t openly say yes, but they did agree with Jobs.
Faced with the impossible situation, they all looked troubled.
But in Jobs’ mind, things had actually become much clearer.
The person who helps me can’t be my enemy. And they have to be someone who won’t use my illness as leverage to attack the company. They need to be utterly businesslike and keep their mouth shut.
And above all, they had to be an overwhelmingly skilled programmer.
Someone capable of handling an algorithm as difficult as a search engine perfectly.
Only then could the program be completed before he died, the DNA analyzed, and the right drug found.
That kind of programmer...
The person who satisfied all those exacting conditions.
Only one name came to Jobs’ mind.
The one who had already released Search, a search engine that surpassed Google.
The monster who had overwhelmed the system built by tens of thousands of Google engineers.
That man might be able to fix this program.
...Zero, the true CEO and developer of Another Technology.
He was the only one who could solve this problem.
If even he said it couldn’t be done...
Then I’ll have to accept my fate.
A painful remainder of life, receiving immunosuppressants just to gain a few more years after a liver transplant, all while letting the cancer grow inside him.
That was the fate Steve Jobs had prepared himself to accept.
With that thought, he said, “I’d like to entrust the program to a ‘genius’ I know. He could turn your software into something on an entirely different level.”
“...”
“Dr. Raymon, may I have your permission?”
Steve Jobs’ fate now rested in Dr. Raymon’s hands.
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