Numbers
for his daughters and sons

Ron loved numbers. His license plate was "NUMBER" (see the photo to the right). To him, every number tells a story. For example, 1729 is the smallest number which can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways (as mentioned in Hardy's Ramanujan story). He actually remembered phone numbers. I sometimes asked him for phone numbers when I forgot or just for fun.

There was a special number that caught our attention in the last several years. That was 508 or ΔF508. We knew that Ron had one hidden bad gene. According to Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, "Every person has two copies of the CFTR gene, one inherited from the mother and one from the father. For a person to have CF, there has to be a mutation in both copies of the CFTR gene."

Ron only had one mutation in ΔF508 so he was asymptomatic we thought. After all, he was super atheletic. He excelled in table tennis as the champion at Bell Labs and New Jersey leagues. He loved trampoline, was qualified as a judge for international competitions and he always kept a trampoline in the yard. He was a juggler of the first order, serving previously as the president of the International Jugglers' Association. He kept a good collection of unicycles and designed some variations together with the great Claude Shannon. In Ron's office, he hung a poster of squares arranged in 100 lines each containing 52 squares. Each week one square is supposed to be filled and therefore one can see how finite and previous life is. He only filled 84 lines.

Ron's health took a turn about four years ago after he was diagnosed for bronchiectasis which is chronic and progressive. For quite a while, we still maintained a good quality of life, enjoyed our place in Vancouver and bought a place in Berkeley which was his hometown with rich culture. However, the symptoms are more and more looked like CF, especially near the end of 2019. On Oct 21, 2019, FDA approved the new breakthrough drug, called Trikafta, for CF patients. His doctor, Doug Conrad, got Ron qualified with the diagnosis "atypical CF". The first day when Ron took Trikafta, the mucus almost miraculously vanished. Hence, against the general belief, one mutation ΔF508 in only one copy of CFTR gene can also lead to CF, albeit at a later age. Trikfta is, with no doubt, the right treatment although it was too late for Ron.

I was lucky to have known Ron for 48 years, which translated into almost twenty thousand glorious days that, all of a sudden, were gone. It reminded me of a poem by Henry Van Dyke:

Time is too slow for those who wait,

Too swift for those who fear,

Too long for those who grieve,

Too short for those who rejoice,

But for those who love, time is eternity.

            -----Fan Chung Graham, July 2020.