Diploma in One Hand, Hasselblad in the Other — The Shungite Medium, Chapter 4

Why I Trained as a Scientist and Refused to Become a Doctor · Chapter summary · from The Shungite Medium by Gary Fong

I grew up aimed at medicine. I tested exceptionally in third grade and was pulled out of public school and taken every morning to the University of Washington, into a small white room with a mirror mounted at an odd angle. I cupped my hands against the glass to block the light and saw observers in lab coats taking notes behind a reel-to-reel recorder. That was how I learned what a two-way mirror was.

In high school I took a cafeteria job at Marina Mercy Hospital, volunteered in X-ray, and was moved to the emergency room when they found out I spoke Spanish. The ER had three rooms and one physician on duty, a man named Bruce. We played harmonica between calls. On an auto-versus-auto call with three criticals he triaged on the dock, sent one patient to Daniel Freeman and kept two. All three lived. Afterwards he told me ER physicians focus on the process, not the outcome. That was the night I decided I actually did want to be a doctor.

I studied radiology and nuclear medicine at the UCLA Medical School in 1980 and 1981, then transferred in 1982 to the pharmacology program at UCSB, the first undergraduate pharmacology degree in the country, launched in 1974, with a surviving cohort of thirteen students. My hand was always up. I read the saccharin paper and found the rats dosed at a human equivalent of one pound a day. I stopped wanting the white coat. On the tenth of June, 1983 I graduated with a diploma in one hand and a Hasselblad in the other. Twelve of the thirteen went to top medical schools. I had not applied.

From the chapter

Then came the saccharin study. We were told that saccharin caused bladder cancer in rats. I pulled the paper. The rats had been dosed with the human equivalent of one pound of saccharin per day, every day. One pound. A normal person would not eat one pound of artificial sweetener in a year, let alone in a day. At that dose, the cytoplasm of the cell was no longer behaving like cytoplasm. The specific gravity of the cell had shifted. The solute concentration was so high that the ribosomes, the RNA machinery that builds the proteins of the cell, were physically clogged. The cell could not function. Of course there was disease downstream. The disease was not caused by saccharin. It was caused by drowning a cell in solute. Yet that one study sat in the regulatory record as evidence saccharin was carcinogenic. Warning labels were ordered. Twenty years later they were quietly removed. The same molecule, the same regulatory body, two opposite verdicts in the same decade. That was the logic of the system.

— Gary Fong, The Shungite Medium, Chapter 4

This is a summary of one chapter of The Shungite Medium: The Groundbreaking Exposé of History's Most Miraculous Stone by Gary Fong, LSH Publishing, first edition 2026, 259 pages. Three chapters are published here complete: What Is Shungite? · The Corporate Sticker · How to Tell Real Shungite from Fake. The reference apparatus is complete too: the studies, the glossary, the bibliography and the endnotes.