The summer before she started her neuroscience degree at the University of Texas, Celine Halioua interned at a clinic in Germany, working with patients who had age-related brain cancer. She formed a bond with one of them. “He had a large, bushy moustache and a permanent smile – the picture of a kind father,” she told me. “My German was not great, and neither was his English, but what struck me was his kindness – despite the fact he was there to discuss his terminal diagnosis.”
Halioua was shadowing a doctor, and found it hard to grasp that nothing could be done for this patient. “I always thought that doctors were magical – that if you put the effort in, you’d be able to fix it. The realisation that you can’t made me feel that we don’t have free will.”
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