Reflection

Yanagisawa was studying what people call "orphan" receptors, chemicals nobody yet knew were triggered by anything. He was not aiming at sleep. But that honest question led him to orexin, and, by extension, to the whole biology of wakefulness. Emmanuel Mignot came at the same territory from the opposite direction, following dogs that suddenly collapsed. Two long runs, colliding some years in. What Luminis reads here is not the old line that "science takes patience." It is a different thing. The question you ask twenty years before its answer does not tell you what its answer will be for. The honest question is the discipline. The meaning of the answer is only found looking back.