ABSTRACT
On a rainy day in May, 2002, 23 years after my older brother’s death, I went back to see his room at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In family parlance, it is referred to as The Room. It wasn’t just any hospital room. It was a special sterile enclosure. My brother, Ted, had an illness that had destroyed his immune system. He lived out the second half of his nearly 18 years in the sterile room, divided from the world, and from us, by a clear plastic curtain that kept germs away from him. He was known as Washington, DC’s “Bubble Boy.”
