This is a feature on a researcher’s race to solve the biochemical puzzle of chronic fatigue syndrome — the disease afflicting his son. Ron Davis is a wizard at revealing what’s invisible to the rest of the world. A renowned geneticist, in 2013, The Atlantic magazine ranked him among the world’s greatest living inventors. His biotech methods helped launch the field of genomics, making terms like “artificial chromosomes” and “genome editing” part of the lexicon. A substantial number of the major genetic advances of the past 20 years can be traced back to Davis. Now the focus of his research is to find a cause and a cure for CFS, the disease that has crippled his son Whitney.
“The Puzzle Solver” tells the story of a much-loved adventurous young freelance photographer, his descent into an illness so mysterious and horrifying it incrementally steals away, first his ability to work, then to walk, then to eat. He’s told he’s crazy, lazy, friends abandon him. Finally, trapped in a back bedroom at his parents’ Palo Alto home, this once handsome, 6’3″ 170 lb. young man, withers to near starvation conditions hovering at 115 pounds.
He can’t speak, he can’t write, he can’t listen to music. He wears a visor to block out light, ear phones to block out sound. An IV line delivers nutrients, any motion exhausts him, any human contact drains him, any eye contact causes him physical pain. For the past three years, Whitney Dafoe has remained trapped in that back bedroom a prisoner of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. His father, his greatest advocate, cares for Whitney each afternoon, then works tirelessly searching for a cure.