In the spring of 1997 Dr. Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood received a call from one of her father’s colleagues — the kind of call that everyone dreads. “There is something wrong with your father,” the man reported. He described symptoms of confusion, slurred speech and severe headache. “So I called my sister [a physician] in India and she said, ‘Take him to the emergency room immediately. He may be having a stroke.’”

It’s just 400 miles from Rochester, New York to Washington, D.C. — a quick flight — but Tanveer arrived to find her father in acute distress, wracked by seizures. The nurses rushed him away for a simple contrast MRI, but by the time they wheeled him back into the room the sudden violence of the seizures had given way to a profound and unnerving stillness.

“ Take him to the emergency room immediately. He may be

having a stroke. ”

“His brain is gone,” they told her, after investigating the depth of the coma. It had been damaged beyond repair, and beyond the body’s ability to heal itself. Her father, a healthy, energetic man — himself a Ph.D candidate with a sharp mind and an indomitable will — was now “declared a vegetable.”

Unacceptable.