Bill Katz

Vol. 15 • Issue 7 • Page 64

In Person

Writer in Resonance

A biomedical engineer switches fields to generate an award-winning short story that melds MRI and sci-fi.

By Jeff Bell

In the realm of science, William T. Katz, MD, PhD, is a respected biomedical engineer who's developed techniques for medical image visualization and processing, and co-created a pioneering brachytherapy treatment planning system.

But in the cultish community of science fiction, Dr. Katz is something of a button-down Dr. Frankenstein, subverting the principles of radiology—specifically, magnetic resonance imaging—to create a controversial form of artificial life. He's the unlikely mind behind "The Plastic Soul of a Note," the tale of a disease-ravaged concert pianist whose brain is imaged by a futuristic MR unit and replicated in an android body. Last August, his short story earned the Grand Prize accolade in the 20th Annual Writers of the Future Contest, sponsored by the estate of the late author L. Ron Hubbard. His work appears in the current edition of the Writers of the Future anthology, published by Galaxy Books.

Dr. Katz's resume hardly suggests a frustrated sci-fi scribe yearning to express his inner H.G. Wells. Until 2001, when he left his position as senior scientist at Varian Medical Systems in Charlottesville, Va., he'd followed a strictly hard-science tract that included tenures as a neurosurgery research professor and, briefly, the director of the neurosurgical visualization lab at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (UVA); and as a research assistant at California's Stanford University Medical Center, where his work entailed ultrasound image analysis and processing in the department of urology. As co-founder and senior software engineer of a medical systems start-up company in the mid- to late 1990s, Dr. Katz helped develop what would later become Varian's VariSeed prostate brachytherapy treatment planning system. He also programmed the Digital Humans CD-ROM, a lauded document of digitized cadavers from the National Institutes of Health's Visible Human Project.

But as a boy, he feasted on a steady diet of the fantastic, thrilling to the sophisticated superheroics of Marvel Comics, the paperback pulp of Doc Savage and the space opera stylings of Perry Rhodan. Those youthful interests reignited more than a decade ago during his MD/PhD program at UVA, when he penned his first draft of "Note" during a creative writing workshop. "My dissertation on the PhD side was segmentation and digitalization of 3-D brain images, so I had always been thinking a lot about 3-D brain imaging," recalls Dr. Katz, 40. "I'd also done work in artificial intelligence when I was studying premed and computer science at Stanford, so the combination of the two led me in that direction of thinking: 'Well, if we ever did cross that threshold and try to replicate a brain in a synthetic form, how would you go about doing that?'"

Upon sampling the fruits of his rumination, Dr. Katz's writing instructor urged him to leave medicine and pursue a master of fine arts degree. "But at that time, I had no inclination of doing that," he says. "I didn't have what I needed to know about bioengineering, [and] I wanted to experience that fully, so I stayed in that field. [But] I thought that this might be a good idea to try my hand at this and create stories—do things in a totally creative fashion, unhindered by regulations."

Following his work in academia, the development of his first start-up company and its eventual acquisition by Varian, Dr. Katz revisited his short story while taking a writing course in the Arlington, Va., area, where he resides with his wife, Jennifer. After submitting a revised version of "Note" to the Writers of the Future Contest in early 2003, he was named the First Prize winner for the second quarter of that year.

The award was a validation to Dr. Katz, who by that time had been toiling for roughly two years as a writer and online entrepreneur (he's fine-tuning www.writertopia.com, a workshop and resource site for authors). He concedes that the premise of "Note"—human reborn as android—isn't wholly original, but credits his biomedical training with inspiring the yarn's atypically humane twist. "My background in noninvasive diagnostic imaging made it clear to me that when you made that transition [to a simulated life-form], the old human version didn't have to be destroyed—there would be noninvasive ways of handling the data acquisition for the simulation," he says. "I think that the diagnostic imaging aspects of my story are much closer to reality than the ability to model the human brain. We're pretty far away from understanding the brain at the level required to create a simulation but from the standpoint of figuring out the architecture of a brain, we're a lot closer."

A jury of his sci-fi elders was sufficiently swayed by his rendering of the concept. A year after being named a quarterly First Prize winner, Dr. Katz was voted last summer by a panel of prominent authors as the 2003 Grand Prize recipient, netting a total of $5,000 in prize money and enjoying a week-long, all-expenses—paid trip to Los Angeles, where he participated in intensive writing workshops. While his contest booty doesn't include a publishing deal, he enjoys royalties from the Writers of the Future paperback—not to mention the distinction of top honors in science fiction's premier writing competition.

He'll leverage that win to pry open publishing house doors when he shops around his upcoming first novel, a techno-thriller involving messaging through time and serial murders. Despite his creative momentum, however, some of Dr. Katz's erstwhile peers remain ambivalent about his new venture. "I view this as a detour to jumpstart a writing career that I can continue when I go back to science," he says. "Some [colleagues] are tickled pink, and some are still wondering, 'Why aren't you back in science?' I guess the people who are close friends or mentors [are] concerned that the longer I stay out of the science side, the more difficult it will be for me to re-enter. But most of the time, they're very supportive." After all, he adds slyly, "They've gone out and bought the book."

Jeff Bell is managing editor of ADVANCE.

Katz Scan

Technically speaking, Dr. Katz's first foray into science fiction occurred roughly five years prior to the 2004 publication of "The Plastic Soul of a Note."

Having seen the 3-D anatomical images Dr. Katz created for his Digital Humans CD-ROM, a Hollywood special effects house tapped him to produce (free of charge) a background clip for "Virus," a 1999 sci-fi creature feature starring Jamie Lee Curtis. His work—the electronic peeling of a skull down to the cortex—appears on a computer screen as the film's alien antagonist scans a database on human anatomy.

"The idea of having something that I create [be used] in movies was really awesome, so I spent a lot of long nights working up a sequence," says Dr. Katz, whose contact in the FX house was fired prior to the motion picture's completion. "I wound up seeing the clip in the film, but my name wasn't in the credits."

A screen capture of his "Virus" sequence appears on his Web site, www.billkatz.com. "I figure if they didn't credit me, then I could at least [use] that excerpt."