AS a private hospital turned down 2010 Nobel laureate Richard Heck for unpaid bills, which led to Heck’s severe physical deterioration and death, the country’s electoral institutions were preparing for the May 2016 circus. It was the season of the year not much else mattered. A Nobel prize winner died under the most tragic of circumstance? Who he ?

No one, except for an on-the-mark Manila Times editorial, had the time and the effort to raise this pained and harrowing question. Why did this country lose its soul? Only a soulless country can host a hospital that will turn down a human being for unpaid bills and let him die on the streets. Had it not been for the fact that a Noble winner married to a Filipina, and who devoted a lifetime doing scientific researches to improve human lives was the victim of the money-hungry callousness, that death would have been regarded as “one of those things” and Heck’s death would have been relegated to a cold, meaningless statistic.