Prior to the delivery, the Vetters had arranged for a priest to be on hand to baptize their son after he'd been placed inside the bubble. Like almost everything else David would touch during the next 12 years, the holy water was sterilized.
David was transferred to a room at Texas Children's Hospital, which was then a part of St. Luke's. His bubble, made of transparent polyvinyl chloride film, sat on a plain wooden table next to a window.
Attached to the "crib bubble" was a small "supply bubble," which contained items such as diapers, clothes, vitamins, food, washcloths, medicine and water. Sterilizing such supplies was no simple task. First, labels and glue were removed from bottles and jars containing pre-sterilized food. Then those and other necessities were loaded into perforated cylinders, which were placed in chambers filled with ethylene oxide gas, at a temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit, for four hours. Afterward, the containers had to be aerated for one to seven days before they could enter the bubble.
The walls of the bubble were fitted with heavy-duty rubber gloves so that his parents and medical personnel could handle David. Using those gloves, they diapered and fed the baby, and hugged him as best they could.
Mary Murphy's office was only two doors away from David's room. She was working as a psychological associate at Baylor College of Medicine's Center for Developmental Pediatrics, and she watched as a constant parade of visitors -- princes and royalty, even Beverly Sills -- trooped past her door, intent on seeing David; he served as a kind of tourist attraction for VIPs. It was said that Hermann Hospital had a helicopter, and Texas Children's had the Bubble Boy.
Murphy passed by David's room many times each day, but she never looked in. The project appalled her, and she wanted nothing to do with it.
Murphy had come to psychology late in life. As a college student during World War II, she'd studied to be a mechanical engineer. But instead of pursuing that career, she married and moved to Texas. After her husband left her, she and her infant son found themselves alone in Houston.
"I had a baby, a penny and a potato," laughs Murphy, a matronly but attractive woman with short white hair. To support her son and herself, she went to work as a waitress. Murphy remarried, and in the late 1950s, she enrolled part-time at the University of Houston. She graduated in 1967, and earned her master's degree two years later. While an instructor at Baylor, she began her doctoral work. In her office at Texas Children's, she struggled to complete her dissertation, examining the stresses that beset families of children with birth defects.
By the fall of 1974, David was no longer a constant presence outside Murphy's door. A plastic bubble had been set up in the Vetters' home in Conroe, and the child could spend two to three weeks at a time there. Ironically, Murphy met David not at the hospital, but in his home.
Her mentor, Dr. Barry Molish, was working on an article about David's psychosocial development, and asked Murphy to assist him by giving the child psychological and intelligence tests. She agreed reluctantly, and on the day after David's third birthday, she and Molish drove to Conroe in the pouring rain.
To Murphy's surprise, she was smitten with David, a handsome, dark-complected boy with a thick mop of black hair and dark, wide-spaced eyes. She wondered how the boy could survive in such a confined space. The isolator bubbles were periodically replaced with larger models as David grew, but even the largest was tiny: six feet by two feet by four and a half feet. (Later, a sterile "playroom" would be attached.)
Murphy could barely hear the boy speak over the roar of the bubble's blower motors, and she asked to turn them off. David laughed. "He said I was dumb," she remembers, "and didn't I know that the bubble would deflate if the motors were turned off?"
In spite of the noise, Murphy administered tests. Asked to define a tree, David responded that it was a brown rectangle with a green oval on top. She was stunned, amazed that a three-year-old would know so much about geometry but so little about the stuff of daily life.
No, she told David, the green part was made of leaves. He replied that she was totally wrong.
To prove her point, she fetched her umbrella and went outside. As David watched through a window, she broke a small limb off a tree and brought it inside for him to examine through the plastic. "You never saw so much astonishment in your life," she remembered. She left the Vetter home that night feeling that there was much she could teach David -- but she had no intention of doing so.
A few days later, Murphy's boss informed her that David was back at Texas Children's, and that his mother and the hospital staff were having trouble with him. Specifically, a photographer from United Press International was standing by to snap the first pictures of David as he entered his newly constructed playroom. Roughly 11 feet long, six and a half feet wide and eight feet tall, the sterile space marked a huge addition to David's world. But to the embarrassment of the medical team, he refused to crawl through the stainless steel tubing that connected his bubble to its new addition. Since Murphy and David had gotten along so well, David's mother suggested that Murphy might help coax David into the play area. Murphy agreed to try -- but only after she finished her other duties for that afternoon.
