Searching my own name has always returned my father first.
We share it exactly: Renato Valdés Olmos. He is a nuclear medicine physician. For most of my life, anyone who typed the name into a search box got sentinel node protocols and radioguided surgery, and somewhere below the fold, eventually, a designer.
Alkmaar
He came to the Netherlands from Chile and became the medical head of nuclear medicine at the hospital in Alkmaar, which is roughly the geography of my childhood. The town where nothing much happened, in the earlier essay, sat inside his catchment area. In 1989 he moved to the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, a consultant in its oncology diagnostics division. A doctorate at the University of Amsterdam followed, and from 1993 the work that would occupy the rest of his career: lymphatic mapping, the sentinel node, guiding surgeons by image toward tissue they cannot see.
The name itself is an immigrant artefact: two surnames in the Spanish manner, welded to a Dutch life. It overflows sign-up forms, confuses airline systems, and slows border checks in both directions. I have carried it as an inconvenience for decades. It took building his archive to notice it is also the only infrastructure we have always shared.
The institute
My first job, in 2000, was at the Netherlands Cancer Institute: interaction designer, working on medical trial systems. I did not think of it then as walking into my father's building, though that is plainly what it was. For a while the institute held two people with the same name, one making tumors legible to surgeons, one making trial software legible to researchers. At the time I mostly noticed the commute. It took me twenty years to notice the sentence.
Invisible pathways
The introduction to his collected work begins like this: a tumor drains along pathways that are invisible to the surgeon and different in every patient, and his work is concerned with making those pathways visible. I have read a great deal of design writing and very little of it states a practice that cleanly. Inject a tracer, image where it travels, hand the surgeon a map of one specific body. Every patient a new territory, the instrument calibrated to the person. I have spent a career saying something similar about software, in considerably more words.
The archive
I am building the archive of his work now: his papers digitized one at a time, a site that will outlast the journals' logins. I wrote earlier about losing twenty years of my own record to platforms other people operate, and this is the other half of that essay. The record of a life is not the life. His life is in operating theaters and survival curves and the surgeons he trained across thirty countries' worth of conferences. But the record is the part a grandchild will be able to hold. This time I control the login.
The papers themselves are a lesson in what a body of work looks like from the outside. Decades of them, most with a dozen co-authors, many describing a technique that has since become simply how it is done. Nothing in them announces importance. They accumulate it, one specific patient population at a time, which is a rhythm my industry, with its launches and keynotes, has mostly forgotten exists.
There is a line of his on the site that I did not write and could not improve: the question has stayed the same throughout, only the instruments have changed. It is a sentence about thirty years of imaging. I have started to suspect it is also about the two of us.
A companion to Operator. My father, Renato A. Valdés Olmos, practiced nuclear medicine at the Netherlands Cancer Institute from 1989 and continues his research in interventional molecular imaging at Leiden. The archive of his publications is in progress; the first fifteen papers are digitized.
© 2026 Renato Valdés-Olmos