Bunch of Amateurs (18 page)

She wanted to illuminate the seemingly complex world that most of us imagine when we hear words like “recombinant” and “DNA” and show that it was quite accessible. For instance, extracting DNA from the classic green pea, the famous subject of Gregor Mendel, can be made to sound very scientific and complicated: A professional in a lab might discuss cell disruption to penetrate the membrane, followed by removal of lipids, followed by an isopropanol bath and a protease wash, followed by a centrifuge to yield some stringy DNA in the bottom of a test tube.

Patterson showed up with a box of stuff found in most kitchens or bathrooms. The only thing she lacked was a centrifuge substitute, so she asked the guy in charge to help her find a salad spinner.

“My talk was on a Sunday and there was a party Saturday night,”
Patterson said. “The organizer was going around to everyone he knew to see if they had a salad spinner.” By Sunday, though, an Oxo salad spinner with the black push-down button pump had been procured and donated to the Patterson amateur lab.

“I started with dried ground-up peas,” she said, “and I put those in a saline buffer.” She quickly translates for me: “Regular old saltwater.” Then, she continued, “you shake it up a little bit and add some shampoo, which contains a detergent which breaks apart the fatty cell wall. To that you add some meat tenderizer, which contains papain, which is a protease which breaks down the nucleus.” So the shampoo gets us inside the cell, and the meat tenderizer gets us inside the nucleus where the DNA resides and releases it from the proteins that accompany it. Then you let it sit for a while until it turns into what Patterson calls a “slurry” of “digested goo.” This gunk is put into the salad spinner to separate the solids from the liquids. After pouring off the liquid, one adds rubbing alcohol. DNA likes alcohol about as much as oil likes water. So it tends to bunch together to separate itself from the rest of the liquid. Sticky strings begin to form. This is pure, extracted DNA, ready for bioengineering.

The pleasure of inventing everything yourself—starting from scratch—gives this operation (any amateur operation, for that matter) a kind of buttress against frustration. The tabletop rig that Patterson had cobbled together was so obviously a source of satisfaction that the expected failures of any experiment cycle were easily brushed off as she improvised her way to the next step.

And when things went perfectly, it gave way to moments of intense and obscure beauty. When she was putting some distilled water onto our bacteria samples, she cleaned her hands and carefully removed a single sterilized corked tube. In the other hand, a syringe. With one elegant motion, the long, graceful fingers of one hand drew up some water; with the other she one-handedly pulled the cork. She looked sideways at the open tube so that her slight breathing wouldn’t
contaminate her work as she injected the sample with water. She pipetted just enough in and re-corked the tube. Twenty times, perfectly, like some tiny private ballet.

There is really no step to this process and no part of this homemade lab that she doesn’t know intimately. When something went wrong, Patterson just stepped back, thought about it for a while, and dove back in. Part of the freedom and pleasure of the amateur space derives from the fact that the little lab on the table has no black boxes on it. There’s nothing store-bought whose processes Patterson doesn’t understand. She’s built and rebuilt everything sitting here.

When I asked, for instance, about the broth in the tubes, i.e., the food that will feed our bacteria to grow overnight, she said, “Normally when you are growing lacto, you use MRS broth; MRS stands for a couple of guys.” (De Man, Rogosa, and Sharpe, if you’re interested.) “But that stuff is expensive,” she said, so she made her own. “What I did was manage to track down an article Ellicker wrote in the
Journal of Dairy Science
.” The article was written in 1956—talk about going back to basics.

“I could have solved the problem by throwing money at it,” she said, “but what I’ve generally found is that old articles tend to have the cheapest but still effective way of going about anything. This was back when people didn’t have a lot of money to throw at problems and they were still figuring out things.”

Patterson says she doesn’t get frustrated too easily, a habit she ascribes to her father’s constant encouragement when she was a kid. But it’s also the case that amateurs have a different relationship to failure than professionals. At an office, failure is profoundly frustrating since it’s known to others and embarrassing. Failure and success are binary modes, up or down, and often tied directly to pay. Did you succeed or not? Failure can often lead to getting marginalized or pissed off or fired.

But if the entire rig on your kitchen table is your own creation, hatched from street castoffs and dairy farmers’ lessons dating from
the Eisenhower administration, then failure is just a glitch in the system you’ve built. Putting your hands in there, e-mailing other amateur scientists for advice, checking out colleagues on your common wiki, fixing what’s wrong, and moving one’s investigations forward are actually just other ways of being successful. Amateurs are often fixing things, their own devices, so there is this constant reinforcement of feeling smart and competent.

People who study creativity and productivity say that this is a key feature of highly productive pursuits. Most people, when continuously frustrated, will walk away. But if competence is also defined as cunningly figuring out a problem with your lab, then staying with the program becomes a lot easier.

Of course, that staying power can also become a treadmill that keeps an eccentric in his garage for a lifetime, convinced that if he tinkers just a little more he’ll eventually find the secret to perpetual motion. No one argues that amateurism is some kind of secret path to success, just that it’s a path. And, naturally, if your goal is a little more likely to actually occur in this time/space continuum, then this kind of motivation makes it easier to endure experimental setbacks.

“If you go through many interactions where you feel really incompetent,” said Professor Edward Deci, the author of
The Psychology of Self-Determination
, “it has a big impact on you and you feel depressed in no time.”

Deci has pioneered the study of what makes people go off and just do something, formally known as “intrinsic motivation” or “self-determination theory,” but in this context, let’s call it by its common noun, “amateurism.” In the workplace, getting people productive and creative in a capitalist sense involves a lot of human resource activity. The effort there is to ensure that everyone is working at his or her skill level and not below it (waste of human capital) or beyond it (the Peter Principle theory that one can be promoted beyond one’s skills and become useless).

Outside the world of paid labor, intrinsic motivation becomes a different matter. Whether one is in a literal garage or a symbolic one (a wiki is, arguably, today’s figurative garage), research consistently shows that even working alone, one needs a few things to occur: The best amateurs require a sense of opened-ended playfulness—that sense that anything’s possible.

Deci cites a study of nursery school children who were asked to draw for fun with some special markers. Afterward, some were given “good player” awards. Later, when the kids were asked to draw again with the markers, something surprising happened.

“The youngsters given awards were less likely to draw at all, and drew worse pictures, than those who were not given the awards,” Deci has written. “Why did this happen? Children draw because drawing is fun and because it leads to a result: a picture.” But the “good player” reward redefined the pleasure narrowly as authority figure approval. Fun play turned into a form of paid work, the death of amateur passion.

These experiments have been reproduced many times, revealing every time that play is more productive than work. That is, a sense of being on your own and just trying to do this thing (whatever that thing is) can be more productive than if you introduce either money or reward into the equation. Experiments where some kind of meaningless grunt work was asked of people as a
favor
to the experimenter resulted in extremely high productivity returns. The minute those same people were praised and offered money, the productivity rate plunged.

One could argue that such productivity is related to belief in some higher calling—that you are enduring this donkey work because you have faith in the future (noble) rather than for money (labor). Soldiers will recognize this distinction as the same that exists between a citizen serving out of love of country and a mercenary earning a paycheck. The sense of satisfaction from within and the sense of pride flows together to create a motivation that money simply destroys. The word
“amateur” comes from the ancient word for “love”—which, when encouraged with money, becomes a profession, a form of the oldest profession. An amateur’s love is both public and private, internally motivated but, in order to be productive, outwardly praised. It’s a kind of love that hasn’t very well spoken its name. It’s neither eros nor agape, nothing involving filial bonding or generous charity. It may be the least described love, ultimately personal, charged with the hope that there is a possibility of finding that new thing just over the horizon of the unknown and toting it back across, into the realm of the familiar.

Over the months prior to my seeing Meredith Patterson’s lab, she had already been trying to coax the glow gene into her chosen yogurt bacterium,
Lactobacillus acidophilus
. She had tried to use the heat shock method to drive new genes into the cell’s nucleus.

“When bacteria get to a certain temperature, they start producing these heat shock proteins which also opens up some holes,” she explained. And in that brief moment, the new genes sloshing around nearby can slip in. “In my head, it’s like, holy shit, it’s hot in here, let’s open some windows.”

But that hadn’t worked at all, so she had moved on to electroporation, 150-millisecond pulses at 2,500 volts—the method we’ll be trying on my visit. In my head, I picture the tiny bacteria ballooning like a cartoon character with its finger in a socket—its flagella sticking out like hair—and its microscopic pores bulging open like wide eye sockets, such that the new material can rush in. For us, the question
is, how do we administer these shocks to our bacteria. Patterson has already configured the timing mechanism on an Arduino—an easily customized computer board. It will handle the literally split-second timing: The 2,500-volt pulses last only 150 milliseconds each. All we need now is 2,500 volts—the precise amount, I recently learned, once used to carry out the missions of famous twentieth-century electric chairs, the insanely powerful ones from the early days that had nicknames Gruesome Gertie, Yellow Mama, Old Smokey, and Sizzlin’ Sally.

To accomplish this, Patterson got hold of a transformer from an old neon sign. It takes in 12 volts and ramps it up to 3,000 volts. So it would make sense that if we fed the transformer 10 volts, it would then kick out 2,500. But Patterson’s voltmeter kept telling us something was dodgy here. So she started to connect different transistors to get the right combination to deliver the needed, precise amount of electricity. Patterson maintains a little tool cabinet containing various transistors, but none of them, or any combination of them, would get us to our magic number. The only solution, it was decided, was to jump in the car and drive thirty miles to Fry’s, a kind of Home Depot of everything electronic. We did this without hesitation because now the entire mission was stuck in the bottleneck of finding the right transistor mix.

This effort went on for days, I should add. We must have tested the input and outputs of the Arduino board some fifty times. These tests amounted to us sitting on the wooden floor and carefully holding the (insulated) lines in place as we blasted away with, potentially, lethal streams of electricity. One day we spent ten hours trying to configure one wiring set-up after another. Hours of this fiddling passed, but maybe you know this feeling, it was as if no time had passed.

Patterson’s cat Alexander continually appeared at the edge of our experiments, poking his nose in at the most inopportune moments. “We named him after Alexander Shulgin,” she explained, as if I should immediately recognize the name of the chemist who popularized
the drug MDMA, aka ecstasy. “Do not name your cats after chemists; they will want to do chemistry.”

As we prepared to run some serious electricity through the Arduino board, Alexander came cantering over and just a millisecond or two before he put his foot on a live wire, I scooped him up and moved him to the other side of our little power grid.

Meanwhile, the tiny amount of lactobacillus that Patterson had extracted from the yogurt and placed in the incubator was growing away. There was one new flaw with that device: Its two-bit thermostat had busted. There no longer was a way to automatically regulate the heat inside, so Patterson would carefully monitor the temperature by checking it on her own. She’d turn the incubator off after a while and wait for it to cool down a few degrees before turning it back on. This way she kept it from overcooking our bugs. We were now several days into constant experimentation, and we spent a lot of time together, staring at transistors, tending the incubator as if it were an old woodstove, sterilizing equipment, waiting for very slow things to happen. Patterson is a smoker, and in moments precisely like these, I allow myself a temporary relapse into a habit I enjoyed back in the Pleistocene era. So we’d take cigarette breaks, standing by her window, often talking. But already, we were comfortable enough to not say a word.