8
T
HE MEETING
took place in a borrowed Harvard seminar room both airy and dusty, painted ivory from its cornices to its radiators. Cliff came in with a pile of notes, and Feng followed after him, and they sat next to Mendelssohn and Glass on the far side of the dark wood conference table.
Robin could barely keep her hands from trembling as she sat there, nor could she look at Cliff. Art Ginsburg, once Marion's nemesis, now a Harvard professor, came in and shook Sandy's hand, greeted Uppington as an old friend, and kissed Marion on the cheek. Robin knew Professor Ginsburg had stolen Marion's ideas in the past. Years ago, hearing of her metabolic work with mice, he'd pursued a similar line himself and then presented his results first at a major conference, effectively stealing her thunder. Robin couldn't help shuddering to see him. Working for Marion, she had been brought up to distrust him. He was arrogant and lanky, with curly gray hair, a haughty nose, and deep brown eyes that ranged in their expression from bemused to pitiless. He wore a tweed jacket over corduroys and had a habit of opening his mouth wide and then shutting it again, as if he were trying to clear his ears after a long flight. He took out a sheaf of papers and busied himself with a red pen, even as Uppington called the meeting to order and Jeremy Choi burst through the door.
“I'm terribly sorry!” Choi was a young professor at BU and a protégé of Uppington's, which meant he was bound to come to the meeting even though he was busier than Ginsburg. He had been raised in Hong Kong and trained at Cambridge, and his English accent was far more pronounced than Uppington's, whose words and tones had flattened and smoothed like river stones from his long years in America. Choi's accent had not had time to mellow like that; he had no time for anything. “Have you already begun?”
“Not at all,” said Uppington.
Ginsburg announced, “I'll have to leave at eleven.”
“Well, let's get started, then,” said Uppington, and he nodded at Robin. “Let's begin with just a brief outline of your observations and your concerns about the
Nature
paper.”
He gave Robin the floor, and smiled encouragingly. Still, in the long, sickening moment before she began to speak, she felt all eyes on her, and heard Ginsburg's watch ticking. How odd she must seem, unruly and quixotic, tilting at errors no one else could see. She had been granted a hearing, but she was nothing to these men; she had no rights or reputation, no useful results to offer, only her critique, her niggling doubts about a fine research paper, her failure to reproduce what Cliff had done so well.
Choi produced a yellow legal pad and printed the date in the top right corner, and Ginsburg opened and shut his mouth. She was sure if she'd been a fly he'd have swallowed her on the spot. She wished she could have flown away; she devoutly wished to disappear, but she began to speak instead, and she spoke brilliantly.
She spoke of her high regard for Cliff's paper and her desire to see his experiments reproduced in her own lab and elsewhere. She spoke of her difficulties duplicating Cliff's work, first with pancreatic cancer cells and then with breast cancer cells from his own cell line. Was the problem her equipment? The cell lines she was using? Her own technique? She had eliminated each of these factors in turn, when suddenly, accidentally, she stumbled on three pages of notes. “I think perhaps the data in these pages was not accurately transcribed in the final drafts of the paper,” she told the group. “The raw data conforms better to my poor results than to the excellent results the lab has published.” And she passed around photocopies of Cliff's notes along with annotated copies of the journal article. “The discrepancies are highlighted in yellow,” she explained as the scientists studied the evidence in front of them. Column by column, line by line, point by point, she referenced the data missing from the paper. “The data from Cliff's draft notes suggest a different outcome from the one published in the article,” she said.
“How different?” asked Ginsburg.
“I've drawn two graphs illustrating the differences,” said Robin, passing them around.
Uppington harrumphed at this approvingly. Choi leaned forward and took the two graphs Robin offered him. Even Ginsburg unfolded his reading glasses.
“The first graph displays the published results from R-7, and the second shows what the curve would look like if all the results from the raw data were included. As you can see, the published results cluster beautifully. However, when we take the published and unpublished data points together, they . . . scatter. In the published results nearly sixty percent of the mice are cancer free. When we take the published and unpublished results together, we find only thirty percent of the animals are cancer free, and almost seventy percent still have cancer after treatment with R-7.”
Her manner was controlled, her arguments rigorous. The care she'd taken with her evidence, the graphs she'd drawn, the clear expression of her ideas—this was Robin at her best. No one heard the beating of her heart. Only Cliff noticed the slight tremor in her fingers.
He nearly shook with anger. Robin was accusing him of cheating—and how artfully she made her case. Not a word betrayed her jealousy; every phrase supported her claim to dispassionate judgment. By her account, she did not seek out his notes, but found them by accident! She did not directly accuse him of misrepresenting his results, but suggested he had transcribed them incorrectly. Naturally, she did not mention spying on him in the animal facility or prying into his lab book. She did not bring up the fact that she had taken notes that belonged to him, and photocopied and distributed them without his permission. She was the model of restraint. He wanted to jump up and set the record straight. But he saw how well Robin's calm manner served her; how acute her observations seemed, refined with understatement. How would he look if he attacked her? Cliff held still and scribbled down her points so that he could reply to each in turn.
“I don't have any charts or graphs,” he began. “Just a simple apology and an explanation. The apology is for the notes that Robin found, which include data from several different sets of experiments. I jotted numbers on scratch paper in the dissecting room, and then as soon as my hands were free I copied them over into my lab book. My scratch paper has been lying around in disarray for far too long, and I recognize that this was both messy and misleading. In writing up my results, I never referred back to those scraps, but only worked from my lab notebook, which I've brought with me today. It's an open book for anyone to see. Now, to begin with Robin's first . . . her first concern . . .”
One by one he took on Robin's assertions and, it seemed to her, sidestepped each in turn. He confessed he had been careless. He had been rushed. Marion Mendelssohn nodded here. He had been sloppy because he'd tried to do too much himself. He turned to Feng, as if to say he could attest to that. Then he opened up his lab book on the table, and there the dates and data matched up precisely. As he showed his lab book and interpreted the numbers there, his voice was lively, his enthusiasm infectious. The tortuous connections Robin had attempted gave way to a scientific argument so natural, so compelling and intuitive, that everyone in the room seemed to relax. Choi leaned back and took a handkerchief from his pocket to clean his glasses. Sandy Glass knit his fingers together with bemused pride. Even Ginsburg twisted his mouth into a wry semblance of a smile.
And Robin watched the meeting slip away. Her graphs lay forgotten on the table. She had spoken well, but Cliff spoke better. He had the more compelling argument, because his results were beautiful. Her results were negative, her argument distasteful. He worked in the bright empirical realm, and she had mucked about with dark, dubious, moral forebodings. Perhaps Cliff's record keeping had been poor, but his achievement was tangible; his mice had been sick and now they were well. Even as he spoke about his work, Robin felt the mood shift. With a flick of the wrist, the meeting became a research seminar. Ginsburg and Choi and even Uppington looked at Cliff with true interest, as if to say “Now, here's the real thing; here's matter for discussion.” How delighted they were to return to science.
Marion delivered her admonitions about observing the proper forms in future, and Uppington thanked Robin for speaking up about possible confusions. Ginsburg suggested imperiously that the minutes of the meeting should be written up and distributed. Cliff whispered something to Feng, who smiled and shrugged. They all preached about rigor, Robin thought, but they based their work on trust. Cliff was so intelligent, so winning—he would be a star. And why did she mind so much that he was messy going about it? Many, many researchers were messy. Lab directors could not put their fingers on every scrap of paper in their labs at every minute of the day. There was the book way of working, and then there was the reality. There was the presumption that everything that touched the nudes was sterile, and the reality that equipment was often only fairly clean. There were the rules and regulations posted in the lab and animal facility, and then the general standards of the community. Robin's case against Cliff might as well have been a case against the status quo, an argument against the natural bumps and jolts of the creative process. If only she could pin him down, hang him by the thumbs until he told the truth. Even as she held still at the table, all her rage welled up inside of her and she wanted to lunge at him and seize him by the throat until he cried out and confessed. But what weapons did she have? What recourse was left to her? She would always be the diligent little malcontent, while he was the creative one. Feng was the favorite in magazines for his immigrant success, but in the scientific community, Cliff's story of perseverance was the one everybody loved to hear. Poor record keeping in the past actually made Cliff's triumph brighter. He was the postdoc who finally made good, Prince Hal throwing off his shoddy workmanship and showing his true colors, coming of age at last.
Heartsick, she gathered her papers together.
“I thought you handled yourself very well,” said Uppington.
That afternoon in the lab, Robin knew she could not stay until the spring. She could not continue across the room from Cliff, swallowing everything she knew and felt.
Through the windows the October light seemed hooded; the sun shone furtively. Deciding to leave, she began to feel a measure of peace. She had that power, at least—to turn away and go. Still, even in that moment of release a flood of regret rushed over her. She was going to have to leave the institute with her bone tumor project unfinished. Her work belonged to the lab. The cell lines and the equipment and the animals she'd used could not be moved.
She would probably give up any hope of a first-tier academic job. She was sorry about that—although she knew that after all these years and all this meandering, such a position would have been a long shot, anyway. She was sorry that the others were going to perceive her leaving as mostly personal, the outcome of her breakup with Cliff. She winced at that, but she could not stay.
She didn't say good-bye that evening, nor did she take anything from her lab bench but her purse. Still, she looked once around the room quickly, shyly, in a kind of farewell. Then she walked out into the hallway and down the stairs.
Someone was coming up as she descended; someone puffing, a little out of breath. “Robin,” said Nanette. “I was looking for you. I have something for you.”
Robin stood still. She had lasted to the end of the day; she would endure this.
“Here's the phone number,” Nanette said, “of someone who found out some things about this institute he shouldn't have. It's a guy who uncovered a lot of crap and suffered for it. He knows what's gone on here—and he's had to deal with people trying to silence him. I want you to have this.” She held out a little sheet of notepaper—pink paper, Robin noticed, bordered with purple hearts. There was a phone number and address printed in black pen, below the name Akira.
Part V
Inquiry
1
T
HE WORLD
outside was wet. The morning's rain had stopped, and bright autumn leaves lay in tatters on the ground, shellacked to streets and sidewalks. Cliff and Prithwish were spearheading the effort with R-7 and everyone was pitching in, except for Feng. He had taken up a small project on the side, just a little thing, modest in scope, but entirely his. The project was Robin's bone tumor study. With her blessing, Feng had taken over the work and was trying to complete it.
“I don't want you to spread yourself too thin,” Marion had warned him.
“It's okay,” he said.
She frowned. “I don't want this to be a boondoggle for you.” She couldn't help feeling superstitious about the unfinished work Robin had left behind. She knew it was irrational, but everything Robin had touched seemed unlucky to Marion. Doomed to disappointment.
Feng looked at Marion searchingly. She wondered if he understood how she had tried with Robin; how she'd argued with her, urging her not to give up, not to succumb to bitterness and isolation. She saw now she should have given Robin more guidance; she should have tended to Robin's wounded pride. She had been too caught up in the work and managed her academic children badly. She judged herself for this, and as usual, she judged harshly. She had tried for a better ending. She deplored the way Robin had left so suddenly, her work undone; it was a kind of suicide—at least professionally—a destructive, vindictive, frightening act. Marion saw the troubled look in Feng's eyes, a silent reproach.
But she misread Feng's expression. He was not thinking about Robin, but about the language Marion had used. His English was superb. He scarcely ever came across a term he didn't know, but for once she'd stumped him. He had never heard the word
boondoggle
before.
The lab was different now, the atmosphere so much lighter. Cliff hadn't realized until Robin left just how tense he'd been. He'd felt her staring at him, her look so penetrating, he'd thought at times she wanted to pry him open, the way he'd seen jewelers pry off the back of a watch. Then there were his papers, his notes and lab book. He had no longer felt safe leaving his notes strewn about, but gathered them up at the end of the day and locked them in the file drawer under his bench top. He'd never even thought to use the key to that drawer before Robin began prying. He'd had to ask Marion for it.
He'd come to think Robin had suffered a breakdown. People did crack in the sterile, claustrophobic quarters of the lab. The researchers were like miners or submariners, and inevitably some foundered. It was a confining life. He'd known someone in grad school who'd had a nervous breakdown and been hospitalized. He'd known others whose marriages broke apart—one friend in particular had had a disastrous affair with a professor. It was hard to tell how much trouble came into the lab with people and how much was caused by the work. In Robin's case, all he knew was that something had snapped, and she'd transferred all the frustration from her own failures onto him. It had been a horrifying transformation. She, who had always been so self-possessed, abandoned herself to accusations and conspiracy theories. What could she possibly have gained from it? Absolutely nothing. She seemed to have lost any hope of professional advancement. Furiously, irrationally, she'd simply tried to bring him down, and so he had begun to think that she was sick. The others thought so too.
Prithwish said, “I think something was wrong with her.”
Billie overheard his remark as she came into the lab. “I could see she was out of balance; the environment was poisonous to her. That was why she fell apart in the animal facility.”
“Fell apart?” Cliff turned to Billie.
“She went to pieces,” Billie said.
“When was this?”
“Two, three weeks ago.”
Cliff and Feng looked at each other. That would have been just before Uppington's meeting.
“She didn't get help,” Billie said. “It makes me very sad.”
“Of course it's sad,” said Prithwish.
“I wish I could have done something for her,” said Billie. “I had a book I was going to lend her, but now she's gone.”
“She's not dead, you know,” Aidan broke in. “She just left the lab.”
“Well, I miss her,” Billie said.
“You didn't know her,” Natalya retorted, and Billie shrank back, rebuffed. She couldn't help it; the others didn't like her. And she was new in the lab. She would always be new.
“It's for the best,” Aidan said of Robin. “She was in a bad way.”
“She changed,” said Prithwish simply.
“Now she can move on,” Aidan declared.
“But where?” Natalya asked.
Nobody knew. Billie had heard she'd gone up to New Hampshire for a few days, and there was a rumor she was going to move back there. Prithwish had it on good authority from Nanette that she was tech-ing for Uppington at BU, at least for the short term, just to make ends meet.
In fact, Robin was just a few blocks away, across Mass Ave. Under scant gold leaves she made her way up Avon Street until she came to a house on the corner surrounded by a pale green fence. The fence was six feet tall, and she had to walk all around the periphery until she found the gate.
Stepping inside, she found herself in the autumn ruins of a rose garden. Thorny canes and withered leaves surrounded a Victorian house with a great barnlike gambrel roof and peeling brown paint.
A gardener was raking leaves from under some hydrangea bushes, and she marveled at the deep pink blossoms still clinging to the stems.
“Excuse me,” Robin said. “I'm looking for Akira O'Keefe.”
“You're looking at him,” the gardener shot back. He seemed pleased at her surprise.
She hadn't expected him to have reddish brown hair. He was not what she'd imagined. Ignorantly she'd assumed he would look much more Japanese. He was extremely tall and slender. His nose was freckled, his eyes quick and black behind gold-rimmed aviator glasses. He seemed to have trouble with his sight; he blinked continually, eyes darting everywhere, from her to his growing leaf pile to his stack of folded leaf bags.
“Nanette suggested I come see you.” She stood at a little distance, trying not to step in the mud.
“I've already read a copy of Cliff's paper,” Akira said.
“I guess Nanette's told you all about me,” Robin said, feeling a bit exposed.
“I know everything.” His rake was metal, with quivering bent prongs. “I hope before you left the lab you made copies of all the materials you found there. Have you been keeping a journal?”
“Well . . .” Robin began.
“You'll need all that.”
“I wasn't exactly sure . . .”
“Mendelssohn and Glass are very good at instilling self-doubt,” said Akira, “because they have none. They transfer it into their postdocs.”
Robin flinched. She had tasted bitterness, but never in such strong concentration.
“You'll have noticed by now,” Akira said, “that people at the institute have a tendency to lie.”
“People in general? No,” Robin said.
“Yes, people in general.”
“And who would they be lying to?”
“To themselves,” Akira said. “Marion killed my work because she didn't like where it was going. She saw where I was heading, and she sacrificed my mice.”
Robin stuck her hands in her jacket pockets unhappily. He was a kook. “You're talking about the outbreak in the colony.”
“They
say
there was an outbreak in the colony,” Akira told her. “The truth is they didn't like my results. I had negative results.”
She shook her head, indignant. Marion would never have sacrificed an entire colony of mice without evidence of contamination.
“They hate me,” he told her. “Marion had me barred from the institute. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Yeah, she didn't like me coming around after I'd officially left.” He flipped his rake over and cleaned out the prongs. “She didn't want me talking to people and that kind of thing, so at one point she called security and got my name listed as Do Not Allow Upstairs. I think I may be the only person officially barred from the Philpott. There may be others, but I believe I'm the only one. She hates me. They both do. My last year, the two of them turned against me big-time. They didn't like me; they didn't like my work; they wanted me gone, and they killed my mice for it. They almost killed me, but Nanette came over and took me to the hospital. Unfortunately,” he said, “people get sacrificed quite often in science. Could you hold that bag for me? You can't see it so clearly when you're inside,” he told her. “You always think it's you, but it's not. The system favors them. It's feudal, actually. There are the lords and ladies like Glass and Mendelssohn, and then the postdocs are the vassals paying tribute every year in the form of publications, blood, sweat, tears, et cetera. If there's a conflict, they call the shots, and there's really nothing you can do about it. Lord Glass and Lady Mendelssohn know the truth. If you cry foul, they break you.”
“We had a seminar about my concerns,” said Robin.
“Yeah, you had your little show trial. That's just cronyism. You've got evidence of foul play—”
“Well . . .” Robin hedged.
“Either you're making the claim or not.” He took the heavy leaf bag from her and crimped the top. “You're dealing with investigators who believe what they want to believe. Look, lying is a human trait, and it works well in religions and philosophies, but in science it's a recipe for disaster. There's just too much money involved. Drug money—and I don't mean the guys in Harvard Square. I'm talking about the pharmaceutical companies. Don't you think academics are all tangled up with corporations? Don't you think Sandy Glass is in the pocket of a drug company—or would be, if he could? There's big bucks out there, and where there's money like that there is no such thing as academic freedom, or independent inquiry.”
“The Philpott is independent,” Robin said.
“Yeah, right. It's a principality of Harvard. The Philpott is like Vichy France. Let me ask you a question.”
He was too tight, his motions quick with pent-up energy. He spoke too fast, as if he were afraid she'd interrupt or leave too soon. He sounded as though he hadn't talked to anyone in weeks.
“Do you want justice?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Are you willing to suffer for it?”
She wished she could just turn away and laugh, make a joke—anything to break the tension. But he was not joking; he was looking her over with his darting eyes.
“Are you?” he asked.
“Maybe,” she said.
He snorted, unimpressed. “Wrong answer.”
“Look, I didn't come here to be interrogated,” Robin said. “I just wanted to talk to you about your experience and maybe discuss . . .” She trailed off. There didn't seem to be much she could discuss with Akira. He might be good at delivering manifestos, or rallying troops for guerrilla warfare, but he was clearly not the sort of person who talked things over. “I came here for advice,” she said.
“All right,” he said. “Here it is. I've read everything Nanette gave me; I've looked at the data and I think your case is exactly what we've been looking for. I've spoken to Hackett and Schneiderman at ORIS and they're willing to meet with you.”
“What? ORIS?”
“Yes,
the
ORIS, at the NIH. The Office for Research Integrity in Science.”
Robin spluttered, “I—I never gave anyone permission to . . .”
“I've worked closely with Alan Hackett and Jonathan Schneiderman in the past. I didn't mention your name to them—only the outlines of your case. I made no promises; I did not reveal your identity; I'm only conveying their interest. Whether you meet with them is up to you.”
“I'm not meeting anybody,” Robin protested furiously. “I don't know them. I don't even know you—and I never authorized you to be my spokesman to the NIH!”
“Well, that was my mistake, then,” said Akira, “because I thought your allegations of fraud were a serious matter. . . .”
“There are no allegations of fraud,” said Robin. “My only claims were about possible error.”
A slight smile played about Akira's lips. “Either you're making a charge or you're not,” he said again. “If you're going to pursue this, you'll have to decide what exactly you are pursuing.”
“I'm pursuing the truth,” said Robin.
“And would that be a gentle, conciliatory truth, or the real deal?” Akira asked her. “Because there's no point working on this if you don't know where you stand. Naturally, you aren't used to making judgments,” he allowed. “In the lab it wasn't your place to think about what was right and what was wrong.”
She was amazed. Where he should have been apologizing to her for presenting her case to ORIS—albeit anonymously—he was apologizing
for
her instead, excusing her ignorance and timidity. He spoke with such a strange mixture of intelligence and paranoia that she scarcely knew how to listen.
“You were just a servant,” he told her. “It takes a while to stop thinking like one. Grab that, will you?”
She gave him such a look, he picked up the folded leaf bag himself.
“I've got to get going,” she told him.
“I want to show you something,” he said.
“I really have to go.”
“No, wait,” he said. “Look at these first.”
They were the biggest dahlias she had ever seen. They bloomed high above her head, each blossom honeycombed in deepest purple.
“They're gorgeous,” she said.
“They're Art's favorite.”
“This is Art Ginsburg's house?” She glanced with new respect at the massive brown building.
“He was on my committee at Harvard, and he took me in. He hired me a couple of years ago.”
She was shocked. She had never imagined Marion's nemesis capable of helping anybody. He of the reptilian smiles at the seminar table.
“He's a good guy,” said Akira. “He got me working here as horticultural therapy. He was the one who turned me on to dahlias. I didn't know anything about plants when I was inside. They were too busy killing me.”
How quickly, Robin thought, she'd moved from dedicated research to the muddy land of malcontents. Just weeks before, she'd been a scholar, and now she was listening to a vindictive gardener. If science was cruel and feudal, still she had enjoyed the privileges of the court, the instruments and time there, the great storerooms of materials, the labyrinthine passageways of discovery leading mostly to dead ends, but always promising more, a glimpse of greatness from far off, the glow of success just around the corner. She was still new enough to the outside world to see those who had cast science off as the impoverished ones, and to hope that she would not remain among them. She felt for Akira, but he also frightened her. She did not want to be used by him, or become like him. She did not want to curse the kingdom from afar, but to vindicate herself and find her way back.