Lab Girl (27 page)

“Okay, well, that's what we're gonna do, we're going to rock three times, and then you are gonna push,” she says, and we try it for a while.

“C'mon, baby, you have a beautiful head, but we wanna see your face,” clucks an older nurse as she pats my knee. I synchronize with the arc on the monitor and I push hard, and after I do so, I see the doctor's demeanor change.

She remains calm but stiffens perceptibly and says to the nurse assisting her, “The cord is around his neck. We will do a vacuum extraction.” Three people ready a tray of instruments somewhere near my feet, their actions fluid and rapid. The doctor looks into my eyes, intense and serious, and says to me, “This is going to hurt,” and I nod my acknowledgment. I briefly notice that she is not wearing earrings, and that I am not wearing earrings, and then everything goes white.

The doctor has attached the suction cup of a ventouse instrument to my son's head, leaned forward, stabilized her weight, and then used all of her might to rip the two of us apart from each other. I hear my own voice shrieking out its bewilderment at finding so many imperfections within a world of limitless potential. When my vision clears, I realize that what I have actually heard is the long-known and already-recognized cry of my new baby.

Now my son and I are side by side, and one team of people is holding and helping him and another team of people is holding and helping me, and we are all covered in my blood, and both of us are just fine. I need do nothing but lie luxuriously and passively marvel at my baby next to me, as it seems as if every single worker in the hospital is busily employed in swabbing the two of us, cleaning us, and checking every single part of both of us again and again. Every detail is being written down and recorded on multiple charts and readouts because we all agree that this data is far too precious to ever be lost or forgotten.

Once my team has stopped my bleeding, they massage a bucketful of now-useless placental chum out of my abdomen while the other team brings my washed and wrapped baby to me for a kiss. “
You
just had a completely healthy nine-pound baby,” says a young nurse with a smile.

I smile back at her. “I must be stronger than I look.”

“All women are,” my doctor adds while scrutinizing the womaniest part of me, improvising a pattern upon which to seam the torn pieces and hem the jagged edges.

Clint is standing next to me, and it is finally his turn to hold and kiss the baby. I look over at my son and I see just enough of my own face in his that I know exactly what he is thinking. He is glad to be born so that he can finally get things started. After Clint puts him back in my arms, he falls asleep and I spend the first of the many, many hours that I will pass during the next months fascinatedly staring at his beautiful face. He sleeps contentedly while my doctor sews, and keeps sewing, and more than ninety minutes goes by. Finally, they pack me with gauze and prepare to leave me with my baby and his father, but not before the blood pressure cuff gives me a hug goodbye, beeps its congratulations, and silently promises to check on me later. The lights are dimmed, and the three of us lie side by side and sleep for hours.

The next days are like a long, happy dream in which I don't have to do anything but lie in bed and periodically testify that I am not psychotic. For reasons known only to the medical establishment, it is crucial under these conditions to establish the patient's sentience with respect to both the day of the week and the identity of our supreme elected official once every six hours. I make a point to proclaim, “Happy Tuesday! Ain't it a grand day for Bush to be in the White House?” toward anyone who walks by wearing a white coat.

On the second day of my stay, the doctor who delivered my son examines my stitches and pronounces my healing to be coming along nicely. After they repack me with gauze and prop me up in the bed, I recommence greedily sucking on my strawberry malt until a bit goes down the wrong way. When I cough forcefully, something gelatinous detaches from inside me and tumbles out, and a bloody stain the size of a dinner plate slowly soaks in between my legs for all to see.

“I don't mean to be a bother,” I remark, “but am I supposed to be bleeding this much?”

“There's not a pound of fat on you,” answers my doctor. “All that weight was fluid and tissue that you no longer need. It's going to take a while for it all to come out.”

As the nurses help me change my bedclothes all over again my doctor adds, “Don't worry. We're all watching you,” and after she walks out, I resist hard my temptation to believe that my grandmother might be speaking to me through her.

And so I lie in bed and feel what I don't need come out of me. A steady ooze of bloody, amorphous clots slides out of me for days and with it flows all the guilt and regret and fear that I have carried, and while I sleep, people stronger than I am silently take it all away and dispose of it properly. When I wake, I hold my baby and I think about how he is my second opal that I can forever draw a circle around and point to as being mine.

As we remain in the hospital for another week, the rainy April weather gives way to a dazzling bloom of May sunshine, and the new pattern of our lives starts to emerge. When Clint holds our son I edit a manuscript, or remotely log on to the mass spectrometer, or reject somebody's paper, or sketch out a graph, and we develop a routine that will carry us through the next several years. We pass the baby back and forth, smiling our love to each other during each handoff, and practice doing three things at once. Bill surprises us by visiting the hospital and hugs me for the first and only time in eleven years, and I am amazed to see how easily and willingly he settles into the role of beloved uncle.

All the extra tests performed during our extended hospital stay verify that my difficult pregnancy has ended in a normal, healthy birth. While lying awake during my final night in the hospital, I realize, as I often do, that a problem has eluded me not because it is unsolvable, but because its solution is necessarily unconventional. I decide that I will not be this child's mother. Instead, I will be his father. It is something I know how to do and something that will come naturally to me. I won't think about how weird my thinking is; I will just love him and he will love me and it will just work.

Perhaps this has been a million-plus-year-old experiment that even I couldn't screw up. Perhaps this beautiful little baby at whom I stare anchors me to yet another thing that is greater than myself. Perhaps it will be one of the great privileges of my life to watch him grow and give him what he needs, and let him take my love for granted. Perhaps I can do this. I have help, I have enough money, I have love, I have work, and I have medicine if I need it. Maybe they that sow in tears actually shall reap in joy. Perhaps I can do this too.

EVERY LIVING CELL IS
essentially just a tiny bag of water. Viewed from this perspective, life (the verb) is little more than the construction and reconstruction of trillions of bags of water. One thing that makes this difficult is that there is not enough water. There will never be enough water for all the cells that could grow. Every living being on the Earth's surface has been conscripted into a never-ending war over a total amount of water that equals less than one-thousandth of one percent of the planet's total.

Trees are at the worst disadvantage because they cannot roam the landscape in search of the water that they need—and because they are large, they need a great deal more than the animals that can move. If you drive across the United States from Miami to Los Angeles on Interstate 10, passing through Louisiana and Texas and Arizona, it might take you three long days, but it will surely teach you the most important fact in all of plant biology: the amount of green that you find at a given location is in direct proportion to the amount of annual rainfall at the site.

If we think of all the water on Earth as an Olympic-sized swimming pool, the amount that's available to plants within the soil would fill less than one soda bottle. Trees require so much water—more than a gallon is needed to build a handful of leaves—that it is tempting to envision the roots as actively sucking the soil. But the reality is quite different: the roots of a tree are absolutely passive. Water flows passively into the roots during the day and passively out of them at night, faithful as the tides of the ocean drawn by the moon. Root tissue functions like a sponge: when placed dry upon spilled milk, it will automatically expand to draw the fluid in. If we then move this full sponge onto dry cement, we will soon see the fluid drawn back out, making a wet spot on the sidewalk. Digging down into any soil, we find it wetter as we travel toward the bedrock.

A mature tree gets most of its water through its taproot, which is the root that extends straight down. Tree roots located near the surface grow laterally to form a netted support structure that prevents the tree from falling over. These shallow roots also leak moisture into the dry soil, especially when the sun is down and the tree's leaves are not actively sweating. Mature maple trees passively redistribute water taken from depth up and out of their shallow roots all night long. The small plants living near these big trees have been shown to rely upon this recycled water for more than half of their needs.

A sapling's life is extremely difficult: 95 percent of the trees that make it to their first birthday will not make it to their second. The average tree seed does not travel far; most maple seedlings take root less than ten feet away from the trunk that supports the very branches from which the seed fell. Thus maple saplings must struggle for light while still in the shade of an adult maple tree that has been successfully capturing and using all of the nutrients in the area for years.

There is, however, one reliable act of parental generosity between the maple and its offspring. Each night beneath the ground, the most precious resource of all—water—moves up from the strong and out toward the weak, such that the sapling might live to fight another day. This water is not everything the sapling requires, but it must help a little, and the sapling needs all the help it can get if one hundred years from now there is still to be a maple tree defending this same plot of land. No parent can make life perfect for its offspring, but we are all moved to provide for them as best we can.

DURING THE LAST TEN YEARS
we have learned that a tree actually remembers its childhood. Scientists in Norway have been collecting seeds borne by spruce tree “siblings” (that is, half-clones) growing in both cold and warm climates; they have germinated thousands of these seeds under identical conditions and have grown the survivors to maturity within a single forest.

Every spruce does the same thing each autumn: they perform a “bud set,” where they stop growing in anticipation of the first frost. The Norwegian scientists have observed that among hundreds of genetically identical trees, grown from seedling to adult side by side in the forest, the trees that had been embryos under a cold climate invariably set their buds two to three weeks earlier than do their counterparts, anticipating a longer, colder winter. All of the trees in their study were identically adapted, but the early bud-setters remembered their cold seedhoods, even though they were consistently ill served by this nostalgia.

We don't know exactly how this memory works. We think it is the sum total of several complex biochemical reactions and interactions. Researchers also don't know exactly how the human memory works. They think it is the sum total of several complex biochemical reactions and interactions.

The year that our son started school, we went to live in Norway for a year. I was a Fulbright Scholar and joined a group trying to figure out what tree memory means for the spruce of today, which experience childhood under one climate, only to be thrust into an adulthood governed by a different climate. Establishing the accuracy of human memory, even within one's own mind, is a difficult scientific proposition. It's much harder to measure memory in an organism with a life span that's more than twice your own.

For our experiments, we exploit the most fundamental difference between plants and animals—namely, that most plant tissues are redundant and flexible: a root can become a stem if need be, and vice versa. The fragmentation of a single embryo can lead to several copies of that plant, each with an identical blueprint of genes. New propagation techniques allow us to answer questions like “Does a tree remember extreme malnutrition experienced during childhood?” by starving one seedling for years while lavishing nutrients upon its identical twin. Such experiments are the only way to find definitive answers; they are deeply repugnant and obviously unethical with human subjects. Plants, in contrast, are fair game.

To start these experiments, I count out a hundred spruce seeds—each one smaller than a sesame seed—and soak them in sterile water for several hours. I sit down and adjust my stool in front of a wall that blows sterile air at me, a gentle mechanical wind. I lose myself for a moment in sentimentality, remembering the young girl that I was twenty years ago, who sat in front of a similar sterile hood within a hospital and searched for her future via painful trial and error. “Everything in front of me is clean, and everything behind me is contaminated,” I chant to myself. I rotely line up my tools, not placing anything between them and the wall.

The seeds that I am using were collected by Scandinavian foresters nearly a generation ago, from a conspicuously average tree for which I have pages of description written in Norwegian, in the forced penmanship of 1950. I picture dour blond men in muck boots and wonder if they would be proud of me. I decide that they wouldn't as I mark my reflection within a window of the darkened room: greasy hair, tightly pulled back, and stubborn acne that comes and goes.

I light the Bunsen burner close on my right and set the flame to exactly one inch. It flickers in the airstream and helps to sterilize the air. I drop my right elbow and put an alcohol swab on my left side, instinctively keeping both away from open fire. Using my left hand, I fish out one seed with tweezers and position it. I look through the microscope and turn it flat, remorseful that my hands aren't steadier and swearing off coffee for the third time that day. With my right hand, I make a broad and shallow cut with the scalpel, attempting to peel back the seed coat and expose the embryo.

I press the scalpel to flex the coat, and slide one prong of the tweezers under the embryo. I move the embryo forward, too small to see, and touch the tweezers into a petri dish full of gelatin medium that I spent yesterday cooking and pouring. I close the lid and tape it shut with purple tape—the color that means Tuesday. On the lid of the dish, I circle the area where I dropped the embryo in order to narrow the field that we will search for growth or infection. Under the circle I write a long code in black pen that designates the year, the media batch, the parent tree, and the seed lot. I don't write my initials because we all learned each other's handwriting long ago, just as I can recognize the handwriting of each dead Norwegian forester whom I have never met. My lab mates rib me by not crossing the sevens within codes that they know I will see, poking fun at my American-ness. I check the code that I have written twice for accuracy, whispering it out loud each time. The entire process takes me between two and three minutes. I repeat it exactly one hundred times.

Of the many million seeds dropped on every acre of the Earth's surface each year, less than 5 percent will begin to grow. Of those, only 5 percent will survive to their first birthday. Given these realities, the first and foremost experiment in each tree research study—growing a sapling—is actually an ill-omened fight with near-certain failure. Thus the initial planting of seedlings at the start of a forestry study represents a weary victory won by a stoic researcher with a strong sense of fatalism.

This unique intellectual agony shapes the character of the tree experimentalist and selects for those with a religious devotion to science, patient with overtones of masochism. They neither seek nor win the adoration and glory claimed by nuclear physicists who observe new particles and bluster about the speed of light. I am learning their mind-set as I am learning the substages of embryonic development, and both appeal to me. We plant tiny trees during the night so that they may be baptized with morning dew, and sustain our faith that their measurement will yield knowledge to our scientific heirs, some two hundred years from now.

I gather up the petri dishes and carry them through the basement to the walk-in incubator, where I will leave them in the dark at a temperature of exactly twenty-five degrees Celsius. The incubator is like a humid mausoleum, and I wonder if the faintly moldy smell is real or just my own paranoia. Each embryo rests on a bed of gelatin extracted from thousands of other seeds. This medium will fool my embryos into developing wildly, unrestrained by the seed coat that I removed.

In twenty days I hope to find them splayed out indecently, many times larger than they would naturally be—that is, if a fungal contaminant hasn't gotten to the nutrients first. At that time I will select the healthy embryos and rip them apart slowly, transferring the pieces onto a gelatin made from ridiculous amounts of fertilizer and growth hormones. If I am careful and lucky, I can tear a single embryo into twelve pieces under the microscope. Today I cull the intact embryos from two weeks ago, dismember exactly fifty, and then leave them bleeding cytoplasm in the hope that they'll recover and elongate into something that is green on one end and rootlike on the other. My embryo pieces will spend a month under artificial sunlight, forced to photosynthesize and trying to outrun that damned fungus.

Like Julia Child drawing a finished soufflé out of the same oven into which she inserts an uncooked one, I select a hundred healthy differentiated embryos from the light chamber, swapping for the ones I just dissected. I tuck each of these tiny plantlets into the potting cups I've fashioned out of egg cartons, using one Popsicle stick to make a hole in the soil and another to tuck the seedling under. Occasionally during planting, I notice something odd in one of the samples—some goofy green whorl—and I allow myself ten minutes to stare at it and soak up the pleasure of an unusual moment within this day, week, month of monotony.

I should write down that this one is different, but I don't. I used to note any oddities religiously, but I do it less and less as the years go by. It feels too much like a confidence that I haven't been given permission to share. The first green tissues of a radish seedling are two perfectly heart-shaped, symmetric leaves. In twenty years of growing hundreds of these plants, I have seen exactly two deviants, each with a perfect third leaf—a baffling green triad where there should be only a pair. I think of those two plants often, and they even enter my dreams occasionally, causing me to wonder why I was meant to see them. Being paid to wonder seems like a heavy responsibility at times.

At the end of my day I have arranged exactly one hundred tiny trees into a grid. I take photos, guiltily indulging in forty-five minutes of insipid pop radio (music causes labeling mistakes). The finished seedlings resemble a company of green toy soldiers, and I imagine them as fresh seventeen-year-old World War One recruits, eager to be shipped out with no real idea of what they're getting into. We'll move them into the greenhouse, where they will live in relative bliss for three years and be conscientiously repotted every time their world needs to be a bit bigger.

A collection of the survivors will ultimately be planted in a forest and begin experimental treatment. All our special attention renders it probable that one out of every one thousand embryos that we process will give rise to an adult tree, increasing the odds of success many orders of magnitude over the natural world. In thirty years, perhaps one of the plants before me will bear seed and help give answers to the questions that we ask today. That is, if the university doesn't cut down our forest in order to build a dorm, a day care center, or a fast-food courtyard.

At eleven-thirty in the evening I call Bill and he picks up after two rings. “All quiet on the western front,” I tell him, and he understands. It is morning where he is, and I have just woken him up.

“Okay, I'll be there in a bit.” Then he asks me, “Did you soak the Popsicle sticks?”

“What?” I ask, pretending not to understand.

“Did you soak the
fucking Popsicle sticks
in bleach this time?”

“Yes,” I lie, and he snorts, unconvinced.

“Yes,” I insist, “I soaked them; I soaked the embryos and I drank a glass of it before I started.”

He continues, “Because a year from now, when we're up to our eyeballs in contamination, this whole thing will somehow lose its poetry.”

“Well, hopefully it won't take that long,” I retort, “because we're out of
fucking bleach,
” and we both laugh.

We laughed because it was a joke: Bill was not actually on his way to meet me that night because he was on the other side of the world.

During the years after my son was born, being a scientist became easier, although I am still not quite sure why. It surprised me, because even though I hadn't changed the way I designed my experiments or talked about my ideas, the establishment changed the way that it thought about me. I won contracts, not only from the NSF but from the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. Private donors such as the Mellon Foundation and the Seaver Foundation found me worthy of support. This additional funding didn't make the lab rich, but for the first time we could build new instruments, replace broken parts, and sleep in decent hotels while we traveled; best of all, I could chart out Bill's salary for a year at a time instead of from month to month.

Once I wasn't stressed to distraction about our survival, my patience returned and I rediscovered my love of teaching. The combination of freedom and love is a potent one, and it made me more productive than ever. I summed up my ideas about plant development within longer works, formatted as whole chapters, that allowed for the necessary detail. I started to win awards for these ideas once they were fully expressed: first the Young Scientist Award of the Geological Society of America and then the Macelwane Medal of the American Geophysical Union, which made my tenure decision a no-brainer in 2006. Encouraged, I started to take even bigger risks: I applied to do the spruce experiments in Norway—I wanted to learn to plant tree seedlings. I wanted to know what tree memory was all about.

While I lived in Norway, Bill stayed back at home, running the lab. Clint's easy charm and rare mathematical gift have brought him several standing job offers over the years; he accepted one of them and we moved near Oslo together, where we enrolled our son in a Norwegian kindergarten.

I have always felt at home in the glittering fjordlands of eastern Norway. There, no one ever perceives me as cold or standoffish; I can just be who I am. I love to speak Norwegian, which is a terse language in which every word counts double and the whole meaning can turn on the lilt of just one vowel. I love the dark, snowy nights of winter and the endless pastel days of summer. I love to walk through spruce needles and pick berries and eat fish and potatoes seven days a week.

During that year, I loved everything about living in Norway, except for how much I missed Bill. But deep down we both knew that the separation was good for us: we were getting older, and I was raising a family. Convention and circumstances dictated that we should act more like coworkers and less like twelve-year-old fraternal twins.

Halfway through my year of living in Norway, I sent Bill a text: “I am thinking of you.”

As soon as I sent it, it appeared in my outbox as the last in a long chain of identical unanswered texts that I had been sending daily for three weeks, interspersed with choruses of “I hope you are okay.”

I hadn't heard from Bill in more than a month. I knew he wasn't lost, although I felt as if I was. Four weeks earlier I had woken up to the following e-mail from him: “Hey I just got word that my dad died today. Guess I'm going to California. I'll shut down the mass spectrometer before I go.” I immediately began to text the above mantras, embellished and frequently at first, settling into once daily over time. I never heard anything back.