Lab Girl (3 page)

My laboratory is a place where I write. I have become proficient at producing a rare species of prose capable of distilling ten years of work by five people into six published pages, written in a language that very few people can read and that no one ever speaks. This writing relates the details of my work with the precision of a laser scalpel, but its streamlined beauty is a type of artifice, a size-zero mannequin designed to showcase the glory of a dress that would be much less perfect on any real person. My papers do not display the footnotes that they have earned, the table of data that required painstaking months to redo when a graduate student quit, sneering on her way out that she didn't want a life like mine. The paragraph that took five hours to write while riding on a plane, stunned with grief, flying to a funeral that I couldn't believe was happening. The early draft that my toddler covered in crayon and applesauce while it was still warm from the printer.

Although my publications contain meticulous details of the plants that did grow, the runs that went smoothly, and the data that materialized, they perpetrate a disrespectful amnesia against the entire gardens that rotted in fungus and dismay, the electrical signals that refused to stabilize, and the printer ink cartridges that we secured late at night through nefarious means. I know damn well that if there had been a way to get to success without traveling through disaster someone would have already done it and thus rendered the experiments unnecessary, but there's still no journal where I can tell the story of how my science is done with both the heart and the hands.

Eventually 8:00 a.m. rolls around, the chemicals need to be restocked, the paychecks need to be cut, the plane tickets need to be bought, and so I've lowered my head and written yet another scientific report while the pain, pride, regret, fear, love, and longing have built up deep in my throat unspoken. Working in a lab for twenty years has left me with two stories: the one that I have to write, and the one that I want to.

Science is an institution so singularly convinced of its own value that it cannot bear to throw anything away. This is true even of my father and his slide rules, carefully boxed in the basement of my childhood home and labeled “Standard Linear Slide Rule [25 cm] 30 ct.” There are thirty of them, because it is important that each student has his own—scientists do many things, but they do not share equipment. These old slide rules will never be useful again; they've been thoroughly and terminally outmoded, first by calculators, then by desktop computers, and recently by phones. Nobody's name is written on the box, just a label itemizing what's inside. I used to look at it and wish, with an inexplicable yearning, that my father would write my name on the box. But no one owns those slide rules; they just are. And they certainly never belonged to me.

In 2009, I turned forty years old. By then I had been a professor for fourteen years. It was also the year that we made a significant breakthrough in isotope chemistry, by successfully building a machine that could work side by side with our mass spectrometer.

You probably have a bathroom scale that can tell the difference between a 180-pound man and a 185-pound man. I have a scientific scale that can tell the difference between an atom with twelve neutrons and an atom with thirteen neutrons. Actually, I have two such scales. They are called mass spectrometers, and they are worth about half a million dollars each. The university bought them for me with the not-so-tacit understanding that I would do wonderful and previously impossible things with them and thus further raise the scientific reputation of the institution.

Based on a rough cost-benefit analysis, I need to do about four wonderful and previously impossible things every single year until I fall into the grave in order for the university to break even on me. This is complicated by the fact that the money for every single other thing—chemicals, beakers, Post-it notes, a rag to polish the mass spectrometer—all has to be raised by me through written or verbal supplication for federal or private funding, which is diminishing rapidly on a national level. That is not the most stressful part. The salary of every single person in the lab—aside from my own—also has to be raised by this same mechanism. It would be nice to promise an employee who has sacrificed everything for science and works eighty hours a week more than about six months of job security, but that is not the world within which the research scientist operates. If you're reading this, and you wish to support us, please give me a call. It would be insane of me not to include that sentence.

The year 2009 marked the third year that my team had been working to handcraft an apparatus that could scrub nitrous oxide out of the gases released during the detonation of a homemade explosive. Once we got it working, we were going to attach it to the front end of one of the mass spectrometers and make measurements. We were hoping to contribute a new method of forensic analysis for the chemical aftermath of a terrorist attack, since the number of neutrons in any given substance can serve as a sort of fingerprint. Our idea was to compare, and perhaps link, the chemical fingerprint of post-blast residues with that of the chemical traces gathered from surfaces where the explosives might have been constructed—a kitchen countertop, for example.

We happened to “sell” the idea to the National Science Foundation in 2007—right after the press reported that IEDs (improvised explosive devices) were causing more than half of the deaths of coalition forces in Afghanistan. Not only were we awarded the funding, but the figure had more zeros behind it than I had ever before seen on paper. I wanted to be studying plant growth, but science for war will always pay better than science for knowledge. My devious plan was that we'd put in our forty hours a week on the explosives project and then spend another forty hours moonlighting with our plant biology experiments.

This protocol gave rise to both a splendid exhaustion and increased desperation during the usual setbacks and demi-failures. The chemical reaction that we were tweaking was difficult and recalcitrant: it was easy enough to get the nitrogen out of the explosives residue, but converting the oxygen attached to it proved much trickier than we had assumed, and we had trouble keeping track of the neutrons during the manipulation. In fact, no matter what we analyzed, once we attached it to the mass spectrometer, the readout gave us almost identical values. It was maddening, like asking a human subject to identify a red versus a green light and then having him respond “green” every time, regardless of what you showed him.

At what point do you escort your befuddled subject to the door and begin anew with a different recruit? Well, never, if you are as pigheaded as I am. We had slowed down and become more careful, hoping to exclude the careless imprecisions that a more robust experiment might have tolerated. Soon after that, what we had projected as two-hour tasks in the lab were taking four days to complete, and eight days to complete correctly. We also had to squeeze all of this lab work in between watering, fertilizing, and documenting the growth of a hundred plants every day.

I'll always remember the night that we finally got our explosives analyzer successfully synced up with the mass spectrometer, and it started giving us the standardized values that we knew it should—similar though it was to many other nights of my life. It was a Sunday evening, at the late hour when one first feels Monday begin to threaten. As usual, I was obsessing over our budgets. Because the project was drawing to a close, I could calculate the exact day that the lab would run out of funding. I was sitting in my office poring over chemical prices, casting spells on dimes and trying to alchemize them into dollars, but I still couldn't push back bankruptcy for more than a few months.

The door opened and my lab partner, Bill, came bounding into my office. He plopped himself down in a broken chair and threw some papers onto my desk. “All right, I'm ready to say it. The motherfucker works, and it works beautifully!” he announced.

I began to leaf through his stack of readouts, unsurprised to see that each of the different gas samples now displayed a different, and accurate, value. I am usually ready to pronounce something a success long before Bill is. He always wants to run one more set of standards and do one more calibration before he admits that we've conquered failure.

Bill and I grinned at each other, knowing that we'd pulled it off, yet again. The whole project was a fine example of how we work together: I cook up a pipe dream, embellish it until it is borderline impossible, pitch and sell the idea to a government agency, purchase the supplies, and then dump it all on Bill's desk. From there, Bill produces a first, a second, and then a third prototype, protesting all the while that the idea is an impossible pipe dream. When his fifth design shows promise, and his seventh works (provided you turn it on while wearing a blue shirt and facing east), we are both seduced by the smell of success.

From there, we enter a period of me working days and him working nights, and both of us Tweeting, texting, and Facebooking every single data readout until our homemade creation has proven itself to be as accurate and reliable as my grandmother's Singer treadle sewing machine. Then, after Bill does one more battery of tests—or two, or maybe just also a third one—
then
we are done. It is now my job to revise history for the final report: to narrate the supreme ease with which we've gotten our baby up and running and to itemize what an excellent investment this has all been for our benefactor. With the new fiscal year, we start all over again—an even more ambitious goal supported by a budget that might get us halfway there, if we're frugal.

A definitive dataset, made with integrity and interpreted honestly, is the most innocent thing in the world, but whenever we produce one, Bill and I feel like Bonnie and Clyde celebrating yet another clean getaway. “In your face, universe!”

I shook my fists toward the ceiling on that night; then I ran my fingers through my stringy hair, trying to massage some fresh oxygen into my brain—a habit that I had picked up in graduate school. “You know, we're both getting too old for these long nights.” I glanced at the clock and noted that my son had gone to bed several hours ago.

“But how shall we designate the apparatus?” Bill, energized by success, wanted to brainstorm over a funny name that could be condensed into an even funnier acronym. “I'm thinking we can work ‘CAT' into it based on the nickel-catalyzed disproportion reaction.”

No writer in the world agonizes over words the way a scientist does. Terminology is everything: we identify something by its established name, describe it using the universally agreed-upon terms, study it in a completely individual way, and then write about it using a code that takes years to master. When documenting our work, we “hypothesize” but never “guess”; we “conclude,” not just “decide.” We view the word “significant” to be so vague that it is useless but know that the addition of “highly” can signify half a million dollars of funding.

The scientific rights to naming a new species, a new mineral, a new atomic particle, a new compound, or a new galaxy are considered the highest honor and grandest task to which any scientist may aspire. Strict rules and traditions govern the naming conventions within each scientific field. You must muster all you know about what you've discovered and the world you live in, take what you remember and then figure out what makes you smile, make an allusion to something both contemporary and eternal, and finally christen the precious article as best you can, hoping against hope that some part of your clumsy label might stick through the ages to come. But on that night I was too brain-dead for the semantics-fest; I just wanted to go home and go to bed.

“We could call it ‘four hundred and eighty thousand dollars of taxpayer money,' because that's what we spent making the damn thing,” I suggested with a hiss toward the disobedient budget sheets that I was torturing toward reconciliation. I couldn't figure out who the hell to petition for more funding now that the project was over; we had maxed out all of our usual sources the previous year, and the budgets of every governmental agency that funded our research were shrinking. As much as I have loved being a scientist, I am ready to admit that I am tired of all the hard things that should be easy by now.

Bill watched me for a moment and then got up, slapping both thighs. “We don't have to call it anything. I'll just grind your last name into it. That's all it needs.” We made eye contact and recognized fifteen years of our shared history reflected back in each other's eyes. I nodded my acknowledgment, and as I was still struggling to find the right words to thank him, Bill turned and walked out of my office.

He is strong where I am weak, and so together we make one complete person, each of us gaining half of what we need from the world and the other half from each other. I inwardly vowed to do whatever it took to raise more salary for him and to keep us going. As with many years before, I'd just have to find a way. Within two separate but adjacent rooms, we tuned two radios to different stations and went back to our work, having once again reassured each other that we are not alone.

LIKE MOST PEOPLE,
I have a particular tree that I remember from my childhood. It was a blue-tinged spruce (
Picea pungens
) that stood defiantly green through the long months of bitter winter. I remember its needles as sharp and angry against the white snow and gray sky; it seemed a perfect role model for the stoicism being cultivated in me. In the summer I hugged it and climbed it and talked to it, and fantasized that it knew me and that I was invisible when I was underneath it, watching ants carry dead needles back and forth, damned to some lower circle of insect Hell. As I got older I realized that the tree didn't actually care about me, and I was taught that it could make its own food from water and air. I knew that my climbing constituted (at most) a vibration beneath notice, and that pulling branches off for my forts was akin to pulling single hairs off of my own head. And yet, each night for several more years, I slept ten feet away from that tree, separated only by a glass window. Then I went to college and began the long process of leaving my hometown, and my childhood, behind.

Since then, I have realized that my tree had been a child once too. The embryo that became my tree sat on the ground for years, caught between the danger of waiting too long and the danger of leaving the seed too early. Any mistake would surely have led to death, and to being swallowed up by a seething, unforgiving world capable of rotting even the strongest leaf in a matter of days. My tree had also been a teenager. It went through a ten-year period where it grew wildly, with little regard for the future. Between ages ten and twenty it doubled in size, and it was often ill prepared for the new challenges and responsibilities that came with such height. It strove to keep up with its peers and occasionally dared to outdo them by brazenly claiming the odd pocket of full sun. Focused solely on growth, it was incapable of making seeds yet prone to fits and starts of the necessary hormones. It marked the year as did the other teenagers: it shot up tall in the spring, it made new needles for the summer season, and it stretched its roots in the fall, until it reluctantly settled into a boring winter.

From the teenagers' perspective, the grown-up trees presented a future that was as stultifying as it was interminable. Nothing but fifty, eighty, maybe a hundred years of just trying not to fall down, unpunctuated by the piecemeal toil of replacing fallen needles every morning and shutting down enzymes every night. No more rush of nutrients to signal the conquering of new territory underground, just the droop of a reliable, worn taproot into last winter's new cracks. The adults grew a bit thicker around the middle each year, with little else to show for the passing decades. In their branches they stingily dangled hard-won nutrients above the perpetually hungry younger generations. Good neighborhoods, rich with water, thick soil, and—most important—full sunlight, give rise to trees that reach their maximum potential. In contrast, trees in bad neighborhoods never achieve half of that height, never have much of a teenage growth spurt, but focus instead on just holding on, growing at less than half the rate of the more fortunate.

During its eighty-odd years my tree was likely sick several times. Unable to run away from the constant barrage of animals and insects eager to dismantle it for shelter and food, it preempted attacks by armoring itself with sharp points and toxic, inedible sap. Its roots were the most at risk, smothered and vulnerable within a blanket of rotting plant tissue. The cost of maintaining these defenses came out of my tree's meager savings that were intended for happier uses: each drop of sap was a seed that didn't happen; each thorn was a leaf that wouldn't be made.

In 2013 my tree made a terrible mistake. Assuming that winter was over, it stretched its branches and grew a new crop of lush needles in anticipation of the summer. But then an unusual May brought a rare spring blizzard, and a copious amount of snow came down in just one weekend. Conifer trees can stand heavy snow, but the added weight of the foliage proved too much. The branches first bowed and then broke off, leaving a tall, bare trunk. My parents euthanized my tree by cutting it down and grinding out its roots. When they mentioned it on the phone months later, I was standing in the dazzling sunshine, living more than four thousand miles away in a place where it never snows. I think of the irony that I fully appreciated that my tree was alive only just in time to hear that it had died. But it's more than that—my spruce tree was not only alive; it had a
life,
similar to but different from my own. It passed its own milestones. My tree had its time, and time changed it.

Time has also changed me, my perception of my tree, and my perception of my tree's perception of itself. Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life. It has also convinced me that carefully writing everything down is the only real defense we have against forgetting something important that once was and is no more, including the spruce tree that should have outlived me but did not.