Lab Girl (31 page)

Clint came home from work just in time for us to eat dinner all together, and afterward we took Coco for a long walk around the neighborhood. Our son was successfully in bed at exactly nine o'clock, but not before I handed him a small vial of wheatgrass juice while he prepared to brush his teeth.

“Drink this first,” I commanded. “If you dare,” I added.

His eyes widened. “You did it!” he said with awe, and then drank it down while wincing over its bitter taste.

For weeks he had been begging me to make a potion that would turn him into a tiger. “Make it in your lab,” he had directed me. “Make it out of plants.”

As I tucked him into bed, he got that look that kids wear when there is something important that they want to tell you. “Me and Bill are going to put a basement on our tree house,” he told me.

“How are you going to do that?” I asked, genuinely interested.

“We're going to design it,” he explained. “It will take a lot of designing. We're going to make a mock-up first.”

I pushed my luck. “Can I go inside when it's done?”

“No,” he refused, and then reconsidered. “Well, maybe after it's not new anymore.” After a pause he closed his eyes and asked, “Am I a tiger yet?”

I looked him up and down slowly, and then answered, “No.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because it takes a long time,” I answered.

“Why does it take a long time?” he pursued.

“Why? I don't know,” I admitted, then added, “It takes a long time to turn into what you're supposed to be.”

He looked at me as if he wanted to ask more questions, but he also understands that pretending that things are true is often more fun than knowing that they are false.

“But it will work for sure, won't it?” he asked.

“It will work,” I confirmed. “It worked before.”

“On who?” he said, intrigued.

“On a little mammal named
Hadrocodium,
” I explained. “He lived almost two hundred million years ago and he spent most of his time hiding from the dinosaurs, who would step on him if he didn't watch out. Do you remember the magnolia tree in front of the house where we lived when you were little-little?” I asked.

“That tree out front was the great-great-great-great-and-more-grandchild of the first flower, which looked like it. It was just born as a brand-new kind of plant when
Hadrocodium
was running around. One day he ate some leaves from it, because his mom told him that it would make him as strong as a dinosaur. But it turned him into a tiger instead. It took a hundred and fifty million years, and a lot of trial and error, but she finally did turn into a tiger.”

My son perked up. “ ‘She'? You said it was a ‘he.' The tiger is a boy.”

“Why can't the tiger be a girl?” I asked.

My son explained the obvious. “Because it's not.” After a few seconds he added, “Are you going to the lab tonight?”

“Yes, but I'll be back before you wake up,” I assured him. “Daddy is just across the hall, and Coco is watching you while you sleep. This house is full of people who love you,” I chanted, our customary bedtime mantra.

He turned to the wall, a signal that he's too sleepy for more talking. I went into the kitchen and made two cups of instant coffee. Looking at the clock, I figured I would get into the lab by ten-thirty. When I picked up my phone to text Bill that I was on my way, I saw that there were already two texts from him. The first read “BRING IPECAC” and the second, sent about an hour later, said “AND MORE FOOD.”

I brought the second cup of coffee to Clint and said, “I'm nearly off.” We both knew that the pages of handwritten equations that he was busy deriving were thoroughly unintelligible to me, and so he laughed when I said, “Hey, let me know if I can help you with that, eh?”

“Actually,” he mentioned, “I would like to get your take on a figure that I made today.”

“It's great. I love it,” I said without looking up from my purse, as I was digging for my keys.

“It's new. You haven't seen it yet,” he emphasized.

“Then it's crap. The y-axis is way off,” I said, waving one hand.

He laughed again. “It's a map.”

I answered, “Then the colors are wrong. Babe, I gotta go botch my own science; no time to ruin yours.” I added helplessly, “The Monkey Jungle never sleeps.”

“Well, thanks for the consult,” he said as I kissed him.

I went back into our son's room to check that he was sleeping. I kissed him on the forehead and smiled because he had already gotten to the age where he doesn't always let me kiss him when he is awake. I recited the Lord's Prayer and my heart felt full. I petted Coco, who was lying at the foot of the bed; when I hugged her head and whispered, “Will you guard my baby?” she looked at me with the big, somber eyes of a Chesapeake who had answered that question once and for all years ago.

I kissed my husband again, put on my backpack, and went outside to open the shed. I got out my bike and looked up through the warm, tropical sky, into the terminal coldness of space, and saw light that had been emitted years ago from unimaginably hot fires that were still burning on the other side of the galaxy. I put on my helmet and rode to the lab, ready to spend the rest of the night using the other half of my heart.

OFTEN WHEN DEALING WITH PLANTS,
it is difficult to tell the end from the beginning. Rip almost any plant in half, and its roots can live on for years. The trunk of a felled tree will attempt to grow whole again year after year after year; its inner trunk is lined with dormant buds—sometimes twice as many buds as are visible from the outside—ready to incite. Buds burst as stems, stems become twigs, lucky twigs become branches, good branches persist for decades, and eventually the canopy is as green as it ever was, perhaps all the more so because someone tried to cut it down.

Unlike animals, which function as a single whole, plants are modular in construction, the whole strictly equivalent to the sum of its parts. A tree can shed and replace whole portions of itself and is indeed compelled to do so repeatedly throughout the several centuries of its average life span. In the end, trees die because being alive has simply become too expensive for them. Whenever the sun is up, leaves are working to split water, add atmosphere, and then glue the whole mess into sugar that can be transported down into the stem, where it meets dilute nutrients that were laboriously pulled up by the roots. A plant can bundle all these treasures into new wood and use it to strengthen the trunk or branches.

But the tree also has many other demands: replacing old leaves, making medicine against infection, pumping out flowers and seeds—these use the same raw materials, there are never enough to spare, and there is only so far out or down the tree can go in order to search for them. Eventually it will require more nutrients to maintain the branches and roots that do not grow quite far out enough to capture those nutrients. Once it exceeds the limitations of its environment, it loses all. And this is why you must trim a tree periodically in order to preserve it. Because—as Marge Piercy first said—both life and love are like butter and do not keep: they both have to be made fresh every day.

THERE IS SOMETHING PROFOUNDLY SAD
about the end of a plant growth experiment. We grow a lot of
Arabidopsis thaliana,
which is a modest little plant. Once it is fully grown you can pick the whole thing up as a single handful. It's one of the very few plants for which scientists have decoded the entire genome, which means that if you unravel the DNA inside one cell of the plant and stretch it out, we can tell you the exact chemical formula of the 125 million proteins that, one after the other, make up the chain.

Once unraveled from its tight snarl within a cell, this chain of proteins stretches almost two full inches. Every single cell in the plant has at least one snarl of these proteins, and scientists have worked out the chemical formula for the whole damn thing. I don't like to think about it, actually; it's just too much data. It overwhelms me. A scientist is supposed to feel overwhelmed at the beginning of her career, not the end. But the more I know, the more my legs buckle underneath me with the weight of all this information.

For the first time in my life, I feel tired. I remember fondly the long weekends of years past when I could work steadily for forty-eight hours, when each new data point reinvigorated me and recharged my mind in stochastic bursts that culminated periodically into new ideas. I still generate ideas, but they are richer and deeper and they come to me while I am sitting down. Such ideas are also much more likely to actually work. And so each morning, I pick up something green and look at it, and then I plant some more seeds. I do it because it is what I know how to do.

Last spring, Bill and I were sifting through the aftermath of a big agricultural experiment up at the greenhouse. We had been growing sweet potatoes under the greenhouse gas levels predicted for the next several hundred years, the levels that we're likely to see if we, as a society, do nothing about carbon emissions. The potatoes grew bigger as carbon dioxide increased. This was not a surprise. We also saw that these big potatoes were less nutritious, much lower in protein content, no matter how much fertilizer we gave them. This was a bit of a surprise. It is also bad news, because the poorest and hungriest nations of the world rely on sweet potatoes for a significant amount of dietary protein. It looks as if the bigger potatoes of the future might feed more people while nourishing them less. I don't have an answer for that one.

The harvest had taken place a few days before with a huge team of students working for almost three days straight, all led by a fantastically strong and wise young man named Matt who would graduate soon. During the course of the experiment he had grown as well, coming into himself as a leader and an expert in a way that was beautiful to see. He could now stand up in front of twenty people in a scene of chaos, streamline each person toward one useful activity, and then provide nonstop advice and quality control for days. It was as if he had gone to war on those plants and the odd leaf or root lying about the place was evidence of his victory. Bill and I had felt truly privileged to stand by, hands-off as we must eventually be when a student nears graduation.

But now it was all over, and everyone was home resting—except us. This is what it must feel like to visit your son's room after he leaves for college: the beginnings of his life left haphazardly behind, irrelevant to him but still precious to you. The air of the greenhouse was thick with the smell of potting soil; Matt had unearthed every potato from every plant and photographed, measured, and described them each individually. The whole thing was a bit of a blur in the harsh light of day; I sensed that I needed to go home and get some rest, but then again, I supposed that a few more hours wouldn't kill me, and so I stayed.

My phone buzzed and I looked at the calendar, only to realize that I was about to miss the mammogram that was three years overdue, which I had already rescheduled once that semester.
Oh crap,
I thought.
Not again.

The greenhouse door swung open and Bill came in.

“We can cut out our own tumors, right?” I asked him. “I mean, we've got a box cutter around here somewhere, don't we?”

Bill answered without missing a beat, “A drill would work better.” He reflected for a moment. “I think I've got a special tip for that, actually.”

He was chewing hard on one end of a slice of cold, dry pizza that he'd found in one of the many boxes that had been ordered and discarded during the night. Twenty years, I thought, and Bill wasn't any the worse for wear.

Bill was thinking of something different. He looked at me and asked, “Good Lord, did you age five years while I was outside?” and then added, “You look like a fucking sea hag.”

“You're fired,” I told him. “Go see the other sea hags down in HR for your paperwork.”

“They don't work on Saturdays. Besides, c'mon, you gotta come outside.” He motioned toward the door.

The greenhouse that we use is one of many at the university research station, nestled up in the valley beside a little creek that flows down to the ocean. Each greenhouse is as big as a gymnasium and is composed of little more than a huge stainless-steel scaffolding covered over with sheer shade cloth. The Hawaiian Islands are themselves more or less a string of greenhouses: plant growth conditions are excellent year-round, complete with daily showers that are more like routine watering events than like storms.

I looked where Bill was pointing, up toward the jungled mountains, and saw a bright ribbon of rainbow stretching in a full arc across the sky. Its sharp focus made it all the more brazen and beautiful, and it was bracketed by a second rainbow, wider and fuzzier, a gentle halo supporting the confident blaze of the first.

“Hey, it's a double rainbow,” I marveled.

“Goddamn right it's a double rainbow,” Bill said.

“Well, you don't see them often,” I said, justifying my wonder.

“Nope,” Bill agreed. “Nobody sees the second rainbow. But it's always there; it's just that nobody sees it. The big rainbow probably thinks that it's alone.”

I looked at him hard. “You're certainly deep today,” I remarked, and then played my part. “The two rainbows are actually one. A single ray of light moving through bad weather just gives the appearance of two separate things.”

Bill paused, and then commented briskly, “Well, rainbows are self-centered fuckers who need to get over themselves.”

I observed that that wasn't likely to happen anytime soon.

We walked around back, got a couple of lawn chairs from the old shed, and went back inside the greenhouse. The far side of the huge space was a shambles, with stacks of dirty flowerpots in the corner, one of which had been used as a bucket to hold a big snarl of dirty measuring tape. There was a loose heap of soil in one spot, and we set up our folding chairs next to it and then sat with our bare feet in the cool, damp dirt. At the other end of the greenhouse was somebody else's ongoing experiment. Perennial in every sense, it had been there before we came and will probably still be going when I retire.

“How can you not like that?” I waved an arm toward the rows and rows of profuse orchids. “Just smell it.”

“We've got it pretty damn good, I have to admit,” said Bill. “Never dreamed I'd end up in Hawaii,” he continued.

I worry about Bill. I worry about his past, and his would-haves. I worry that he would have a wife and a bunch of kids if he hadn't been hanging around me all these years. Bill keeps explaining to me that because Armenians commonly live for more than a hundred years and he's not even fifty yet, he's still too young to start dating. Nevertheless, I worry about his future. I worry that when he does meet someone, she won't be good enough for him. Bill always laughs this off. “Women used to be put off that I lived in a van,” he complains; “now they only want me for my money.”

Bill is indeed living well. His house rests high on a hill overlooking Honolulu; his homegrown mangoes are the jewel in the crown of his rich and ever-blooming garden. Bill accidentally made a small fortune when he sold the Baltimore house that he had bought as a monstrosity with rotting pipes, shoddy electrical, and a melted foundation—all of which he fixed, late at night and without help, turning it into a gorgeous piece of university-adjacent real estate.

People still puzzle over the two of us, Bill and me. Are we siblings? Soul mates? Comrades? Novitiates? Accomplices? We eat almost every meal together, our finances are mixed, and we tell each other everything. We travel together, work together, finish each other's sentences, and have risked our lives for each other. I'm happily married with a family and Bill was an obvious precondition to all that, a brother whom I would never give up, part of the package. But people that I meet still seem to want a label for what is between us. Just as with the potatoes, I don't have an answer for that one. I do us because us is what I know how to do.

I reached over and picked up a watering can, raining water over the soil covering both our feet. We wiggled our toes and worked the dirt into a nice luxurious mud, and then we leaned back and just sat for a while. Bill eventually broke the silence with “So! What should we do now? We're good until 2016, right?”

Bill was referring to our funding for the lab; we were indeed financially solid through the summer of 2016, with several federal government contracts in place. After that, however, the lab could still fold: research funding for environmental science decreases every year. I have tenure, but Bill certainly doesn't—that sort of thing is only for professors. It is maddening to me that the best and hardest-working scientist I've ever known has no long-term job security, and that this is mostly my fault. The only thing that I can think to do if I lose funding is to threaten to quit, which would probably just leave both of us out on the street. As research scientists, we will never, ever be secure.

“Hey, snap out of it.” Bill clapped his hands in front of my face. “What should we do next? We can do anything we want!” He rubbed his hands together, slapped his thighs, and stood up. Bill was right, as usual.
O me of little faith.
What hard-working team anywhere doing anything has any more security than we do? We will be like the lilies of the field, I decided, except that we
will
toil and spin and sow and reap.

I stood up and stepped forward. “Well, what have we got?” I glanced around, taking a casual inventory of our scattered equipment. “I know,” I said, “let's put all of our stuff in a big stockpile and stare at it for a while. Something will come to me.”

Bill nodded at me and walked to the other side of the greenhouse. He brought over the stash of grow lights that were still good and put them down gently beside the wads of extension cords that I had dragged over from the other side. Then we worked together to move the miter saw, as well as several uncut two-by-fours and a barrel of particleboard scraps. I brought over our toolboxes and positioned them prominently, one with the lid propped open like a deep-sea treasure chest. Bill slid over a few bags of potting soil and set a bag of fertilizer next to each one.

I was laying out the different seeds that we had, one package next to the other, when I looked up to find Bill dragging toward me a roll of chicken wire that had probably been rusting in the corner for years. I wrinkled my nose. “That's not even ours,” I said with disgust.

“It is now,” said Bill, and then we both knew what was coming. We began to sneak through the orchid experiment, plucking loose hoses and broken clamps, shoving them into the makeshift aprons of our T-shirts and walking them back to the pile.

“Holy shit,” exclaimed Bill as he spied an expensive cordless power drill set down between two orchid plants. Bill and I locked eyes as he picked it up. We have at least five cordless drills already and Bill knows that we could buy any number of them just for the hell of it. We very likely have several times more grant money than whoever owns this tool. Every moral and rational fact argued that we should not have stolen the drill. Except for one: whoever owned it was not there.

“Well, you know what they say about Hell,” I remarked while adding the drill to our pile. “The ambiance is bad, but the company is actually pretty good.” Bill sat back down and cracked open a Pepsi. I circled the pile, tucking orchid flowers into it here and there as if I were decorating a Christmas tree.

The drill turned out to be broken: it didn't work then and we've never been able to fix it. But we still have it in the lab somewhere—Bill and I have never even considered putting it back or throwing it away. I'll never concede that any tool is useless and I'll never admit that there is one that I don't need. I will never stop being ravenously hungry for science, no matter how well it feeds me.

On that day that Bill and I sat together inside the greenhouse, we began to talk about our hopes and goals, about what plants can do and about what we might be able to make them do. Soon our brainstorming about what to do next included inevitable discussions of what we'd done before. Before long we were telling each other the stories of this book. I am amazed to realize that these stories now span about twenty years.

During that time we've gotten three degrees, worked six jobs, lived in four countries and traveled through sixteen more, ended up in the hospital five times, owned eight old cars, driven at least twenty-five thousand miles, put a dog to sleep, and produced roughly sixty-five thousand carbon stable isotope measurements. This last was our ostensible goal throughout it all. Before we made said measurements, only God and the Devil himself knew what the values were, and we suspect that neither one of them much cared. Now anyone with a library card can look these values up, because we published them as seventy separate articles within forty different journals. We think of this as progress because it is our impossible job to manufacture new information out of whole cloth. Along the way, we also managed to become adults without ceasing to be children. Nothing reminds us of this as well as the stories that we told and retold on that day.