Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

  Bill looked at me for ten seconds. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  I shrugged again. “How should I know? It’s from the Bible. You’re not supposed to know what it means. Nobody does.”

  He looked at me suspiciously for a minute, but after he saw that I had nothing further to say, he relaxed and returned to digging. Later that evening, after the communally prepared dinner had been rationed out, I sat down at a picnic table across from him. Bill was wrestling with his undercooked chicken. “Wow,” I remarked while examining my own plate. “I don’t think I can eat this.”

  “I know. It’s gross,” he conceded. “But it’s free, so I scarf down seconds each night.”

  “As a dog returneth to his vomit,” I said, while making the sign of the cross in the air in front of me.

  “Amen,” he agreed with his mouth full, and toasted me with his 7Up can.

  After this we began to casually seek each other out, and observing the larger action as a pair became a comfortable default position for both of us. We took to situating ourselves on one edge of the group—still part of it, but removed from the main activity. It seemed natural and easy that we should sit together much while talking little.

  Each evening while I spent the hours reading, Bill sat and rubbed handfuls of dirt across the blade of his old Buck knife, rounding its edge past the dullness of a spatula. He explained to me in great detail how a knife is better for digging than a shovel when you are dealing with a very clayey soil.

  “What’s the book about?” he asked me one night.

  I was reading a new biography of Jean Genet, with whom I had been fascinated since seeing a production of The Screens in Minneapolis in 1989. To me, Genet was the perfect representation of an organic writer, one who wrote purely and didn’t labor to communicate, didn’t expect recognition, and when recognition came didn’t take it in. He was also untaught, which meant that his voice was absolutely original and not a subconscious imitation of hundreds of other books he’d read. I was obsessed with trying to figure out how Genet’s early life had destined him for success while rendering him immune to it.

  “It’s about Jean Genet,” I answered guardedly, knowing that I was revealing myself to be a bit of a nerd. Bill displayed no judgment and even some noncommittal interest. I ventured to explain. “He was a great writer of his generation—had a boundless and complex imagination—but even after he got famous, he just didn’t realize it on some level.”

  I added some of the details that disturbed me most. “While he was growing up, he was incarcerated for one meaningless crime after another and so he developed an alternative vision of morality,” I explained, surprised at how good it felt to be talking with someone about a book. Being outside in the fresh air while speculating on the motives of a dead author made me think of my family, from whom I had drifted far away, in every sense. I watched Bill scrape his knife through the dirt and remembered summer days in the garden with my mother.

  “Genet worked as a prostitute and robbed his clients, and then used the time in jail to write books,” I continued. “The weird thing is that even after he got wealthy, he would still go into stores and steal random stuff that he didn’t need. Pablo Picasso personally bailed him out of jail once…It just doesn’t make any sense,” I concluded.

  “It probably made perfect sense to him,” Bill countered. “Everybody does all kinds of shit that they don’t know why they do. They just know that they have to,” he said, and I thought about that for a moment.

  “Hey, you guys! Want a cold one?” We were interrupted by a good-natured offer from a drunkish student who was dangerously armed with a guitar. He was waving the sort of beer that one purchases for six dollars a case when miles from nowhere.

  “No, I don’t. That stuff you are drinking tastes like piss,” Bill said.

  I felt a need to soften Bill’s statement and added, “Well, I don’t really like beer, but that stuff does seem pretty awful.”

  “Jean Genet wouldn’t have even stolen that shit,” Bill hollered at him over his shoulder, and I smiled, knowing that the joke was ours alone.

  The little group of students leaned in toward one another and said something private, and then began to titter in our direction. Bill and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. It might have been the first time, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last, that the people around us would misinterpret the nature of our connection.

  During the next week we toured a working citrus orchard and were dumbfounded to learn how many different ways there were to mechanically shake the produce from a tree. We also toured the packing facility and saw rows of women standing along a conveyor belt pulling out large or oddly shaped spheres from a river of forest-green fruit that flowed down the line at a rate of ten per second. I am sure that we looked confused when our guide announced solemnly that these women were sorting lemons; it would have been easier to believe that the spheres were billiard balls, given the extremely hard knocking noise they made while bouncing down the conveyor belt.

  Our guide loudly narrated our visit, gushing about how this factory was a great place to work, complete with on-site housing, and I thought about the weird little town that would result from such an arrangement. He ushered us into the plus-five-degree “ripening room,” which was like a windowless train car packed floor-to-ceiling with the hard green fruit. The door would be sealed tonight, he told us, and the room would be flooded with ethylene gas, forcing these lemons to get off their asses and ripen in ten hours. Sure enough, the room next to us contained thousands of identically sized fruits, each sporting a peel so perfectly yellow that it could have been made of plastic.

  After the tour was over, we milled about in the parking lot. “Good grief, talk about mind-numbing. I’ll never complain about school again.” Bill was referring to the lemon-sorting and was also jumping up and down in order to warm himself up after leaving the chilled rooms.

  “Assembly lines depress the shit out of me. The town where I grew up had miles of them,” I said, rubbing my hands and shuddering at the secondhand memory of my brother’s gory third-grade field trip through the slaughterhouse. “Actually, they were more like disassembly lines.”

  “Did you ever work in the factory?” Bill asked.

  “I was lucky, I went to college instead. I moved out of my parents’ house when I turned seventeen.” I spoke cautiously, modulating my urge to trust him.

  “I moved out of my parents’ house when I was twelve,” Bill replied. “But not far, just into the yard.”

  I nodded, as if this was the most perfectly normal thing in the world. “Was that when you lived in a hole?”

  “It was more of an underground fort. I put carpet and electricity in it and everything.” He spoke offhandedly, but not without shy pride.

  “Sounds cool,” I said, “but I don’t think I could sleep in a fort like that.”

  Bill shrugged. “I’m Armenian,” he said. “We’re most comfortable underground.”

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was making a dark joke about his father, who as a child had been hidden in a well during the massacre that had killed the rest of his family. Later, I came to know that Bill lived pursued by the ghosts of his macabre ancestors, and it was they who continuously pressed him to build, plan, hoard, and—above all—survive.

  “Where is Armenia? I don’t even know,” I asked.

  “Most of it isn’t anywhere,” he answered. “That’s kind of the problem.”

  I nodded, sensing the gravity of his words while not really understanding them.

  Near the end of the trip, I approached my advisor as he readied the equipment for the next day’s work. “Listen, we have to hire that Bill guy in the lab,” I told him.

  “You mean the weird dude who’s always off by himself?” he asked.

  “Yes. He’s the smartest one in the class. We need him in the lab.”

  My advisor looked back at the tools he was sorting. “Uh-huh. And how do you know that?
” he asked me.

  “I don’t know it,” I said, “but I feel it.”

  As usual, my advisor relented. “Okay, go ahead, but you have to do the paperwork. I’m already way too overloaded, so he’s your responsibility. You are the one who is going to keep him busy, got it?”

  I nodded gratefully. I was newly excited about the future, but I didn’t quite know why.

  Three days later, when we finally rolled back into town after the trip’s end, it was my job to drop the students off, finally bringing them home with their gear. Bill was the last to be delivered, and it was late at night as I pulled up to the BART station that he’d requested.

  I mentioned the possibility of a job to him. “Hey, I don’t know if you are interested, but I could set it up for you to work in the research laboratory where I work. For money and everything.”

  There was no immediate reaction to my statement. He looked down and after a moment he said gravely, “Okay.”

  “Okay, then,” I agreed.

  Bill continued to sit and stare at his feet while I waited for him to get out of the car and say goodbye. Presently he looked up and then out of the window for several more minutes while I wondered what could be keeping him.

  Finally, Bill turned around and spoke to me: “Aren’t we going to the lab?” he asked.

  “Now? You want to go now?” I smiled at my new friend.

  “I’ve got nowhere else to go,” he said gamely, and then added, “and I’ve got my own shovel.”

  As happens at odd moments, a scene in a book that I had read came back to me and I thought again of Dickens, but this time Great Expectations. I thought about Estella and Pip at the end of the story, and about how they stood exhausted but hopeful within a dusty garden, tasked with rebuilding a ruined house. I thought about how even though neither character knew what to do next, they could see no shadow of being parted.

  7

  THE FIRST REAL LEAF is a new idea. As soon as a seed is anchored, its priorities shift and it redirects all its energy toward stretching up. Its reserves have nearly run out and it desperately needs to capture light in order to fuel the process that keeps it alive. As the tiniest plant in the forest, it has to work harder than everything above it, all the while enduring a misery of shade.

  Folded within the embryo are the cotyledons: two tiny ready-made leaflets, inflatable for temporary use. They are as small and insufficient as the spare tire that is not intended to take you any farther than the nearest gas station. Once expanded with sap, these barely green cotyledons start up photosynthesis like an old car on a bitter winter morning. Crudely designed, they limp the whole plant along until it can undertake the construction of a true leaf, a real leaf. Once the plant is ready for a real leaf, the temporary cotyledons wither and are shed; they look nothing like all the other leaves that the plant will grow from this point forward.

  The first real leaf is built using only a vague genetic pattern with nearly endless room for improvisation. Close your eyes and think of the points on a holly leaf, the star of a maple leaf, a heart-shaped ivy leaf, a triangular fern frond, the fingery leaves of a palm. Consider that there can easily be a hundred thousand lobed leaves on a single oak tree and that no two of them are exactly the same; in fact, some are easily twice as big as others. Every oak leaf on Earth is a unique embellishment of a single rough and incomplete blueprint.

  The leaves of the world comprise countless billion elaborations of a single, simple machine designed for one job only—a job upon which hinges humankind. Leaves make sugar. Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter. All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf. Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die. Period. Under duress, your liver can make glucose out of protein or fat—but that protein or fat was originally constructed from a plant sugar within some other animal. It’s inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves.

  A leaf is a platter of pigment strung with vascular lace. Veins bring water from the soil to the leaf, where it is torn apart using light. The energy produced from this tearing apart of water is what glues sugars together after they are fixed from the air. A second set of veins transports the sugary sap out of the leaf, down to the roots, where it is sorted and packaged for either immediate use or longer-term storage.

  A leaf grows by enlarging the string of cells located along a central vein; single cells on the perimeter eventually decide independently when to stop dividing. From this tip, smaller veins develop, eventually completing the network at the stem; thus the overall maturation proceeds from tip to base. Once the most daring portion of the leaf is complete, the plant puts horse before cart and begins to slide sugar back down and in, down to where it will be used to make more root, which will be used to bring up more water, which will be used to expand new leaves, which will pull back more sugar, and in this manner four hundred million years have passed.

  Every once in a while a plant gets an idea to make a new leaf that changes everything. The spines on a cholla cactus are barbed like a fishhook, sharp and tough enough to puncture the leathery skin of a tortoise. They also reduce airflow across the cactus’s surface, thereby reducing evaporation. They provide meager shade for the stem and a surface upon which to condense dew. The spines are actually the leaves of the cactus; the green portion is its swollen stem.

  Probably within just the last ten million years, a plant had a new idea, and instead of spreading its leaf out, it shaped it into a spine, such as those we find today on the cholla cactus. It was this new idea that allowed a new kind of plant to grow preposterously large and live long in a dry place where it was also the only green thing around to eat for miles—an absurdly inconceivable success. One new idea allowed the plant to see a new world and draw sweetness out of a whole new sky.

  8

  ESTABLISHING YOURSELF as a scientist takes an awfully long time. The riskiest part is learning what a true scientist is and then taking the first shaky steps down that path, which will become a road, which will become a highway, which will maybe someday lead you home. A true scientist doesn’t perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. This transition between doing what you’re told and telling yourself what to do generally occurs midway through a dissertation. In many ways, it is the most difficult and terrifying thing that a student can do, and being unable or unwilling to do it is much of what weeds people out of Ph.D. programs.

  On the day that I became a scientist, I stood in a laboratory and watched the sun come up. I was convinced that I had seen something extraordinary, and I was waiting for the new day to ripen into a reasonable hour at which I could make a telephone call. I wanted to tell someone what I had discovered, though I wasn’t quite sure whom to call.

  My Ph.D. thesis was built around the tree Celtis occidentalis, better known as the hackberry tree, which is found all over North America, common as vanilla ice cream and similarly uninspiring in appearance. Hackberry trees are indigenous to North America and were widely planted in cities in response to one of the innumerable casualties of the European conquest of the New World.

  For hundreds of years, beetles—as well as people—have emigrated from Europe to the United States, arriving on ships and docking at ports across New England. In 1928 a hardy group of six-legged insect-pioneers left the Netherlands and homesteaded themselves under the bark of countless Ulmus trees. During the process, they also introduced a deadly fungus directly into each tree’s bloodstream. The trees responded by shutting down their vascular systems vein by vein to try to limit infection and slowly starved themselves to death while unused nutrients pooled at their roots. Even today, Dutch elm disease continues to ravage the United States and Canada, and tens of thousands of trees succumb each year, pushing the overall death toll well into the millions.

  In contrast, not much can kill a hackberry tree, which has been observed to
endure both early frost and late drought with nary a loss of leaf. These thirty-foot-tall trees will never grow to be as majestic as their sixty-foot-tall elm predecessors; they ask only a moderate amount from their surroundings and earn our regard in proportion to their humility.

  I was interested in Celtis occidentalis because of its prodigious fruit that superficially resembles a cranberry. If you pick one up and squeeze it, however, you’ll find that the berry is as hard as a rock—mainly because it is a rock: just under its rosy skin is a shell harder than that of an oyster. This rocky structure serves as a mighty fortress for a seed that might have to pass through an animal gut, weather the rain and snow, and do battle with ruthless fungi for years prior to germination. The sediments of many archaeological digs are positively loaded with the stony remains of hackberry pits, as each tree produces millions of seeds during its lifetime. I hoped to develop an analysis of these fossil seed pits that would allow me to guess the average summer temperatures that occurred between the glaciations of the Midwest.

  For at least the last four hundred thousand years, glaciers have expanded from the North Pole and then contracted periodically, regular as clockwork. During the short interim periods when the Great Plains have been ice-free, plants and animals migrated, interbred, and tested out new food sources and habitats. But just how hot were these interim summers—were they like the full-on sweltering summers of today, or were they just balmy enough to prevent snow from falling? If you’ve ever lived in the Midwest, you know that this distinction matters, but imagine how much more it matters to people living close to the land, with animal skins for shelter and a moving target for a food supply.

  My thesis advisor and I could imagine all kinds of chemical reactions that would lock in the temperature of formation as each seed pit condensed out of the fruit sap. Our whole theory of temperature-setting-fruit-becoming-fossil was novel and also mysterious enough to keep easy answers out of reach. I devised a set of experiments intended to break the main question down into a series of smaller, discrete tasks. My first task was to figure out exactly how a hackberry seed formed and what it was made of.