Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

  I took out a small portable TV from one of the cupboards and moved three microscopes to the side, clearing a place for it. In a few minutes it would be 11:00 p.m. and Jerry Springer would be on. I put some popcorn in the microwave and cracked open two Diet Cokes. Bill entered carrying nine frozen McDonald’s cheeseburgers: three for me, three for him, and three for Reba. He had purchased forty or so of them when the campus commons ran a twenty-five-cent special, and we had happily discovered that their physical properties were not meaningfully changed when reheated from a frozen state.

  Bill and I had both left California fairly deep in debt, due to a series of dissimilar but equally foolish purchases from years ago, and had vowed to pay it all off as quickly as possible once we got “real jobs.” We soon found ourselves conducting a long-term experiment designed to measure how little we could spend each week and still get by, and frozen food had become a major component of our dietary intake.

  We ate in front of the TV, watching a man clad only in a diaper spiritedly invoke First Amendment protection for his “adult baby” lifestyle, waving his bottle for emphasis.

  “Man, I would do anything to get on Jerry’s show,” I said with wistful longing.

  “So you’ve mentioned,” acknowledged Bill with his mouth full as we watched a montage of the man being changed and powdered by his sweetheart-slash-caregiver.

  When lunch was over we cleaned up. “Hey, I’ve got a wacky idea,” I volunteered. “Let’s spend tonight running our own samples for a change.”

  Bill was game. “That’s so crazy it just might work,” he said, “but first there must be the Airing of the Beast.” We went outside and all three of us gazed up at the stars while Bill smoked a cigarette. “This pack cost me more than two dollars,” he complained. “I’m going to need a raise.”

  The entire geographical footprint of a college campus is illuminated all night every night, greatly enhancing its desolation during the weekend. During the school week, the university belongs to no one. It buzzes and throbs with people coming and going. But the whole place is different on a Friday at midnight, when the university belongs to you. Smug in the presumption that you are the only working person within a fifty-mile radius, you accomplish just enough to feel justified in being naughty. In the rhythm of these Friday nights beats the honest, humble heart of science, and it also explains how discovery and mischief are two sides of the very same coin.

  “A tarnished penny half hidden by the dust of the gutter,” I reflected while we were cleaning out the lint traps of the air compressor.

  “A penny that will buy you a nonfat soy latte,” added Bill, “after somebody loans you three fucking dollars and eighty-four cents.”

  We had spent the week doing organic carbon extractions, which is a lot more fun than it sounds. For about two hundred million years, dinosaurs roamed our planet in great groups, and a very tiny minority of them were preserved in the mud and silt of their time, including some locked away in Montana until a couple hundred years ago, when landowners stumbled upon them. Dinosaur bones have been carefully excavated, described in painful detail, prepared with special glues, shown to the public, and studied for posterity. Other, less charismatic fossils are of lesser value but potentially greater import, I would argue.

  Each streak of brown within each rock that houses a fossil might be the smeared residue of a plant that lived at the time and provided the food and oxygen that supported so many huge reptiles. In these smears there is no anatomy, no morphology, and nothing to take a picture of or to display. However, we might harvest some chemical information from the smear, if we could somehow isolate it and hold it up to the light.

  Living plants are distinct from the rocks that surround them in that they are rich in carbon. My colleagues and I decided that if we could capture and separate all the carbon within the dark smears inside the rocks that also held dinosaur fossils, we would have then laid claim to a new sort of plant fossil. The chemistry of this carbon might tell us something about the plant, even though we would never know the shape of the leaves that had made the smear.

  In order to liberate the organic carbon—and only the carbon—from a dead rock, we trap the gas that is released while the sample burns. When we do chemistry with liquids, we use beakers to hold one liquid and pour another, to mix the two and to keep others separate. To do chemistry with gases, we use a glass apparatus called a vacuum line, similar to the apparatus that I had been using when I caused the explosion years earlier.

  Working a vacuum line is rather like playing a church organ: both have lots of levers to pull and knobs to twist, and it all has to be done in the right order and with the right timing. Both hands are moving at the same time, often performing dissimilar tasks, as the trap and the exhaust are operated independently. After a day of use, both the vacuum line and the organ must be lovingly shut down and delicately maintained; they can both be regarded as pieces of art in their own right. The biggest difference between the two, however, is that a church organ will not explode in your face if you make a mistake while using it.

  “Arrgh, I hate that thing!” Bill had covered his ears after the loudest air compressor in the world started up with a phlegmatic mechanical cough.

  “I know it’s awful,” I acknowledged, “but a new one is twelve hundred dollars.”

  “Isn’t there someone somewhere who owes us?” he ventured. “Maybe you should write a Christmas letter to Santa.”

  “You are a goddamn genius,” I said, and I meant it.

  Bill was referring to our ever-increasing exploitation at the mittened hands of “Professor Santa” (the Elf’s boss), in which I was supremely complicit, having initiated the whole thing as a barefaced effort to ingratiate myself with an influential person. After reading some of this distinguished professor’s publications about oxygen chemistry, I had offered to run some trial analyses of oxygen isotopes for free, and the project had snowballed from there (the puns practically wrote themselves that winter) after he deemed the data to be “very interesting” and then redirected his whole workshop toward making additional samples. We naively consented to run them, vastly underestimating the number of oxygen reactions that could be carried out using a wooden mallet while standing at a conveyor belt and singing.

  Earlier that winter, I had gone to a lot of trouble writing multiple private e-mails to the Elf, insisting that he implement a workshop-wide protocol requiring all samples to be labeled in either green or red ink, and bundled in units of ten using silver tape, prior to delivery. My efforts paid off with interest once the sample tubes accumulated to the point where Bill had gotten the joke.

  When we inspected our sample logs, we estimated that user “Rudolph” had logged about three hundred free analyses, knowing that they would cost thirty dollars a pop if ordered commercially. We agreed that I would write a letter asking Dear Santa to bring us a shiny, new, silent air compressor. We envisioned ourselves coming downstairs on Christmas morning to find one adorned with a huge red bow, sitting just beneath the biological materials incinerator.

  “Start out by explaining how we’ve been very, very good all year,” directed Bill.

  “You get the thesaurus and I’ll get the department letterhead. It has to be perfect.” I was determined to wring as much fun out of the exercise as possible.

  “I wonder if they stock crayons in the front office,” mused Bill.

  While I was digging in my purse for the keys to the office-supplies cabinet, I found a nearly full package of Razzles in one of the pockets, and I stopped in my tracks. “You’ll never believe this, but the greatest thing in the history of the world has happened,” I told him. We put aside what we were doing, sat on the floor, and divided up the candies, fighting over the precious orange ones and automatically segregating the blue-raspberry ones for Reba because they were her favorite.

  The fifty-six hours of weekend that rolled out before us seemed endless. At sunrise we planned to declare ourselves the rightful inheritors of everything in the
departmental refrigerator, but beyond that we had nothing scheduled. Maybe we would pick the lock to the machine shop and gawk at the huge saws, drills, and welding tools, treating it as our own personal museum. Maybe we would stage a private showing of The Seventh Seal using the projection system in the main auditorium. And maybe there was someone somewhere in the world who was happier than I was during that year, but on nights like that I certainly couldn’t imagine it.

  3

  PLANTS HAVE FAR MORE ENEMIES than can be counted. A green leaf is regarded by almost every living thing on Earth as food. Whole trees can be eaten while they are only seeds, while they are only seedlings. A plant cannot run away from the endless legions of attackers that comprise an unremitting menace. Within the slime of the forest floor thrive opportunists that regard all plants, dead or alive, as nourishment. The fungi are perhaps the worst of these villains. White-rot and black-rot fungi are everywhere, so named because they have chemicals that can do what nothing else can: they can rot the hardest heart of a tree. Four hundred million years of wood, save a few fossil slivers, has decomposed back to the sky from whence it came. All this destruction can be attributed to a single group of fungi that makes its macabre living by rotting the ligneous limbs and stumps of a forest. Yet within this very same group are the best—and really only—friends that trees have ever had.

  You may think a mushroom is a fungus. This is exactly like believing that a penis is a man. Every toadstool, from the deliciously edible to the deathly poisonous, is merely a sex organ that is attached to something more whole, complex, and hidden. Underneath every mushroom is a web of stringy hyphae that may extend for kilometers, wrapping around countless clumps of soil and holding the landscape together. The ephemeral mushroom appears briefly above the surface while the webbing that anchors it lives for years within a darker and richer world. A very small minority of these fungi—just five thousand species—have strategically entered into a deep and enduring truce with plants. They cast their stringy webbing around and through the roots of trees, sharing the burden of drawing water into the trunk. They also mine the soil for rare metals, such as manganese, copper, and phosphorous, and then present them to the tree as precious gifts of the magi.

  The edge of a forest is a hostile no-man’s-land and trees do not grow outside this boundary for a reason. Centimeters outside a forest’s border we find too little water, too little sun, too much wind or cold for just one more tree. And yet, though rarely, forests do expand and grow in area. Once within hundreds of years a seedling will conquer this harsh space and endure the requisite years of want. Such seedlings are invariably heavily armored with a symbiotic belowground fungus. So much is stacked against this little tree, although it does have twice the usual amount of root function, thanks to the fungus.

  There is a price: during these first years most of the sugar that the little plant makes in its leaves will go directly into the fungus suckling at its roots. The webbing that surrounds these struggling roots does not penetrate them, however, and the plant and fungus remain physically separate but enjoined by their life’s work. They anchor each other. They will work together until the tree is tall enough to fight for light at the top of the canopy.

  Why are they together, the tree and the fungus? We don’t know. The fungus could certainly live very well alone almost anywhere, but it chooses to entwine itself with the tree over an easier and more independent life. It has adapted to seek the rush of pure sweetness that comes directly from a plant root, such a strange and concentrated compound, unlike anything to be found elsewhere in the forest. And perhaps the fungus can somehow sense that when it is part of a symbiosis, it is also not alone.

  4

  SOIL IS A FUNNY THING, in that it isn’t really anything in and of itself but is instead the product of two different worlds coming together. Soil is the naturally produced graffiti that results from tensions between the biological and geological realms.

  Back in California, Bill and I decided that we would teach our soil class differently from the way it was taught to us. Instead of just filling out forms and cataloging data, we would teach where soil comes from and how it forms. We’d make students really look at it, touch it, draw it, and come up with their own improvised labels for what they saw. We developed a teaching protocol that goes like this: we simply pick a place and we dig—we dig the earth open until we can see it whole and naked from top to bottom. We expose what was unexposed, and force its secrets out into the open.

  All around us we can point concretely to what’s alive—a green leaf, a moving worm, a sucking root. At depth lies cold, hard rock, old as the hills to our right and left, and equally devoid of breath and movement—not alive. Everything that is physically located between the two extremes—alive and not alive—we call “soil.” At the top of the soil the influence of the living is most obvious, dark brown rubbed from the residue of dead plants, wilted and rotten, mixed into a slime that seeps and stains everything around it. The bottom of the soil is dominated by the rock’s legacy; the waters of the ages have dissolved the rock little by little, churned it into a paste, and dried-wetted-dried it over endless cycles to yield a slag that is distinct from the undamaged rocks that lie below. In the middle, these two substances interact, sometimes blooming into the garish streaks of color that so struck us when we drove through southern Georgia.

  Bill was born to tirelessly evangelize soil using his God-given talent for marking the subtleties of chemistry, the shading of colors and the twitches in texture that only he can see from within a hole. He can compare the dozens of soils he carries in his memory with the one before him in bafflingly excruciating detail. All reserve is shed when he talks about soil, and I have watched him deliver many dramatic monologues in Irish pubs (perfectly sober) describing how the discovery of new colors in new combinations underground is what he loves most about his work.

  In the summer of 1997, we took a group of five students into the field to teach them how to characterize and map soil. The trip was a first-time experience for four of them, and a repeat trip for the undergraduate who volunteered many hours in my lab each week. Bill had warmed up to this guy, and I had also, and so we invited him to come along on each of our research and teaching excursions.

  The best way to prevent people from complaining about food while camping is to force each one of them to take responsibility for one night of cooking, and our undergraduate mascot had eagerly volunteered. Desperate to impress us, he had brought cans, boxes, spices, and a bag of potatoes that he peeled and then boiled until soft, but he was only able to start cooking at about 11:00 p.m., after we finally arrived at the campground.

  Boiling water on a campfire is tortuously slow, and so I was dismayed when, after removing the cooked potatoes, he set another huge pot of cold water over the heat to boil. Instead of just doling out the potatoes with a fork, which would have been haute cuisine by our standards, he instead began to mash them, adding the fine-milled flour that had appeared from his backpack. I noted with alarm that the cooking process was starting all over again and I asked him what he was doing. “I am making Hungarian potato dumplings,” he explained. “My grandmother used to make them. Trust me, you’ll love them.”

  We ate at about three in the morning. “Hey, you should start going by ‘Dumpling’!” I exclaimed as we finally sat down to eat, and the student’s face lit up; he was delighted with the professional intimacy that a private joke implied.

  “I will not refer to him as ‘Dumpling,’ ” Bill said with a masculine scowl as he bent over his soup. He was tired and hungry and not in the mood.

  The warm night air was perfectly still and we could hear a chorus of frogs that were croaking somewhere in the darkness. We all ate in silence, stuffing ourselves with the delicious dumplings that had been prepared in ridiculous abundance. While we were cleaning up, Bill was the first to comment. “Good dinner, Dumpling,” he said solemnly while gathering up the empty bowls. Whatever the student’s real name was, I have since forgott
en it, for it was never used by any of us again. I have also never eaten anything that tasted as good as those dumplings, in all my years since then.

  We were digging in Atkinson County, which, although it does not seem notable for anything, we referred to as “Nirvana” because of its exquisite soils, unequaled within the forty-nine other states and five continents we have traveled. We found it the same way that we found so many of our teaching sites: from the car window. If you drive across the state of Georgia, from the Piedmont plain near Atlanta southeast toward the Atlantic Ocean, you will find yourself driving along a river of red dust that was rubbed from the residue of what might have been mountains in some ancient geological dream.

  While driving on Highway 82 toward the Okefenokee Swamp earlier that year, we had seen what appeared to be buckets of rich apricot paint thrown across a ditch of creamy sand. In those days Bill required a cigarette frequently, and so we were in the habit of stopping often to inspect the landscape. When we had pulled over near Willacoochee, the “paint” turned out to be the rusted-iron band within a rare oxisol soil-type, and we immediately decided to include the stop in our soils course.

  When we arrive at a soil site with students, we first unload the shovels, the picks, a tarp, the sieves, the chemicals, and a big blackboard with colored chalk. We dig a hole, down deeper and deeper, until we hit hard rock, careful to stand only on one side so that everyone is looking at the same thing. Once we have dug deeply enough, we dig away from the profile, opening a “pit” that is large enough for three people to stand in, and from which we can make an evaluation as to the lateral continuity of the soil’s properties. This digging can take hours, and if the clay is thick or the soil is waterlogged, it is physically exhausting.