Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

  “Okay.” He laughed good-naturedly. “But you have to let me pay the next time.” I didn’t promise anything, but I took his words as a good omen.

  At dinner I couldn’t eat a thing because I didn’t want to be distracted from the fact that something wonderful was happening. We left the restaurant laughing over our waiters’ disapproving stares during the course of our three-hour meal. We went to a pub a few blocks away and talked for hours while our drinks went untouched. We argued over the essential difference between measuring something and modeling it. We discussed mosses and ferns. It turned out that we had attended Berkeley and studied the same subjects at the same time. I knew many of his friends and classmates, and he happened to know many of mine. We even determined that we had sat in the same room on more than one occasion, both listening to the same seminar. We marveled over how in the world we could have missed each other all these years. It seemed obvious that we should make up for it now.

  They closed the bar and I still didn’t want to go home. We decided to go to his house, and he asked me if I wanted to walk or take a taxi. He saw the look on my face and then stepped into the street to wave for a taxi. Where I grew up, we only ever saw taxis in the movies. Taxis were for people so sophisticated that they left their houses wearing shoes they couldn’t even walk in. Taxi drivers were exotic guides into the unknown who dispensed detached wisdom while delivering you faithfully to an important place that you couldn’t have found on your own. I was stunned to find that the ultimate proof of love for me was nothing heroic, but an easy and superfluous gesture performed just to make me smile. The love that I had to give someone had been packed too tightly and too long in a small box, and so it all tumbled out when opened. And there was more where that came from.

  We love each other because we can’t help it. We don’t work at it and we don’t sacrifice for it. It is easy and all the sweeter to me because it is so undeserved. I discover within a second context that when something just won’t work, moving heaven and earth often won’t make it work—and similarly, there are some things that you just can’t screw up. I know that I could live without him: I have my own work, my own mission, and my own money. But I don’t want to. I really don’t want to. We make plans: he will share his strength with me and I will share my imagination with him, and in each other we will find a dear use for our respectively obscene surpluses. We will fly off to Copenhagen for the weekend and live in the south of France each summer; we will get married in a language that we don’t understand; I will have a horse (a brown mare named “Sugar”); we will go to avant-garde theater productions and discuss them afterward with strangers in coffeehouses; I will give birth to twins like my grandmother, but we’ll keep the dog (duh) and we will always take taxis and live like in the movies. And some of these things we do, and some of them we don’t (like the horse), and it is better than a movie, because it doesn’t end, and we are not acting, and I am not wearing any makeup.

  ***

  Within a couple of weeks I had convinced Clint to quit his job in D.C. and move into my house in Baltimore, knowing that his incredible talent for mathematics could get him a job anywhere. Soon after moving, he reentered academia and took a job at Johns Hopkins researching the deep Earth, in the same building as my lab. He spent his days writing fantastically intricate computer models designed to predict million-year flow within unfathomably hot and pressurized pseudo-solid rock, thousands of miles below the depth where the lava of a volcano brews. I couldn’t understand—still can’t—how he was able to study the Earth in his mind only, how he could imagine and observe its workings through the baroque equations that he writes so fluently, the corner of his mouth always inky from the ballpoint pen that he doesn’t notice he’s been chewing.

  I have to see my science for it to be real: I must hold it in my hands and manipulate it; I need to watch plants grow and make them die. I need the answers that can come only from control; he prefers to set the world in motion and then watch it flow. Tall and thin and dressed in khaki, he looks and acts just as a scientist is expected to, and so acceptance into the profession has always been relatively easy for him. Nevertheless, his sweet, solid, and loving nature was a treasure overlooked until I recognized it and then decided to never, ever let it go.

  Clint and I met in early 2001, and during the summer that followed, we took a trip to Norway, so that I could show him the places that I love most: long, low hills of pink granite with purple wildflowers pushing out of the cracks, sparkling fjords superintended by sober-faced puffins, white birch trees illuminated by salmon-colored sunsets that last all night long. The Oslo leg of our trip was transformed into an impromptu wedding party after we took a number, waited in a queue for twenty minutes, and got married in the Rådhus (City Hall).

  Upon returning home to Baltimore, we went straight to Bill to surprise him with the good news. Bill had never commented on the guys that I dated, probably because it was obvious that there wouldn’t be very many dates to comment on. But he’d been acting strangely since Clint had come on the scene, avoiding us the same way that a reformed felon avoids driving by the hoosegow. For his part, Clint was confident that Bill just needed time to get used to the situation; it was exactly the same as with me and his three little sisters, he kept insisting.

  About a month earlier, Bill had moved out of my attic after buying the run-down house located just a few doors down. He now owned a four-floor row home that must have been beautiful in its day, but that day was long past. When he moved in, Bill had dumped all of his belongings on the first floor, having carried them over from my house one by one over the course of several days. He kept a few key items (coffeepot, razor, screwdriver) in a corner next to the nest of laundry that he crawled into and back out of when it was time to sleep and wake up. Bill had grand renovation plans for the place, but during that summer it looked like a heroin den, complete in every detail except for the drugs.

  The day after we returned from Norway, we knocked hard on Bill’s door and then also rang the doorbell. At length we heard someone shuffling around, and a bit later we heard the lock turn. The door opened and there stood Bill in a ripped T-shirt and some faded swimming trunks. His hair was mussed and he was rubbing his eyes: we’d obviously woken him up. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

  “Hi!” I greeted him, standing there with Clint’s arm around me. Then I burst out, “Guess what? We got married!”

  There was a long pause while Bill looked at us blankly. “Does this mean I have to buy you a present?” he asked.

  “No,” answered Clint, while I simultaneously responded, “Yes.”

  We stood there for a while, Clint and I with giddy smiles on our faces. Finally I said to Bill, “Get dressed. There’s a Civil War reenactment downtown at Fort McHenry and we’re going.”

  “I’d join you, except that it’s probably the War of 1812, you’re a dumbass, and I have about a million other things to do,” Bill answered, looking uncomfortable.

  “Watch your mouth, you filthy hippy,” I chastised him. “I won’t have you dishonoring our fallen heroes that way.” I added, “Now, put some fucking pants on, start acting like an American, and get into the Toyota.”

  Bill still looked at us, and I knew he was conflicted over whether to consent or withdraw. I looked up at my new husband, the strongest and kindest man I had ever met, firm in my belief that everyone who had ever earned my love had a natural claim to his as well.

  “C’mon, Bill, you’re with us now,” Clint said while offering his car keys. “Why don’t you drive?” he added. Bill took the keys and we spent the day at Fort McHenry bobbing for apples and dipping candles and forging a real horseshoe. We ate hot dogs and cotton candy and watched the three-legged race and petted animals at the petting zoo. And we all got in for a reduced rate because it was, after all, Family Day.

  7

  AGRONOMISTS AND FORESTERS have charted the growth of hundreds of plant species, starting in 1879 when a German scientist noticed that the increas
ing weight of a corn plant, when graphed against the days of its development, resulted in a line with a curious lazy-S shape. These scientists had weighed their potted plants daily, and for the entire first month they saw very little growth. Then, during the second month, the plants’ weights shot up sharply; they doubled in size each week until they reached their maxima at three months of age. The scientists were then surprised to see the weights drop off again, and by the time they began to flower and produce seed, the plants weighed only about 80 percent of what they had been at their largest. This scientific result was enduring, and the many thousand corn plants that have been charted since then have all shown a similar lazy-S curve. We don’t know exactly how it works, but a corn plant knows what it is supposed to be, even though it meanders along the way.

  Other plants display very different growth curves. The curve describing the development of the leaves on wheat resembles your pulse: a brief throb of growth that settles back into decline. The curve for a sugar beet also shows increase followed by decline; however, the curve makes a long, low arc centered on the summer solstice. The curve for the nuisance grass Phragmites looks like a pyramid: birth and growth symmetrically bracketed by decay and death. Such curves are invaluable in the farm field or in the forest, where harvesting food or wood is a distant goal. By approximating the position of growing plants along these standard growth curves, one can guess a good date for harvest, and by extension, pencil in the possible payday associated with it.

  The growth curves of trees are diffuse and sprawling compared with the curves for smaller plants, as they extend for hundreds of years instead of for just one season. Each tree species is subject to its own unique curve. Monterey pine grows twice as fast as Norway spruce, but both trees are harvested for papermaking when they are of similar girth. As a result, Norwegian paper companies are more likely to be solvent and generally own larger territories than their American counterparts.

  Within the forest, the variation in stature among trees of the same age is far larger than it is for other organisms, including animals. Within the United States, the tallest ten-year-old boy is about 20 percent taller than the shortest ten-year-old boy. This same differential holds for five-year-old boys as well as for twenty-year-old men: the tallest is about 20 percent taller than the shortest. Within a pine forest, the thickest ten-year-old trunk is about four times thicker than the thinnest ten-year-old trunk. This same differential holds for twenty-year-old trees as well as for fifty-year-old trees: the thickest trunk is about four times thicker than the thinnest. It turns out that there is no “right” or “wrong” way to grow into a hundred-year-old tree: there are only ways that work and ways that do not.

  Becoming a tree is a long journey, and so even the most experienced botanist cannot look at a twig on a sapling and accurately describe what kind of branch it might develop into over the next fifty years. Plant growth curves can be useful for guessing, but it is important to remember that they don’t show us the future, only the past. They are improvised lines, drawn through data that was collected for plants that are mostly dead by now. The datasets that define these curves are not static, and every time a new plant is measured it can be added to the graph. Each new data point changes the overall pattern slightly and thus alters the growth curve. There is no way to mathematically predict the shape of these curves, even with the massive computers that can lately be brought to bear. Nothing in these growth curves tells us what a tree should look like, only what trees have looked like. Every plant must find its own unique path to maturity.

  There are botany textbooks that contain pages and pages of growth curves, but it is always the lazy-S-shaped ones that confuse my students the most. Why would a plant decrease in mass just when it is nearing its plateau of maximum productivity? I remind them that this shrinking has proved to be a signal of reproduction. As the green plants reach maturity, some of their nutrients are pulled back and repurposed toward flowers and seeds. Production of the new generation comes at a significant cost to the parent, and you can see it in a cornfield, even from a great distance.

  8

  BEING PREGNANT IS by far the hardest thing that I have ever done. I can’t breathe, I can’t sit down and I can’t stand up, I can’t put down the tray-table on the airplane, I can’t sleep on my stomach, and I’ve only slept on my stomach for the last thirty-four years. I wonder what kind of god in what kind of heaven decided that a hundred-and-ten-pound woman could carry thirty-five pounds of baby. I am compelled to march in endless circles around the neighborhood escorted by Reba, because the baby is quiet only when I am moving. He kicks me not with here-I-am-Mommy playful bops, but in the writhing torture of a man struggling against a straitjacket. I walk and walk and walk some more, a solitary parody of some pagan fertility parade, and I think about how neither I nor the baby is enjoying this suffocating arrangement.

  A manic-depressive pregnant woman cannot take Depakote or Tegretol or Seroquel or lithium or Risperdal or any of the other things that she’s been taking on a daily basis for years in order to keep herself from hearing voices and banging her head against the wall. Once her pregnancy is confirmed she must cease all medications quickly (another known trigger) and stand on the train tracks just waiting for the locomotive to hit. The statistics are pretty simple: a bipolar woman is seven times as likely to experience a major episode while pregnant, compared with before or after. Leaving her to ride it out without medication for the first two trimesters is the cruel reality upon which doctors insist.

  Early in the pregnancy I wake up and vomit violently until I collapse onto the bathroom floor and lie there for hours, retching and crying in exhaustion until finally, in desperation, I begin to hit my head against the walls and the floor, trying to knock myself out. I regress to my child’s habit of begging Jesus for help or at least for the mercy of oblivion. Later, when I come to, I can feel a cool film of snot, blood, saliva, and tears between my face and the tile floor, but I cannot speak and I do not know who I am. My steadfast husband, who has been frantically on the phone, comes in and picks me up and washes me off, and calls the doctor again. They take me in and try all the things that they have tried on me before, but in a week I am right back to doing it again. This goes on until Clint and the dog are the only beings in the whole world whom I can recognize by name.

  I go to the hospital in earnest and stay for weeks at a time, strapped down when nothing else works, and they put me through countless rounds of electroconvulsive therapy, which make me forget most of 2002. I beg the doctors and nurses to tell me why, why, why this is happening to me, and they do not answer. All of us can do little except count the days until it will be safe for me to take the drugs that I need. Twenty-six weeks is a magic date: it ushers in the third trimester, a period of advanced fetal development for which the Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of a whole series of antipsychotic drugs to address the health of the mother.

  As soon as it is medically advisable, I am put on this and that and the other medication regimen, and then slowly my more florid symptoms begin to come under control. I begin to drag myself into work, often just to spend the day sleeping on the floor of my office. I try but find myself too weak to teach, and so I put myself on medical leave. One morning during my eighth month, I trudge through the front door of the building and stop to rest in the front office while mentally preparing to drag this extra thirty pounds down to my laboratory in the basement. I don’t handle any chemicals, of course, but it comforts me to sit next to the humming machines and examine the readouts as they are produced, and pretend that the instruments need my approval and encouragement in order to continue with each next task.

  In preparation for my difficult journey down in the elevator, I sit on one of the visitor’s chairs next to the photocopier and lean back behind my huge abdomen. I announce, “I think I get it now. This is the new me. He is never coming out. Eighteen years from now I will have a grown man living inside my body,” and although I don’t really mean it as a jok
e, the secretaries chuckle in sympathy.

  Walter, the head of the department, walks in, and I automatically stand up, like a soldier coming to attention in the presence of a senior officer. I am close to being the first and only woman ever awarded tenure in this hundred-year-old ivy-draped department at Hopkins, and I instinctively know that I should hide any physical weakness that accompanies my pregnant state.

  Unfortunately, I’ve stood up too quickly and the blood rushes from my head and I feel faint. I automatically sit down and put my head between my legs, knowing that this will pass in a minute or so. This light-headedness is familiar because I have always been plagued by low blood pressure and tend to be resistant toward eating, viewing it as an endlessly recurring chore. Walter looks around in puzzlement, and at me in the middle of it all having assumed the posture of a beached and prostrate whale. He goes into his office and closes the door. Someone offers me a cup of water, but I refuse it. I limp to the elevator burdened by a new nagging worry that I can’t quite put my finger on.

  The next day at about six-thirty in the evening, Clint comes into my office, which is located just down the hall from his own. His face is drawn in such a way that I wonder if he has come to tell me that someone has died. He leans on the doorframe and says gravely, “Listen, Walter came into my office today.” He pauses, looking pained. “He told me that you can’t come into the building anymore while you are on medical leave.”