Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

  Of the many million seeds dropped on every acre of the Earth’s surface each year, less than 5 percent will begin to grow. Of those, only 5 percent will survive to their first birthday. Given these realities, the first and foremost experiment in each tree research study—growing a sapling—is actually an ill-omened fight with near-certain failure. Thus the initial planting of seedlings at the start of a forestry study represents a weary victory won by a stoic researcher with a strong sense of fatalism.

  This unique intellectual agony shapes the character of the tree experimentalist and selects for those with a religious devotion to science, patient with overtones of masochism. They neither seek nor win the adoration and glory claimed by nuclear physicists who observe new particles and bluster about the speed of light. I am learning their mind-set as I am learning the substages of embryonic development, and both appeal to me. We plant tiny trees during the night so that they may be baptized with morning dew, and sustain our faith that their measurement will yield knowledge to our scientific heirs, some two hundred years from now.

  I gather up the petri dishes and carry them through the basement to the walk-in incubator, where I will leave them in the dark at a temperature of exactly twenty-five degrees Celsius. The incubator is like a humid mausoleum, and I wonder if the faintly moldy smell is real or just my own paranoia. Each embryo rests on a bed of gelatin extracted from thousands of other seeds. This medium will fool my embryos into developing wildly, unrestrained by the seed coat that I removed.

  In twenty days I hope to find them splayed out indecently, many times larger than they would naturally be—that is, if a fungal contaminant hasn’t gotten to the nutrients first. At that time I will select the healthy embryos and rip them apart slowly, transferring the pieces onto a gelatin made from ridiculous amounts of fertilizer and growth hormones. If I am careful and lucky, I can tear a single embryo into twelve pieces under the microscope. Today I cull the intact embryos from two weeks ago, dismember exactly fifty, and then leave them bleeding cytoplasm in the hope that they’ll recover and elongate into something that is green on one end and rootlike on the other. My embryo pieces will spend a month under artificial sunlight, forced to photosynthesize and trying to outrun that damned fungus.

  Like Julia Child drawing a finished soufflé out of the same oven into which she inserts an uncooked one, I select a hundred healthy differentiated embryos from the light chamber, swapping for the ones I just dissected. I tuck each of these tiny plantlets into the potting cups I’ve fashioned out of egg cartons, using one Popsicle stick to make a hole in the soil and another to tuck the seedling under. Occasionally during planting, I notice something odd in one of the samples—some goofy green whorl—and I allow myself ten minutes to stare at it and soak up the pleasure of an unusual moment within this day, week, month of monotony.

  I should write down that this one is different, but I don’t. I used to note any oddities religiously, but I do it less and less as the years go by. It feels too much like a confidence that I haven’t been given permission to share. The first green tissues of a radish seedling are two perfectly heart-shaped, symmetric leaves. In twenty years of growing hundreds of these plants, I have seen exactly two deviants, each with a perfect third leaf—a baffling green triad where there should be only a pair. I think of those two plants often, and they even enter my dreams occasionally, causing me to wonder why I was meant to see them. Being paid to wonder seems like a heavy responsibility at times.

  At the end of my day I have arranged exactly one hundred tiny trees into a grid. I take photos, guiltily indulging in forty-five minutes of insipid pop radio (music causes labeling mistakes). The finished seedlings resemble a company of green toy soldiers, and I imagine them as fresh seventeen-year-old World War One recruits, eager to be shipped out with no real idea of what they’re getting into. We’ll move them into the greenhouse, where they will live in relative bliss for three years and be conscientiously repotted every time their world needs to be a bit bigger.

  A collection of the survivors will ultimately be planted in a forest and begin experimental treatment. All our special attention renders it probable that one out of every one thousand embryos that we process will give rise to an adult tree, increasing the odds of success many orders of magnitude over the natural world. In thirty years, perhaps one of the plants before me will bear seed and help give answers to the questions that we ask today. That is, if the university doesn’t cut down our forest in order to build a dorm, a day care center, or a fast-food courtyard.

  At eleven-thirty in the evening I call Bill and he picks up after two rings. “All quiet on the western front,” I tell him, and he understands. It is morning where he is, and I have just woken him up.

  “Okay, I’ll be there in a bit.” Then he asks me, “Did you soak the Popsicle sticks?”

  “What?” I ask, pretending not to understand.

  “Did you soak the fucking Popsicle sticks in bleach this time?”

  “Yes,” I lie, and he snorts, unconvinced.

  “Yes,” I insist, “I soaked them; I soaked the embryos and I drank a glass of it before I started.”

  He continues, “Because a year from now, when we’re up to our eyeballs in contamination, this whole thing will somehow lose its poetry.”

  “Well, hopefully it won’t take that long,” I retort, “because we’re out of fucking bleach,” and we both laugh.

  ***

  We laughed because it was a joke: Bill was not actually on his way to meet me that night because he was on the other side of the world.

  During the years after my son was born, being a scientist became easier, although I am still not quite sure why. It surprised me, because even though I hadn’t changed the way I designed my experiments or talked about my ideas, the establishment changed the way that it thought about me. I won contracts, not only from the NSF but from the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. Private donors such as the Mellon Foundation and the Seaver Foundation found me worthy of support. This additional funding didn’t make the lab rich, but for the first time we could build new instruments, replace broken parts, and sleep in decent hotels while we traveled; best of all, I could chart out Bill’s salary for a year at a time instead of from month to month.

  Once I wasn’t stressed to distraction about our survival, my patience returned and I rediscovered my love of teaching. The combination of freedom and love is a potent one, and it made me more productive than ever. I summed up my ideas about plant development within longer works, formatted as whole chapters, that allowed for the necessary detail. I started to win awards for these ideas once they were fully expressed: first the Young Scientist Award of the Geological Society of America and then the Macelwane Medal of the American Geophysical Union, which made my tenure decision a no-brainer in 2006. Encouraged, I started to take even bigger risks: I applied to do the spruce experiments in Norway—I wanted to learn to plant tree seedlings. I wanted to know what tree memory was all about.

  While I lived in Norway, Bill stayed back at home, running the lab. Clint’s easy charm and rare mathematical gift have brought him several standing job offers over the years; he accepted one of them and we moved near Oslo together, where we enrolled our son in a Norwegian kindergarten.

  I have always felt at home in the glittering fjordlands of eastern Norway. There, no one ever perceives me as cold or standoffish; I can just be who I am. I love to speak Norwegian, which is a terse language in which every word counts double and the whole meaning can turn on the lilt of just one vowel. I love the dark, snowy nights of winter and the endless pastel days of summer. I love to walk through spruce needles and pick berries and eat fish and potatoes seven days a week.

  During that year, I loved everything about living in Norway, except for how much I missed Bill. But deep down we both knew that the separation was good for us: we were getting older, and I was raising a family. Convention and circumstances dictated that we should act more like coworkers and less like
twelve-year-old fraternal twins.

  ***

  Halfway through my year of living in Norway, I sent Bill a text: “I am thinking of you.”

  As soon as I sent it, it appeared in my outbox as the last in a long chain of identical unanswered texts that I had been sending daily for three weeks, interspersed with choruses of “I hope you are okay.”

  I hadn’t heard from Bill in more than a month. I knew he wasn’t lost, although I felt as if I was. Four weeks earlier I had woken up to the following e-mail from him: “Hey I just got word that my dad died today. Guess I’m going to California. I’ll shut down the mass spectrometer before I go.” I immediately began to text the above mantras, embellished and frequently at first, settling into once daily over time. I never heard anything back.

  For weeks after his father’s death, Bill’s e-mails had stopped and my string of unanswered texts left a void in my life. I worked my usual hours but often caught myself staring unproductively at the wall, questioning for the first time why I was doing this science, and finally realizing that it was pointless to do it alone.

  Though I heard nothing from him, I knew Bill well enough to know exactly what he was doing. He was working hard each night from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., seeing and talking to no one. This was his usual pattern when he was “in a funk,” usually post-migraine, and everyone in the lab knew to leave him alone until it passed.

  This funk had dragged on, however, and I couldn’t help but imagine what his week of mourning in California had been like. How the coming of the dusk dissolves the laces of the splint that holds you together during the day, and the desperate sadness that follows can be anesthetized only with sleep. The heaviness of opening your eyes the next morning when you realize that you’ve begun another day of grief, so pervasive that it removes even the taste from the food that you eat. I knew that when someone you love has died, you feel that you have also. And I knew that there was nothing that I, or anybody else, could do to fix it.

  I kept texting daily and never received a reply. Finally I sent Bill an e-mail: “Hey, let’s you and me go into the field. Ireland. You always love Ireland. I bought you a ticket, it’s attached as a PDF. Your dad was a good guy. He was good to your mother, and he was faithful to her. He loved you kids, and he was home with you every night. He didn’t drink, and he didn’t hit people. That’s what he gave you. That’s what you got, and it’s a lot. That’s what we got. It’s more than what some people get, and maybe it’s more than what most people get. And as of now it has to be enough. You land before I do, but the rental car is in my name, so wait for me.”

  There was so much that I wanted to add, but I didn’t. I wanted to venture that Bill had been his dad’s baby and his favorite, a final son who came to him late in his life, bringing with him one last precious chance to enjoy childhood by proxy. I wanted to tell Bill that he embodied the happy ending of his father’s life, that he was the comforting unspoken punch line to the dark genocide jokes that he told, and that his very flesh constituted a triumph over injustice and murder. I wanted to tell Bill that he was his father’s heart and prize, a strong, sinewy boy whom the world couldn’t maim, smart and lithe even underground. I wanted to reassure him that, like his dad, he would survive, but I didn’t know how. I wrote what I wrote, pressed “send,” and packed my gear.

  I flew to Ireland and walked off the plane into Shannon Airport to find Bill standing beside three huge duffel bags that had been stuffed full of tools and then strapped with duct tape. “Good God, have you run away from home?” I asked him, smiling. “What exactly did you think we were going to sample on this trip? The ocean floor?”

  “I didn’t know what the hell to think,” Bill answered. “Your e-mail didn’t say a damn thing. I couldn’t take chances, seeing as this is a third-world country. So I brought everything.” Bill’s manner was somewhat subdued and he looked tired but otherwise fine. He will survive this, I thought; we both will.

  I did have a plan, but only sort of. First, we went to the airport shop and I bought two packages of every different kind of candy that they had for sale. “Provisions,” I explained. At the rental car desk, the man behind the counter asked us if we were married. “Maybe,” I hedged. “Will it affect our rate?” He explained that the additional driver fee is waived when it is applied to a spouse. “Well, then, yes, I seem to remember that we are married. Isn’t that right, dear?” I prompted Bill with my elbow. I saw Bill’s face blanch and he looked to be stifling the urge to vomit. I smiled with satisfaction.

  The clerk asked us if we had our own car insurance. “Yes,” I answered. He then asked if I wanted to supplement it with additional insurance, and I automatically answered, “Yes.” He asked if we wanted to fully cover both the car and the—and I cut him off with another “Yes.”

  The clerk looked at me quizzically. “It’s bleedin’ expensive, you know,” he told us, possibly confused by the fact that only moments ago I’d been willing to pretend holy matrimony in order to save five bucks a day.

  “It’s not as expensive as some other things,” I answered mysteriously as I signed and initialed the stack of papers.

  Finally, the clerk described the car and pointed us on our way. “Right, then. The petrol is prepaid; the cleaning is prepaid; the vehicle is insured; the drivers are both insured; any damage to any other vehicle is insured; if anything happens—”

  “We walk away.” I finished his sentence for him. “We just walk away.”

  “Yes,” affirmed the clerk, but he looked troubled as he handed me the keys.

  “ ‘Bleedin’ expensive, you know,’ ” Bill mimicked as we walked out, looking for the car. “Why is everything so bloody-bleeding over here?”

  I launched into a discourse on the gradual contraction of medieval oaths invoking the Virgin Mother Mary’s menstrual blood and the seepage of Christ’s wounds, astounded to find any use for my college study of medieval literature. I was driving, and eventually we settled into a comfortable silence, watching a foreign world go by from the wrong side of the road. We’d been to Ireland many times before: the massive layered cliffs of coal along its western coast are a wonderful place to teach students how to identify and map fossil-bearing rocks. On this trip, I was doing the driving—for a change, I was going to be the strong one, taking care of everything.

  “Let’s go through Limerick and not around it, what do you think?” I asked Bill. He shrugged to signify that he didn’t care. I took the roundabout off of the N18 and eased onto Ennis Road, then headed south toward the Shannon Bridge.

  “Ughhhuh!” Bill suddenly made a retching noise and spit a huge wad of tar out the window and into the River Shannon. “Whatever that was, it just threw up in my mouth.” He pointed to a package of black candies that had turned out to be pungent gelatinous licorice rolled in salt and not sugar. “Zounds!” he added, referencing our recent conversation.

  “It’s an acquired taste,” I remarked, giggling at his discomfort. Bill didn’t laugh, but his eyes lightened and I thought I saw his misery leave him for a moment. “Do you want me to throw the rest of it at this policeman, or bobby, or whatever he is?” I offered, rolling down my window.

  “Naw.” Bill slumped in his seat. “I’ll probably eat the rest of it later.” We turned north on O’Connell Avenue and headed for the Milk Market district. “What are we doing here?” asked Bill, rather philosophically, I thought.

  “We’re looking for leprechauns,” I answered pensively. “Keep your damn eyes open.” I was getting lost, confused by streets with names like “Sráid Eibhlín” and “Seansráid and Chláir,” but I didn’t care. I wasn’t trying to find anything; I was waiting for something to happen.

  The roads narrowed and I drove on, taking whichever claustrophobic turn looked to lead down the most obscure alleyway. I turned my head toward Bill and was about to wonder aloud what an “Arms” was anyway, having passed by the Johnsgate Arms, the Palmerstown Arms, and several others, when I heard “Bam!” and felt a bone-rattling
crack go through the car.

  I slammed on the brakes, wondering why anyone in this tame neighborhood would try to bash our car window in with a baseball bat. My hands were still shaking on the wheel when I looked to the right and saw only the silhouette of Bill’s head, lit from behind with a glowing halo made by the spider-web pattern in his passenger’s-side window. We scrambled numbly out of the car on my side, and Bill lumbered around to the other side of the car in order to see what had happened. I sat down on the curb and tried to still my nerves.

  “God, these car accidents are a lot less fun than they used to be,” I told Bill, and he agreed.

  Unable to accurately judge the position of the vehicle from the right side of the road, I had been driving too close to the curbside. This had gotten worse until I passed near enough to a streetlight such that it snapped the passenger’s-side mirror clean off and smashed it into Bill’s window.

  “Well, you’ve made a holy show of yourselves,” remarked a man in an apron, coming out of a nearby pub with a few other people who had heard the glass shatter. He whistled at the car. “Now, that will be dear to put right.”

  Bill saw an opportunity for diplomacy in action. “We’re Americans,” he clarified. “Our plan is to just walk away.”