Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

  I stood back and smiled at Bill and all the silly undergrads, and felt the joy that accompanies a new thought as my mind picked up speed like a commuter finally passing a traffic bottleneck. My own spirit had been fed, and at the very least, the day’s work ahead of me would be happier because of it. Perhaps that was enough of a scientific accomplishment in itself.

  A few hours later I convinced Bill to break for lunch. I told him it would be my treat but that I also had to stop by Whole Foods on an errand. “Me too,” he answered, and then explained, “I’m looking into homeopathic remedies for my hand.”

  We got in my car and drove across the island. Having never actually been inside of a Whole Foods, Bill was immediately enthralled after we walked through the door. He went directly over to a plastic package that cost about thirteen dollars and contained six capers, each the size of a golf ball. He held it up toward me and asked, “Do rich people really eat these things?”

  “Absolutely,” I answered without looking at what he was showing me. “They love nothing better.”

  I was occupied in poring over the seven different types of wheatgrass extract available. When I finally identified and selected the greenest one, I noticed that Bill had wandered off, but not before placing the capers inside my cart. I found him marveling at a refrigerated trough of soft French cheese and all at once a plan presented itself. “Let’s get all this stuff,” I suggested. “Why the hell not?”

  “You serious?” Bill had narrowed his eyes dubiously, but his body was tensely hopeful.

  “Sure,” I announced. “Today we will eat like people with mutual funds.”

  I often feel guilty that I make more money than Bill does, because our work feels like two halves of one thing. I also like to randomly buy things, and when he’s around I can rationalize it as munificence instead of impulsiveness.

  “Thank God they had all that crap next to the checkout,” Bill observed while reading the label of an organic chocolate bar containing cold-pressed cocoa from the Dominican Republic and açaí berries. “I shudder to think how close I came to missing this thing,” he said with his mouth full.

  Bill loaded our two-hundred-dollar lunch into my car by himself, shooing away any help from me. He had plans for the four “real thick paper” grocery bags and had begun to hover guardedly over them. He got in on the passenger side and as I started the engine he mumbled, “I sure hope this shit is fair trade,” while preparing to unwrap a second chocolate bar, this one flavored with rambutan.

  Two hours later we were sitting in the lab and eating “Rockefeller Hot Pockets,” which are composed of a slice of jamón ibérico wrapped around a spoonful of sturgeon caviar and microwaved for ten seconds. “Crap,” I said, startled from checking my watch, “I gotta go, but I’ll be back tonight.”

  Bill waved goodbye with a wedge of Camembert. “See you later.” His words were muffled by the baguette that was stuffed in his mouth.

  I jumped into my car and raced over to pick my son up from his school, which was just letting out for the day. I traded him his swimsuit and towel for his backpack, and we drove directly to the beach, as was our habit. On the way, I asked him how the third grade was going and he shrugged. We parked in our usual spot across from Kapiolani Park.

  Walking across the park, we passed by clusters of great banyan trees, and I stood and waited while he swung from what look like vines but are actually the unanchored roots that grow streaming out of the branches. When we got to the beach, we laid our towels over our shoes and went straight into the ocean and played monk seals for a while, diving and rolling around in the shallows together.

  Afterward we sat on the sand and I checked myself for bruises. “Baby monk seals are more rambunctious than the storybooks suggest,” I mused while massaging my middle-aged neck. “It’s strange that such good swimmers feel the need to ride their parents for locomotion.”

  My son was digging in the sand. “Are there really animals in there so small that you can’t see them?” he asked, referring to the handfuls of wet sand that he was throwing back into the shallows.

  “Absolutely,” I affirmed. “Tiny animals are everywhere.”

  “How many?” he asked skeptically.

  “Lots,” I specified. “Too many to ever count.”

  He thought for a while, and then said, “I told my teacher that the tiny animals find each other with magnets that are inside their bodies and she said she didn’t think so.”

  I immediately overreacted and retorted defensively, “Well, she’s wrong. I know the person who discovered it.” I was getting myself worked up.

  Like a judge trying to preempt an annoying trial lawyer, he changed the subject. “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway because I am going to be a major-league baseball player.”

  “I promise to come to every single one of your games.” I asked my usual question: “Can you get me free tickets?”

  He paused for a while, thinking. “Some of them,” he finally agreed.

  It was getting toward six o’clock, so I stood up, shook out the towels, and gathered up our things, getting ready to leave.

  “What’s for dessert tonight?” he asked me.

  “Your Halloween candy,” I replied, and added, “Duh.”

  He smiled and punched me in the arm.

  We went home and I made dinner while he wrestled with our dog, Coco, who is Reba’s successor and who, like her, is a Chesapeake Bay retriever. Reba lived to almost fifteen years and was greatly mourned, but through Coco I have come to learn that the entire breed shares her best qualities.

  Industrious and indestructible, Coco never hesitates to go out into the rain and is constantly trying to figure out a way to be helpful toward whatever we are doing. She prefers lying on hard cement to lying in her bed, and she will go out back and munch on driveway gravel if she gets hungry before we remember to feed her. She will also run and hurl herself into a seven-foot-high crashing ocean wave if I throw a coconut beyond it and then command her to retrieve, which is what our family does on the weekends. When we travel, she goes and stays at Uncle Bill’s house, where she deals severely with the rats that threaten his favorite mango tree.

  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 a
sked.

  “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.

  13

  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.

  14

  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.