Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (5 page)

I was just an undergraduate and unaware of Ashby’s Fourth of July event. I had been working with lithium aluminum hydride, and I thought it was my responsibility to get rid of it. To do that in the lab required a long tedious procedure, but outside the chemistry building there was a drain in the alley. I combined all the solutions in a single two-liter beaker, covered it with aluminum foil, and carried the beaker outside to the drain. I dumped it quickly, stepped back, and waited for the flames. Nothing happened.

I stood nearby. Two minutes passed. Maybe the ether had evaporated and the hydride had not yet combined with water to produce the hydrogen. Maybe it was dry down there. I didn’t want to walk away, in case something horrible happened.

A campus cop walked up the alley. Please God, don’t let him light a cigarette. He didn’t. He was about twenty feet away from the drain. He looked at me suspiciously.

I noticed an outside water spigot on the building. As the cop watched, I filled the empty beaker with water and poured it down the drain. A deep red flame—the color of lithium atoms and the combustion of hydrogen—erupted from the drain. The cop looked from the drain to the spigot, back to the drain and back to the spigot. I knew he was thinking that
water spigots aren’t supposed to dispense liquids that blow up. I walked quickly into the building, wondering whether he would report the drain, the spigot, or the student. The chemistry building was old and labyrinthine, and once I passed under the furnace ducts and slipped into a cluttered hallway, I was safe.

T
HE LAB IN WHICH
I learned the most about life was presided over by Joe Neilands. I think he taught me specifically three things:

1. Use a funnel when you are pouring acetone from a large bottle into a smaller one.
   
2. Drink tea instead of coffee.
   
3. Be responsible; you are a scientist.
   

Joe Neilands made me aware of the present-day planet. I already knew about the universe but had spent little time thinking about today and the people around me. Joe’s lab studied micro-organisms that, when grown in the near absence of iron, could make things that would bind tightly to iron when it was provided. We were interested in the fact that iron is everywhere in biology and that it isn’t soluble in water without some kind of carrier.

Joe Nielands was a remarkable man. His lab was a place to play with scientific tools. In most university labs, the function of graduate students is to conduct experiments and write papers that will advance the career of the professor running the lab. Joe was pleased when we did some work on iron transport,
but it wasn’t a requirement. He encouraged us to follow our interests.

As long as I wrote a thesis and got a degree, Joe didn’t much care what else I did. He figured I would not be very successful in science because I was too interested in everything else, including women. He introduced me to visitors to the lab as his “wide-angled genius.” Joe hoped I would get a good education. If he said anything at all to me on the grand scale, it was that my education was being paid for by the people and I owed them my conscientious best. From my home base in Joe’s lab, I followed my own curiosity. It took me into anthropology, sociology, physics and math, and even music courses, where I could meet women. He warned me that my style of hanging out as long as I could as a graduate student would eventually result in some tightening of the departmental rules, and it did. But the university was a big place and there were so many courses to take. I audited as many classes as I could.

During my first year at Berkeley, the biochemistry department had purchased a brand-new Varian A60 nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer. It was absolutely the coolest tool I had ever seen. It was a powerful analytic instrument that allowed you to identify all the different types of hydrogen atoms in a particular molecule, and from that it was possible to determine the molecular structure. It enabled a chemist to understand how the carbons and hydrogens and nitrogens and oxygens were all stuck together—literally to draw a picture of a molecule. They had one at Georgia Tech, but they never let undergrads even look at it. At Berkeley I helped take it out of the box.

It was a huge machine. To operate it, you sat in front of a
console surrounded by dials and switches. It was like sitting in the cockpit of a 747. By the time I’d read the manual and played with it enough to feel confident, the spring quarter had ended. I was taking the summer off, but I couldn’t wait to get back to the machine in the fall.

When I returned to Berkeley in September, I raced up to the third floor to find the NMR. When I walked into the room, I saw that a gray plywood box had been padlocked over the top of the console. The machine looked as if it had been put in prison. It was difficult to believe that anyone would cover such a lovely instrument with an ugly box. Someone had staked a claim to my machine.

I discovered that the machine had been imprisoned by a postdoctoral chemist working in the lab of Dr. Dan Koshland. This chemist had used an A60 in Berkeley’s chemistry department, but he was ignorant of a crucial fact. The A60 was a very sensitive instrument, and the longer it stood idle, the more it went out of whack. I’d found that if it hadn’t been used on weekends, it would take more than an hour on Monday morning to properly adjust the amplitude of its three perpendicular magnetic fields. In fact, the manual clearly warned that this problem probably would be the worst on Monday mornings.

They didn’t have that problem in the chemistry department, which was much larger than the biochemistry department. Consequently, their A60 was in use seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. It never had down time to lose tune, so the chemists didn’t have to learn how to align it. When the postdoc found our machine out of tune, he just assumed that the biochemists were screwing it up. This was typical
of a chemist; chemists always believe they’re smarter than biochemists. Of course, physicists think they’re smarter than chemists, mathematicians think they’re smarter than physicists, and, for a while, philosophers thought they were smarter than mathematicians, until they found out in this century that they really didn’t have anything much to talk about.

In order to prevent biochemists from ruining his alignment, the postdoc had the carpentry shop construct the box to cover the dials. No one could use the machine without his permission. This did not sit well with me. I was not going to beg for permission to use it. I bought my own lock and slipped it through the hasp. There were now two locks on the machine.

I explained the situation to Neilands. He thought my response appropriate and pretty damn funny. It wasn’t long before Dan Koshland came in. “Kary, could I see you for a moment?”

“Come on in, Dan,” I said. “Have some tea.”

Reluctantly, he sat for tea. “Did you put that lock on the NMR machine, Kary?”

“I did,” I admitted. “Did you put the other one on?”

“My postdoc did,” he confessed. “He thought people were messing it up.”

“Well, if I had thought that, I would’ve called a meeting of all the people using the machine and we could have figured out what to do, instead of putting a crude-looking box over it. But I’ll take mine off if you’ll take yours off.”

So we took both locks off the machine, and I had the janitors take the box away. As a compromise, an electronic key was installed. Everybody who needed a key got one. I hung a key on a nail behind the machine. No one failed to notice it.

I
STARTED WORKING
at Cetus in 1979. It was founded when Ron Cape, Pete Farley, Don Glaser, and Carl Djerrassi decided that a whole lot of money might be made in biotechnology. They didn’t know about recombinant DNA yet, but they sensed something coming down the pipeline. Cetus hired me in 1979 to make oligonucleotides. It was a wonderful place to be doing biochemistry. I probably worked harder my first few years there than at any other time in my life because it was fun and because Ron Cape and Pete Farley made it even more fun. I was learning how to synthesize DNA and it fascinated me. There were all kinds of wild ideas floating around the halls, and there was absolutely no restraint in terms of imagination.

When I first started, Cetus was still a small company. For the first time in my life I had the personal privilege as a scientist of buying pretty much whatever I needed when I needed it. Without having to get permission, I could call a company and order anything costing less than five thousand dollars. If something cost more than that, it usually took me one phone call to Farley to get approval. Cetus provided scientists with every service imaginable. The concept was to eliminate as much of the routine work as possible, to allow scientists the time to do science.

As the company grew, forms were eventually distributed. Rules were instituted. Good people became involved in bad office politics. Cetus became just another business. I didn’t blame Pete or Ron; they were just as helpless as the rest of us when the gray-suited middle managers came vulturing in after
the public stock offering. The worst thing I remember about those days of swelling middle management was when the guy who used to empty the isotope disposal buckets became the “safety officer” and suddenly got a staff, an office, and power.

Safety officers have a vested interest in interpreting everything in terms of various degrees of danger. In order to live for another day and to develop respect for the safety officer, signs were posted everywhere reminding us that everything we did was dangerous. Enclosed with every chemical is a Materials Handling Data Safety Sheet that explains its potential hazards—it’s the law. The person who wrote the instructions for sodium chloride must have thought it was a mixture of sodium metal and chlorine gas rather than a completely innocuous compound that people sprinkle on foods to enhance the taste, usually called salt. Sodium and chlorine are pretty serious separately but not when combined into sodium chloride. The safety sheet described in detail the method that should be used to clean up sodium chloride: “Wear rubber boots,” it advised. “Wear a respirator. A small spill can be flooded with water. Cleaning up a larger spill may require more than one person.” Since I did not want anyone in my lab to suffer serious salt injury, I posted this warning on the wall. This is what happens when government agencies, who have to answer to nobody in particular, run rampant. If you want to have sodium chloride in your lab, you must have safety equipment that would be appropriate for sodium metal and chlorine gas. If you want to have it in a restaurant, you just have to have a salt shaker.

The safety officer at Cetus and I had a real serious battle. I never called him the safety officer; I called him the danger
officer because all he ever did was put up
DANGER
signs. A danger officer wants to find dangerous things because it gives him more power. Just like a toxicologist would like to find as many toxins as possible. If you are paid to be a safety officer in a lab, you will find danger whether there is any or not.

At Cetus the most dangerous thing was the blue punch that David Gelfand made for the Blue Death Party at the scientific retreats, which he concocted from alcohol and something blue. Many people, myself included, drank it until we did things that were so out of line with normal social discourse that we either fell over in some inconvenient place or, as in the case of what happened to me one night, got into fights with fellow researchers. The safety officer should have put some signs around Gelfand’s blender. The things the safety officer did made it more difficult to work and could have resulted in more accidents. His work always reminded me of the military officer in Vietnam, who explained: “In order to save that village, it became necessary to destroy it.”

I had several work cabinets with sliding hoods made of thick safety glass. They enabled people to work safely with dangerous materials. I came in one day to find that he had plastered stickers on everything. Hazardous materials. Noxious materials. Radioactive materials. Corrosive materials. Signs posted everywhere warned that safety glasses had to be worn at all times. One hood was almost half-covered with his stickers. Overnight my lab had become a very dangerous place. I went storming into his office. “What do you think those hoods are made out of glass for?” I screamed at him. “With all your stickers covering the glass, you can’t see a damn thing!” When I calmed down, I explained, “My people
don’t need to be constantly reminded they’re in danger. They’re not in that much danger or we wouldn’t be doing it. With all your little signs everywhere, nobody can tell what’s dangerous and what’s not, because according to you everything is dangerous.”

With a razor blade and solvents, I scraped off all his danger stickers. Eventually we compromised. I allowed him to post those signs required by law but not on any transparent surfaces. And we agreed that every time he put up a new sign, he had to take down an old one.

The biggest battle I fought with the danger officer was over the fact that I insisted on keeping my lunch and a case of Beck’s beer in the same fridge in which I kept my radioactive isotopes. I kept the beer in bottles on the bottom shelf and the radioactive isotopes in a sealed lead-lined container on the top shelf. I pointed out to him that there was no way known to science that anything, even radiation, could escape from a closed lead-lined container into a sealed bottle. “I’m planning on drinking most of that beer myself,” I said. “If it wasn’t safe, I wouldn’t put it in there.”

Fortunately, Pete Farley, the president of Cetus, liked my beer. He liked coming into my lab in the afternoon and taking a bottle from my refrigerator. This presented the danger officer with a dangerous situation, so he took the safest way out: He stopped searching my refrigerator.

Once he hired a beautiful young woman as his assistant. He sent her into my lab to conduct a safety inspection. I eventually called her
Nostradama Salutatis
or “Our Lady of Safety.” The danger officer thought she might be able to handle me. Instead, I invited her home for dinner, and several months later she moved in with me.