Intuition (19 page)

5

C
LIFF AND
Feng spent Monday morning mocking up their poster for a conference at MIT. They stood at a table in the third-floor lounge with flowcharts detailing how R-7 entered and subverted cancer cells. The process was both simple and elegant in theory: the virus with covert forces in tow approaching, parachuting in behind enemy lines, and knocking off the cancerous sentinel, then donning the enemy uniform and proceeding to destroy the enemy infrastructure. Illustrating these war games accurately on paper was not easy, however. Cliff had prepared elaborate diagrams showing the genetic structure of R-7 and the genetic structure of the target cancer cell. Feng had typed up several pages of exposition explaining exactly how virus and cancer cell fit together. The two men now stood arranging and rearranging diagrams and notes on their foam core board.

“It's too cluttered,” Cliff said after some thought. “We should take these out.” He discarded two pages of Feng's description.

“I think we need those,” Feng said.

“They're too wordy.”

“I think,” said Feng, “the diagrams need a key.”

“They shouldn't need a . . .” Cliff caught his breath and sneezed. “What is that?” He rubbed his eyes. “I'm allergic to something in this room.” A bunch of flowers lay half dead on the side table near the couch. “Who left these here? God.” He tossed the wilted blossoms in the trash. “The diagrams should speak for themselves,” he said, quoting Sandy Glass.

“Accuracy is more important than elegance,” Feng retorted, quoting Marion Mendelssohn.

The two of them faced off for a moment, tense and almost rivalrous, like brothers, opposites in the same family, one taking after the father and one after the mother, neither willing to give way. Feng made his point, but Cliff knew that he was right. The poster was supposed to advertise, not explain. How many times had he been told that in grad school? The poster was a storyboard; the cartoon version. And so, with some authority, he set Feng's wordy pages off to the side.

Cliff was exerting control as he never had before, and control was his prerogative. Feng did not dispute that. Characteristically, he did not debate the issue further, but in that moment Feng resolved to work on something else. He needed something of his own, even if it was on the most trivial problem. In the lab, solitude had always been his friend, and obscurity meant freedom. Cliff's lexicon of Fungi made Feng seem merely cynical. The scrawled definitions: “axiom = assumption; assumption = confusion; confusion = status quo”—all those transcriptions of Feng's sayings hardly captured the contradictions in his character: his reticent imagination; the sublimation of self, masking independence. He was tired of Cliff and his famous discovery.

Restless, Cliff propped his poster on the couch, then on a chair, and finally on the counter against the microwave. He backed into the doorway to look at the result, considered his composition, and then paced a little in the hall. He just wanted to get the presentation right. All his thoughts and actions served R-7. Cliff saw now that you could not become possessive of this kind of research. Instead, he, the researcher, had become possessed by his creation. Was there some way to simplify the diagrams? He wanted graphics bold enough to stop people from across the room.

Pacing in the hall, Cliff nearly collided with Robin. “Oh, sorry,” he said.

She stared at him hard. She couldn't help herself; it was as if she saw him for the first time.

“I said I was sorry,” he told her, irritated by her piercing look, and he kept walking.

She ducked into the cold room with its cluttered shelves of old equipment, its defunct Beckman centrifuges. Shivering, she tried to compose herself.

She'd spent half the night poring over her photocopies. The notes included the numbers for several experimental mice, along with the outcome of injection with R-7. This material was familiar to Robin. There was nothing wrong with the data—except for one thing. There was too much.

Robin had stared at the columns in Cliff's sloping handwriting. He'd recorded the ear-tag numbers of each mouse sacrificed; the record continued from one page to the next, spilling over messily. Had he repeated himself? Written down the same data twice? No. Each mouse number was unique. But there were too many mice. The total number dissected in the notes was thirty-three, ten more than what Cliff had recorded in his journal article.

Robin checked and rechecked. Had Cliff forgotten to include some mice in his final results, or had he intentionally excluded them? Why would he publish his results with some animals and not with others? Was there something wrong with the missing ones? Had they been contaminated?

Sleepless then, Robin sat up in her apartment with Cliff's flimsy draft notes on one side of the couch and the stiff journal offprint on the other. The notes and article would not reconcile.

Resentment had pushed her to this point, a shameful desire to pull and pick at his results, even hurt herself a little, as one might feel picking the scab off a wound. She'd hoped to find something wrong, but now that she had, she did not know what to do. Suspicion had brought her strength, but the evidence justifying her suspicion terrified her. Searching for mistakes, she had not expected anything but relief. She hadn't considered what would happen if she succeeded. She might have been jubilant, but jealousy did not carry her that far and led, instead, to darker emotions. She had never felt so angry in all her life. She was angry about the journal article, which was surely nothing more than a house of cards. She was angry at Sandy and Marion for betting everything upon this work. Most of all, she was angry at herself. She felt the irony acutely, that this was the one discovery she'd made in almost six years at the Philpott, and the finding was purely negative. She had uncovered not truth, but falsehood. How despicable she would seem to the others; how hateful she seemed to herself for even contemplating crying foul.

That evening the sky was gray and sullen, the August air so heavy she felt she was pushing aside curtains as she walked home. She was wearing a shirtwaist dress—comfortable in the air-conditioned lab, unbearable outside. She wiped the sweat from her eyes as she cut through Harvard's quadrangle of redbrick laboratories. In the grassy courtyard the scientists were warming up, shirtless, batting the ball back and forth over the volleyball net despite the heat. Prithwish and Cliff and a couple of people from the second floor were there, warming up to play some plant biologists from Harvard. She stood and watched for a few minutes as the men set and spiked the ball. The courtyard rang with shouting; the men fought hard for every point. Cliff jumped up at the net, stretched his long arm, and slammed the ball down at a wicked angle. Then he turned back to Prithwish, bowed, and grinned. His grin faded only ever so slightly as he saw Robin standing on the sidelines.

A drop of rain pelted her face, then another. It began to pour. Robin took cover in the doorway of the bio labs where the bronze rhinos stood guard. Even in the cloudburst, the guys whooped and jumped with the ball. Cliff dove to make a save and skinned his knees and elbows. He was wet and bloody and dog-happy. The rain delighted him, even as it brought him down.

“Water polo!” he called out, palming the ball with one hand and heaving it into the net.

Robin had never seen anyone look less guilty. But how did guilty people look? Was he really so deluded? Had he deceived himself so well? Why not? He charmed everyone; he spoke and smiled and had you like the ball in the palm of his hand. She'd known he was a charmer, but she hadn't understood the half of it.

That night she padded up to the fifth floor of her apartment building and knocked softly on Larry and Wendy's door.

There was no answer. Of course she should have called first. She shrank away, embarrassed, when Larry finally came to the door.

“I was wondering . . .” Robin began.

“Do you want to go to the Toshiro Mifune Festival?” Wendy interrupted at Larry's shoulder. She was holding the Brattle Theater schedule.

“Actually,” Robin said, “I was wondering if I could ask your advice about some weird stuff going on in the lab.”

“Weird stuff in the lab. Come in, come in, that sounds like fun,” said Larry, ushering Robin inside.

The apartment was at least three times the size of hers, and overlooked the Common. The place was painted white and had an airy, albeit slightly cluttered, feeling. There was a real entrance hall, and a formal dining room, which Larry used as his wood shop. The built-in china cabinet displayed Larry's tools behind its glass doors, and a sawhorse stood in place of a table. In the living room, several harpsichords in varying degrees of completion stood on spindly legs or lay prostrate on the floor. Bookcases were piled high with computer-science texts and board games in their boxes. The walls were adorned with completed jigsaw puzzles sprayed with fixative, mounted, and framed. Renoir's
Dance at Bougival
hung in the apartment, as well as Van Gogh's
Starry Night.

Robin took a seat on the futon that served as couch and guest bed. Wendy poured her a glass of seltzer and placed it on the coffee table next to the one thousand pieces of Vermeer's
The Lacemaker
while Larry asked cheerfully, “What's the dirt?”

And so Robin told them about the journal article, and her apprehensions. She told them how she'd come across the three pages of data stuffed in the drawer. She told them what she'd seen, and what she had concluded. “I saw him sacrifice his mice on March twenty-first,” she said, “and that was the same day he recorded here.” She offered the three photocopied pages to Wendy.

“How do you remember what day it was?” Wendy asked.

Robin flushed. “My diary,” she said. “I wrote it down.”

She took out the journal article, creased and worn with reading, and began to push aside the pieces of Vermeer so she could spread the pages on the table. “Ah, ah, ah,” warned Wendy as Robin mussed the edge of the puzzle. Robin stopped and simply handed the pages to Larry, who nodded as he followed her finger from one data set to the other.

She was amazed at how much better she felt disburdening herself. Her terrible thoughts took rational form. Her doubts changed from secret monsters to cogent questions. In the telling, all her ideas and her actions were beyond suspicion; they were entirely justifiable.

She was unprepared for Larry's response. “Well, what are you suggesting? You're telling us Cliff is actually hiding data?”

“Why would he try to hide his data?” asked Wendy.

“I think he was . . . I think the data didn't conform to his ideas,” Robin spluttered, “and so he suppressed the results that didn't fit.”

“No scientist would do something like that,” Larry declared.

“Never,” said Wendy. “And besides, if he was so anxious to suppress his data, why would he leave his notes in the dissection room for you to find them?”

“I think, possibly, he made a mistake, or forgot . . .”

“He may have left some kind of draft notes around, but lie in a publication?” Wendy turned to Larry. “Have you ever heard of something like that?”

Larry squinted thoughtfully, as if he were scanning every scientific field. “There are instances. I mean, there have been scandals in the past, but they're rare. And they're almost always disputed. There's almost always some explanation. Look,” he said to Robin, “people just don't come out in refereed journals and lie about their work. It's crazy. First of all, they'd never get away with it. There are too many safeguards. They'd get caught by their principal investigator. Or the referees would find something fishy in the article. And then, even if the thing did get published, no one would be able to reproduce the work later on, and the scientific community would catch them. Think about it logically. Once your paper is published, everyone else is going to try to follow in your experimental footsteps, and they'll get bad data of their own. It's unavoidable. Six months later or six years later, the truth will out. You suppress bad data—it's going to cost you your career.”

“No one would do it? Or no one should do it?” Robin asked.

“Both,” said Larry.

“What put this idea in your head?” asked Wendy.

Robin could see they thought the worse of her for speaking up. She'd offended them, blaspheming their ideas of what a researcher always did and said and meant. Larry and Wendy were both atheists, of course, but they kept the scientific faith, hallowing intellectual honesty, and technology, and the pursuit of progress. Though they were nerdy, they were pure of heart. Larry had devised all sorts of programming solutions, and Wendy was famous for her ingenious methods for testing and debugging code. She was known at MIT as the Queen of Bugs. They were frighteningly skilled and devilishly imaginative, but neither could conceive of such dishonesty as Robin proposed.

“So you're alleging some of this data isn't in his paper,” Wendy said. “How about his lab book?”

“I'm not sure,” Robin confessed, “but I don't think it's all in there either.”

Larry raised an eyebrow. “What are you trying to say?”

Robin stared down at the murky-colored puzzle pieces in front of her.

“His record keeping is shitty,” said Wendy. “I'll give you that.”

“Even if it is,” Robin said, “you don't just lose ten animals in the publication process.”

Larry and Wendy looked at each other, and Robin was embarrassed to see herself through their eyes, desperately collecting Cliff's discarded draft notes, hunting spitefully for some weapon against him. Even so, her neighbors had no explanation for the raw data she had found. “I think there's a problem here,” she insisted.

“Highly unlikely,” said Larry.

Robin flinched, but then she countered. “Highly unlikely isn't the same as impossible.”

“No, no, no,” Larry began again.

She listened to his argument. Still she was unconvinced. Her intuition told her Cliff had cheated.

On the ground, in the lab, intuition was a restricted substance. Like imagination and emotion, intuition misled researchers, leading to willful interpretations. While scientists like Mendelssohn knew how to wield it properly, young researchers had their intuition tamped down lest, like the sorcerer's apprentice, they flood the lab with their conceits. Plodding forward in the daily grind, Robin had not conceived a scientific intuition in years. She'd learned from hard experience not to trust her inner convictions lest they betray her. Now, however, her intuition was quite clear. “I can't keep this to myself,” she said.