Lab Girl (12 page)

BILL AND I SPENT
night after night of those first years designing and redesigning the first Jahren Lab, the same way that a little girl never tires of dressing and redressing her favorite doll. First we put up drywall and split the space into two rooms, each less than three hundred square feet in area. Then we crammed them full-to-bursting with instrumentation—a mass spectrometer, an elemental analyzer, four vacuum lines. We refurbished the ventilation hood to make it capable of tolerating even that most dangerous acid: hydrofluoric. Bill custom-carpentered space-saving compartments under each counter and inside each cabinet that allowed us to fit all of the things we needed and a lot more of what we didn't.

We instinctively hoarded against hard times, which Bill was positive were already on the way. We went to the Salvation Army and got old camping equipment for the lab and amateur oil paintings for my office. We visited the state surplus warehouse, where anyone with a Georgia state employee ID card could help themselves to the mountain of outdated equipment that had been discarded by local government agencies. From there we came home with four 35mm film cameras, an inky mimeograph machine, and two police batons. If we were going to be scientists for fifty more years, we asked ourselves, who could know what might come in handy over such a time span?

One night in early December of that first year, 1997, stands out in my memory, even though it was nearly identical to many other nights that had come before and would come after.

“Season's greetings!” I called out while entering the lab. “What's up?”

Bill's head popped up from underneath the mass spectrometer. “The Elf didn't come by today, if that's what you're asking,” he shouted over the noise of the air compressor, which sounded for all the world like an old car with a bad starter. “That goddamn thing is going to make me deaf before my time.”

“Huh? What? Huh? Speak up!” I answered.

“The Elf” was what we called the head graduate student within a huge and über-busy lab located on the far side of the campus. Bill had christened the place “Santa's workshop” because of its bizarre atmosphere: upon entering you were surrounded by buzzing students, each of them too preoccupied to even say hello. We ran many gas samples for them, which were delivered to us daily by the Elf.

“If they expect us to work for free, they could at least stick to a schedule,” I grumbled.

Bill shrugged. “It's a busy time of year for the Elf,” he said, nodding toward the calendar.

“Maybe his heart's not in his work. I've heard that he actually wants to be a dentist.”

I wasn't really too concerned: I had finally handed off the revised version of a manuscript to a coauthor, and I was savoring its lifted weight. “Ready for ‘lunch'?” I asked cheerfully.

“Sure, why not?” Bill accepted my invitation and we relocated to the microscope lab. “It'll be my treat,” he added.

My seventy-pound Chesapeake Bay retriever, Reba, stretched and got up from her basket in the corner. Pleased to see me, she ambled over with her bone, wagging her tail. “Hey, girl, you hungry?” I petted her, rubbing the sharp occipital bone on the top of her head that we referred to as “the Fin of the Beast.”

While moving from California to Georgia, I'd gotten lost on the outskirts of Barstow while trying to get myself off of Interstate 15 and onto Interstate 40. Somewhere near Daggett Road, which runs north-south on the eastern side of Barstow, I'd stopped to ask for directions at a parked RV displaying the sign
PUPPIES FOR SAIL
. When I crouched down and asked the little pack of brown burr-heads which one of them wanted to come to Atlanta with me, a gangly brindled pup had stumbled over with a serious look in her eyes and then tried to climb into my lap. Fifty dollars later (I knew it was meant to be because they took my check), she was my dog.

Like me, Reba spent the best part of her puppyhood in a laboratory, sleeping under the benches and begging Bill to share his tuna-fish-on-saltines dinners. The arrival of each new student spurred the same serious debate between me and Bill as to whether this new person could be anywhere near as smart as Reba. Reba always refused to weigh in, and we weren't sure if she was appalled at our unprofessionalism or convinced that the comparison was facile, or perhaps both.

I took out a small portable TV from one of the cupboards and moved three microscopes to the side, clearing a place for it. In a few minutes it would be 11:00 p.m. and
Jerry Springer
would be on. I put some popcorn in the microwave and cracked open two Diet Cokes. Bill entered carrying nine frozen McDonald's cheeseburgers: three for me, three for him, and three for Reba. He had purchased forty or so of them when the campus commons ran a twenty-five-cent special, and we had happily discovered that their physical properties were not meaningfully changed when reheated from a frozen state.

Bill and I had both left California fairly deep in debt, due to a series of dissimilar but equally foolish purchases from years ago, and had vowed to pay it all off as quickly as possible once we got “real jobs.” We soon found ourselves conducting a long-term experiment designed to measure how little we could spend each week and still get by, and frozen food had become a major component of our dietary intake.

We ate in front of the TV, watching a man clad only in a diaper spiritedly invoke First Amendment protection for his “adult baby” lifestyle, waving his bottle for emphasis.

“Man, I would do
anything
to get on Jerry's show,” I said with wistful longing.

“So you've mentioned,” acknowledged Bill with his mouth full as we watched a montage of the man being changed and powdered by his sweetheart-slash-caregiver.

When lunch was over we cleaned up. “Hey, I've got a wacky idea,” I volunteered. “Let's spend tonight running our own samples for a change.”

Bill was game. “That's so crazy it just might work,” he said, “but first there must be the Airing of the Beast.” We went outside and all three of us gazed up at the stars while Bill smoked a cigarette. “This pack cost me more than two dollars,” he complained. “I'm going to need a raise.”

The entire geographical footprint of a college campus is illuminated all night every night, greatly enhancing its desolation during the weekend. During the school week, the university belongs to no one. It buzzes and throbs with people coming and going. But the whole place is different on a Friday at midnight, when the university belongs to
you.
Smug in the presumption that you are the only working person within a fifty-mile radius, you accomplish just enough to feel justified in being naughty. In the rhythm of these Friday nights beats the honest, humble heart of science, and it also explains how discovery and mischief are two sides of the very same coin.

“A tarnished penny half hidden by the dust of the gutter,” I reflected while we were cleaning out the lint traps of the air compressor.

“A penny that will buy you a nonfat soy latte,” added Bill, “after somebody loans you three fucking dollars and eighty-four cents.”

We had spent the week doing organic carbon extractions, which is a lot more fun than it sounds. For about two hundred million years, dinosaurs roamed our planet in great groups, and a very tiny minority of them were preserved in the mud and silt of their time, including some locked away in Montana until a couple hundred years ago, when landowners stumbled upon them. Dinosaur bones have been carefully excavated, described in painful detail, prepared with special glues, shown to the public, and studied for posterity. Other, less charismatic fossils are of lesser value but potentially greater import, I would argue.

Each streak of brown within each rock that houses a fossil might be the smeared residue of a plant that lived at the time and provided the food and oxygen that supported so many huge reptiles. In these smears there is no anatomy, no morphology, and nothing to take a picture of or to display. However, we might harvest some chemical information from the smear, if we could somehow isolate it and hold it up to the light.

Living plants are distinct from the rocks that surround them in that they are rich in carbon. My colleagues and I decided that if we could capture and separate all the carbon within the dark smears inside the rocks that also held dinosaur fossils, we would have then laid claim to a new sort of plant fossil. The chemistry of this carbon might tell us something about the plant, even though we would never know the shape of the leaves that had made the smear.

In order to liberate the organic carbon—and only the carbon—from a dead rock, we trap the gas that is released while the sample burns. When we do chemistry with liquids, we use beakers to hold one liquid and pour another, to mix the two and to keep others separate. To do chemistry with gases, we use a glass apparatus called a vacuum line, similar to the apparatus that I had been using when I caused the explosion years earlier.

Working a vacuum line is rather like playing a church organ: both have lots of levers to pull and knobs to twist, and it all has to be done in the right order and with the right timing. Both hands are moving at the same time, often performing dissimilar tasks, as the trap and the exhaust are operated independently. After a day of use, both the vacuum line and the organ must be lovingly shut down and delicately maintained; they can both be regarded as pieces of art in their own right. The biggest difference between the two, however, is that a church organ will not explode in your face if you make a mistake while using it.

“Arrgh, I
hate
that thing!” Bill had covered his ears after the loudest air compressor in the world started up with a phlegmatic mechanical cough.

“I know it's awful,” I acknowledged, “but a new one is twelve hundred dollars.”

“Isn't there someone somewhere who owes us?” he ventured. “Maybe you should write a Christmas letter to Santa.”

“
You
are a goddamn
genius,
” I said, and I meant it.

Bill was referring to our ever-increasing exploitation at the mittened hands of “Professor Santa” (the Elf's boss), in which I was supremely complicit, having initiated the whole thing as a barefaced effort to ingratiate myself with an influential person. After reading some of this distinguished professor's publications about oxygen chemistry, I had offered to run some trial analyses of oxygen isotopes for free, and the project had snowballed from there (the puns practically wrote themselves that winter) after he deemed the data to be “very interesting” and then redirected his whole workshop toward making additional samples. We naively consented to run them, vastly underestimating the number of oxygen reactions that could be carried out using a wooden mallet while standing at a conveyor belt and singing.

Earlier that winter, I had gone to a lot of trouble writing multiple private e-mails to the Elf, insisting that he implement a workshop-wide protocol requiring all samples to be labeled in either green or red ink, and bundled in units of ten using silver tape, prior to delivery. My efforts paid off with interest once the sample tubes accumulated to the point where Bill had gotten the joke.

When we inspected our sample logs, we estimated that user “Rudolph” had logged about three hundred free analyses, knowing that they would cost thirty dollars a pop if ordered commercially. We agreed that I would write a letter asking Dear Santa to bring us a shiny, new, silent air compressor. We envisioned ourselves coming downstairs on Christmas morning to find one adorned with a huge red bow, sitting just beneath the biological materials incinerator.

“Start out by explaining how we've been very, very good all year,” directed Bill.

“You get the thesaurus and I'll get the department letterhead. It has to be perfect.” I was determined to wring as much fun out of the exercise as possible.

“I wonder if they stock crayons in the front office,” mused Bill.

While I was digging in my purse for the keys to the office-supplies cabinet, I found a nearly full package of Razzles in one of the pockets, and I stopped in my tracks. “You'll never believe this, but the greatest thing in the history of the world has happened,” I told him. We put aside what we were doing, sat on the floor, and divided up the candies, fighting over the precious orange ones and automatically segregating the blue-raspberry ones for Reba because they were her favorite.

The fifty-six hours of weekend that rolled out before us seemed endless. At sunrise we planned to declare ourselves the rightful inheritors of everything in the departmental refrigerator, but beyond that we had nothing scheduled. Maybe we would pick the lock to the machine shop and gawk at the huge saws, drills, and welding tools, treating it as our own personal museum. Maybe we would stage a private showing of
The Seventh Seal
using the projection system in the main auditorium. And maybe there was someone somewhere in the world who was happier than I was during that year, but on nights like that I certainly couldn't imagine it.

PLANTS HAVE FAR MORE ENEMIES
than can be counted. A green leaf is regarded by almost every living thing on Earth as food. Whole trees can be eaten while they are only seeds, while they are only seedlings. A plant cannot run away from the endless legions of attackers that comprise an unremitting menace. Within the slime of the forest floor thrive opportunists that regard all plants, dead or alive, as nourishment. The fungi are perhaps the worst of these villains. White-rot and black-rot fungi are everywhere, so named because they have chemicals that can do what nothing else can: they can rot the hardest heart of a tree. Four hundred million years of wood, save a few fossil slivers, has decomposed back to the sky from whence it came. All this destruction can be attributed to a single group of fungi that makes its macabre living by rotting the ligneous limbs and stumps of a forest. Yet within this very same group are the best—and really only—friends that trees have ever had.

You may think a mushroom is a fungus. This is exactly like believing that a penis is a man. Every toadstool, from the deliciously edible to the deathly poisonous, is merely a sex organ that is attached to something more whole, complex, and hidden. Underneath every mushroom is a web of stringy hyphae that may extend for kilometers, wrapping around countless clumps of soil and holding the landscape together. The ephemeral mushroom appears briefly above the surface while the webbing that anchors it lives for years within a darker and richer world. A very small minority of these fungi—just five thousand species—have strategically entered into a deep and enduring truce with plants. They cast their stringy webbing around and through the roots of trees, sharing the burden of drawing water into the trunk. They also mine the soil for rare metals, such as manganese, copper, and phosphorous, and then present them to the tree as precious gifts of the magi.

The edge of a forest is a hostile no-man's-land and trees do not grow outside this boundary for a reason. Centimeters outside a forest's border we find too little water, too little sun, too much wind or cold for just one more tree. And yet, though rarely, forests do expand and grow in area. Once within hundreds of years a seedling will conquer this harsh space and endure the requisite years of want. Such seedlings are invariably heavily armored with a symbiotic belowground fungus. So much is stacked against this little tree, although it does have twice the usual amount of root function, thanks to the fungus.

There is a price: during these first years most of the sugar that the little plant makes in its leaves will go directly into the fungus suckling at its roots. The webbing that surrounds these struggling roots does not penetrate them, however, and the plant and fungus remain physically separate but enjoined by their life's work. They anchor each other. They will work together until the tree is tall enough to fight for light at the top of the canopy.

Why are they together, the tree and the fungus? We don't know. The fungus could certainly live very well alone almost anywhere, but it chooses to entwine itself with the tree over an easier and more independent life. It has adapted to seek the rush of pure sweetness that comes directly from a plant root, such a strange and concentrated compound, unlike anything to be found elsewhere in the forest. And perhaps the fungus can somehow sense that when it is part of a symbiosis, it is also not alone.