Lab Girl (15 page)

“I fucking
met
myself,” mumbled Bill as he craned his neck to look backward while reversing the van out of the parking lot.

Once we had merged onto I-95, I put my feet up on the dash and settled into my familiar role of leading the group in killing time. I was about to incite a semantic argument over whether Monkey Jungle was a jungle
of
monkeys or a jungle
for
monkeys, but decided against it after looking into the rearview mirror and observing that Dumpling was already sleeping like a baby.

THE LIFE OF A DECIDUOUS TREE
is ruled by its annual budget. Every year, during the short months from March to July, it must grow an entire new canopy of leaves. If it fails to meet its quota this year, some competitor will grow into a corner of its previous space and thus initiate the long, slow process by which the tree will eventually lose its foothold and die. If a tree expects to be alive ten years hence, it has no alternative but to succeed this year, and every year after.

Let's consider a modest, unremarkable tree—the one living on your street, perhaps. A decorative maple tree, about the height of a streetlight—not a majestic maple reaching its full height in the forest—a demure neighborhood tree that's only one-quarter the height of its regal counterpart. When the sun is directly overhead, the little maple in our example casts a shadow about the size of a parking space. However, if we pluck off all the leaves and lay them flat, side by side, they would cover three parking spaces. By suspending each leaf separately, the tree has stacked its surface area into a sort of ladder for light to fall down. Looking up, you notice that the leaves at the top of any tree are smaller, on average, than the leaves at the bottom. This allows sunlight to be caught near the base whenever the wind blows and parts the upper branches. Look again and you'll notice that leaves low in the canopy are of a darker green; they contain more of the pigment that helps each leaf absorb sunshine, allowing them to harvest the weaker rays that penetrate shade. When building foliage, a tree must budget for each leaf individually and allocate for each position relative to the other leaves. A good business plan will allow our tree to triumph as the largest and longest-living being on your street. But it ain't easy, and it ain't cheap.

The leaves on our little maple, all taken together, weigh thirty-five pounds. Every ounce therein must be pulled from the air or mined from the soil—and quickly—over the course of a few short months. From the atmosphere, a plant gains carbon dioxide, which it will make into sugar and pith. Thirty-five pounds of maple leaves may not taste sweet to you and me, but they actually contain enough sucrose to make three pecan pies, which is the sweetest thing that I can think of right now. The pithy skeleton within the leaves contains enough cellulose to make almost three hundred sheets of paper, which is about the number that I used to print out the manuscript for this book.

Our tree's only source of energy is the sun: after light photons stimulate the pigments within the leaf, buzzing electrons line up into an unfathomably long chain and pass their excitement one to the other, moving biochemical energy across the cell to the exact location where it is needed. The plant pigment chlorophyll is a large molecule, and within the bowl of its spoon-shaped structure sits one single precious magnesium atom. The amount of magnesium needed for enough chlorophyll to fuel thirty-five pounds of leaves is equivalent to the amount of magnesium found in fourteen One A Day vitamins, and it must ultimately dissolve out of bedrock, which is a geologically slow process. Magnesium, phosphorous, iron, and the many other micronutrients that our tree needs can be gained only from the extremely dilute solution that flows in between the tiny mineral grains within the soil. In order to accumulate all of the soil nutrients that thirty-five pounds of leaves require, our tree must first absorb and then evaporate at least eight thousand gallons of water from the soil. That's enough to fill a tanker truck. That's enough to keep twenty-five people alive for a year. That's enough to make you worry about when it is next going to rain.

The life of an academic scientist is ruled by her three-year budget. Every third year, she must solicit a new contract with the federal government. The grant money guaranteed within the contract provides the cash that pays the salaries of her employees; it also provides money to buy all of the materials and equipment that she will use within her experiments and to pay for any travel necessary to complete the research objectives. Universities generally help a new science professor “start up” with a limited sum of discretionary funds—the academic version of a dowry—that support her while she attempts to secure a first contract. If she fails to land a deal within the first two or three years, she won't be able to do the work that she was trained to do, and thus won't produce the scholarship necessary to earn her tenure. If a new professor expects to have a job ten years hence, she has no alternative but to succeed. This is all greatly complicated by the fact that there aren't nearly enough federal contracts to go around.

The type of science that I do is sometimes known as “curiosity-driven research”—this means that my work will never result in a marketable product, a useful machine, a prescribable pill, a formidable weapon, or any direct material gain—or if it does indirectly lead to one of those things, this would be figured out at some much later date by someone who is not me. As such, my research is a rather low priority for our national budget. There is just one significant source of monetary support for the kind of research that I do: the National Science Foundation, or NSF.

The NSF is a U.S. government agency, and the money that it provides for scientific research comes from tax dollars. In 2013, the budget of the NSF was $7.3 billion. For comparison, the federal budget allocation for the Department of Agriculture—the people responsible for supervising food imports and exports—was about three times that amount. Each year, the U.S. government spends twice as much on its space program as it does on all of its other scientists put together: NASA's 2013 budget was more than $17 billion. And these discrepancies are nothing compared with the disparity between research and military spending. The Department of Homeland Security, created in response to the events of September 11, 2001, commands an annual budget that is fully five times larger than that of the entire NSF, while the Department of Defense's mere “discretionary” budget comes to more than sixty times that sum.

One side effect of curiosity-driven research is the inspiring of young people. Researchers generally love their calling to excess, and delight in nothing better than teaching others to love it also; as with all creatures driven by love, we can't help but breed. You may have heard that America doesn't have enough scientists and is in danger of “falling behind” (whatever that means) because of it. Tell this to an academic scientist and watch her laugh. For the last thirty years, the amount of the U.S. annual budget that goes to non-defense-related research has been frozen. From a purely budgetary perspective, we don't have too few scientists, we've got far too many, and we keep graduating more each year. America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it. Within environmental science in particular, we see the crippling effects that come from having been resource-hobbled for decades: degrading farmland, species extinction, progressive deforestation…The list goes on and on.

Nevertheless, $7.3 billion sounds like a lot of money. Remember that this figure must support all curiosity-driven science—not just biology, but also geology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, psychology, sociology, and the more esoteric forms of engineering and computer science as well. Because my work is about learning why plants have been so successful for so long, my research falls within the NSF's paleobiology program. In 2013, the amount of funding that paleobiology gave out for research was $6 million. This is the entire annual budget for all of the paleontology research that happens in America, and the dinosaur-diggers predictably secure the lion's share.

Nevertheless, $6 million still sounds like a lot of money. Perhaps we could agree that one paleobiologist from each state in the country should get a grant. If we divide $6 million by fifty, we get $120,000 for each contract. And this is close to the reality: the NSF's paleobiology program gives out between thirty and forty contracts each year, with an average value of $165,000 each. Thus, at any given time, there are about one hundred funded paleobiologists in America. This is probably not enough to answer the public's many questions about evolution, even if we limit ourselves to the charismatically extinct, such as the dinosaur and the woolly mammoth. Note also that there are a
lot
more than one hundred paleobiology professors in America, which means that most of them can't do the research they were trained to do.

Nevertheless, $165,000 sounds like a lot of money, to me at least. But how far does it really go? Fortunately, the university pays my salary for most of the year (it is very uncommon for a professor to be paid when classes are not in session—that is, all summer long), but it is up to me to secure salary for Bill. If I choose to pay him $25,000 per year (he's got twenty years of experience, after all), I need to request an additional $10,000 to pay for his benefits, bringing the total to $35,000 per year.

On top of this, there's the interesting fact that the university effectively taxes the government for the research that its professors do. So, on top of my request for $35,000, I must request another $15,000 that goes straight into the university's coffers, and I never see a dime of it. This is called “overhead” (or sometimes “indirect cost”), and the tax rate that I indicate above is about 42 percent. The rate of taxation is different at each university, and while it can range all the way up to 100 percent at some of the more prestigious schools, I've never seen it dip lower than 30 percent. This tax is ostensibly used to pay the university's air-conditioning bill, fix the drinking fountains, and keep the toilets flushing, though I feel moved to mention that each of these things works only intermittently within the building that houses my laboratory.

Anyway, the total cost of employing Bill for three years under this pitiful scenario is $150,000, which leaves a whopping $15,000 for all the chemicals and equipment necessary to do three years of state-of-the-art high-tech lab work, or to employ student help, or to do any travel, or to attend workshops and conferences. Oh, and remember—there's only $10,000 of
spendable
money because of the university's tax.

Next time you meet a science professor, ask her if she ever worries that her findings might be wrong. If she worries that she chose an impossible problem to study, or that she overlooked some important evidence along the way. If she worries that one of the many roads not taken was perhaps the road to the right answer that she's still looking for. Ask a science professor what she worries about. It won't take long. She'll look you in the eye and say one word: “Money.”

A VINE MAKES IT UP
as it goes along. The copious vine seeds that rain down from the top of the forest sprout easily, but only rarely take root. Green and malleable, they search frantically for something to cling to, some scaffolding that will provide the strength that they so completely lack. Vines resolve to fight their way up to the light by any means necessary. They do not play by the rules of the forest: they place their roots in one optimal spot and grow their leaves elsewhere, a different optimum, usually several trees over. They are the only plant on land that grows farther sideways than it does up. Vines steal. They steal patches of light left unattended and rivulets of rain. Vines do not enter into apologetic symbiosis, but instead grow bigger at every opportunity, a dead scaffold being just as good as a living one.

A vine's only weakness is its weakness. It desperately wants to grow as tall as a tree, but it doesn't have the stiffness necessary to do it politely. A vine finds its way to the sun using not wood, but pure grit and undiluted gall. An ivy plant sports thousands of rubbery green tendrils programmed to wrap around anything and everything, assuming that whatever each tendril touches is strong enough to support it, at least until something stronger comes along. It is a renegade that can improvise like no other: should a tendril touch soil, it transforms itself into a root; should a tendril touch rock, it grows suction cups and cements them firmly. A vine becomes whatever it needs to be and does whatever it must in order to make real its fabulous pretensions.

Vines are not sinister; they are just hopelessly ambitious. They are the hardest-working plants on Earth. A vine can grow an entire foot in length on just one sunny day. Within their stems gush the highest rates of water transfer ever measured in a plant. Don't be fooled by the few red or brown leaves you find on poison ivy in the fall—the plant is not dying; it's just cheating with different pigments. Vines are evergreen, which means that they never take a day off: no long winter vacation like the deciduous trees that they have laboriously scaled. On top of everything, vines do not flower and bear seed until they reach the open sun above the canopy of the forest, and therefore only the very strongest have ever survived.

In an earthly age when people reign supreme, the strongest plants are becoming stronger. Vines cannot take over a healthy forest; they require a disturbance in order to take hold. Some gash has to create open soil, a hollow trunk, a sunny patch that a vine can come into. People can disturb like nothing else: we plow, pave, burn, chop, and dig. The edges and cracks of our cities support only one kind of plant: a weed, something that grows fast and reproduces aggressively.

A plant that lives where it should not is simply a pest, but a plant that thrives where it should not live is a weed. We don't resent the audacity of the weed, as every seed is audacious; we resent its fantastic success. Humans are actively creating a world where only weeds can live and then feigning shock and outrage upon finding so many. This mixed message is irrelevant: there is already a revolution taking place in the plant world as invasives effortlessly supplant natives within every human-modified space. Our impotent condemnation of weeds will not stop this revolution. We aren't getting the revolution we want: we're getting the one that we triggered.

The vast majority of vines found in North America are invasive species whose seeds were accidentally imported from Europe and Eurasia along with tea, cloth, wool, and other basic necessities. Many who immigrated to America during the nineteenth century built a spectacular fortune in a new land. Freed from the torment of insects that had exploited their weaknesses generation after generation for millennia, these vines also flourished in the New World unfettered.

The vine that we know by the name “kudzu” arrived in Philadelphia as a gift from Japan to honor the 1876 centennial. Since that time kudzu has expanded to cover a total land area the size of Connecticut. Thick ribbons of kudzu embroider thousands of miles of highways in the American South. Kudzu thrives within the roadside ditches where we throw our beer cans and cigarette butts: it is the living garbage of the plant world. Kudzu is perpetually where it should not be, blocking our view of prettier pink dogwoods. If we were to wade through the refuse and tease one out, we'd see that a single strand of kudzu can grow to be one hundred feet long, easily twice the height of the forest. Kudzu is resigned to its lot as a parasite; it knows no other way. While the dogwood tree blooms, stationary and secure in its expectation of another glorious summer, the kudzu resolutely continues to grow one inch each hour, searching for its next temporary home.