Lab Girl (21 page)

FOR SEVERAL BILLION YEARS,
the whole of the Earth's land surface was completely barren. Even after life had richly populated the oceans, there is no clear evidence for any life on land. While herds of trilobites wallowed on the ocean floor, preyed upon by
Anomalocaris
—a segmented marine insect the size of a Labrador retriever—there was nothing on land. Sponges, mollusks, snails, corals, and exotic crinoids maneuvered through nearshore and deepwater environments—still nothing. The first jawed and jawless fishes appeared and radiated into the bony forms we know today—still nothing.

Sixty million more years passed before there was life on land that constituted any more than a few single cells stuck together within the cracks of a rock. Once the first plant did somehow make its way onto land, however, it took only a few million years for all of the continents to turn green, first with wetlands and then with forests.

Three billion years of evolution have produced only one life form that can reverse this process and make our planet significantly less green. Urbanization is decolonizing the surfaces that plants painstakingly colonized four hundred million years ago, turning them back into hard and barren lands. The amount of urban area in the United States is expected to double during the next forty years, displacing a total area of protected forest the size of Pennsylvania. Within the developing world, urbanization is happening even faster and involves much more space and many more people. On the continent of Africa, a Pennsylvania-sized area of forest is converted to city every five years.

Baltimore is the most tree-impoverished city on the East Coast of the United States, where the relatively wet climate used to support dense forests. Baltimore proper contains about one tree for every five of the city's inhabitants. Viewed from space, only about 30 percent of Baltimore City appears at all green and the rest is uninterrupted asphalt. On the same day that Bill and I arrived in Baltimore, I got a mortgage with no down payment and bought an old row house near the university. Bill moved into the attic and quickly became reaccustomed to not sleeping in a public building. It was bittersweet to have left Georgia, a place where we had both grown up so much. But like the very first plants, we needed a new place to spread out, and so we decided that this bare slab of rock could serve as home.

“DO YOU REALLY THINK T
his is illegal?” I asked Bill over the CB radio.

“Jesus, I don't know. Let's mull it over using the public airwaves.” Bill's voice was crystal clear, which was unsurprising given the fact that he was driving the vehicle directly in front of me. We were returning to our still-new home in Baltimore after a quick trip to Cincinnati, and one of us was driving a U-Haul van.

“Well, I'm just thinking,” I mused. “We've got at least four hundred miles to go, and if a cop pulls us over and notices that we're hauling hundreds of dollars of lab equipment stamped ‘Property of the University of Cincinnati,' our Maryland state driver's licenses may not qualify as sufficient proof of ownership.”

“Don't you have a copy of Ed's last will and testament, stating, ‘Being of retired mind and body, I hereby bequeath all my laboratory possessions, contaminated and otherwise, to my academic granddaughter that she may go forth and multiply my own findings manyfold'?” Bill was actually perfectly happy to converse, and I had been put under strict orders to keep babbling after the radio in his vehicle had proved inoperable.

“No, I don't have one, and I don't think that he'd want to put anything in writing anyway,” I said, considering. “Maybe I'm just being paranoid,” I added. “I mean, what possible crime could a cop think we were planning to commit with a bunch of beakers?”

“I dunno, you dumbass, how about inaugurating the ten-thousandth methamphetamine lab in West Virginia, for starters?” Bill impressed me with his worldliness.

I didn't think that he was being very supportive, seeing as he had been at least as keen to take the stuff as I had. Hadn't he packed and repacked the U-Haul three times over, successfully cramming in more boxes during each reconfiguration?

“Listen, you're right; we need to keep our eyes on the prize here, and remember that all this useless crap was
free,
” he said, morally clarifying the situation.

The next day we'd continue our work converting a huge basement room within the Johns Hopkins geology department into a magnificent laboratory, a project that we started after we moved during the summer of 1999. In between major construction tasks, we had been making the rounds at all the national scholarly conferences on biology, ecology, geology, whatever—I was getting my name out there and generally promoting the new lab. While wandering through the vendors' hall at the Geological Society of America conference in Denver during the fall of 1999, we had bumped into my favorite “academic uncle,” Ed, while he was busy searching for his wife's birthday gift. I hadn't seen him in some time; he was a little grayer but still cut the same fatherly figure with which I associated him. When I approached him to say hello, he had stopped what he was doing and greeted me with a big hug.

Ed had gone to graduate school with my dissertation advisor (hence the “uncle” designation) and had been one of the scientists who figured out the ups and downs of sea level over the eons. He and his team had analyzed thousands upon thousands of tiny ocean shells left by the microscopic animals that lived and died at the surface of the ocean. This work had started during the sixties and led to a method by which the chemistry of a shell could be used to calculate how much ice was sitting at the North Pole, based on a series of serendipitous indirect relationships.

When Arctic summers are cold, the snow that falls during the winter does not melt but instead builds up and packs down on itself until huge tongues of ice are forced out from the bottom of the pile. We find the tracks of such splaying ice as far south as Illinois, leading us to argue over whether unremittingly cold summers could create a “snowball” Earth, covered in ice from pole to pole. Because precipitation starts as evaporation, an Earth with huge expanses of polar ice is also an Earth with less ocean water, enough to lower sea level by many feet. With the sea thus drawn down, new land is exposed, and a new type of real estate opens up for plants, animals, and people. Bodies of water that have kept animals separate for thousands of years dry up, and everything begins to mix. An icy world is a brave new world, full of land to conquer and balances of power to be challenged.

Ed and his contemporaries dared to believe that this cooling and warming occurred in cycles, but mourned the fact that each generation of ice would have rubbed out the tracks of the one before it, forcing them to search for new ways to read history back beyond the most recent endless winter. At the bottom of our swelling and retracting ocean, the empty shells of tiny organisms that lived their brief lives at its surface collect, and the drills that search for petroleum haul up layers and layers of the rock into which these shells have solidified.

Each little shell bathed in the ocean of the time when it lived, in the water that was left over after ice had been taken out. During this bathing, the chemistry of the ocean was imprinted upon the chemistry of the shell, leading to the theory that analyses of fossil shells through time tell the history of global ice—of the glacial cycles. For decades, Ed had worked on his little piece of the theory, which progressed from being an unlikely fancy to a reified fact and is now found within every introductory geology textbook. To do his work, Ed ran a large laboratory full of state-of-the-art equipment, that “state” being 1970.

Ed asked me what I was up to these days, and I told him that I was building a new lab at Johns Hopkins University. I introduced him to Bill, whom he didn't quite remember from Berkeley. I knew that since I'd last seen Ed, he had been promoted to dean, and I asked him how he liked it. “I don't,” he told me while picking through a tray of gemstones. “I'm retiring at the end of this year.”

Although he was easily in his seventies, I was nevertheless shocked by this announcement, as I was far from ready to think about losing the generation that had mentored me. I wondered what the Old Boys' Club would make of me once my few allies, such as Ed, were no longer around to defend me behind closed doors.

“What's going to happen to your lab?” I asked Ed in disbelief.

“It will house a computer cluster for the new geophysicist that they just hired,” he told me sadly. “All my stuff will go straight into the Dumpster. Why, do you want any of it?”

The blood rushed to my head. I looked at Bill, whose mouth was hanging slightly open. The next week, we got in my car and drove to Ohio. When we got to Cincinnati, we rented a U-Haul for the one-way trip back.

When we met Ed in front of the building that housed his laboratory, it was mid-morning on a Tuesday. He took us inside and introduced us all around, proudly telling people that he'd known me since I was a new student, that I was now a professor doing great things, and that I had come to town because his equipment was of too much scientific value to be discarded. He told them the stories that I had heard him repeat every time he saw me and that he probably repeated when I wasn't around too. He told about how I had written him a long letter after reading one of his papers, asking for the backstory of the experiments, for the details, and for the “blooper reel.” He told about how he had gone on a soils trip with me and I had slept in my car because I didn't want to lose valuable daylight hours setting up a tent. He told them that I was the hardest-working student he'd ever seen and that he knew I was special from the first time that he met me. I kept my head down so that no one could see my embarrassed smile and experimented with standing on one foot while waiting for him to finish.

After he finished, I looked up at Ed and said, “Thank you.” Then I cringed as, one by one, the people to whom I was being introduced sized me up and down, each of them wearing a look with which I was very familiar. It was the look that says, “
Her?
That can't be right; there's a mistake here somewhere.” Public and private organizations all over the world have studied the mechanics of sexism within science and have concluded that they are complex and multifactorial. In my own small experience, sexism has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can't possibly be what you are.

“And you don't do yourself any damn favors by going around in pigtails and stained T-shirts,” Bill reminds me whenever I affect an air of persecution, and I must concede his point.

Ed took us down into the basement and unlocked his lab for us. It was clear that no experiments had been done inside that room for years, but nonetheless it constituted about a thousand square feet full of dusty instruments as well as a sizeable hoard of supplies. Bill was standing in one corner, and the look on his face told me that he was mentally comparing the volume of the room with the volume of the truck. I knew that his first instinct would be to simply transfer all objects from one to the other and that I would have to make a stringent case for leaving anything behind, up to and including a drawerful of used earplugs.

“Well, you'd better let us know what you would miss if we took it.” My mind was bucking with greed, making it difficult for me to sound diplomatic.

Ed smiled. “You know, I couldn't even tell you what most of this stuff is anymore. The guy who worked for me—a brilliant guy—his name was Henrik—too bad you never met him—he custom-made most of the instruments. We worked together for thirty years. He retired three years ago and lives in Chicago now, but you could contact him if you needed help figuring something out. Even the factory-bought stuff he had to adapt quite a bit. He only had one arm.”

A long silence followed, which was broken only when Bill raised both hands to the ceiling and bellowed out, “Dear God, do you mean he was a
gimp
? If there is
one
thing I cannot tolerate, it is the idea of a freak in the lab! Disgusting!”

During the strange minutes that followed, Ed turned to look at me as if to say, “Where on Earth did you
get
that guy?” I just stood there paralyzed with a serene smile on my face, as I usually did on such occasions. Ed shook his head and checked his watch, saying, “I should get back to the dean's office. The guys in Facilities might help you with anything heavy if you ask. Come by my office when you are loaded up—the secretary upstairs will tell you where to find it.” He pulled a necktie out of his briefcase, donned his suit jacket, and walked out.

I grinned at Bill as we locked eyes. “I can't take you anywhere,” I sighed.

Bill is missing part of his right hand, which is also his dominant hand. For some reason it takes people years of working in close quarters with him to notice it, if they do at all. Because his skin is extensively scarred, it is clear that his hand started out whole and that a hunk got chopped off at some point. He must have been a very young child at the time, because Bill has no memory of the event. I think the only people who truly know what happened are Bill's parents, and they aren't at all interested in talking about it. Bill's mother has Swedish blood, and so all this lack of information makes perfect sense to me.

Bill can do more with 1.7 hands than the vast majority of people in the world can do with two, and so the only time that the nonstandard nature of his appendage matters is when it provides the odd comic moment. I experience twisted glee when I insinuate to people that Bill received the injury during a bungled lab experiment, and one of Bill's favorite pastimes involves walking up behind a student who is working with a sharp scalpel and barking out, “Watch yer digits!”

We carried in the cardboard boxes and rolls of bubble wrap that we had brought with us, and moved furniture in order to set up a staging area where we could pack the items we wanted to take. We decided that Bill would disassemble the big stuff and I would sort the little stuff, wrap everything, and pack it in cardboard. We worked for hours, focusing first on items that would be of obvious use: unopened boxes of gloves, custom-sized flasks, independent transformers, pumps, and power supplies. We then moved to seldom-used but expensive items, such as containers that could slow down the boiling of super-cold fluids when they were exposed to air. For each item that I packed I imagined the several hundred dollars that we'd never need to spend, and I kept a running tab. Bill carefully drew the larger items in his notebook and photographed them from all angles before taking them apart, knowing that he'd have no other assembly manual once we returned home. He also multitasked impressively by criticizing everything I did while he worked.

“What the hell? You're using up all the bubble wrap. Slow down,” Bill ordered me.

“Oh, sorry,” I answered. “Stupid me, I thought I remembered something from my Ph.D. about how glass can break. I guess you learned better at community college.”

“Use less wrap, it'll go further and pack tighter and we can take more stuff,” he snarled in return. “I'll drive slow.”

“Why are you in such a foul mood?” I asked him. “You should be glad I set up this little heist.”

“Oh, I don't know,” he answered. “Maybe because I drove all through the fucking night while you slept.”

“Did I forget to thank you for that?” I chirped with wide eyes. “Oh well, too late now; what's done is done.”

We were avoiding what we wrongly assumed would be a tense confrontation over the homemade mass spectrometer on the other side of the room. We both wanted it, but we knew we couldn't take it. Eventually we drew near it and walked around it to look at it from all angles, as if we were slowly circling wily prey. It was a big, stand-alone thing, about as big as a small car, fronted by a panel of analog readouts, each with a needle that had long since ceased to dance. “That thing is half glass, half metal, and half particleboard,” joked Bill as our eyes tried to identify the path from the inlet to the detector through the wires, gauges, and handwritten signs that said things like
DO NOT OVER-TIGHTEN ME
on the exterior of the machine.