• Part 1
• Part 2

Henrietta opened the door to the tissue culture incubator. She had stopped by the lab this late in the evening mainly to check on her cells. Also, she had gotten a message from Harry.

“Hen – if you’re going into the lab – can you check on my cells too? They might need a bit of feeding…”

She and Harry had been covering for each other since the beginning, when she was a new student and he had recently joined the lab as a postdoc. They knew each other well, had each other’s backs. Harry had saved her more than once when she was out taking a painting class or setting up for one of her art shows. She’d disappear – sometimes for weeks at a time – to paint with her boyfriend Tom at his art studio in the mountains. So she and Harry had a special bond, one that couldn’t easily be replicated or explained to the new lab members, whom Henrietta at this stage did not have time or energy to get to know.

This evening she’d been in stealth mode, hoping to avoid chit-chat with the other lab members on her way to taking care of a few things in the lab. She’d had to pass several of them on her way to the tissue culture room – Rochele, who’d seemed lost in space as she silently pipetted liquid from one tube to another, and Bernard, who was sitting at his desk and appeared to be sulking. Henrietta had darted past Steve’s office, since she didn’t want to be pulled in to talk about her paper, the one that had yet to be written. And she had almost run into Rajiv, who was emerging from the cell culture room carrying an ice bucket, filled to the brim with tubes.

“Sorry,” he’d muttered, and she’d jumped to the side, but had kept going. She was glad that the cell culture room was now empty. Breathing a sigh of relief, she switched on the radio and sang along to a Madonna song as she pulled her plates and Harry’s one by one out of the incubator and checked them under the microscope. 

Her cells were a little overgrown, but it was nothing that a quick split wouldn’t take care of. Cancer cells were so hardy. She was embarrassed to say it, but that’s why she loved them. And they really were beautiful: the little ruffles around their edges suggested graceful movement, while the denser areas at their centers contained the nuclei, the blueprints of life. Most of all, though, Henrietta never tired of watching the mitotic cells, the ones that were in the process of dividing. Their DNA condensed into a line of chromosomes holding hands down the center, the rounded cells slowly pinching off into two while the chromosomes moved gradually away from their partners, dragged apart by a triangle of fibers tethered to opposite ends of the cell. Henrietta could only see snapshots of this through the eyepiece of the microscope – the actual process was too slow – but she could envision the cells dividing in her head.  

It was this – the art within the science – that motivated Henrietta to keep going even when she struggled with her day-to-day lab tasks. It was, perhaps, what had drawn her into research all along – the beautiful images she’d seen in her college biology lectures had made her intrigued to find out more, to unravel the mysteries that were wrapped up in these images, even if at the time she had not realized that this was what was driving her. But the reality of graduate school research had turned out to be different than what she’d imagined – lately, she’d found herself counting and re-counting mitochondria, the topic of her thesis project, until she’d almost gone dizzy in the head. She’d plotted graphs of their different numbers and lengths, had demonstrated trends of mitochondrial networks connecting and reconnecting. And now her committee members were requesting additional biochemical proof of the trends she had found, and Henrietta had been dragging her heels, hoping that someone else in the lab would volunteer to do these experiments.

She could see the mitochondria in her mind’s eye: splashes of red weaving in squiggly lines throughout the cells. She’d first painted these mitochondria in a burst of creative expression at the local museum’s art class, and this had set off a chain of events that she found hard to believe even now. When she’d met Tom while preparing for one of the museum’s art shows, her painting streak had exploded. The first piece she’d made while visiting Tom in the mountains had been titled, “Gene Expression.” It had shown, from her perspective, what it might look like if genes tried to express themselves in ways other than becoming proteins. Since then, she’d painted mitotic cells, differentiating cells, and dying cells, depicting them as she saw them under the microscope.

Thankfully, Steve had not yet kicked her out of the lab and had even shown up at some of her art exhibits. Her frequent absences meant that she would probably never have a first author paper, but at least she was second author on Harry’s big Science paper. It was she who had found Harry’s cells when, after being left too long in treatment over the long weekend, they’d undergone a sort of differentiation process, turning from epithelial to mesenchymal, their edges elongated and ruffled, migrating like crazy across the dish. It was she who’d taken the time to document this change, to take a few pictures and to realize the potential importance of the cells’ metamorphosis. She could have just thrown the cells away, but she hadn’t. More than anything, she had wanted to capture their beauty, and she was certain that without her artistic proclivities, this new scientific discovery would have gone unnoticed.  

As Henrietta threw her final pipette into the Biohazard waste container and began putting away her bottles of media and trypsin, Rajiv walked back in, his face looking dejected.

“What’s up?” Henrietta asked, even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. 

“Nothing,” said Rajiv, wincing. “I just – it’s just – never mind,” he said. “Everything is under control now.”

“Well, that’s good,” said Henrietta, certain that things weren’t under control. But she really didn’t have the time or the inclination to probe further. She had done what she had come in to do, and now it was time to get out and go home. There was just one folder of papers that she wanted to retrieve from her desk – some articles that she hoped would help her to write up the next part of her final committee meeting report – and then she would head back to her apartment for a nice dinner of leftovers in front of the TV, maybe even a glass of wine. 

“Have a good night,” she said to Rajiv as she switched off the light in the tissue culture hood and began heading out the door. Just before exiting, she turned around and saw that Rajiv’s hood was piled high with tubes and bottles, and she thought with a sympathy that was at once compassionate and self-righteous, that it looked like the poor kid still had a long night ahead of him.

***

After Rochele finished distributing her cell lysates into tubes and storing them away in the freezer, after struggling with the door of the freezer for several minutes, pushing against the shelf of thick, deeply frozen ice that was stuck to one of the inner drawers and seeing it finally release, after removing her gloves and washing her hands slowly and thoughtfully in the lab sink, she decided to spend a few more minutes on her presentation before heading home for the night. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Henrietta making an appearance one bay over, shuffling through a pile of papers on her desk. Rochele hadn’t seen Henrietta in a while, and she had wanted to ask her about borrowing one of her antibodies, but she didn’t have the energy now to start a conversation. In any case, Henrietta seemed a bit frazzled.

As Rochele sat down at her computer and started flipping through her slides, an alertness suddenly overcame her. She could feel herself being drawn into the figures and the words on the pages, and she wondered whether she had been missing something before. It seemed, now, that there was an interesting story here – that she had all the pieces, that she just had to connect them somehow. For the story, the one that she wanted to tell, the one that she would present at the department meeting, that would tantalize and rouse interest, even without a full set of data. There was a question here, a clear train of logic – she could sense it, feel it.

Yes! Rochele began typing frantically, her aha moment overtaking her. She knew what it was that she wanted to say, what she wanted to ask. There wasn’t a moment to spare. She had to get it all down while it was still in her head.

***

Bernard had just had a moment of despair. While waiting for his final gel of the night to finish running, he’d been searching Pubmed for other papers that used live-cell imaging to study proteins in his pathway of interest. When he’d scrolled to the last page of the forty or so documents that had appeared in his search, he’d come across a paper in which it looked like someone had done precisely what it was that he was planning to do – five years ago. It was in a somewhat obscure journal and the article’s title was not very relevant to what Bernard was working on, which would explain why he hadn’t seen it before. But there it was, in the abstract, unmistakable. Bernard couldn’t believe that he had been scooped before he’d even begun.

Bernard banged his fist on the table; noticed Rochele look up briefly at the noise, then turn back to her computer. F—, he thought. There’s probably something else that I can do with these constructs, but I’ll have to think about it.

He continued searching in Pubmed, feverishly scanning through abstracts as they came up. He was already beginning to think of a new idea. Labeling of endogenous genes was becoming even more hot now, and there were several new methods to do it, ones that were better and more reliable than the one he had been trying a couple of months earlier, shortly after joining the lab. Bernard was sure that he could get one of them to work for his gene, maybe even improve on existing techniques. He began scribbling furiously in his lab notebook, nearly forgetting about his gel. Luckily, he’d set a timer to beep when it was done. As he switched off the gel and prepared to take it to the imager, Bernard ran through his new idea in his head. 

***

Steve was puzzled by some figures in his presentation. Bernard’s western blot was simply not compatible with Henrietta’s staining experiment, or at least he didn’t see how it could be. In Henrietta’s experiments, the TRel protein bound to a mitochondrial factor that promoted cell survival, whereas in Bernard’s experiments, it appeared to elude that very binding and promote cell death. In previous presentations, Steve had found a way of weaving the two pieces of data into compatible stories while also suggesting that it was an unsolved question, but something about it was still bothering him.

There had to be an answer – perhaps there was just information, still, that they didn’t know. For now, any of his explanations would merely be interpretations of the data, and there were several possible interpretations. It occurred to Steve that maybe he didn’t need to figure out the true answer – that he just needed to learn how to be better at communicating nuance. The best scientists, the ones that got the money, the research grants, and the attention, were those who were the best at creating and delivering their scientific interpretations and stories. Steve knew this, and yet he wished it weren’t so. He wanted a biological reality that he could set out logically, cleanly.

He wasn’t implying, heaven forbid (though he didn’t believe in heaven), that those other scientists were fudging their data, or even worse, that the data itself were not real. Or that there was not an absolute scientific truth, based on measurable facts. It was just that he had become somewhat disenchanted with the scientific process and culture. He felt, lately, that the only way to get to the top – no, not only to get to the top, but to survive as a scientist at all – was to know how to be convincing. He used to think that the data would speak for itself; but really, the data needed a good lawyer. His own postdoc supervisor had had a natural talent at it, and it was that, as much as Steve’s own luck and hard work, that had moved Steve’s project forward to the point that he’d been able to get a faculty position at a university. Even so, he had not had his pick of the draw – that was the job offer, and he had taken it, making his then girlfriend, now wife, follow him to the other side of the country.  

Steve glanced at the clock: nearly 8 p.m. He had told his wife an hour ago that he was headed home. The puzzle of the TRel protein would have to wait. 

But as he gathered his things, he continued thinking about the TRel mystery. Maybe he already had enough information, and he just had to figure out how to piece it together. On the other hand, there were still some things that they could try. New experiments to be designed – and he’d have to figure out who in his lab would be willing to do them. 

Because even with all his jadedness, Steve knew that he wanted an answer. That once a seed was planted inside of him, that he would tend to that seed, go after it feverishly until it had sprouted into a plant. That he was driven by a burning excitement that made him question, made him want to find answers. That it was this that had made him become a scientist in the first place. 

Yes, he wanted to understand where this conflict in the data would lead. There could turn out to be a simple technical interpretation, or it could turn out to be something much greater. A paradigm shift, maybe, in the lab’s whole research program.

Steve snapped his briefcase shut and headed for the door.

***

A loud bang sounded from the far corner of the room, breaking the silence that had been previously characterized by only the low hums, beeps, and whirs of a standard evening in the lab. 

Henrietta looked up from the stack of papers she had been sifting through at her desk. 

Rochele turned around, annoyed at the break in her concentration that had finally allowed her to begin making progress on her presentation. 

Bernard flinched but continued the careful unwrapping of his gel from the running device.

Steve, about to walk out the door, stopped in his tracks, trying to decide whether he should see what the noise was or leave it to the members of his lab to deal with, since he was already late.

Rajiv rushed to the centrifuge. The lid was open – hadn’t he closed it? The machine had stopped, and his tubes were scattered all over the floor. Some remained sealed, but at least two had cracked, their pink liquid leaking out in dribbles. 

For a moment he froze, unsure of what to do. His experiment was ruined – or at least part of it was. He’d have to see what he could salvage. Why had this happened? He had made sure to balance the tubes – 

Or had he? There was that one extra tube – still sitting in the machine, seeming to glare at him accusingly – that had no partner. Had it fallen out, landed somewhere? Rajiv scanned the tubes on the floor, counting. An odd number. Had he really just done that? Rajiv wondered whether he should go and get someone or clean up and try to cover his tracks. 

***

Rochele tried to ignore the bang and go back to her presentation, but then she became worried, and knew she wouldn’t be able to continue working without going in to see what had happened. Hadn’t Steve just given her the job of babysitting Rajiv? And now she was going to just sit there, ignoring the possibility that he might have set himself on fire? Rochele rose from her seat and rushed back to the cell culture room, with Bernard close behind.             

She knew the culprit as soon as she saw the tubes on the floor: exploded centrifuge. Rajiv’s sheepish expression was hidden as he bent over, trying to gather the evidence, and Rochele didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. On the one hand, Rajiv’s experiment was probably ruined, and the machine was likely broken and unusable. On the other hand, no one was hurt, and no fires had been set. Rochele thought that maybe there was a lesson here: without balance, everything flies to pieces. She wished that she could share this bit of wisdom with the others, especially Rajiv, without it sounding condescending or trite.

“What happened?” Bernard nearly shouted.

“It’s okay,” said Rajiv, “It’s under control, it’s okay – ”

“No, it’s not okay…”  Bernard seemed to have lost his cool. “You’re endangering all of us by not running things properly – all the biohazards can leak out! A centrifuge is a machine that needs to be respected…”

Henrietta and Steve had both appeared at the entrance to the room. “What is going on?” asked Steve. Henrietta seemed to be unable to decide whether to cut her losses and slink away or join in on the fun.  

“Nothing, it’s nothing,” Rajiv was saying. He wished that they would all go away. 

Spinning, spinning, always spinning. Henrietta was overtaken, suddenly, with a new idea for a painting. A pottery wheel, spinning paint in all directions… splattering everywhere… “The Centrifuge,” she would call it. 

Balance, thought Rochele again. It’s all about balance. And these people have none!

“OK,” said Bernard more calmly. “So, you know that you’re supposed to balance the tubes?”

“Yes, okay, yes!” said Rajiv, looking up. “You know, you guys have to stop being so patronizing. I don’t know what happened. I guess I messed up!”

“What happened is that you’re trying to do too much,” said Steve. Somehow, having a baby on the way these past months had softened him. He no longer saw things in black and white. There was no “good for the lab” or “bad for the lab.”  There was just “lab,” and a bunch of students and postdocs, dedicating themselves, each in his or her own way, to the pursuit of science. Working for HIM. He didn’t know why, but he wanted to jump up and down, sweep the tubes off the floor. 

“But Rajiv’s right,” he continued, not knowing where his own voice was coming from. “He’s got this. We all make mistakes. It’s part of doing science…”  

And then he was telling them all about the time, when he was a student and had nearly set his own lab on fire. He hadn’t realized the Bunsen burner flame was still on, had stuck some cardboard packaging right through it and watched as the shelves around him caught fire. The fire department had been called in, and his bay mate’s experiment had burned up into nothing. 

Henrietta started giggling; she couldn’t help it. And then they were all laughing, each recounting the times they had blown things up, dropped things, screwed up royally – or watched someone else do it. Bernard told about the stickers falling off into the liquid nitrogen in his ice bucket. Rochele described how a former colleague had once stored blocking buffer in a milk container in the lab coffee fridge, and someone had almost added it to their coffee. 

They told of lost tubes and contaminated cells and irreproducible results. They gripped their sides, all but rolling on the floor like the scattered centrifuge tubes. Talking at once, chaotically, randomly. But feeling, strangely, inexplicably…balanced.

Harry appeared – there was something he’d forgotten. He was followed by two of their neighbors from the lab next door who’d heard the laughing and had come in to see what all the commotion was about.           

“The ultimate imposter!” Steve laughed, pointing at Harry. “If it isn’t the ghostly Harry, gracing us with his presence. Harry, who publishes the top papers in the lab by being careless!”

“Hey, not careless, man – just carefree…” Harry did not want anyone thinking he was irresponsible, or unfairly lucky. He knew that his randomness had an order to it. That it was all, somehow, meant to turn out the way that it did; that his brain was behind his experiments, and that working wasn’t about doing more and more, but about doing the right amount.

“I’ve got it!” said Steve, leaning up against the lab bench, suddenly more serious. “I understand how TRel can both bind to the survival factor and elude its binding…”

They all stopped laughing. “What?”

“It’s an imposter!” he said, hurrying out the door. “Can’t talk now – I’m late. Really late. But I’ll see you all Monday morning, in lab meeting, when I get back from the conference! All except you, of course,” he said, turning to Harry, “unless you choose to make a guest appearance.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Rajiv stood in the corner, surveying the situation. His tubes were cleaned up. After some fiddling with the buttons, it became clear that the centrifuge was not broken. It had ground to a halt, burped, and spit out its contents – as if expressing its unhappiness, its lack of balance – but it would take a lot more to cause it to break down. 

And he had discovered that his lab mates, boss included, were a crazy, happy bunch. He wasn’t sure whether he liked this or not – but for now, he knew he’d better accept it, since at least this time, it had worked to his advantage. 

Henrietta followed Steve out the door, no longer worried that he would delay her. She had new questions to ponder now: on cells spinning, spinning, and falling. And getting back up again.

Rochele went back to her computer and turned it off. Her presentation could wait until tomorrow. Her earlier epiphany was beginning to gel even further in her mind. Imposters. She knew that she could connect this idea of Steve’s, somehow, to her own story. A story of cells, and of experimenters testing those cells. Of the cells pretending to be one thing, but really being another. 

Will I cure cancer? thought Bernard. Probably not. But I will invent something great. 

Will I invent anything? thought Rajiv. Probably not. But maybe, just maybe, I will find a better treatment for cancer.

Will I make a new discovery? thought Rochele. Probably not, at least not today. But I will wow the department with my seminar.

Will I get a first-author paper? thought Henrietta.  Probably not, but at least I will have created some art and expressed my curiosity about life.

Will my next grant get funded? thought Steve. Probably not. But at least I had some fun trying. Because in the end – in our own ways – we are each doing this, no more and no less, for the love of science.

• Part 1
• Part 2

The lab stretched in all directions like a beach at low tide, its habitat revealed by the passing wave of the daytime rush. Glass bottles, tube racks and lab notebooks sprawled across lab benches, equipment rested on tables lining the walkways. Computers connected to fancy plate-readers and microscopes sat idly, save for the fumbling of a passing student or postdoc collecting their last data of the day. 

In his corner by the window, Bernard mulled over his latest samples. His experimental protocol was spread out on the bench next to him, a long slab of gray marble lined neatly with lab supplies and a few papers. Bernard was excited. He was designing DNA constructs, which was his favorite part of every project. Bernard was aiming to attach a gene for GFP – the green fluorescent protein derived from jellyfish – to a human gene responsible for making an inflammatory protein. Then he’d add this DNA construct to human skin cells growing in a dish, and he’d be able to see the inflammatory protein glow in green when he observed the cells under a fluorescence microscope. He’d be able to track how the labeled protein behaved in the cells: did it move around? Did it change its abundance over time? Did it interact with certain cellular structures? 

Bernard placed the small plastic Eppendorf tubes containing his newly isolated DNA into a rack on his bench and labeled each tube carefully with a permanent marker. Never again would he make the mistake of labeling tubes with colored stickers. Once, when he was a PhD student starting out, he had meticulously written the sample numbers on stickers and placed the stickers on the caps of the tubes. When he’d thrown the tubes into an ice bucket filled with liquid nitrogen to freeze them quickly, as his protocol had called for, the stickers had immediately peeled off into the vat of seething liquid, rendering the tubes useless. That tiny mistake had cost Bernard a week of work. He’d had to start over again, preparing his samples from scratch. 

Bernard arranged his tubes in a row – he enjoyed the feeling of orderliness it gave him. He also enjoyed the knowledge that inside the tubes was something that he, Bernard, had built, from other pieces of DNA, cut and pasted together like strings of words in a computer document. When he was a little boy, he’d always liked building things: castles made from Legos, toy trains, piles of rocks surrounding an anthill in his backyard that helped him to observe the ants more easily. As he’d gotten a little older, he’d started building clubhouse structures with his friends, using trees and fences as the walls, and improvising with the rest. 

Bernard had always imagined that he would become an engineer, but a biology class had piqued his interest in college, and he’d decided to go into bioengineering instead, with a sub-focus in molecular biology. Instead of designing inanimate objects, he would be working with the building blocks of life itself. And he hadn’t been disappointed. His research allowed him to manipulate genes in ways that no one else had done before. 

It was the building part that Bernard really liked the most. The rest of it – what he would learn from it about human disease – felt almost secondary to him. He knew that the moment he’d finish making his DNA constructs, before even adding them to the cells, he’d already be planning out the next set of constructs he could design, the next new technology he could get his hands on. Most other biologists he knew preferred to answer biological questions through their experiments and viewed construct design as a necessary evil. But Bernard was the opposite. His favorite pastime was reading Methods journals, which described new techniques or technologies. 

Bernard placed his tubes in the centrifuge, shut the lid, and pressed Spin. The centrifuge picked up speed until it began to whir at a perfect 14,000 rotations per minute. After a five-minute spin, his samples would be ready to be run on a gel, which would tell him whether the DNA contained the pieces that he hoped he had put together.

As he was walking away from the centrifuge, Rochele, the Canadian postdoc who’d started at the same time as him, paused as she passed by his bay. He nodded to her, and she wandered over to his lab bench, pulled up a stool and sat down. 

“How’s it going?” she asked.

 “OK,” he said, happy for a momentary distraction while his tubes were spinning. “I think I finally have the construct that I’ve been trying to make.”

“That’s good,” she replied, then hesitated. “I was actually wondering if I can borrow some lysis buffer, for a western blot. I’m all out.”

“Sure,” he said. As he headed over to the refrigerator at the edge of his bay, he could feel her dark eyes on his back, hear her hair flowing around her face. He retrieved the lysis buffer and as he handed it to her, he noticed that her eyes seemed sad.

“How’s your project going?” he asked. 

The centrifuge on his bench stopped spinning, the clicking noise indicating that it was done, that the lid was unlocking. Bernard was eager to get back to his samples, but new postdocs had to band together. He thought that she might want to talk. And her hair – so flowing. And her eyes – so deep…

***

Rochele did want to talk – or she’d thought she did. Bernard seemed like a nice guy, and Rochele wanted to get to know him better. Important, if they’d be working together in this lab for the next however long it took to finish their postdocs. Years, most likely. It was critical to create bonds, to have someone to commiserate with during those late hours when gels had to be run and cells had to be split. When timepoints had to be collected, or presentations prepared on short notice. When you needed someone to come to for support or advice.

Rochele had intended to confide in Bernard, to share her frustration that even after six months her project seemed to have no direction. Her experiments were technically sound, her data clear – most of the time – but she felt like her project had no clear question. She wasn’t sure what she was trying to answer or what story she was trying to tell, and she was hoping that maybe he’d be able to help. But when she’d walked over to Bernard’s bay and saw him there, so focused on his samples, so…content, she’d lost her nerve. She didn’t want to admit how lost she was feeling. So she’d answered that her project was going okay. That she was just tired. Thanked him for the lysis buffer and gone back to her bay. 

Rochele sat down at her computer. It was her turn to present at the monthly departmental meeting in a few days, but she felt that she had nothing to show other than a bit of preliminary data. She wanted to present something jazzy – a new angle that would spark some interest, or an old angle, with a new twist. For her project, she’d begun treating cells with anti-inflammatory drugs, observing their behaviors, measuring their secretion of cytokines – proteins that signaled to other cells that something was happening – and their levels of intracellular signaling proteins. But because she didn’t yet know what all the outcomes would be – wouldn’t know for quite some time – it was difficult to figure out how to motivate her story. Behind every answer is a question… but Rochele knew that in science, behind every question is also usually an answer.  

She opened up a new presentation, setting aside the one she had begun the day before. Her biggest fear had always been that she would get up in front of an audience and not know what to say. She was a practiced speaker by now – she’d worked hard to get to that point during her PhD, but – and Rochele was a perfectionist with herself about this point – you couldn’t give a good talk if you didn’t know what you were trying to get across.

She stared at the blank screen in front of her, thinking. She wanted to come up with an unanswered question, something the audience didn’t realize they needed to know.

THE COMPLEXITY OF CANCER, she typed as the title of her first slide, then deleted it. Everyone knew that cancer was complex.

MULTIPLE, CONTRASTING INFLAMMATORY PATHWAYS ACTIVATED WITHIN A SINGLE CELL: The Evolutionary Complexity of Signaling Pathways

She reminded herself that her title shouldn’t be too catchy and that she needed the data to back it up. Or perhaps not. Maybe at this point she could just plot out the story she was hoping to describe. Or even better, she could create a story with diverging, parallel plotlines. Depending on the data, the stories could emerge in different ways, like that game she used to play as a child, Clue, a murder mystery whose solution turned out different each time.

Rochele released the computer mouse that she’d been gripping tightly. Carpel tunnel, here I come, she thought. It was almost time to begin lysing her cells with the buffer that Bernard had given her. She figured that pipetting was likely not going to be much better for her arm muscles than sitting at the computer, and she wondered yet again why she had become a biologist. 

Still lost in her musings, Rochele began walking toward the cell culture room.

***

Rajiv was deep in thought when Rochele sauntered past him in the cell culture room. He could see her out of the corner of his eye, heading calmly toward the incubator where she kept her cells, even as he tried to concentrate on the massive numbers of cell culture plates and conical tubes spread out inside of the cell culture hood in front of him. He sat at the edge of his seat, desperately trying to remember whether he had already added the treatment to tube #4. But to no avail. Even if Rochele’s entrance hadn’t distracted him, his own musings would have – Rajiv knew that his mind had been wandering. 

Worrying suddenly that his gloved hand may have touched the side of his chair outside of the sterile environment of the hood, he grabbed the bottle of 70% ethanol sitting on the table beside him and sprayed his hands generously. He was beginning to wonder whether he had bitten off more than he could chew with this experiment. He still had thirty more plates in the incubator waiting for treatment and collection, and he hadn’t even finished with the first ten. It was going to be a long night. 

Rajiv sprayed his hands again, trying to figure out the best course of action for tube #4. Would it be better to double-treat, in case he had treated it already, or not treat it at all? This was not what he had envisioned when he’d signed up to be a PhD student in the department of Biomedical Sciences. He had wanted to cure cancer, not sit all night inside a small room with humming machines and only one small window overlooking an air shaft. He’d been at the top of his class all through high school and college. Had been groomed to become a doctor, by his family, his teachers, everyone. But he had said no. I’m not going to treat cancer; I’m going to cure it. And at times, he still thought that he could. It would just take discipline and concentration. No skimping on the size of experiments. Efficiency, he was sure, was key. And if he had to stay all night to process his samples, then so be it.

“How’s it going?” 

Rochele had come up behind him, looking over his shoulder down at his experiment-nearly-gone-awry, with an expression of slight concern, Rajiv thought. Or possibly amusement? Either way, he would have none of that.

“It’s going really well,” he said, trying to sound perky, but he knew that he wasn’t hiding his dismay very well.

“Looks like it,” said Rochele, raising her eyebrows and turning back toward the incubator. 

He could tell that she was about to offer to help, but then thought better of it. On her way out, though, she paused again. “Listen, if you need a hand, let me know. I’ll have an hour incubation after I collect these lysates. I’ll be at my desk.”

He nodded, feeling slightly ashamed. He didn’t want to lose face with the older postdocs, who generally tried to curb his enthusiasm, encouraging him to aim for one successful experiment, not a cure for a disease that had stymied researchers for decades, or millennia. Rajiv couldn’t stand their smug know-it-all-ness, their jaded “been there done that” expressions when he described one of his lofty ideas. Rochele was nice, but still. Rajiv didn’t want her help. 

He grabbed the ethanol bottle and began spraying around the edges of the hood, in the spaces between the plates; then he sprayed his hands again. One couldn’t be too careful. A single bacterium could ruin an entire experiment, costing him weeks of work and expensive reagents. 

He could see it now: his name in bold letters, first author in a long list of names, at the top of a high-profile journal, touting a new discovery in the search for a cancer cure. Not only would he, Rajiv, be helping people, but he would also be recognized finally for the talent he knew he had. An inventor. A discoverer. He could feel the glory washing over him. 

Allowing his mind to wander further, he imagined himself in a white lab coat, standing with a group of doctors, describing to them his new medical breakthrough. Or perhaps he was on TV, being interviewed by a talk show host. 

Rajiv’s daydreaming was cut short by the beeping of a timer – one of three timers – counting out the minutes and hours of the different parts of his experiment. He jumped out of his seat and grabbed the next set of plates out of the incubator. He wasn’t done yet with the first set, but that would have to wait. 

After placing the new set of plates in the hood, he remembered that he hadn’t decided what to do with tube #4, so he scribbled on it quickly, using an indelible marker: Not sure if treatment added. Will collect without. Reconsidering, he crossed it out and wrote: Adding treatment. Might be double.  

He was about to add the treatment to the tube when he realized he didn’t have enough of the mixture left. “Damn!” he muttered a bit too loudly. But there was no time to spare. He had to collect the second set of plates, hoping that he would remember afterward to record this little mishap and what he had decided to do about it in his lab notebook. 

He opened the door of the freezer that was by the wall, pulled opened the freezer drawer, lifted the lid off the box labeled “inhibitors,” took another aliquot of the one that he needed, and put it on the counter to thaw. Then he went back to the second set of plates, removed the lid from each one by one, aspirated the liquid medium with a glass pipette, washed with buffer, and added the trypsin solution to lift the cells off the plate. 

Rajiv’s timer went off again, and this time he couldn’t remember what it was for. He continued with what he had been doing, trypsinizing the cells, putting them in tubes, spinning them in the centrifuge and adding, finally, the thawed inhibitor treatment to tube #4. He set one of the timers for thirty minutes and waited. Then he remembered that he had told his boss, Steve, that he would send him a slide this evening, the one containing a plot of last week’s data. 

“Damn,” he swore again. The graph definitely needed some tidying up before it could be sent. Error bars needed to be added and the axes were currently readable only by someone with bionic vision. He knew that Steve needed it tonight because he was leaving for a conference in the morning. Or was it the next morning? Rajiv couldn’t remember. 

The centrifuge beeped, indicating that it was done spinning. The tubes would be fine waiting for a few minutes. Rajiv decided to go to his computer and send Steve an email, asking him whether it would be okay to get the slide to him tomorrow.

 In spite of the little bit of chaos he had created in the cell culture room, Rajiv felt good as he walked to his desk in the lab. Everything would fall into place. And even if he still had a few more hours of work to do tonight and wouldn’t get home until some ungodly hour, it was all for a higher purpose: for the advancement of human knowledge and of his own bright future. All in the name of science.

***

The notification of a new email dinged on Steve’s desktop. Rolling his highly sophisticated, new office chair from the other side of his L-shaped desk to his computer screen, he checked who the message was from. Anything for a distraction. He was trying to finish up a grant that was already a week overdo and had to prepare slides for a talk that he was giving at a conference in a few days. It was a never-ending race to keep up. 

Steve enjoyed speaking at conferences. It was the one time he felt that he could comfortably feed the attention-seeking side of his usually introverted self. Even the grant-writing would be bearable if he thought he had a chance at getting funded. Steve remembered the first few grants he had written at the end of his postdoc, when he was transitioning into a more independent role. On some level, those had been enjoyable. Putting all his brainpower into organizing his ideas, tapping into his creativity, and putting onto the page a unique set of plans that had come out of his own work, time, and thoughts. In a grant proposal, he could suggest even the most outlandish things – the more outlandish, the better. He could let his dreams soar. But now that he’d been running his own lab for six years, his dreams often came crashing down. Even when his grant score was high, it was often rejected due to lack of funds.

The email was from his newest student, Rajiv. Steve clicked on the message, hoping that it contained the slide that Rajiv was supposed to send him.

When do you need the slide by? Big experiment tonight. Can I send it tomorrow?

Steve pondered for a moment. He figured he could get by for now without it. But he was worried about Rajiv. The kid seemed to be throwing himself into big experiments without planning them out too carefully. He didn’t want to tell Rajiv what to do; Steve had always hated micro-managing. But he also didn’t want to see Rajiv get burned. Taking time to let data settle before diving into the next experiment could often be a good thing. Whereas collecting more and more data without stopping to think about what it meant – in Steve’s experience, that was often a recipe for disaster.

Steve made a mental note to ask one of the postdocs to help Rajiv out. There was often a steep curve, Steve knew, in learning how to do good science – and he couldn’t afford to let one of his students wander down a misguided path. Funding was getting too tight. Rajiv was still being paid for by his graduate program, but that would be changing in a few months. And if Henrietta didn’t finish up and find a new position soon, the lab would have one too many mouths to feed.

He typed back: OK. Meet when I get back? Want to discuss data and planning.

He knew he wouldn’t get a reply right away. Rajiv was probably in the cell culture room, plating cells, or whatever it was he was doing in there. Steve remembered those days. He wasn’t sure whether he missed them or was glad to be past them. Surely, there was a certain amount of nostalgia associated with the late nights of his postdoc lab: the endless hours analyzing data on his computer, the timepoints that always needed to be collected, the gossiping and complaining in the bays of his lab mates. The nights out in the local pub, the disappointments, frustrations, and occasional triumphs when an experiment yielded an important piece of data, or when a paper was finally accepted for publication. 

Steve did miss those days. Now, he spent most of his time holed up in his office, staring at his computer, alone. No one ever talked about how lonely it was being a professor. It had always been a job that was seen as a holy grail, something that only the best and hardest working among them could attain. Now that he’d attained it – by some fluke of good luck, he was certain – he longed for the days when he’d been a postdoc, one of the gang rather than the solitary leader upon whom the ultimate responsibility fell. 

Once upon a time, Steve remembered, he had wanted to make a difference. To help fight diseases, to understand how life itself worked. Now he saw that his aspirations had been too grand. Only occasionally did he still get that spark of excitement that came along with a new discovery. And only occasionally, too, did his research ever seem to connect directly with the advancement toward a cure for any disease. He had become instead an expert in writing convincing arguments for a funding agency to give him money (and even still, they often didn’t). An expert in making slide presentations in PowerPoint and sharing them with an audience that was mostly speculating about where they were going for dinner and with whom, or about whether there would be good music at the conference’s closing dance party. He had enjoyed those conferences once – the travel, the excitement, the late-night rendezvous with new and old colleagues and friends. But now that he was married with a baby on the way, the travel didn’t seem quite as exciting anymore. He was in a constant state of worry about being left swimming in a sea of missed deadlines.

There was a knock on the door, and Rochele poked her head in. Her eyes looked a bit sad, he thought, like she wanted to talk.

“Have you had a chance to look at my slides yet?” she asked.

Steve shook his head. No sense in lying. He’d wanted to look at the slides she’d sent him but he hadn’t made it a priority. Rochele, he knew, could take care of herself. She hadn’t been in the lab long, nor had she produced much data yet, but he had a sense about her that she would come up with something if left to her own devices. He didn’t really have time to fuss over someone like her. It was some of the others – Rajiv in particular – that he was more worried about.

“OK,” said Rochele, “I was just checking –”

“Actually,” he said, swiveling his chair around as he thought of an idea, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you… Why don’t you come in?”   

***

Rochelle shut the door behind her. She hoped that whatever it was that Steve wanted to ask her wouldn’t take long. Her lysates were spinning in the cold room and she only had a few minutes before she needed to go retrieve them. And even if the lysates would be fine, she was eager to finish up with everything and get home. Try as she might, she didn’t have the energy of someone like Rajiv, or Bernard, to stay focused until all hours of the night. 

“I’ve been a little worried,” Steve began, and for a moment Rochele thought that he was going to say that he was worried about her, about her lack of data, her lack of a story.

“… about some of the others in the lab.”  

Rochele breathed a sigh of relief, but then began to feel uncomfortable. What was Steve about to tell her? 

“Rajiv, for example,” Steve continued. “I’m just not sure he knows where he’s going with his project. He collects lots of data but doesn’t seem to want to stop to analyze it. Not only is that a bad learning situation for Rajiv, but it makes it harder for me to guide him.”

Rochele nodded. What Steve was saying came as no surprise.

“What do you think about helping him out a little… mentoring him. Sitting him down to analyze his data, giving him some direction in planning out his experiments, that kind of thing. You could even join us in our meetings… and of course if a publication came out of his work, you would be on it. A win-win for everybody.”

As with all such requests that had come her way over the years, Rochele didn’t know whether to be flattered or peeved. Yes, she was competent, and she liked that people, especially her bosses, tended to appreciate that fact. But did it look like she had extra time to spend doing a job that wasn’t hers? What about her own project? She still needed a story, and for that she needed time to focus, to think; not to spread herself thin with other people’s projects. 

And that bribe at the end, the one about getting her name on a paper – Rochele had heard it too many times. If there was a paper, if it was written using the particular experiment that she advised on, if the project went in the direction that it started in. If the results were publishable. She knew the drill. She had seen it happen, had been there before. Nine times out of ten, there was no paper.

“Think about it,” Steve was saying. “You’d be perfect for this. Otherwise, I’m not really sure who I’d ask. Bernard is smart but he likes to be very focused on one thing… “

Yes, thought Rochele. I am always the responsible one, who ends up taking on too many jobs, doing everything for everyone else.

But she answered that she would think about it and excused herself to go finish collecting her lysates. 

***

When Rochele returned to her bay, hugging an ice bucket that held her lysates, Bernard was waiting near her desk, holding a printout of a gel. Even from a few feet away, she could see that he was excited.

“It worked!” he said, holding up the printout. “I have my construct!”

Rochele high-fived him, determined to be supportive and not bring him down with her own melancholia.

“Show me what you have,” she said, less eager now to get back to her own work. 

As Bernard was explaining, Rochele could have sworn that just a few weeks earlier, he’d been working on something entirely different. He’d been excited about that too – but what was it? Was this a side project, maybe? Or was he designing more than one thing at once?

“So, Bernard—” she began, trying to sound nonchalant, remembering now the details of the other construct he had described to her before, “Whatever happened with that thing you were telling me about last time we spoke? The endogenous reporter, that would directly label the gene in epithelial cells, without overexpression. It sounded really cool.”

“Oh, that…” Bernard looked disheartened, in sharp contrast to his eager expression a few moments earlier. “There were some big issues with that – poor integration, signal brightness.”

“But I thought you’d worked a lot of that out.”

“Yeah, well –” he said, “Maybe I’ll get back to it, but I was reading about this other thing that sounded much more promising, something I could get results for more quickly…”

Rochele could see that she was losing him, and she didn’t want to burst his bubble. “Never mind,” she said. “This new data looks really great.”  

She wondered about where Bernard was going with this – they had both only been in the lab for a few months, and this already seemed like his third attempt at a project. She couldn’t imagine being in that kind of position herself – she, who had yet to define her first project. But who was she to say which approach was better? Maybe Bernard would end up with three successful projects, and she would end up with none.

“I need to go finish with these lysates,” she said, realizing that her arm was getting sore from hugging the ice bucket to her hip, as though she were carrying a small child. “And then I need to get out of here.”

Bernard nodded, looked again at the gel printout, and turned to leave. “Thanks for listening,” he said, “And let me know if you ever need to bounce any ideas off me…” He glanced up at her, and Rochele noticed that he was looking at her eyes, seeming to want her approval. 

She tilted her head, smiled slightly, and put her ice bucket down as she watched Bernard walk slowly back to his lab bench.

***

Removing his gloves, Bernard sat down at his desk and stared at his computer screen. Maybe Rochele was right – maybe that other project had been better. He never did seem to finish things. She hadn’t come right out and said that, but she’d been thinking it, he was sure. He valued Rochele’s opinion. Even though he’d only known her a few months, he could tell that she was – how to put it – high quality. At her recent presentation in their weekly lab meeting, she had delivered a talk that was clear, intriguing, and exciting, even though she didn’t have much data yet. She seemed like a natural.

And then there was Harry, their elusive yet impossibly successful lab mate. Bernard generally tried not to think about Harry. He’d told himself over and over that it wasn’t good to compare. But Harry didn’t even seem to try, and yet he got great data, published top papers. When Bernard had interviewed a year earlier for the postdoc position, the lab had been celebrating the acceptance of Harry’s first paper in Science – one of the most prestigious journals – and it had been that, along with the impassioned recruitment speech by Steve, that had tipped Bernard’s decision in favor of joining the lab. But now, a year and a half later and a few months into his own postdoc, Bernard realized that this had been a fluke. Harry was the only one in Steve’s lab to have published in a top journal in several years. And now, Bernard could tell that Harry was at it again. Just the other day he had presented a nearly finished follow-up story at the departmental meeting, one that he was writing up to send to Cell.

But it wasn’t just that. Generally, Bernard felt he should be happy for his fellow postdocs, supportive of their successes – we’re all in this together. It was an environment in which no one could thrive alone, and cooperation was key to everyone’s survival. Sometimes it was even necessary to sacrifice one’s own small achievement for the sake of the common good: you thrive, I thrive too. But it was hard for Bernard to feel supportive of Harry. The guy would waltz into the lab at noon, fiddle with a few things on his computer, and then go home. He hardly ever stayed late, could never be found slaving away in the tissue culture room or anywhere else. It seemed like he never did any work at all. 

Bernard presumed that Harry was either brilliant or just very lucky, or both. In fact, lab lore had it that Harry’s big discovery for his Science paper had been serendipitous – he’d left his cells too long under treatment – over a long weekend, maybe – and they had taken on a new phenotype that no one had seen before. The phenotype had turned out to be an important step in cancer development, and the result was the paper in Science. 

But it irked Bernard that someone who did so little work could get so lucky, when he, Bernard, worked nights and weekends, and still couldn’t seem to get his projects to go anywhere. And what was more – Harry didn’t even want a career in academic science. He’d already told everyone that he was going to go into business consulting when he was done with his postdoc – he wanted to make more money and not struggle with writing grants all day. Harry’s heart wasn’t in it, whereas he, Bernard, had always wanted to be a scientist. He couldn’t imagine doing anything else. But without a top publication, or several, there was no way that he would ever be offered an academic position. It didn’t seem fair.

Bernard stood up again and picked up his pipette. There was nothing else to do but plow ahead. Data or no data, it was the only thing he knew how to do.

To be continued…

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 Editor’s note: We are pleased to present the final episode of a new four-part story by Deborah Flusberg, about a lab research project that suddenly gets personal. Use the navigation links at the top to catch up!

He ran and ran, not knowing where he was going. Was he possessed? What was going on? One moment he wanted her more than anything, and the next moment he feared for his life. Who was she, this demonic angel with the flowing hair, who kissed him and told him to feel his pain, made it sound like he was guilty of something, and then asked him to feed her with biological reagents? It was ludicrous. Was he dreaming? Sleepwalking? Should he do it – feed her? In exchange for love – was that was she was offering? Robert was sure that he had made a deep mistake. He needed to leave this lab at once; go back to studying Drosophila. Surely, the fruit flies would not haunt him in this way.

Robert got to the park. He wandered there aimlessly for a while, and then, tired out, sat down next to a small pond surrounded by tall trees; it was dark and a bit creepy, but also peaceful, the water half-lit by a nearly full moon. Robert stretched out, staring into the water. Then he lay down, placing his bag underneath his head as a pillow; removing his glasses, he closed his eyes. A gentle breeze wrapped around his skin and the distant sounds of passing traffic hummed against his ears. Here, Robert felt that he could finally let go of some of the craziness; peace began to wash over him, and he drifted into a shallow sleep.

It was not long before Elinor appeared to him, standing at the edge of the pond, her white dress blowing in the wind. Her head was covered, as usual, with a red scarf; but this time he noticed that there was no hair flowing out of it. Still her face was starkly beautiful, each wrinkle framing the shadows under her eyes like brush strokes in an impressionist painting. Robert felt happy, because she had come to see him outside of the lab, after all – and here she seemed wholly angelic, the demonic side of her completely vanished. But even as this happiness washed over him, a pain stabbed him in the stomach, making its juices flow wildly and sending an unpleasant tingling sensation up and down his back. It was a stab of loss. He felt, rather than knew, not that he was about to lose her, but that he already had.

“Why did you come to me?” he asked, his voice pleading. “Why did you make me love you?”

She did not answer.

“I know they’re your cells,” he continued, needing to know now, for certain. “The ones that I’m growing in the lab, for my experiments. They were yours, from your cancer. The ones that made you die.” It all came out in a rush; he couldn’t stop now. “But you came back. Why did you come back? There are other people growing these cells. Why did you pick me?”

Elinor walked over lightly, barefoot, and sat down beside him. Stroked his forehead as though he were a child. Finally, she spoke. “Without your media,” she whispered, “I would die.”

“But you’re already dead,” he said to her. “And why would you want to feed the cancer cells? Don’t you want to starve them, to kill them off? So that you can live?”

He knew that he wasn’t making any sense. Either she was alive or she was dead; she couldn’t be both. Either her cancer was killing her; or she needed it to stay alive. Or to stay dead. His mind was messing with him. He knew it, as one knows a dream to be illogical even while experiencing it. But still, he had to find the answers. Had to have her explain, before he woke up and lost her again.

“So you’re drinking my media to feed your cancer,” he said slowly, uncertain of how to proceed. “Why?”

“I’m already dead,” she answered matter-of-factly. “But sometimes we need to feed the cancers within us. If we fight it, this thing trying to take over us from within, it will not heal us. It will only make us sicker.”

Robert didn’t know what she meant. But he could see that she was beginning to fade away. Like in a cartoon character from his childhood, the visiting fairy losing color and disappearing into thin air. He tried to hold on, to force his mind to continue the dream, but it was no use. She was gone.

Robert stayed on his back a few moments longer, not wanting to open his eyes. When he finally did, he sat up, moved his head from side to side, pinched his arm to prove to himself that he was awake. To his right, just past where his right arm had been, lay some remains from a picnic that he hadn’t noticed before. A few potato chips, and a half-eaten chocolate chip cookie.

The cookie. In a flash, Robert felt another pain in his abdomen that traveled this time up to his throat, taking away his breath. He had forgotten about the cookie. And then it all came back to him, that day at the park, and then later, the searing pain. That he had squelched; resisted. Stuffed down inside, so that he would not have to feel it. Ever.

“Give me a cookie!” his sister had demanded in her little-girl voice, blonde curls falling down the front of her face. “You can’t have all of them!”

In his hands he held two perfect Duncan Hynes chocolate chip cookies. The moist kind, that melted in your mouth. He wanted both of them.

“I don’t have two cookies,” he said, “I only have one.”

“Liar!” she said, “I saw you have two!”

In his attempt to hide one, it had fallen, dropped on the ground. Into a pile of dead leaves. Next to the leaves was some dog poop, left to rot in the grass. The cookie was not touching the poop, but it was close. The sight of it made him feel slightly sick; he didn’t want it anymore.

Laurie had turned away, was about to run back to the house to tell on him, to get a cookie of her own. He didn’t want to get in trouble. He was already walking on eggshells with his parents, having disobeyed his mother’s repeated requests to clean his room, and he knew that with one more misbehavior he would get punished.

Quickly, he picked the cookie up off the ground, wiped it off on his shirt.

“Don’t tell!” he said, calling after her. “Here, you can have the cookie.”

She had not seen him pick it up off the ground. The smile that lit up her face, so innocent, jabbed his heart.

“Thanks!” she said joyfully, slowly breaking the cookie in two, nibbling on the first half. He knew that she would save the second half for later. Unlike himself, she had amazing self-control for a nine-year-old. She knew what she wanted, and how to make it last.

Three days later, Laurie had woken up in the night with a fever that wouldn’t go away. When she did not get better after a week, his parents took her to the hospital. And after that day, life as he knew it changed forever. The word “leukemia”, whispered by the adults in low tones, was one that he was not familiar with. But he knew that it was bad. And what was more, he knew that it was his fault. He had given her a dirty cookie, and she had eaten it.

Sitting there in the grass all these years later, Robert was amazed by this memory. He knew that eating a cookie off of the grass, even if it had been touching the dog poop, would not cause leukemia. It might have given her a stomach ache, maybe food poisoning; but not cancer. Yet the guilt that he had felt as a young boy was still there inside of him. Eating at him from within, taking over his body like a metastasizing tumor. What was even more shocking was that he had not remembered any of this until just now.

Robert rose slowly, lifted his bag that he had placed under his head as a pillow. It was early morning now, the sun just beginning to rise.

“I am your dirty cookie,” a voice seemed to be whispering in his ear, as he walked toward the end of the park, mulling over where to go next. It was Elinor’s voice, raspy and urgent. “I am your guilt, and your pain, and you need to stop feeding me. ”

He didn’t understand exactly what this voice inside his head was trying to tell him; hadn’t she just told him the other day that if she was going to help him, that he needed to keep feeding her? But in spite of that, he knew, somehow, that this new voice was the one that he had to listen to. Not the other, demonic voice, the one that was making him get crazier and crazier; and not the seductive voice, that had caused him to fall deeper and deeper into his own fantasy and despair. This new voice was lighter, calmer. It was the voice of his own truth.

Robert spent the day wandering around the town, trying to make sense of all this. But he knew that he couldn’t wander forever. He needed to face her, to see her, to hear her explanation. Or at the very least, he needed to get back to the lab to finish up his rotation project. He knew he couldn’t hide forever; and he hoped that the answers would come to him when they needed to.

At close to midnight, Robert wandered back to the lab. This time, he didn’t try to distract himself with data analysis, music, or western blots. He went straight to the cell culture room, pulled out one of the rolling plastic blue lab chairs, sat down and waited.

He waited and waited and as several hours passed, he thought that she might not be coming. He began to doze, sitting alone in the cell culture room, interrupted only by the hum of the freezer and the occasional beeping of a distant lab instrument.

Finally, he opened his eyes and there she was, in front of him, more beautiful than ever. He wanted to reach out to her as he had earlier in the summer; but he realized now that he had been drowning out his pain with fantasy; that he had to be strong. The clock said 3 AM.

“Robert,” she whispered, smiling slightly. “I see that you understand…”

He nodded, but was still uncertain about what he understood, and whether they were talking about the same thing.

“Who are you?” he said, “And why did you come to me?”

“Do you know what it’s like?” she whispered, in response, taking a step backwards, her eyes sagging sadly. “Do you know what it’s like to be told on your thirtieth birthday that you have less than a year left to live?”

Robert inhaled slowly, shook his head.

“To get sicker and sicker,” she continued, “paler and paler, thinner and thinner? To ingest toxic chemicals that they call medicine, to have them irradiate you like you are an infectious microbe? To have your hair fall out, your friends look at you with pity in their eyes? To see your family, even the ones that sit by your bedside, already preparing to move on without you?”

Robert swallowed. He did know what it was like. He had watched it happen to his sister.

“I watched my fiancé grow more and more distant,” she went on, “Even when I outlived the doctors’ expectations, first by one month, then another. I watched as people came to visit me, and I saw the fear in their eyes. But it wasn’t only the fear of losing me.” She paused, looked Robert in the eye. “It was the fear of facing their own mortality.

“I was being treated at a big teaching hospital in Toronto,” she continued, “and one day one of the doctors there, a young resident just out of med school, told me a secret – that they had taken my cancer cells and were growing them in the lab. He wasn’t supposed to tell me. Everyone signs a waiver, he said. I had signed it too. But usually they don’t tell you the details. This resident, I had become close to him – he wanted me to know. At first I said, who cares? And then I realized that maybe this was something good; something powerful. That I was giving to Science, to help find better cures in the future. I told the resident to take good care of my cells; to make sure that they would live on forever; and that they would be used for good purposes.

“The whole time that I lay sick in bed, I struggled against my cancer. It was the enemy. Who wouldn’t feel that way? And then, one morning when I woke up, a week before the end, I realized something spectacular. That the cancer cells were not an invading army. They were not a foreign enemy. They were a part of me… a part that I had to acknowledge.”

She paused, continued. “You see, the cancer cells are not bad, they’re just doing what every creature on earth is doing – trying to survive.”

Robert let this sink in for a moment.

“It was 1982,” Elinor said, picking up her story, “When I finally succumbed to the cells growing inside of me. I had resigned myself to it. I knew that there was nothing more to be done. But then a strange thing happened. I watched myself die… watched them cover me up, roll me away. Watched the tears of my family. Watched the nurse clearing the bed, making room for someone new. But I was there. I was there! I watched it all.”

Suddenly, the incubator began to beep, and both of them whirled around; but then just as suddenly, it stopped again.

“I didn’t know what to do – you can imagine – so I started wandering around the hospital. Eventually I found the area with the labs. It was then that I noticed how hungry I was…”

Robert had begun to feel queasy. But he couldn’t leave. He needed to hear her out.

“Since then I’ve been wandering…” she continued, “around the world. From lab to lab. Looking for my cells. For media to feed me and my cells. And wherever I go, I have a mission… I teach people how to feel their pain. Because you see,” she finished, staring at him with sudden clarity, “When I tried to kill my cancer cells, they just came back, with a vengeance that was stronger than ever. Like your pain. It will never go away if you try to suppress it. Until you allow yourself to feel it, you will never be happy.”

Robert remained silent, considering her story and its message. When he finally looked up, she was peering at him inquisitively. “You don’t need me anymore,” she said. It was a statement, rather than a question.

“If you don’t need me anymore,” she said pensively, as though trying to figure things out at the same time as he was, “It means that I’ve succeeded. I have no power over you anymore.”

Robert wanted to believe her. He knew this to be the continuation of the true voice inside of him, the one that he had caught a glimpse of the night before when he was leaving the park. But at the same time, he still didn’t want her to go. Maybe, he thought, they could still be together, just a little bit longer… maybe she still needed to help him – and in return, he would help her?

As though on cue, her voice shifted, taking on an eerie, whining timber. “I’m here to help you!” she said loudly. A wind began blowing – was it the AC? – raising Elinor’s hair in a messy halo above her head. “But if I’m going to help you, I need you to feed me…”

She reached toward him, but Robert slipped past her and ran out the door. She sailed after him, white dress flowing behind her. “You will never be free without me,” she hissed, chasing after him and grabbing onto his wrist, her eyes sucking him in like a vacuum pump. He recognized this voice now as the voice from the summer, the one that had taken over his research and his life, that had made him act crazy. He didn’t want to be hearing that voice anymore. He wanted the other one, the one that made him feel stronger inside, the voice from the park. And yet there they were, these two voices, battling within him, personified in the ghost of a beautiful woman from the ‘80s who had given her life to glioblastoma and her cells to research, who was trying to make him fall in love with her so that she could live forever.

Just another day in the lab?

Elinor reached for him again, but this time he managed to dodge her, squeezing into the space between the centrifuge and the water bath.

“Let go of me!” he shouted.

“You must let go of me yourself,” she said, her voice hardened. “I am your guilt. Your dirty cookie. It is you who are keeping me alive.”

“No!” Robert shouted. “Let me go!”

He reached for her, pushed her against the wall, his arms around her neck.

“You can’t kill me that way,” she said scornfully, laughing at him now. “I’m already dead.”

Robert let go of her, his anger melting away. He didn’t want to kill her. He didn’t know what he wanted. He just wanted this whole thing to go away.

Elinor smiled now, relief mixed with seduction. But then her eyes took on a crazy look that made Robert frightened. “I came here to free you, and I succeeded. But now I need you. Without you, I’m nothing – just a frozen vial of cells in a liquid nitrogen tank. And I need you to feed me!”

Robert froze. He wanted to take her in his arms again, to tell her that he would take care of her, of her cells; that everything would be okay. That of course he wouldn’t desert her. That they would go back to the way things had been before – it had made him so happy – hadn’t it? And yet from deep within him was that other voice, the one from the park: you must let go of her in order to be free. Which voice was telling him the truth?

As he was pondering this, her eyes suddenly opened wide and he shrunk backwards and spun around, facing the refrigerator. In that moment, looking through the glass doors of the fridge, once again he knew what he had to do. He pulled open the door, grabbing two bottles of media by their orange lids.

“No!” she shouted.

But it was too late; he was unscrewing the lids, and pouring the media into the sink, down the drain. All four bottles. When he was finished, he went to the incubator, pulled out his stack of plates, his cell cultures – her cells.

She tried to ram into him, to knock over the stack of plates, to prevent what he was about to do. But he was quicker. He ran out of the room with the plates, grabbing a bottle of bleach on the way. Set the plates on his lab bench and lifted the lids one by one, pouring an equal volume of bleach in to the liquid already contained in the plates.

Elinor stood by the opening to his lab bay, watching, horrified. He was half expecting some dramatic ending, like the melting of the wicked witch of the west. But instead, she just vanished; the look of perplexity on her face vanishing with her, except for where it was etched forever into Robert’s mind. Like a genie in a bottle, she had gone back to where she came from: the liquid nitrogen tank, seething with vapors, its low-fill alarm beeping gently. Robert pressed the silence button, and the beeping stopped.

When it was done, Robert was alone. He sat down at his desk, put his head into his computer’s keyboard, and cried.

Robert woke up the next morning still at his desk, sunshine streaming through the window. The clock said 7 AM. He had slept a peaceful sleep, and felt rested. The image in his mind was of the dream he had been having just before waking up. It was his sister, smiling at him, holding out a cookie.

“Here’s one for you,” she said, her golden curls bouncing up and down. An Oreo, his favorite. He reached out to take it. And then, an older version of Laurie, one that looked a bit like their mother, standing behind the younger Laurie, saying: “Robby, it wasn’t your fault. I was feeling sick for a long time before I ate that cookie you gave me. I was just too little to realize what was happening, so I didn’t tell anybody, and they didn’t figure out that anything was wrong until I got that fever in the middle of the night. Robby, that cookie you gave me was the most delicious thing I ever ate. Really, it was. Do you know why? Because I knew that my big brother loved me.”

Robert could feel the sunshine washing over him. He felt a relief he had not felt in a long time. And a pure sense of excitement about the future, and what lay ahead. He knew that he would not be joining this lab. But he also knew that somehow, in some way, his future would be tied to cancer research, or to researching other diseases. To helping others – in a grand way. How exactly this would play out, however, was open to be determined.

Robert got up and left the lab to go and find some breakfast.

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Editor’s note: We are pleased to present the third episode of a new four-part story by Deborah Flusberg, about a lab research project that suddenly gets personal. Use the navigation links at the top to catch up!

When he opened his eyes, head cradled in his arms at his lab desk, it took him a few moments to realize that what had just happened had been a dream. Or had it? He wasn’t sure. Dream or not, he was convinced that he had identified the perpetrator of the missing media, and how it was going missing, bizarre as it might seem.

Too frightened to go into the cell culture room alone, Robert waited until mid-morning the next day when the lab was crowded with people. Sure enough, when he checked the fridge, the 100ml of liquid that had remained of his media was gone. The bottle stood empty on the shelf.

Robert inhaled slowly. Then exhaled. What exactly was going on? Why was the woman from the coffee room drinking his media; and if she wasn’t, was it possible that he was imagining it? Was he going insane?

And then suddenly, as if on autopilot, he knew what he had to do next. Knew as surely as he had known that he didn’t want to do cancer research, that loved ones were always lost, and that things you needed most usually went missing; that life was often unfair. That the only way to keep going was to work within the system, to go along with what you’ve got.

Robert collected all of the necessary reagents, sat down in the cell culture hood, and prepared not one, but three bottles of fresh media. When he was finished, he cleared out a space on his shelf, throwing away some of the old bottles that he no longer needed. The de-cluttering felt good. The three new bottles now sat spaciously at the front of the shelf. He had labeled the bottles 1, 2, and 3. Then he went home, and occupied himself with mindless tasks for the rest of the day.

The next morning, as Robert had predicted, bottle #1 was missing, but the other two remained. He replaced #1 with a fresh bottle, and used some of the media from bottle #3 for his own experiments. And so it continued. Robert made sure at the end of each day that there were always three bottles of media, at least two of them full, on his shelf.

After two weeks of this, Robert felt that he was ready. That night, he stayed late in the lab, and waited until everyone else had gone home. He had brought a book to keep himself occupied, and some extra snacks that he kept in the little office space outside of the lab, in case he got hungry. He was determined to wait all night, if he had to.

**********

But Robert didn’t have to wait all night. Just after 11pm, he saw her. She was wearing a white dress with pink flowers. Robert was mesmerized. She still seemed gaunt, but less so than before. There was a radiance in her cheeks, as though she had just come in from being out in the fresh air. She stopped opposite his bay, took a step toward him.

“It’s okay,” he said, voice shaking. “It’s okay. I’m not afraid.”

She smiled slightly, then seemed about to go.

“Wait!” Robert said softly, “Don’t go. Tell me your name.”

The woman paused, then smiled again. “Elinor.” Her voice was soft but strong.

“Elinor,” he repeated. “I’m Robert.”

He took a step toward her, then another. She did not back away. He had meant to confront her, to ask her who she was and what she wanted from him; but suddenly he felt himself overcome. And he heard his own voice saying not what he had intended to say, but something else entirely. “Elinor,” he whispered, stuttering slightly, “I think you’re beautiful.”

Elinor looked at the floor, then looked up and smiled again. “Thank you, Robert,” she said.

Robert took a step closer, and it was as though time stopped and all of the years swirled together, collecting like a clump at the bottom of a centrifuge tube, spinning and spinning at the highest rpm that the laws of physics allowed. Robert felt himself to be inside that clump at the bottom of the tube. Such a small speck, as small as life itself, so unimportant, and yet this moment, now – Robert reached out his hand and touched her cheek. So soft. Her hazel eyes were like two mint candies. Elinor smiled again slightly, and then, without warning, stepped in closer, wrapping her arms around his neck.

“Thank you, Robert,” she said again, whispering into his ear. She brushed her lips against his cheek, then his lips. Before he could respond, she stepped away lightly, facing him. “Thank you for taking care of my cells.”

And then she turned, and ran out the door.

**********

Robert continued to stay late in lab as often as he could. On most nights, Elinor came to meet him, and he would kiss her in the corner until she said she had to go and disappeared. The next morning, bottle #1 of media was always gone, the empty bottle thrown neatly in the biohazard bin beside the refrigerator.

Robert walked around during the day in a daze. His lab mates began asking him if he was okay; he shrugged them off. Kelly looked at him skeptically, but after he snapped at her when she asked him if he had ever figured out what happened to his missing media, she didn’t ask again.

People started to leave him alone, and Robert was glad. He stopped returning phone calls, didn’t answer the phone even when his old friend Jonah called him over and over, leaving message after message on his phone.

And so spring turned to summer, the days grew warm and the nights hot and sticky. Now Robert had a real excuse for why he was staying in the lab so much, and so late: it was too hot in his small apartment, and the lab had AC. He could stay there all night if he wanted and not arouse too much suspicion.

Robert felt himself slipping further and further away from reality. Day and night, he dreamed of Elinor, of the soft touch of her pale hand on his skin, the brush of her lips on his. Their intimacy never went beyond an hour or so of kissing in the corner of the cell culture room, and Robert couldn’t really say why. On more than one occasion, he had tried to invite her home with him, but she always said she had to go. She would look at him, though, with such a sweet, sad face, full of longing, that in the moment Robert never felt rejected, was merely drawn into a sense of longing with her. He couldn’t really explain what was happening to him; only that he felt bewitched.

But as the summer drew to a close, Robert’s stomach began to grip in a panic. Soon his rotation would end, and with it, his relationship with Elinor. Even if he decided to join this lab (which he now desperately wanted to do), he wasn’t sure if he would be accepted there, or when. Robert had been remiss, and had not even gone about planning his next steps, talking with the professors he’d worked with so far about potential thesis projects, or about additional rotation possibilities. He had distanced himself lately from the other lab members in his current rotation, and he knew that their word would mean a lot in recommending him or not for a permanent position. He also knew that while he gave off the appearance of working hard, staying late nights in the lab, that he was really not producing much data. He spent most of his time planning elaborate cell culture experiments that really had no purpose, just so that he could prepare more media, and be there, closer to her. He would collect cell lysates and run western blots without having any real question or hypothesis in mind. Robert knew that he had to pull himself together, but he also did not want to. For the first time in many years, he felt giddy with happiness.

**********

And then the nightmares began. Robert dreamed of Elinor falling past the cell culture room window. He would reach for her, but was unable to stop her. Sometimes, she would be hovering outside the window, watching him split his cells; sometimes silent, other times whispering, “Robert, help me, I’m dying…”

Each time, he woke up in a sweat, not knowing what to do. On the fifth day of the nightmares he became feverish, and lay in bed for a week, barely able to get up to prepare himself food. He wished that Elinor would come to visit him. He felt that he was going crazy; kept searching the incubator that was his body for the knob to turn himself back to 37 degrees C but it could not be found and the increased temperature was making his brain cells go wild.

On the seventh night of his fever, she appeared to him more softly, as his eyes fluttered lightly with REM sleep prior to waking. A flowing white dress trailed behind her; her eyes were lit up radiantly.

“Who are you?” he whispered, “Tell me who you are…”

She reached out her hand, uncurling her fingers, then curling them back again.

“They’re your cells,” he whispered, under his breath, a bit louder this time. “Aren’t they?”

She closed her eyes gently, then opened them. “I gave them to Science,” she said, looking him directly in the eye, her gaze reflected onto the back of his retina, protected only by the fluttering of his still-closed lids. “And now Science is giving back to me.”

She turned and walked away, dress fluttering in synch with his lids. Robert opened his eyes. He was drenched in sweat, and he knew that his fever had broken.

**********

Back in the lab, he busied himself with work. Made appointments to meet with his professors. He knew that he needed to get more serious, if he was going to continue with his PhD. He started talking to Kelly again, and noted her relieved surprise. He went through his notes, and began putting together a summary of his summer rotation project. Maybe there was something he could yet salvage. He told the others that he would be taking some time to write, and might not be at the bench for a while. And he stopped preparing bottles of media.

He knew that eventually she would appear again, though, and she did. There was no avoiding it. It’s not that he didn’t want to see her – he still longed for her, and he still wanted to understand what it all meant. Why had she chosen him, now – why had she come back? He also still wanted to love her, even though a part of him doubted whether she even really existed. It had felt so real; but the logical part of his brain doubted her reality. And he knew, also, that even if she was real, that keeping things going with her was only going to make it worse in the end, for him. That just like the other times in his life, love equaled pain and loss. It was his legacy. And so the only way to avoid one was to avoid the other.

But when she came to him that night, he didn’t try to resist. He allowed her to flood his senses, to numb his frontal cortex. She arrived this time looking gaunter than usual, enveloped in a haze of what looked like liquid nitrogen mist. As though she had been bottled up inside a tube of her frozen cells, and had managed, somehow, to escape.

“Robert,” she said, her eyes pleading.

“Robert,” she said again, when he didn’t respond, “I’m here to help you.”

He paused; unsure of what she meant. But when she reached out to touch him, he pushed her arm away. The mist, too, scattered gently.

“I’m here to help you,” she continued, more insistently this time. “To help you feel your pain, and to ease your guilt. But you need to feed me…”

She reached toward him again, but Robert slipped past her and ran out the door.

To be continued…

• Part 2
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Editor’s note: We are pleased to present the second episode of a new four-part story by Deborah Flusberg, about a lab research project that suddenly gets personal.

That night at his apartment, Robert dreamed of his sister in the cancer ward of the children’s hospital. Her head was bare, hair long gone, but her eyes were smiling. She stretched out her arm, and he tried to take her hand. But he couldn’t reach. Suddenly there was a large barricade between them, transparent but unmovable. He tried to break it, pounded on it with his fist, but it would not crack. His sister began to cry. Only then it wasn’t his sister anymore, it was the woman from the coffee room. Hair tied back in a kerchief, eyes complacent. Wondering what he would do. The glass began to shatter, but Robert was afraid he would cut himself if he stuck his arm through.

Robert woke in a sweat, shaking. Sat up in bed, saw that it was eight in the morning and the sun was shining through the window of his small studio apartment. He ran his hands through his hair, trying to change the channel in his head. He hadn’t dreamed about his sister in a long time. He had tried to forget about those days, to bury them deep inside of himself, cleanly, where they would not hurt or scratch. He preferred to remember his sister as the smiling little girl that she was before she got sick. How they used to hide together under the bed when they were in the middle of a game, Monopoly or Othello, and their mother was calling them down to have supper. How they would run together in the park, he, the older brother, taking her hand to protect her. They had built a little fort in the trees by the brook behind their house that only they knew about, and sometimes they would hide there too.

Robert felt a pang of pain in his intestines as he thought of those memories.

“Damn!” He punched the table beside his bed. He didn’t want to feel this again. It was an old pain, carried with him over the years, but sufficiently locked away in a drawer so as to not interfere too much with his life.

“It was her time,” people had said, adults mainly, trying to comfort him. “She was always a little angel, and she is a real angel now.”

He had hated it when they said things like that. He would run away, outside to the little brook behind the house, to be by himself. Cried there, once, and then told himself that he had to pull himself together, to not cry anymore. And so, bravely, he had stood up, and decided then and there to put it behind him. After that, he would not speak of her. He could tell that his parents and teachers looked at each other worriedly when he passed by, thinking that something was wrong with him. But nothing was wrong with him. It was they who had something wrong with them. He knew what he had to do. For himself. For her.

Robert sat up on the side of his bed as the morning sun streamed across his bare legs. Looked around for his socks, his shirt. Stood up and went into his small kitchen to make a cup of coffee. Coffee usually made him feel better. He had started drinking it when he was sixteen, younger than most other people he knew. He poured himself a bowl of cereal and then realized that he was out of milk. Oh well. He could pick up some breakfast on the way to lab.

The weather was warm and Robert hopped on his bike, riding past the shops of the small town center, toward the lab. On the outskirts of the campus he stopped at a popular coffee shop and bought a croissant. A girl at one of the corner tables tried to get his attention but he pretended not to see her. Connie was her name. They had gone out, or more like hung out, a couple of times, but for some reason Robert just hadn’t felt like seeing her again. So he hadn’t called. He’d felt bad, a little; she was a nice enough girl, really. Pretty, too. But it was often like that with him: something nagging him on the inside, telling him to move on. Girls liked him, but he usually got tired of them after a few days or weeks.

He’d had only had one girlfriend really, back when he was still in high school. When he thought of Arielle he winced, as though a sharp object was literally jabbing him on the inside. He had loved Arielle. She had been there for him, gently, unassumingly, during those years when he was trying to pick up the pieces, figuring out how to go on living. His parents had become distracted, distant in their own grief, and the few friends he’d had in middle school had distanced themselves from him too, or he had distanced himself from them; he wasn’t sure which. He’d been a bit of a loner in high school, until Arielle. She had given him the courage to live again.

Until he had pushed her away too. Robert bit bitterly into his croissant, leaning against the outdoor bicycle rack as it made a dent in his behind. He remembered kissing Arielle in the field behind the school stadium, like in that song he liked to hum along with on the radio sometimes. Only her eyes were blue, not brown. Robert swallowed the last of his croissant, unlocked his bike. The day awaited: he would have to save his sorry musings for another time.

By the time he got to lab, Robert had forgotten about his memories of the past and was humming a tune. It was a beautiful day, one of the nicest so far of the early spring. Pink flowers were bursting from their buds like ballet slippers on the feet of five-year-old girls kicking their impatience to start their dance lessons. Birds tweeted messages like postmen in the sky. Robert was feeling good. Today he would run a western blot of the samples he had collected from the cells the day before, and his cowboy self was kicking his heels in anticipation. He had very little cell culture to do today – just to check and maybe feed his cells. They wouldn’t need to be passaged until Friday.

When he got to his desk, his baymates, Kelly and Mark, were already there. It seemed that everyone was feeling perky that spring morning.

“Hey!” said Kelly when he walked in. “How did your experiment go yesterday?”

“Great,” said Robert. “I’m running the western blot today. Do you have some sample buffer I can borrow?”

After getting some sample buffer from Kelly, Robert walked around the lab collecting the items he would need for his western blot: bucket of ice, lysates collected yesterday from the freezer, various pieces of the gel apparatus. Robert whistled a tune as he set up. Really, everything was grand and he was happy with his rotation choice. Maybe he would even stay in this lab for his thesis project: the people were nice, the boss a bit absent but very smart and friendly. Come to think of it, maybe he would even give Connie a call. He really shouldn’t have ignored her in the coffee shop.

While his samples were thawing, Robert wandered into the cell culture room to quickly check on his cells. He removed the plates, one by one, and looked at them under the small microscope. Still fairly sparse; he could definitely wait until Friday to split them again.

Then, on a whim, he opened the refrigerator door. Reflex, perhaps, or habit; since he didn’t actually need anything from within. But as he stood there with the door open, about to slam it shut again, his heart suddenly froze as though flooded with liquid nitrogen. Hadn’t he put the fresh bottle of media right there, at the front of the shelf? Quickly, with shaking hands, Robert fumbled through the various items on his shelf, and on the shelf next to his, and then the one above and below. Seriously? Again? Was someone playing a joke on him?

Robert went back to his bay and said to Kelly, “You’re not going to believe this. My media is missing again.”

Kelly looked at him warily. “Are you sure you didn’t put it somewhere else by mistake?”

Robert was sure that he hadn’t. He had been so mystified about losing his media the first time that he had made a mental note to himself the other day as to exactly where he’d put it.

“Minds can be tricky things…” said Kelly. “Do you want me to help you look for it?”

He didn’t like her tone – just because he was a first-year grad student didn’t mean that he couldn’t keep track of things.

“Do you think someone could be playing a trick on me?” he asked Kelly again, ignoring her implications. “Or intentionally sabotaging me?”

“I think you’re being paranoid,” Kelly said. “Why would anyone do that?”

Robert shrugged. He didn’t really know people here well enough to make that call. And there were more people floating around, from other departments, people neither of them knew very well. Maybe one of them was a sociopath.

“Well, nothing like that has ever happened before,” said Kelly. “And I can’t imagine anyone from our lab doing that. Not even as a joke. I can’t vouch for strangers passing through… but then again, why would they want to steal your media?”

Robert decided to let it go, and continued with his western blot. Maybe the bottle of media would show up later. Maybe someone had borrowed it, and would put it back on his shelf when they were done. No harm there. And if, by the next day, it had not reappeared, he would ask around. Try to play along. He had talked to almost everyone in the department when it had happened last time; maybe someone really was just messing with his head.

Robert loaded his samples onto the gel, plugged in the electrodes and let it run for an hour while he sat at his computer and speculated. Maybe he was being paranoid; it was something he had been accused of before. Like when in college, his favorite CD had gone missing, and he had assumed that one of his roommates had stolen it, to get back at him for leaving a mess in the kitchen. This proclivity to suspicion had arisen within him after his sister had died, when he had felt as though God, the Universe, and the World were against him. However, he had done some work on that in his later college years, some personal introspection, and he thought that he had mostly conquered that demon. But what else could he think, now? Something was up; he didn’t know what. He was sure he had placed that bottle of media in its spot on the shelf.

When his gel finished running, Robert busied himself with the next step of the process, blotting it onto a small piece of nitrocellulose filter paper. This was also an “electrophoretic” process, using electrical current to transfer the proteins out of the gel and onto the paper. The setup was an intricate mixture of art and craft, kind of like getting the hang of paper maché or collage. Robert had never considered himself to be much of an artist, but he enjoyed meticulously transforming the slippery wet gel and nitrocellulose filter paper combination into a neat “sandwich”, surrounded on both sides by thicker sheets of paper and a couple of sponges to buffer the current, all encased in a plastic device that held it together. Red to red, black to black – the sides of the plastic device were colored according to their corresponding electrodes. He dropped the sandwich into its buffer-filled container, plugged in the electrodes, and set it to run in the cold room for two hours.

For the rest of the day, Robert intentionally did not go into the cell culture room. He wanted to wait and see whether his bottle of media would show up, and he didn’t want to check obsessively every hour. He removed his blot from the sandwich, happy to see that his proteins had transferred perfectly. He finished the steps of the protocol and then added the detection antibody to incubate overnight. Easy Peasy. Then he went home, made himself a nice dinner, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

**********

The next day, he finished the detection steps on his western blot, and although the levels of the tumor suppressor protein he was probing for had not changed as much as he had hoped in response to his treatment, the controls worked, meaning that at least technically everything was okay. It was a first step; in his next experiment, he could vary the treatments slightly, to see if he got a better result. He spent some time at his computer, fiddling with the images and plotting the intensity of the bands.

By the end of the day, he couldn’t wait any longer, and went to check the cell culture room. He stood for a long moment by the refrigerator door, almost afraid to open it. He wasn’t sure what he would do if the bottle of media still wasn’t there; but he also wasn’t sure what he would do if it was. He pretty much expected that it wouldn’t be there, and that he’d again have to make up a new bottle. Otherwise, he’d have to figure out who had returned it, and where it had been all this time.

Robert slid the glass door to the right by its handle, just enough to peer into the side of his shelf. He blinked. There was his bottle of media… only it was nearly empty, only about 100ml remaining. He remembered distinctly that he had put it back at three-quarters full, maybe 700ml out of one liter. Had someone actually taken his media and used it? 600ml at once? That seemed like a lot. Definitely more than someone should borrow without asking. And once again Robert was mystified, since no one in his lab that he knew of was growing cells that required this particular media mixture.

And then, from the corner of his eye, Robert caught a glimpse of the woman, the one from the coffee room. She did not stop to do anything or even to look at him; she just walked in one door and out the other, on the opposite side of the room from where Robert stood, still gripping the refrigerator’s sliding door. She left a slight scent of soap behind her, a clean, nice smell, and Robert felt his eyes following her; but by the time he turned to look, all he caught was the tail of her scarf, flowing in her wake.

Once again, in spite of himself, Robert was transfixed. He wanted to follow her… but who was she? Did she work in the department? Maybe Kelly would know who she was… yes, he would ask Kelly. And then he would find her. And talk to her. Yes, that’s what he would do. Robert paused, shutting the refrigerator door.

But could she… have anything to do with his missing media? The thought flitted through Robert’s mind, just quickly enough for him to dismiss it. She did have an uncanny way of slithering by, in and out, without saying anything. And yet – Robert didn’t want to think that. He wanted – he knew that he wanted to talk to her. There was something about her that made him feel like he needed to get to know her better.

Robert decided to go back to his desk and finish analyzing his data. He had plenty to do without having to seed cells for a new experiment. He would stay late to do some work on the computer; record his experiments, maybe, from last week. One couldn’t overstate the need to be organized, to write everything down. Besides, Robert still enjoyed being in the lab at night, when no one else was around. It was quiet, and he could silence the noisy rumbles inside of his head. He said a muted goodbye to Kelly when she left and tried to catch his attention; he didn’t really feel like chatting. He wanted some time alone, to organize his thoughts and plans. Robert turned on the stereo that sat above the bench next to his. Some nice soft rock would perfectly fit the bill. He turned back to his bench.

And that’s when he saw her. Standing there, right before his eyes. Watching him. She was not moving this time, or trying to get away. Just looking at him, silently, the red scarf around her head like a picture frame. Robert noticed, this time, that her hair was shorter than it had been before; or perhaps it was tied back.

“Who are you?” he whispered, turning to face her.

She did not speak, but instead walked toward him. He reached out to touch her; felt her hand in his, its clammy coolness. He thought that he would turn into a dripping puddle of ice cream.

“Thank you,” she said.

Robert didn’t know what she was thanking him for, but it didn’t matter. Her eyes were indeed hazel, as he had imagined. Robert held his breath, waited. Gently, she let go of his hand, touched his cheek, smiling, and then turned to walk away.

“Wait!” Robert called out after her, his voice barely a whisper. “What’s your name?”

But she had already turned the corner around Robert’s lab bay, and disappeared. Robert stood staring after her. After a few moments had passed, he realized that he was still standing in the same spot, the music from the radio still playing in the background. Brown-Eyed Girl. As he snapped back into reality, he was barely sure that this meeting had really happened. Was he dreaming? Sleepwalking?

He decided to follow her. After he turned the first corner, she re-appeared, then turned another corner, swiftly, silently, toward the cell culture room. Robert tip-toed after her. Her dress swirled gently in the breeze of her wake, red scarf trailing behind her like a bird’s wings. She headed toward the deli-fridge. Slid open the glass door. Robert stood behind the entrance to the room, hidden, watching. He couldn’t believe what he saw. She stuck her hands into the fridge and pulled out his bottle of media, the one that he had left there, nearly empty but still containing 100 or so ml of bright red liquid. Slowly but with determination, she unscrewed the orange cap on the bottle. Brought the clear plastic bottle up to her mouth… and began to drink.

To be continued…

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Editor’s note: We are pleased to present the first episode of a new four-part story by Deborah Flusberg, about a lab research project that suddenly gets personal.

When people asked Robert why he wanted to go into biology research, he never mentioned his sister. He didn’t talk about the week when she had gotten a high fever and had to be taken to the hospital, staying there for what felt like months; the headaches and the blackouts. Nor did he bring up what had happened later, when she’d had to stay home from school and her hair had fallen out. At first, it had seemed like everything would be okay, that she would be cured. Robert didn’t like to think beyond that point. It was all a blur, like a distant film reel playing over and over in his twelve-year-old memory – one that he would rather forget.

Even when close friends from his childhood brought it up gently, noting that his chosen career path was such a wonderful way to honor her memory, he just looked at them and said nothing. In his mind, the two were not connected. Robert liked asking questions, trying to understand how things worked. This was what had driven him to major in biology, to apply to graduate school, and to aspire to be a researcher – to seek an understanding of life’s great mysteries. Not to honor anyone’s memory. And not to try to help sick children.

He really didn’t want to study cancer – in fact, he had tried to stay as far away from it as he could. This had worked well enough in the small undergraduate college that he had attended, where basic science was praised above all. But once he got to graduate school, he found that it was everywhere, this web of cancer, casting its net upon even the most reluctant of researchers. When he had told one of the professors that he’d interviewed with that he wasn’t interested in studying cancer, the professor had laughed.

“If you want to get funded,” he had said, “you’ll have to study cancer.”

Anything that had to do with the growth of cells, their structure, life-cycle, even their development within a tissue, was all related to cancer, because cancer represented the case when these processes started to go wrong. And in order to get research money, said the professor, you had to study everything that could possibly go wrong.

But he could study fruit flies, Robert had responded. Researchers who used the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism usually focused more on questions of organismal development, rather than cancer. For example, he knew from his undergraduate days that researchers would breed flies with different genetic mutations and characterize the effect of the mutation on the body shape or behavior of the fruit fly – the mutation’s ‘phenotype’. Or maybe he could study neurodegenerative diseases – there was money in that, and it wasn’t cancer.

Robert’s professor had just smiled politely when Robert suggested this, not saying yes or no. “You are an idealistic young man,” the professor had responded. “And that is always a good thing.” And so Robert’s disdain for cancer had helped him to get into graduate school.

In the first year of the program, the students in Robert’s class had to rotate through three labs before choosing the one they would ultimately join for their graduate thesis project. There was a thick book of labs to choose from, but his professor had been right: most of them were linked to cancer. Robert was able to find two labs that piqued his interest that were not related to cancer research, and so he did his first two rotations in a Drosophila lab and an Alzheimer’s lab. But when it came time to choose his third rotation, toward the end of his first year of graduate school, Robert didn’t know what to pick. The Drosophila lab was a very small group, and the Alzheimer’s lab was large and impersonal. Robert wanted to find something in between. There was a professor whose class he had taken the first semester who was a dynamic speaker and with whom Robert thought it would be exciting to work. The lab was studying something called “cellular stress” and used all kinds of imaging and biochemistry techniques to address these questions. But their questions were directly tied to cancer.

Robert decided to rotate there anyway. He didn’t want to be too picky and the lab seemed like a good one, had gotten positive reviews from his other classmates. It was a relatively big lab with 15 or more members, but that meant that no one minded having an extra person passing through, and Robert was assured that everyone there was happy. And it sounded like he could pretty much pick his own rotation project, as long as he studied something related to the lab’s general area of research.

**********

Robert’s days in the lab were long. He would get in late morning and set up an experiment before going to eat lunch. The bulk of his experiments, though, took place from the afternoon until late at night. It was how he liked it – the lab was quieter at that time. He could think, without too many outside distractions invading his brain.

During his first days in the lab, Robert learned how to take care of cells: how to thaw them from the lab’s stock of frozen vials into a petri dish filled with growth media; how to prepare such media, one 500 ml bottle of nutrients plus 50ml of a tube of bovine serum to aid cell growth, plus a small amount of antibiotics to prevent bacterial contamination of the cells. He learned how to “split” or “passage” the cells when they started to grow crowded in the dish: to break off their attachment to the dish using an enzyme called trypsin, and then once the cells detached, to collect them in fresh media and add a small fraction of them to a new dish. Then to let those cells grow until the dish, once again, became crowded. The fact that these were cancer cells didn’t bother Robert too much: he just decided not to think about it. In his mind, they were human cells, in all of their wonder and glory. There was, he knew, so much within them to be discovered. And it was easier to do these studies in cancer cells, he had learned, because of their robustness and rapid growth compared to “normal” cells.

In terms of the stress response that Robert’s new lab was studying, the usual cells that the lab worked with were giving uninterpretable results, ones that were different from those that another lab in Japan had published. Kelly, the postdoc that Robert was working with, decided that it might be better to try another cell type, preferably one that was more representative of glioblastoma, the lab’s new interest. The old cell line was one that many labs the world over had been experimenting on for decades, and during this time it had mutated so much that it was not really representative of any particular cancer anymore. Moreover, stocks of this cell line likely differed from one lab to the next, due to its high mutation rate and abnormal number of chromosomes, which tended to rearrange themselves in all possible manner of combinations during cell division. The lab down the hall had been studying glioblastoma for some time and had various newer cell lines in their liquid nitrogen freezer stock. One of the postdocs there recommended a particular cell line that he had worked with the year before that was fairly easy to grow. No one in the lab, as far as he knew, was working with the cell line now, so Robert was free to take as many vials as he liked.

The cells were called GL-350. They were star-shaped, with a partial fibroblastic morphology, and the postdoc had been right, they grew pretty well in the dish. The media was a bit complicated to make up, with a bunch of supplemental factors not required for the other cell line he had learned to work with, but the postdoc was kind enough to provide Robert with his stock of aliquots.

Robert got into a routine. He would plate cells in the evening to perform his experiment on them the next day. The experiment usually involved treating the cells in some way to induce or prevent a stress response, and then collecting the cells to measure what was going on inside them, like changes in the levels of certain proteins. Robert liked the work. When he ran a western blot, a technique that allowed him to detect the levels of specific proteins within the cells, he imagined himself to be an explorer, only instead of seeking land and adventure, he was seeking knowledge and understanding. “Proteins of the Wild West” was the title of the movie that he starred in within his mind. He pictured himself with a cowboy hat, saving science from imminent doom. Riding a horse through the desert, with cartoon proteins as his companions. In the Drosophila lab, he had picked up names of genes that he felt a connection to: Wingless, Hunchback, Son of Sevenless. Now, the proteins accompanying him on his journey had more obscure names: p38, Hsp70, MAP Kinase. But these “aliases” only made them seem more interesting to Robert, who was determined to uncover their true identities.

Everything was going well. And then, just as suddenly, it wasn’t. Robert came into lab one morning feeling excited about an experiment that he was planning to run. When he arrived in lab, he went straight to the incubator where he kept his cells growing. Only when he opened the incubator door, he did a double-take – his cells were gone. At first he thought that he was mistaken, that maybe he had put them on a different shelf in one of the other incubators. But he looked in all of the other incubators, and his cells weren’t there either. Robert asked everyone in the lab whether they had seen his cells, and no one had. He sent an email to the department, asked the postdoc in the other lab who had given him the reagents. Nothing. He wondered if he was going crazy. He was sure he had been there the night before and plated cells. But what if he hadn’t? Had he dreamed it? Or slept-walked back to lab and did something with his cells?

Or what if someone in the lab wasn’t telling the truth? There was no one that he thought of as particularly “suspicious”. Could one of the cleaning staff have thrown away his plates accidentally? Robert searched all of the biohazard trash cans, which were still full that morning, but could find nothing. Was someone in the lab lying? But why would anyone want to steal his experiment?

Robert had heard about things like this in other labs: competition so great that people sabotaged each other’s experiments. But he was just a rotation student, with barely any results to show for himself yet. He certainly wasn’t a threat to anyone. And the cells he was growing were nothing special – anyone could get a plate for themselves if they wanted to – all they had to do was ask. In fact, no one within his own lab was studying these particular cells at the moment – so it seemed unlikely that they would have taken Robert’s plates by mistake. They had been clearly labeled with his initials. Robert had no idea what to do.

He decided to just go ahead and thaw a new batch of cells, and within a few days he was able to set up his experiment again. He made up a fresh bottle of media, and spent the evening plating. As the week went by, he convinced himself that he must have been mistaken about the cells from the previous week. He had been working so hard, staying late in the lab; maybe he had fallen asleep and only dreamed about plating the cells. Or, perhaps one of the cleaning staff had accidentally knocked over his plates and thrown them out somewhere else, and was too embarrassed to come forward. In any case, it was not that much work to set it up again.

The next morning Robert came in and checked the incubator. Thank goodness, cells in place, growing fine. Everything had been seeded at exactly the optimal density, and Robert was pleased with his progress in technique and skill. He went to the tissue culture fridge to start taking out the reagents he would need for the day’s experiment. The first thing he reached for was the fresh one-liter bottle of media that he had prepared the night before. He had only ended up using a little bit for plating his cells, perhaps 100ml, and the remaining 900ml was left to use for today’s experiment and hopefully, for the rest of the week. But when Robert reached his hand into the fridge, the bottle was not there.

Robert poked around in the fridge, thinking that someone had just moved it. Or maybe used a little bit, and put it back by mistake on their own shelf; that wouldn’t be the end of the world. When his bottle of media still failed to turn up, Robert looked all over: in the water bath, on the shelves in the tissue culture room, in the trash containers. Nothing.

Robert went around the lab, asking everyone if they had seen his media. There were only a handful of people around as it was still early, but no one knew anything.

“Just make up a new bottle,” said Kelly. “It shouldn’t take that long. At least your cells are still there this time.”

At this point, Robert had spent a good part of the morning trying to track down his bottle of media. He still had plenty of time to make more media and run his experiment, but he was feeling exhausted. In particular, the emotional strain of suspicion, counteracted by his own attempt to contain that suspicion, was wearing him down. He decided to take a short break and get some coffee before starting over again.

The coffee room was on the first floor, down three winding flights of stairs. Usually it was crowded but when Robert arrived the room was empty. A full pot of coffee sat in the coffeemaker, still warm. Robert swirled the pot, transfixed for a moment by the translucent brown-ness of the coffee, like mud diluted very finely.

While scanning the counter for a mug, Robert’s peripheral vision caught a movement from the direction of the door. He looked up; it was a young woman he had never seen before. Her hair flowed down the back of her neck like hazelnut chocolate, swirling from side to side as she moved, held in place at the top of her head with a red scarf. Robert’s eyes followed her as she reached the far side of the room, turned, and sat in the corner on the couch. His eyes stayed glued to her, but she stared straight ahead, seeming not to notice him, and began flipping through some papers on the coffee table in front of her.

Briefly, she looked up and they locked eyes. Hers were hazel and round, like two saucers needing a refill of espresso. She looked back down at her journal article. Robert stood there, still holding the coffee pot, still without a mug, cells and media temporarily forgotten, thinking about whether he should say something. She looked up and saw him staring at her; he turned his eyes away; she tilted her head back down. Damn! He thought, feeling stupid. He turned back to the counter, found the clean mugs, picked one that said “Drink Me!” and began filling it.

When he looked up again, she was gone. He cursed himself again, thinking she must have slipped by when he was facing the counter. It made some sense to him: her body, so lithe and soundless, almost not present. Translucent, she had seemed to him, like a porcelain doll that might break. He shook himself; added sugar to his coffee. He took a sip and as the warm liquid drizzled down his throat he felt the caffeine oozing through his inner organs and out to his limbs. He shook himself again, wondering what had come over him suddenly, why he was so overtaken by a woman he had never seen before, one who was not even really that attractive. Or was she? Robert decided it had just been his bleary pre-coffee state. She wasn’t even his type. He had been so upset about his recent lab mishaps that he was daydreaming, perhaps had even dreamt her up. How had she disappeared so quickly? In any case, Robert told himself, if she worked in this department, he was bound to see her again.

Energized, Robert went back to lab. He got a new bottle of media from the lab’s cold room, thawed and added the necessary supplements, filtered the bottle. This time, he was careful to label it with his full name and the date, in larger letters than usual, using the dry erase marker. He wrote on both sides of the bottle, as well as on the lid. Not taking any chances. Robert continued with his experiment – collecting cell lysates and passaging the remainder of the cells – and was pleased that he was still able to finish before dinnertime. He put the leftover media on his shelf in the tissue culture room fridge, threw the empty tubes and plates into the biohazard trash. Removed his gloves and washed his hands, letting the cold water from the sink drip into his empty palms. Still thinking, in spite of himself, about the woman from the coffee room.

To be continued…