• Chapter 18
• previous
• next
• index

 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows 
... and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all
 – Isaiah 53:4–6

Monday had been a bad day for Bradley Pettier. Although he’d been in early, at 8:30, and – unusually – without a hangover, this hadn’t been nearly early enough to avoid Little Miss Lady Cop and her unladylike temper. Not to mention her language.

She’d been pissed that the local cops had been snooping around in her investigation, and wanted to know what he, Brad, had said to get them involved. No amount of denial seemed to satisfy her. The look of (genuine) confusion hadn’t helped – probably only served to strengthen her opinion of him as just another dumb ex-colonial. 

The fuss had even, eventually, coaxed the boss out of his lair, leading to an increasingly awkward series of questions, culminating in “Are you ever going to write that paper?” and “Why the fuck do I even pay you?”.

The rest of the week could only get better, he’d thought. But here he was, 9 on a Tuesday morning, wondering why there was a 25 kg tub of ammonium nitrate on his lab bench. 

He peered at the lid again. There was a handwritten label, the ink smudged but definitely ‘De Kooij’ and not ‘Pettier’. That jerk in Stores must be illiterate as well as thick, Brad decided.

“Bradley.” A voice from the corridor outside the lab. “I think you have my order. It is a mistake.”

“You’re telling me. What would I want with the free world’s supply of ammonium nitrate?”

Michel stepped cautiously into Brad’s lab. 

“Nitrate? Ammonium nitrate?”

“Yeah. Fertilizer. You taking up industrial-scale gardening or what? Maybe a sideline in GMOs?”

“Verdomme. I wanted sulphate. For salting out. They got it wrong again. How stupid are these people?”

Brad shook his head, too tired even for low-level ragging of this crazy Dutchman. 

“Just take it, man. Get it off my bench.”

Michel nodded. 

“Thank you. We should talk science some time.” Then he lifted the tub without a sound and left the lab, leaving Brad to wonder if he’d just been made a fool of, and whether this was after all an improvement on the previous day.

**********

When Michel got back to his own lab, Felicity the graduate student was loading a gel, while Sabine and Slater were sitting side-by-side, taking turns looking down a microscope. Sabine looked up, smiled. 

“Michel! I wondered where you were.”

“I was chasing a lost order. It is an old Dutch sport.”

Slater snorted, without looking up from the microscope. 

“You’ve been working on your sense of humour, Mike. I approve. I also approve of these latest crystal trays. We’ll be able to book a synchrotron trip soon.”

“Good. Perhaps you can take Sabine and Felicity. It would be good training.”

Slater straightened, turned round. 

“Really, Mike? You’re usually so protective of your crystals. You like to see projects to completion.”

Michel shrugged, putting the heavy tub of chemical down by his own bench. 

“I have enough to be getting on with. Sabine, Felicity… they need papers too.”

Sabine looked from Michel to Slater and back again. 

“Really, Michel? You would do that?”

“Sure. It is no big thing.”

Sabine bent her head. 

“I am not sure how I can thank you,” she said. “Maybe I can buy you that drink sometime.”

Slater wagged his finger in mock seriousness. 

“Now stop it, you two. We have work to do. And you, Mike, need to shift that icing sugar off my desk.”

Sabine’s smile turned into a puzzled frown. 

“Icing sugar? Why are you bringing icing sugar into the lab?”

“I am making a cake.”

“That’s a shedload of icing for one cake, Mike,” Slater said.

“It was a bulk buy discount. And I think we should celebrate Felicity’s PhD upgrade.”

“Very true. Just get it off my desk, all right?”

“In good time, Tom. In good time. But now I have to feed my cells.”

Michel picked up a notebook and walked down the corridor towards the tissue culture lab. Sabine turned to Slater, and said,

“Icing sugar? Does Michel normally make cakes?”

“He hasn’t before, but he’s a man of many talents. And he keeps surprising me. So it’s not impossible.”

She laughed. “Maybe he is making a bomb!”

Slater fiddled with the focus on the microscope. 

“I have worked with Mike for many years, Sabine, and one of the things I have learned is that you don’t question what he’s doing. It all works out fine in the end – usually with a Nature paper.”

**********

The sky outside the lab was darkening, pink tinged with a sombre grey, when Slater emerged from his office. 

“Right you two. Ready? Felicity’s gone ahead – I said we’d catch her up.”

Sabine was already at the lab sink, peeling away  the hated latex gloves and dropping them elegantly into the biohaz bin. 

“Are you ready, Michel?”

Slater chimed in: “You joining us? It’s nearly 8, you should take a break at least.”

Michel looked up at the clock above the door. The minute hand ticked onto the 10. 

“You guys go. I’ll just set up this tray and follow you later.” He reached for his pipettor, and turned to Sabine. A genuine smile spread across his face.

Sabine caught her breath, and smiled back as she walked out the door with Slater.

“Tot ziens, schatje.”

**********

The rest of Brad Pettier’s day had not improved. Truth be told it had got worse, culminating in a letter that he still hadn’t read, having not been able to get past the ‘Formal Warning’ header.

On his way out for a final cigarette before calling it a night, he stood against the corridor wall to let four or five giggling girls go past. One of them he recognized – a grad student from the Slater lab, apparently having passed her upgrade to PhD status. 

Well good luck lassie, he thought, welcome to hell.

He took a detour by the pigeon holes – dammit, bad news loves company, he thought – and was more than slightly surprised to find a large brown envelope in the ‘P’s, his own name handwritten in a Gothic script. He hesitated momentarily, before sliding the envelope under his arm and heading out to the carpark.

Outside, he leaned against the wall of the loading bay, and reached into his jacket pocket for his cigarettes. But then he changed his mind, and slit open the envelope. As he withdrew a sheaf of stapled, laser-printed A4, a loose piece of paper fluttered out. He caught it, and scanned the note quickly, eyes widening. He looked back at the stapled sheaf and quickly flipped the pages with a mounting sense of incredulity. Why would he do this? And why put himself middle, not first? (Or even last? God knew the mental bastard deserved that). 

“You crazy Dutch son-of-a – “

“What’s that you’ve got, Dr Pettier? Looks like a manuscript. Are congratulations in order?”

Startled, Brad looked up to see Sabine and Slater. The older man had a strange smile on his face.

“Uh, good evening, Professor Slater. Your postdoc seems to have given it to me.” Almost guiltily, he slipped the sheaf back into the envelope. “I haven’t read it, but he’s written this note, I’m not sure why – “

Suddenly Slater took him by the arm and pushed him firmly but not roughly into the shadow of the loading bay. Sabine followed. Slater held up a finger and nodded towards the Micro building.

Brad looked in that direction as a white car approached. It stopped under the security camera, and Brad had a sudden flash of insight that this was a deliberate manoeuvre.

A man and a woman got out and headed towards the building. Brad turned to Slater, his mouth open, but Slater shook his head. Sabine also remained silent, but her brow was furrowed.

When the newcomers were safely inside the building, Slater said, 

“Did you know this is the only place in the goods yard there’s no light? And that,” pointing out the white Ford, “is apparently a security camera dead zone.”

Brad shook his head. 

“Never thought about it. I just come out here to smoke.” He felt for his cigarettes again, thumbed one out, and on an impulse offered the packet to Slater and Sabine. Sabine shook her head, but Slater said,

“Don’t mind if I do, that’s most generous of you, Dr Pettier.”

Brad mumbled, his cheeks flushing pink, “Call me Brad.” He held out his Zippo.

Slater drew on the cigarette, a little too deeply for comfort, and coughed, his eyes watering. 

“It’s been a while. But you don’t forget, do you?”

Brad shook his head. 

“I guess not. I should quit, I guess. Say, what are you guys doing out here anyway?” Being so nice to me an’ all left unsaid.

“Tying up some loose ends,” Slater said. “Maybe you can tell us about your manuscript. Michel should be joining us soon.” He looked up to the window of his own lab. Brad and Sabine followed his gaze, and the main light went out, replaced by a smaller glow. “Oh, look. They’re in my office.” 

The glow in the lab window appears to shrink, but is replaced by a strangely blue light, moving faster than thought, expanding into the twilight sky, pushing the glass of the windows before it. The noise follows, crushing their eardrums, collapsing into the patter of glass shards cluster-bombing the tarmac. Orange flames start to lick around the empty window frame. 

Brad recovers first. 

“Mike – Michel? Christ, was he in there?”

He slaps the envelope with the manuscript against Slater’s chest and runs back towards the Institute. 

Sabine sobs, “Michel!”, and starts to follow him. But Slater catches her arm, shaking his head, and she stops. He takes the manuscript out, dropping the envelope on the concrete path, where splots of rain smudge the ink as effectively as they hide the tears on his face. 

Over the sound of the building’s fire alarm, a siren wails in the distance.

• Chapter 17
• previous
• next
• index

My mother she taught me how to read
My mother she taught me how to read
If I don't read, ’n’ my soul be lost
Ain't nobody's fault but mine
 – Unknown

Tom got to his feet, took a step towards Michel. Mallory reached inside his jacket, but stopped when Alice held up her hand.

Slater crouched down by Michel; put his hand on the younger man’s knee. 

“Why, Mike? What is this all about?”

Michel, keeping his gaze on his own feet, said, “She was pregnant. With your child. That’s why I killed her. Even though she promised she never wanted to hurt you. It was a risk I couldn’t take.”

“I don’t understand, Mike.”

“She was a distraction, Tom! You were late in the lab in the mornings, you weren’t concentrating – it was better after she left, but she still had a hold on you. And a child… we would have lost you.” Michel looked up, his cheeks glistening in the fading light. “What would happen to the science? I couldn’t allow it.”

“How did you do it?” Alice asked.

“For God’s sake, woman!” Slater said. “Can’t you just leave it alone for two minutes?”

Alice shook her head. 

“Dr de Kooij, we can give you immunity from prosecution. From a certain point of view, you were on Government business and… collateral damage happens. But, you need to help us to help you.”

“It’s OK, Tom,” Michel said. “It’s only fair. I tell them, and we go back to the lab, and we do good science together again. Maybe we can even build a bridge with Bradley – he has good ideas.”

Slater looked up sharply at Michel, and then sat down. 

“All right. Fine. Tell me. Tell her. Tell all of us.”

Michel drew an invisible line with his finger along the arm of the chair.

“After I hacked your computer I began to think about implanting snake venom into a vector. All the chikungunya work suddenly made sense, of course. Splicing the venom sequence – I thought an alpha neurotoxin would work best – into the genome would have been the work of a couple of weeks. But the challenge was ensuring that the virus itself would have been sufficiently virulent, but not deadly in itself. And we wouldn’t want it to start expressing neurotoxin until we were ready.” Michel smiled. “That would be very bad.”

Slater nodded, thoughtfully. 

“And naturally, the infectivity part of the project fitted in with everything else we were working on. Legitimately.”

“I liked the idea of chikungunya as a vector because it’s not dangerous,” Michel continued. “Not very, anyway. Nobody would suspect it, and unless they took the trouble to sequence an isolate they wouldn’t realize it had been tweaked. All very James Bond. But then the neurotoxin would have given it away. People would know it was a biological agent. Also you wouldn’t sign my orders for reagents, so I didn’t have a template. But then I had a better idea. I could easily get immune components by PCR. Human sequences.” Michel smiled faintly. “I used my own blood for the template.”

“Oh, very clever, Mike. I knew there was a reason I hired you.”

“Yes,” Michel said, “it wasn’t obvious but worked very nicely. Interleukin 4 and a transcription factor or two. It looks like allergic anaphylaxis, or even Reye’s syndrome in the right individual.”

“Wait, stop,” Alice interrupted. “You’ve lost me. How does it work?”

“It’s quite simply, really,” Slater said, sounding more excited than at any other time that afternoon. “What Mike did was use key components of the body’s own immune system – controlling components – to provoke an ongoing immune response in the absence of an authentic immune challenge.”

“So a bit like an autoimmune disease? Arthritis or something?”

Michel nodded. 

“Exactly like that. Except much worse. A positive feedback loop that just gets worse and worse until the body destroys itself.”

“I see,” Alice said. “How did you get it into the test subject?”

“I put the expression cassette behind a heat-inducible promoter. I loaded a sample of the recombinant virus into a sprayer. I knew she liked vintage stuff, so I found a pretty Victorian-replica glass atomizer at a car boot sale. And I gave that to her with some flowers – Freesias. Yellow and white. Charlotte filled the sprayer with water and sprayed the flowers, transferring the virus. Then she must have sniffed the flowers. The warmth of her body activated the virus.” Michel shrugged. “It was not that difficult.”

“Oh come on, Mike!” Slater sounded almost excited. “You must have worked like a demon. I know you have late hours, but that’s one hell of a project. And everything else was progressing too – as far as I could tell, at least.”

“I don’t have much of a social life, Tom. It was for me an interesting exercise. At least, until Charlotte… I was not happy with that, Tom.”

Alice walked over to Michel and put her hand on his shoulder. He tensed, a slight tremor in his arm, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Well done, Dr de Kooij! Excellent work. Heat inducible, you say?”

“It seemed sensible. It was March, cold outside, and such a device should only go off when it comes into contact with a living body, no?”

“Precisely. I think you have great potential.” She lifted her hand and Michel sagged. “Anything else we should know? When can we get a sample?”

“I built in an off-switch. It is crude, but if the virus gets too warm, more than about 45ºC, it will inactivate. Permanently.”

“And the sample? Did you bring some with you?”

Michel opened his eyes wide. 

“No! Of course not. I will need to grow some up from the freezer, and get the files together.” He paused, as if in thought. “Come to the lab at eight on Tuesday night and I will have something your scientists can use.”

Mallory/Peter stepped away from the window. 

“That will do nicely. Come on, ‘Alice’. Let’s get out of here. I need a fag.”

**********

When the white Ford had crept gently away through the gloomy Cherry Hinton streets, Slater closed the curtains and turned the room lights on.

Then, matter-of-factly, not accusing: “You… spent a long time on my computer, Mike.”

“It wasn’t all at once. I put it together over several nights. And you never changed your password.”

“Well, that’s a lesson for me, then.”

Mary appeared from the kitchen, slid her hand into Slater’s. 

“Tom. I’m so sorry. This has been awful, hasn’t it.” She sniffed.

Slater turned, took her fully in his arms, stroked her hair until she stopped shaking. Eventually, Michel said,

“There was one other thing. I did a quick SNP analysis. If Charlotte was going to have your child, I had to know… for sure.”

“How?” Slater asked.

“Coffee cup. Human primers. I had the reagents. But no, it only took a couple of gels to be sure. I couldn’t have murdered my own brother. Or sister.”

Slater nodded. 

“I didn’t really – well, I guess it’s for the best. No more loose ends.”

‘Just one,” Michel said. “There is work to do if I am to be ready on Tuesday.” He nodded politely towards Mary. “Thank you for the tea. And sorry for the shock I gave you.”

“Which one?” Mary whispered, but Michel was already opening the front door.

“Wait!”

Michel turned.

“I know you wanted to get rid of them,” Slater said, “but are you really going to give them a weaponized virus?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Michel said, as the door closed behind him. 

“Do you ever worry we’re too attractive?”

“Ha! Daily.”

“No, I’m serious. We’re supposedly research scientists, but we barely do any research. Instead we’re constantly, like…falling in love, betraying and getting betrayed, having sex in closets, and delivering heartfelt monologues. I worry we’re not actually scientists at all, but sexy actors in a show about scientists.”

“Interesting. How would we test this hypothesis?”

“I think better in the hot tub.”

“Now that you mention it, it does seem strange we have one in the lab.”

My adorable rats, imagining themselves as human actors portraying scientists. Damn, this acid is strong!

Okay, so there’s this kind of slime mold, only, it isn’t a mold. Not really. Molds are usually in the fungal family, but this mold, or “mold”, is really an animal. Well, wait, no I think they’re some other family actually? Protists, or…wait, is Monera still a kingdom? I feel like it was when I was little, but I think last time I looked at the Wikipedia page for taxonomic kingdoms it wasn’t there, and I remember I was kind of confused about that. But they aren’t fungi is what I’m getting at. They’re these giant stalks made of amoebae.

Normally, amoebae just float around, eating bits of algae or whatever: reaching out with their weird tentacle pseudopod things and absorbing little particles. But when one amoeba senses that it’s run out of food, it sends out this chemical signal. This signal alerts other amoebas that food is low. Then their amoeba buddies that heard the first guy’s signal start scooching closer to their starving friend and firing off their own starving chemical signal – starting this whole chain reaction until they’re all huddled up together into a gigantic clear balloon of ectoplasm and vacuoles and nuclei. The amoebas that are the hungriest all start bubbling up to the top, which makes this growth start appearing on the top of the amoeba-ball. It looks a bit like a nipple. 

So, all the hungry guys are in the nipple, and all the well-fed guys are on the bottom. And the hungry guys start doing some chemical reaction thing, which basically is a no-holds-barred everything-must-go laxative kind of evacuation. This turns each of the starving amoebae into hard, empty shells, and has a nice side effect of bathing all the lower amoebae in nutrient-rich slime. Biologists call this portion of their life cycle the slug stage. The bubble structure from before has turned into a writhing, little goo-worm, shooting out a sticky snail trail. 

As this is happening, the well-fed amoebae are also slimming down. They basically eject everything except genetic information and stick to the inner walls of the slug. The slug propels its passengers higher and higher until finally, the slug’s propellers are all dried out: dead. The result of this process is a tall stalk with a big ball of freeze-dried amoeba on the tip. Hopefully, later, something bigger will come by, break the stalk, and send the sleeping amoebae somewhere with more food. At this point, the residents of the spore will wake up, and resume business as usual: maybe with a renewed sense of motivation not to be hungry for too long.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because I always wondered why the hungry amoebae play this game in the first place. The starving ones have nothing to lose. They’re going to die anyway, so why not just go look for more food instead of using their last dying breath to help the guy who happened to be standing in a crowd with him? I think it’s because they’re selfish. 

I know, that doesn’t make a lot of sense but hear me out. So, they know they’ll die no matter what, but they also know that if they’ve self-replicated lately, one of their clones will probably be out there in the crowd too. I mean, they can’t know this, obviously. They don’t have eyes, so if their clone wandered off away from the pack, they have no way of knowing. And more than that, they don’t have brains, so they have no memories. Whether they’ve had a million children, or they’re virgins – whatever that means for an asexually reproducing thing – they won’t remember. They can’t remember. So, for all they know, they’re standing next to their entire family. Maybe their kids or siblings or whatever are well fed. The amoeba doesn’t know. The best thing to do is self-sacrifice. Maybe that amoeba’s genes will live on. 

I’m hoping this will explain why I did what I did. 

When Jake asked me to be his second author on what would no doubt be his last paper before defending his Ph.D., I was overjoyed. I would dutifully labor away, contributing to his work for little or no reward just to add another publication to my CV. He was an algorithms guy, and I was more into pure math. Category theory, as you probably already know. 

At the time, we were both research assistants in the Discrete Computing Lab. It was a real “publish or perish” kind of environment. There was this one student, Sean, I think his name was, who was working there with us for a while. He was a student for a year or so, and he was Jack’s last co-author. There was some issue with his writing, or his lack thereof, or something I was never exactly made privy to.  Eventually Sean was sent a firm email suggesting that maybe he and his advisor would both be made a whole lot more comfortable if he applied his accumulated credits to a Master’s degree, and subsequently left the department: “mastering out”, we called it. It was something spoken of in hushed tones between classes. It was always an option, but then again, so is suicide. He left with little fanfare. There was no lab meeting about it. One day, he simply stopped coming into school. Jack was left without a second author, and asked me to fill the slot.

Jack was one of those rare people that just understood things. He could read a paper, really fly through it, and when he was done, he could explain it in such simple terms it was almost infuriating. So, when he asked me to help him with his paper, I knew it wasn’t to contribute anything. I knew he didn’t need any help solving whatever problem he was working on. My contribution would be writing the boring “Related work”, and “Background” sections so we could push this thing out as fast as possible. He would do the heavy lifting. 

That’s how it started. I set up a big, annotated bibliography, I checked his grammar and so forth. But after a while, he started asking me to write proofs. I was overjoyed by this. Proofs are important; proofs are like the ingredients that make up the whole pie, you know? He kept asking me to prove these seemingly unrelated concepts, building out a series of lemmas: closures on specific directed graphs, optimal node colorings…for some proofs I had to go back and reference Alfred North Whitehead’s work on the logic of arithmetic. It was weird stuff. 

I kept asking him to let me see the whole paper, and maybe then I could be of more help, but he refused. He was careful not to reveal exactly what this was building to. Something about not wanting to bias me in my work. Keeping my math straight so that no one could say I was on his side when this thing came out. He explained that it added to the verisimilitude. I wasn’t pleased about this, as you can probably understand, and it made the math a lot harder than it needed to be. But, despite his best efforts, after a few months, I had a pretty good idea of what he was building to. 

There’s this theory: P=NP. Basically, there’s a class of algorithms, P, that you can do in polynomial time: in other words, really fast. There’s another class of algorithms called NP, where that isn’t the case. What this means in real terms is that for P problems, you can just tell a computer to do it, and after a few seconds it’ll shit out a solution; for NP problems, you’re shit out of luck. Either wait a year for the program to find the answer, or settle for a close approximation. P=NP just means that those problems that seem to take a long time can really be solved much faster, we just haven’t figured out how yet. Jack had set out to prove the opposite. 

This revelation was disappointing at first. Sure, most computer scientists were pretty sure this result was inevitable, but still. If P=NP, then protein folding, kidney donor matching, and even optimal wedding seating charts could be calculated in the blink of an eye. Tragically, weddings would always take NP time to plan. But being the bearer of bad news had its own kind of charm. No, I’d think. You and your partner can’t get residency at one of your top 3 hospitals efficiently, I would imagine telling prospective medical students (yet another NP-complete problem). Sorry, Garmin, your GPSs will always route round trips slowly. It was liberating to be so evil.  

But after weeks of writing, I began to notice something. I didn’t think it was intentional. Maybe Jack had just made a mistake. More likely, I had made some mistake, and all of this just stemmed from my lack of understanding. I arranged for a meeting to try and clarify. 

***

“I’m not worried about the schedule or anything,” Jack started, “I think we’re making excellent progress. So, I hope that isn’t what this is about.” 

“No, nothing like that.” I looked away. The walls were made of alternating glass and whiteboards. The glass showed the still hallways of the science and engineering building. The whiteboards were covered in equations and diagrams from the previous meeting. More likely the previous ten or so meetings. I think they told the janitors not to clean off the whiteboards because it made the meeting rooms look more “academic” or something. Some dean or manager saw A Beautiful Mind and decided to make it school policy. 

“It’s about the paper itself,” I said. “I’m having some serious doubts about it. Like, I’m sure it’s just that I’m not understanding this stuff, so I don’t want it to come off as me saying you’re wrong about this, but I’ve just been noticing a lot of…inconsistencies, maybe? Or not inconsistencies, that’s not the right word. I guess you’d say that there are still some gaps we need to patch up before this thing is really steady enough to be called a proof. It’s those gaps I’m worried about.” 
            Jack took a deep breath in through his nose. He put his hand on his chin. “Gaps?”

“Well, okay, so like for one example, I think it was…” I quickly flipped through a copy of the paper I had printed out for this exact occasion. On the fourth page, I found the highlighted section. “Okay, here. Equation 6 is true…but we omit that it’s only true for certain cases. And then later on in Lemma 2 we extend it, but then right here,” I point to a letter in subscript below a Greek Zeta, “sometimes this variable falls outside those cases where it’s true. Not all the time! But it happens in a few cases, so we can’t really say that this is…true. Like, in all cases, I mean.” 

Jack was following along in the copy I had printed out for him. He raised an eyebrow for just a second, lowered it, and then looked up at me. He just stared, waiting for me to continue. 

“…and, we build a bunch of other proofs off of that one. So, I guess we just need to…find a way to fix that?”

Again, silence. He looked down at the paper again, pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes, and sighed. Finally, he said, “Do you think we can bridge those gaps?”

“It’s possible-”

“No. I mean really. Do you actually think it’s possible? You must have tried to do that before you called me in here.”

“Well…no, not really. Actually, I think I was close to a proof showing that…it’s impossible. But that’s the good news! That’s the whole reason I called for this meeting! I think that means we’ve proven the opposite!” I got up, smiling, and wrote on the whiteboard: “P=NP”. Jack seemed unimpressed, so I circled it a few more times. “P equals NP, Jack! P equals N. P.!”

He stood up, snatched a marker from the whiteboard tray, and drew a slash through the equal sign. He looked at me with a quiet intensity. “Don’t say that,” he said. “Never say that”. 

I didn’t understand. If I was right, this was the most important discovery of the century. The consequences of this proof were unimaginable. Humanity could only benefit. We had discovered this, and he was angry? “I don’t understand.”

“Let me show you something”. 

<center>***</center>

We left the building. He walked with a brisk pace down the city street. 

Someone a block away was shouting through a megaphone. “THEY ARE LYING TO YOU!” he cried. “THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION IS FUNDED BY DEVILS!” 

As we walked, his sermon faded away. Jack did not seem to notice. We pushed through a crosswalk at a pace slightly faster than a walk. For several blocks, we pretended to ignore the relentless requests for spare change that echoed off alleys and alcoves until we arrived at an imposing brick building just off the river. A metal door: in the spots where mint green paint had long since peeled off, rust scabbed over the wounds. Jack scanned his student ID to open it, and I followed him in. 

I had never been to the school’s data center before. I knew it existed, I had used some of the computers for projects; I was vaguely aware that it powered the school’s VPN and did some sort of routing for the larger internet, but I had never actually seen it. I always imagined it would look more crisp and clean and chrome: white tile, bright fluorescent lights, imposing black obelisks holding hundreds of rack-servers. Instead, the floor was mottled concrete, the ceiling, a dusty skeleton of metal trusses, webbed with wires. The lights were bright fluorescents, though. 

Jack led me to a far-off corner in front of one of the nondescript metal boxes that housed computers. LEDs blinked green and red in codes too abstruse to decipher. “The server room,” I said. “Very cool.” I looked at the computers through the cage that blocked them from intrusive human hands. “Oh nice. Is that an A100?”

“I’m not here to show you the hardware,” he said. He withdrew a tube key and opened the door to the rack. He pulled a laptop out of his bag and plugged it into the server. White text scrolled down the black screen faster than I could read it. 

“Have you ever heard of Philip Maymin?”

I shook my head. 

“He wrote this paper. Almost a decade ago. It was pretty controversial. He said that markets are efficient if and only if P=NP.” He paused and looked at me. I had no idea what he was talking about, and it must have shown. “Okay, so his theory was that if there was a pattern in financial data that could be extrapolated in polynomial time, then people would use it to predict the market. But, if such a pattern does exist, and people aren’t using it, then it must mean that the pattern takes such a long time to compute that it isn’t usable.” 

I just cocked my head. He seemed angry. 

“The efficient market hypothesis – or EMH, if you prefer – says that if enough smart people are trying to benefit themselves at the cost of others, and the others are all also smart, that the market should be perfectly efficient. So, stocks are always traded at fair prices, and no one can get a leg up on anyone else, assuming everyone has as close to perfect information as possible, which, believe you me, those MIT quants have. But, if everyone has perfect information, it means that everyone could find some pattern in old trading data that perfectly predicts future data. The only reason they don’t is because it would take longer than real time to use all the past data to make those predictions. I.e., any algorithm that could perfectly value trades must be in the class NP. He, dubiously, goes on to say that rational agents who are highly motivated to find a P-class solution to such a problem would have found it by now, and because they can’t or haven’t, that means that either the market is not fair, or such a solution does not exist. Are you following?” 

I wasn’t.

“He also makes mention – and this is important – he also makes mention of the ‘No Free Lunch’ theorem, which states that if some perfect algorithm was discovered by one agent, all of the others would also discover it, and it would come out in the wash. So, after enough people found whatever perfect trading pattern existed, everyone would just use it, and again, no one would have a leg up. But, and this is a big but, it doesn’t work if only a few insiders know the pattern.” He gestured again to the laptop. “Turns out, markets are not fair,” he said, “but not because P doesn’t equal NP.”

I took a closer look at the laptop. The text whirring by began to make sense. It was numbers and stock tickers. There was a number at the end of every line. It was hard to make out, but it seemed to be getting larger with every second that passed. I suddenly understood.

“I don’t think your fake proof will last very long,” I said. 

“Maybe not,” he said. He looked at the computer again. A contentedness washed over his face. “But then, it only needs to last about a decade. This account started with just one dollar. Do you want to take a guess at its value now?” 

I squinted but couldn’t read the terminal. 

“Hundreds of millions,” he said. “And if it runs long enough, I’ll crack ten billion and change. I can give you access,” he said, smiling, “if you want. If you’re willing to play ball.” 

“I don’t think it can be done,” I said. “Maybe, and it’s a slim chance, but maybe it will get past the reviewers, but you know as well as I do that this is going to be unpopular. And if I could figure it out from your notes, what makes you think other people won’t figure it out from your paper?” 

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I found it first. The longer it stays unproven, the longer the market remains unfair.”

“Then why publish anything at all? Isn’t it better to just let it be? Isn’t this just inviting the world to try and prove you wrong?” 

“Afred North Whitehead,” he said. “He set out to prove that arithmetic was both sound and complete. He and Bertrand Russel published the first volume of Principia Mathematica in 1910; it was completed in 1913, but it took until 1930 for Kurt Gödel to figure out their logical inconsistencies. But you know, when people talk about Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem, they inevitably cite Alf and Bert. They get to ride Kurt’s coattails into the annals of mathematical history. So, no. Not really. I’ll have a few more years of profits. Probably not 18, thanks to the internet, but time enough. More importantly, my dissertation proving P doesn’t equal NP will be ground-breaking. I’ll probably have my pick of tenure-track Ivy positions. As for you, if you play your cards right, maybe you can be my Gödel. In a few years or so, you can come along and prove me wrong.”

“And what if I publish on my own?” 

“Well, Sean asked me the same question. It’s interesting. The number on that machine actually used to be quite a bit higher. It’s surprising how expensive some jobs are…. No, hitmen aren’t real. Believe me. But there are other services that can be just as convincing.” 

The text continued to scroll by agnostic to its meaning or purpose – a white blur of numbers and letters. Characters on a screen that symbolized value. Theoretical value or true value, I wasn’t sure, but value. I stood there in silence for a long time, watching. At one point, the solid rectangle of text bumped up a place-value and became a stair-shape for just a moment. Nines rolled into zeros. Wealth accumulated. For my R.A. services, I was paid $14/hr.

“How much does my silence cost?”

***

The paper was finally in pretty good shape. We had worked out most of the inconsistencies, and buried the fallacies so deep in minutia and appendices that it didn’t matter who the reviewers were. This would get published. Moreover, it was structured in such a way that the reasons we were wrong were so convoluted and difficult to discern, that when the inevitable counter-paper emerged, and discredited us (I was already working on such a paper –however, my portion of the proceeds was held in a trust such that I was forced to wait at least two years before submitting it anywhere) the authors could not say we were intentionally deceptive. Instead, we had made one of those “mistakes” that was so important to advancing science that we would inevitably be credited with the real proof’s discovery. Or so I hoped. There was always the gut-wrenching possibility that someone at Tsinghua University had made the parallel discovery, and their paper was even now in the process of being fast-tracked into The Annals of Mathematics, pending an English translation. 

After our advisor’s stamp of approval, the paper was officially camera-ready. There were still some minor formatting issues to sort out: it was a tiny bit over the page limit. There were probably some grammatical errors still hiding in plain sight. Our advisor had this fixation on paragraphs whose bottom line contained a single word. These were all things that were fixable within an hour. It was 4:56 PM, and I was done for the day. 

Around this time, it was always horrible to try to ride the trains. Obviously, you couldn’t find a seat; that should go without saying. But even standing room at rush hour in the city was a nightmare. Right at closing time, you were lucky if you could find a hand-sized opening on any of those roof-attached grabby-bars throughout the train. I was about halfway through some book, and really wanted to get at least a good spot to lean back on a wall so both of my hands could be free to hold it and turn pages on my commute home, but this was an unthinkable dream. So, to kill some time, and to celebrate the conclusion of this horrible paper, I decided to have a beer or two at the campus bar. I walked over, grabbed a stool, and sheepishly told the bartender that no, I wouldn’t be needing a food menu. I just wanted something with an ABV higher than 6.5% and silence. 

Just over two hours had passed when I closed my tab and shambled to the train station. I had that warm feeling in my belly that accompanies local ales sloshing around in there as I walked down the dark city street. With the sun down, it was cold. I seemed to hit every “do not cross” sign as I walked but took the time to appreciate the graffiti and posters that adorned every light fixture on the corners. I was in no rush. 

Blood has this bizarre, indescribable smell to it. When I was younger, we had this unit in chemistry or physics or something. Back in high school – it was a guest lecture, or whatever you would call that for pimply sixteen-year-olds – we had to take human blood in these droppers. I still don’t know how they sourced this blood. I assume that’s what happens when you check the little “organ donor” box on your driver’s license. Anyway, we took the blood in these syringes and dropped it from various heights onto little metal plates at differing angles and we were supposed to measure the splatter the droplets made. We’d take readings, and report back the size and shape of the little crimson splatters that plopped down onto the slides. 

When we were doing this whole experiment, I told the cop that brought in the blood that the big puddles of sticky liquid settling into our Petri dishes had a smell that reminded me of the beach. He asked me what the hell kind of beaches I was going to, and I didn’t have a great answer for him. Either way, blood, in my opinion, has a salty, umami kind of scent that smells like the beach. It’s intrusive. It penetrates your nose and doesn’t do that thing that air fresheners do where it just becomes ignorable after a while. It lingers. It has this thick, heavy quality to it that smells like brine and sand and…the beach. I stand by it. 

But, so, I had managed to wander back to campus, only a few blocks away from the Science and Engineering Hall, just about to the train station, when I thought that I was smelling something that was out of season. It was one of those smelling bug spray in the middle of winter kinds of moments. As soon as it hits you, it starts a whole chain reaction of thoughts and feelings about warm weather, and shorts, and flip flops even though it’s November. I’m not even sure how much this permeated into my conscious mind. That smell was filling the air, totally impossible to ignore, and I looked down and watched as this slick carmine pool pulsed out of some guy’s neck, as he was spread out, supine in the middle of the road. I was totally unable to grasp what was going on as his blood pooled onto the pavement, permeating the air with that salty, beachy smell. I was so disconnected from reality that I didn’t even realize that I was looking at Jack. 

So, I’ll admit it, it was a pretty big ask. When I saw him lying there in the middle of the road, emanating that beachy aroma, I made a calculation. I said that I would only help if he relinquished first-authorship of our paper to me and allowed me to fix the necessary passages to prove that P does indeed equal NP. To hell with the money in the trust. I wanted glory. Given the circumstances, it didn’t seem like a very difficult decision. His options were (1) I could call the ambulance, they could make him stop bleeding out, and he would live: all for the small price of my discovery of a polynomial-time algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem. Or (2), I wouldn’t, and he would bleed out; I would go ahead and publish by myself, and still be the sole discoverer of the TSP proof.

So, imagine my surprise when he told me that he didn’t exactly appreciate my terms. I tried to explain it in a way I knew he could understand. I told him that this was a classic Nash equilibrium-type situation, and that no matter what he did, it was in my rational best interest to just wait it out until he told me I was the rightful first author. Either that would happen, or he could just lay there and quietly exsanguinate onto the pavement, at which point, I would just pop open the LaTeX project, quietly rearrange the author order on our paper, roll it back to my secret counter-proof draft, and go ahead and post it to an open access preprint server while I waited for the reviews from Nature to flood in, begging to accept it. 

This made a lot of sense to me at the time, and I think it made sense to him too, because between violent, productive coughs, forcing out brownish clots of sputum, he gestured in a way that made it seem like he was all too happy to live another day, and write papers about my proof. At which point, I was all too happy to call the paramedics, alert them to the situation I had discovered on my walk home from campus and addressed – rather heroically, I might add. 

So, the EMTs arrived, and scooped him off the pavement. The cops showed up and asked me for a statement. I told them that while I hadn’t seen the collision in person, I was quite sure that he wasn’t the kind of guy that would jay-walk. I was certain that he waited for the little walking man to show up on the sign before entering the crosswalk, and that surely the person that hit him must have driven off into the night, possibly  – no, probably drunk, and that they would be much better informed by checking the closed circuit televisions that surely must monitor this intersection at every hour of the day and night. While I wish I could be of more assistance, unfortunately I was just a good Samaritan that called this incident in to help a good friend and colleague in a time of desperate need. 

Of course, you know as well as I that Jack Wilton et al. (me being among those et alia. The second, in fact. But this ellipsis will at best be a trivia fact for particularly studious algorithm and discrete math students.) was indeed the discoverer of the proof that the TSP is solvable in polynomial time, and therefore P=NP, and now all of our GPSs and map colorings and knapsacks can be routed and colored and filled with items of non-discrete weights in a much faster manner than before. Not that most people really noticed. 

The problem with the logicians is that they rarely consider what happens after their little thought experiments end. Prof. John Forbes Nash Jr., for all his brilliance, failed to consider that after one criminal rats on the other in the prisoners’ dilemma, there is hell to pay. Jack got to the hospital, they stitched him up, and in 5 days he was back at the Discrete Computing Lab. By which point, he had already switched my edit permissions on our paper to read-only. I asked him about the little deal we struck that night, and he just motioned to the stitches on his neck using only his middle finger. I didn’t have a great retort. So, he submitted his proof to Nature, and, well, you know the rest. 

But the proof he submitted was the correct one. All of my old edits and questions and counter arguments were taken into account, and his whole efficient market hypothesis was now out the window. In a few months, all the rational agents at the New York Stock Exchange will be reaping the benefits of it. You probably noticed a small bump in your 401ks around that time; that’s why. 

So, to circle back to your original question, I guess the way I handle difficult situations in the workplace is to wait until the right time, and then address them head-on. Sure, Jack sabotaged my entire academic career after I forced his hand that night. But my self-sacrifice was really for the good of all mathematics, right? 

I mean, I would have loved to be the first author myself, but sometimes we have to destroy ourselves to propel the colony up the slime stalk. 

• Chapter 16
• previous
• next
• index

Do I lie like a lounge room lizard
Or sing like a bird released?
 – Neil and Tim Finn

Slater had not expected to be troubled by the line of questioning taken by Cambridgeshire police, and he hadn’t been disappointed. It wasn’t at the “We know it was you what done it so own up now and we’ll go easy on you”-level, but it wasn’t much higher. 

He had tolerated the recent questioning much as he might listen to a graduate student from another lab give their first talk – part of his brain on the lookout for anything intellectually stimulating, but the rest of him detached and dispassionate. He knew the police had nothing to go on; and of course, he knew he was innocent.

Of causing Charlotte’s death, at least.

“They just accused you of murdering the little tart!”

Mary, on the other hand, was not coping so well.

That he could deal with – was used to dealing with. The question puzzling him was, “Why?”

Why had the police shown up? Why were they asking him such asinine questions? And then who – who in the name of God had put it into their tiny little heads that he might have murdered Charlotte Stowell?

Slater actually had a pretty good idea about that one. Someone with peroxide hair, a black coat – and who wore dark sunglasses to a funeral on a rainy April afternoon.

The only explanation that even started to make sense was one that made him very worried indeed. But for now, he had his wife to deal with. He walked into the living room and sat in his armchair. 

“Mary, I did not murder Charlotte.”

“But you were in love with her!”

“No. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.” Slater sighed, sat down. “She was young, pretty, keen, clever…”

“And she could give you something I couldn’t? Like that whore in Amsterdam and that freak Michael?”

“Michel. He’s not a freak and he’s not my son.” He looked up at his wife. “He’s not my son. I know he’s not. I don’t know if he knows, but he can’t be. It was folly to think it.”

Mary seemed to him to calm, her hand on the back of his chair.

“But, after she left, you were still…?”

“Say it, Mary. You never have, have you? Just, for once, fucking well say it.”

Mary breathed deeply. “After she left, you were still… screwing her. Yes?”

Tom was silent, but his neck was tinged with pink. 

“Oh Tom,” Mary said. “What have you done?”

Slater spread his hands in front of him. 

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all, Mary. Truly. I’ve been as good as gold. The last time I saw her was – “

In the quiet after the storm the doorbell seemed louder than ever. Slater stood up, too rapidly, his face fully red. “Who in God’s name is it this time?”

Mary opened the front door, but didn’t stand aside. “I think it must be someone for you, Tom.”

Slater came out into the hallway, his face suddenly pale again. “I think you better let them in, Mary.”

The woman nodded to Mary. “Thank you, Professor Slater. And this must be your lovely wife. We’ve heard so much about you.”

“Cut the crap,” Slater said, “and close the fucking door. I know who you are. Who’s the goon?”

The man in the doorway smiled slightly, running a thumb along the line of his chin as he turned to pull the front door closed. “The good professor has a point, ah, Alice. Shouldn’t you introduce us?”

The blonde woman nodded, moved further down the hall. “Of course. You may call me Alice. My colleague here is Mallory.” She reached into an inside pocket, pulled out a black-clad rectangle bearing a photograph and some text too small for Slater to read in the gloom. 

“We’re with the Intelligence Service. MI6 as the papers like to call us. May we sit down?”

**********

Mary went into the kitchen to make a pot of tea, and Slater sat back down on his chair in the living room. ’Alice’ pulled up a dining chair to face him. ‘Mallory’ stood by the window, occasionally moving the net curtain aside to get a better view of the drive.

“Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“Yes, I do fucking mind! You might be MI6 but this isn’t the Soviet Union.” Slater stood up, suddenly puzzled. “But wait a minute. Isn’t MI6 the bunch that go off toppling foreign governments and whatnot? I thought you people were domestic, MI5?”

“Well done, Professor. But charity isn’t the only thing that begins at home. Alice, this is your project,” Mallory said, smiling. “Why don’t you explain?”

The woman he called Alice leaned forward. 

“We met, Professor Slater, a couple of years ago. You will remember we came to an agreement. Your work had not gone unnoticed by our superiors, and it was decided that you had a great deal to offer your country. I seem to remember you being quite keen on our proposal.”

Slater looked towards the window. “Mallory wasn’t your driver that night.”

“No,” she said. “My driver was blown up two weeks after that meeting by a roadside bomb in Helmand. This is serious, Professor. It’s not an academic exercise. It’s real, and real people are getting killed, and more real people will get killed if you don’t stop acting like a spoilt brat and start remembering who is paying your generous salary.”

“Now, just a minute Alice, or whatever your name is. I’m respected in my field. My science is competitive and I get grants from all over the place – the MRC, the BBSRC, the – ”

“And who do you think tells them who to fund, Professor Slater?” She leaned back, turned her palms upward on her knees. “Look, we’re not here to argue. We’ve given you everything you’ve asked for, maybe even a little extra, and we just want to know when we can expect to see a return on our investment.”

Before Slater could reply, there was a scream from the kitchen. Mallory was across the living room in two strides, pulling something from inside his jacket as he went.

“No! No! Don’t shoot him, it’s only Mike!” – Mary’s voice from the kitchen. “He just startled me, that’s all.”

Slater and Alice arrived in the kitchen to see Michel, even paler than usual, cowering against the fridge-freezer with his hands on his head. Mallory was standing between him and Mary, holding a short, ugly-looking pistol in both hands, pointing straight at Michel’s face.

“For God’s sake, Peter, put it away,” the woman called Alice said.

Mallory – or Peter – slowly lowered the gun.

“Who the fuck is this?”

“This is my postdoc, Michel,” Slater said. “If you’re looking for a ‘return’ on your ‘investment’, shooting him wouldn’t be the best move.” Turning to Michel, he said, “How did you get in? I’d swear we haven’t been out back since we got home.”

Michel lowered his hands. “If you can’t pick a lock, you’ve no business working in a lab.” He shrugged and dropped something into his coat pocket. “Besides, the Noorderbrug tramps had to eat somehow.”

“Right, fine. Whatever,” Slater said, “We’ve got guests. Mary will make you some tea, and we’ll all go and sit down and have a cosy little chat, because I suspect this concerns you as much as anyone else here.”

**********

Mallory/Peter had taken up his usual place by the window. Slater and Alice sat where they had been before Michel’s arrival. But there was an extra chair, now, with Michel occupying it. Mary hovered nervously.

Michel took a sip from the mug, put it down. “Thank you, Mrs Slater. Your tea is excellent as usual.”

Slater pinched the bridge of his nose.

“So. Let me get this straight. Your lot,” he said, waving a finger at the two intelligence agents, “have been making sure I get the funding to continue my research, in return for some research into transmissible biological agents. And now, despite the small size of my group and losing one of my key personnel, you think the work hasn’t progressed fast enough?”

“You haven’t made it easy for me, Tom,” Michel said. “I don’t know how many times you’ve said you’ve lost my orders for signing.”

Slater pushed his hands through his hair. “Mike, please, I know you’re trying to help but can you be quiet for a minute?”

“No, no, this is interesting,” Alice said. “Michel… Mike? Please continue. I’m very interested in what you have to say. Professor Slater did imply that you were critical to the success of this project.”

Michel looked from Slater to Alice, and back again. Slater nodded, flicked his hand towards Michel. Alice smiled encouragingly.

“OK.” Michel looked down at his feet, but didn’t say anything. One minute, two minutes passed. Mallory/Peter took a step away from the window, eyebrows raised. Alice waved him back.

Finally, Michel spoke. “When you visited Professor Slater two years ago, naturally I was curious. The very next day he got me to work on the virus. It seemed… innocent enough. On the face of it. But I was suspicious. Being suspicious is most of what it is to be a scientist. The rest is finding answers to your suspicion. So when the normally efficient Professor Slater started to lose my orders, or forget where samples were… well, at first I thought it was dementia.”

Alice smirked. Slater just said, “Thanks Michel. This is why I hired you.”

There was a momentary flash of confusion in Michel’s eyes, but he continued.

“Just after that, Charlotte left. But I knew she kept coming back, because I could smell her perfume on your jacket, Tom.”

Mary’s hand covered her mouth, and she left the room. Slater remained impassive.

“And then,” Michel said, “just when things were coming together, you spent a lot of time out of the lab. It was impossible to get new reagents. I was still worried about you. But I was distracted by the project. I was so close. Then one day you came in, spent all day in the office, and left. I hoped you were signing my orders. That’s the day I cracked your password.”

Alice sat up.

“You what? Does the professor know this?”

“Yeah,” Slater said, “he told me a few days ago. No secrets now. He’s seen everything. But you could probably guess that a man of his calibre would have figured it out himself. It was just confirmation, to him.”

Michel nodded. “Quite so. It didn’t matter. I had what I needed, but I wanted to know why. You told me what, more or less, was going on. Last week in the Park. State-sponsored terrorism, you called it. But I discovered something that I didn’t know, that I hadn’t foreseen. And that changed everything.”

“And that was…?” prompted Alice.

“Charlotte was pregnant.”

It was Slater’s turn to sit bolt upright. “No! No. I mean yes, she told me she thought she was, early days, and yes, I assumed it was mine. The coroner said she wasn’t, though. She must have had a miscarriage. And not told me.”

“Professor Slater,” Alice said, not unkindly, “the coroner would have said she was carrying Elvis’ child if we’d wanted. Or she could have been the size of an elephant and he would have said it was wind. Her pregnancy wasn’t something we wanted to be widely known.”

“But why would you do that?”

“It didn’t suit our purposes. We didn’t want to shame you – we suspected you had finished the project already.”

“Which is why you sent the Plod round. But why would I have killed her?”

“Because she was pregnant. Because that complicated matters. Because we had grown tired of waiting, and stressed people do strange things.”

Slater shook his head.

“You’ve got the wrong man. I could never had hurt her.”

“Maybe. But you’re not the only player in this game, are you? You’re not the one who would have done the experiments.”

Slater sat back, his face unreadable.

“Go on,” he said. “What are you saying?”

Alice cocked her head towards Michel, who turned and stared out the window, a faraway look on his face. He said nothing for a while. 

Then:

“Tom. I’m so sorry.” Another long pause. “I killed Charlotte.”

• Chapter 15
• previous
• next
• index

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
 – Lizzie Douglas (Memphis Minnie) and Wilbur "Kansas Joe" McCoy

It was always trying, visiting Mary’s mother. 

Most Saturdays, Slater would rise early and sit in the box room he liked to call his study, with a pile of academic papers, perhaps a lab notebook or two or a student’s thesis, and catch up with everything he hadn’t been able to do during the week. He’d emerge briefly mid-morning for fresh coffee, then take a late lunch. Towards late afternoon, if Mary wasn’t visiting friends they’d go for a walk out towards Fulbourn or over the Gogs, afterwards often heading into town for dinner. They never booked ahead, but rather looked around until they found somewhere not too busy, hang the cost.

Was the spontaneity of their Saturday evenings an attempt to recover some lost romanticism? Or maybe one or other of them was trying to apologize for something – or even simply reminding themselves that not having children was perhaps not without its benefits. All his friends had grown up, had children, and although they seemed to work as hard as he did, he could occasionally feel their envy, disguised though it was as pity.

Whatever the reason, he looked forward to Saturdays – except when once a month when they’d make the tedious drive to Leicester, to the drab Fifties vision that was the Eyres Monsell estate, to the semi smelling of stale cigarettes, Camp coffee and cat piss.

In another life, perhaps, he could have got on with Mary’s mother. She had been by all accounts quite a looker in her youth. But while some women age gracefully, maintaining an air of elegance, even desirability well into their greying years, she had fared no better than her declining council estate environment. Neither was she immune to the more medical slings and arrows of age: the signs of angina and creeping dementia were clear.

She’d also taken an immediate and deep-seated dislike to her only son-in-law. When they arrived at her door, Mary had to tell her Tom’s name repeatedly. When at last she did appear to remember him, she would ask why he’d dropped out of med school, or what kind of career was journalism for the husband of her daughter. He had almost convinced himself that the old bat wasn’t at all senile, but was rather deliberately needling him.

As usual, they had driven home in silence. Slater let Mary through the door first, then threw his keys with slightly more force than intended onto the table. Mary frowned without saying anything, and Slater hated himself just a little bit more.

The decanter was rattling on the edge of the whisky tumbler when the doorbell rang.

**********

Unsubtle.

That was the single thought that occupied Michel’s mind. The blue lights reflecting off the windows in the quiet Cherry Hinton street; the two uniformed officers hammering on the door; the shrillness of Mary’s voice, audible even out here in the allotments.

Unsubtle.

When, an hour after they’d arrived, the police went back to their car and drove off, Michel wasn’t totally surprised that Tom wasn’t with them. Even the Cambridge police must have realized there wasn’t a shred of evidence. No; what was surprising was that they had got involved at all at this stage. There was but one hypothesis that fit his observations, but he couldn’t yet be sure he was right. He needed the fox to come out of its hole.

He’d waited all afternoon; a little longer wouldn’t hurt.

And there it was. The white Ford with the Sheffield licence plates turning into the cul-de-sac, reaching the end, and reversing into the Slaters’ driveway. And the platinum blonde – and a man he didn’t recognize – crunching up to the front door and ringing the bell. 

When the door opened, he pinched out the joint and walked slowly up to the house.

**********

When the police had gone, Slater stood with his forehead pressed against the wood of the front door, the tumbler still in his hand but the whisky untouched. Behind him there was silence, but it was the silence before an earthquake.

I will be calm, he thought. Whatever happens, I will be calm.

A chair creaked; footsteps across the hall to the kitchen. A clink of glassware and the sound of running water. 

Be calm.

The footsteps returned, and he heard Mary gulp down the water.

“What,” she said, just a hint of a quiver in her voice , “was that all about?”

Slater moved his head away from the door and looked up at the architrave. Hmm. Mould. That’s going to be have to seen to this summer.

“Well?”

Calm.

He turned around to face her, dispassionately noting the water dripping from the corner of her mouth; the wide, unblinking eyes; her hand, still holding a glass, hanging limply at her side.

“There’s some mould up there above the door. We should get the wood treated,” he said.

He barely flinched as the glass exploded against the doorframe, inches from his face.

I am so fucking calm, he observed, a bomb could go off and I wouldn’t blink.

He looked down, and poked a piece of broken glass with the toe of his shoe. “For some reason,” he said, “the Cambridgeshire Constabulary think I had something to do with the death of Charlotte Stowell. They’re not the sharpest tools in the shed, as you know.” 

He looked up, and smiled brightly. “Good job that was one of the cheap Tesco glasses and not your mother’s crystal.”

• 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.

• Chapter 14
• previous
• next
• index

Just as every cop is a criminal, And all the sinners saints
 – Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Cambridge News, Saturday 12 April 2008

Was Cambridge scientist’s death murder?

The tragic death last month of brilliant young researcher Charlotte Stowell raises serious questions about safety in Cambridge’s new multimillion pound research institute.

Ms Stowell, 28, worked on the infectivity of flu viruses in Professor Thomas Slater’s laboratory at The Wolfhaven Institute, locally known as the “Nobel Factory”. She died after contracting chikungunya fever, a disease normally carried by mosquitoes.

The virus that killed Ms Stowell normal does not affect healthy people, but it can be dangerous in pregnancy. Dr Michel de Kooij, a virologist in Professor Slater’s lab, said he didn’t know if Ms Stowell was pregnant. He said, “We were as surprised as anyone that Charlotte caught it.”

Dr de Kooij said that despite extensive safety procedures, “poor working conditions” and long hours make it “easy to forget how dangerous working with viruses can be”. But Ms Stowell had left the Wolfhaven four months previously to work for the leading scientific magazine Nature.

Paul McIntyre, a technician at the Wolfhaven said that Ms Stowell, “a really lovely girl”, used to receive packages from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “It always feels a little scary,” Mr McIntyre, 57, said, “because you don’t know what’s in there.”

Scientists at the Wolfhaven Institute routinely take viruses like chikungunya apart to see how they work, and put them back together to test their theories in the wild. It is possible that a toxic gene from another lab accidentally got joined to the chikungunya sequence, but Dr de Kooij thought this was unlikely. “It could never happen by chance,” he said. “It is more likely it was done deliberately.”

Dr de Kooij said he did not know who might have wanted Ms Stowell dead. He said that he plans to use viruses in gene therapy, but added that terrorist groups and government agencies such as MI6 could use exactly the same technology to make a deadly weapon, adding that it would not be difficult for somebody with the right technology.

Whatever the real story behind Ms Stowell’s death, it is clear that many searching questions remain to be answered at this jewel in Britain’s research crown.

**********

The woman slammed the paper down.

“Who the fuck is this journalist? Why don’t we know about her?”

The man shrugged. “It’s unimportant.”

“No Peter, it’s not unimportant. It’s of the utmost fucking importance. Somebody, somewhere, somehow, has tipped them off. Who knows? Peter, who the fuck knows?”

The man reached into a pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes, offering one to the woman.

“No? Well then.” He tapped one out of the packet, flicked his Zippo. “Does it matter?”

She snatched the lighter from his hand. 

“Yes it fucking matters. If Slater has squealed it could get us shut down. And we can’t afford that. If he’s squealed…”

“Yah. Whitehall won’t be happy.”

She grimaced. “I think we need to get heavy on Slater. I’ve just about had enough. We’re so fucking close, I can smell it. I know he’s been stringing us along, but I haven’t wanted to get too close in case we spook him. But now, now… we’re nearly there, Peter. I think we should pay him a visit. In person.”

He reached across the table and plucked the Zippo from her unresisting hand. He flicked it, drew on his cigarette, blew a smoke ring at the ceiling.

“I have a better idea, Susan. Let’s give Captain Plod something to do.”

• 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…

In fact, it’s too soon to reveal the results, but we, the LabLiterati, are currently in the process of analyzing the data needed to update the graph I published in Nature back in 2010 in the piece More Lab In the Library – which gave a tantalizing hint that the inflection point seen in the late 1980s might just well herald a meteoric rise (kicking in around the late 2000s). We’ll know more after we’ve crunched the numbers, but I’m feeling pretty confident that the slope is still heading upwards. It will be a nice way to get in the mood for our twenty-year anniversary in March 2025!

So what sort of books are in the upgrade? As always, it’s an astonishingly varied bunch. Historical fiction continues its reign in the genre, with multiple tales of fictional lady scientists in the Victorian era, and the usual clutch of stories populated by real scientific figures, from the well-known (Rosalind Franklin, Charles Darwin, Charles Audubon, Carl Linnaeus) to the less celebrated (John von Neumann, Guillaume le Gentil, Dorothy Horstmann  and Mileva Marić). Environmental peril, as ever, continues to feature, with tales of rewilding, scientists working clandestinely to evade governmental suppression of global warming, and even the incursion of a climate denialist into an Antarctic research station. So too do intrepid scientific detectives, solving murders. There are stories of missing persons, deadly outbreaks, struggling Ph.D students, family dramas – and a continuing enthusiasm for modern-day chick-lit-esque lab erotica. The most cutting-edged theme we identified, in a satiric novel, was a professor who’d been the victim of cancel culture.

The oldest book in the upgrade is The Insect Man, a semi-biographical children’s book published by Eleanor Doorly in 1936 (yet another historical drama, this time about the real-life entomologist Jean Henri Fabre). On the other end of the timeline, a whopping 22 titles were published in 2023 alone (with two already this year), bringing the total to 463.

None of this intel would be possible without the help of the LabLiterati, but in particular Dom, our ‘lab lit sniffer”, who scours bookshops and broadsheets and single-handedly found the vast majority of more obscure specimens. We also rely on our readers to nominate books we have missed. So do keep those great suggestions coming!

If you want to take a look at the latest entries in the Novels category, they appear after Andrea Rothman’s The DNA of You and Me. (You’d better hurry, though, because due to popular demand, we are about to rearrange the list into alphabetical order by author surname). We added six Crossover titles too, but as always, this category, alongside Television/Streaming and Films, is sadly neglected. If you think anything is missing, we’d love to hear from you about those as well.

We hope you enjoy all the new titles, and we expect our next upgrade to happen in the autumn. Until then, happy reading!