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…
