All day the snow had been falling. Snow muffled every store and
church; drifts erased streets and sidewalks. The punks at the new
Harvard Square T stop had tramped off, bright as winter cardinals
with their purple tufted hair and orange Mohawks. The sober Vietnam
vet on Mass Ave had retreated to Au Bon Pain for coffee. Harvard
Yard was quiet with snow. The undergraduates camping there for
Harvard’s divestment from South Africa had packed up their cardboard
boxes, tents, and sleeping bags and begun building snow people.
Cambridge schools were closed, but the Philpott Institute was open
as usual. In the Mendelssohn-Glass lab, four postdocs and a couple
of lab techs were working.
Two to a bench, like cooks crammed into a restaurant kitchen, the
postdocs were extracting DNA in solution, examining cells, washing
cells with chemicals, bursting cells open, changing cells forever by
inserting new genetic material. They were operating sinks with foot
pedals, measuring and moving solutions milliliter by milliliter with
pipettes, their exacting eyedroppers. They were preparing liquids,
ices, gels.
There was scarcely an inch of counter space. Lab benches were
covered with ruled notebooks and plastic trays, some blue, some
green, some red, each holding dozens of test tubes. Glass beakers
stood above on shelves, each beaker filled with red medium for
growing cells. The glass beakers were foil topped, like milk bottles
sealed for home delivery. Peeling walls and undercounter incubators
were covered with postcards, yellowing Doonesbury cartoons,
photographs from a long-ago lab picnic at Walden Pond. The laminar
flow hood was shared, as was the good microscope. In 1985, the
Philpott was famous, but it was full of old instruments. Dials and
needle indicators looked like stereo components from the early
sixties. The centrifuge, designed for spinning down cells in
solution, was clunky as an ancient washing machine. There wasn’t
enough money to buy new equipment. There was scarcely enough to pay
the postdocs.
On ordinary days, the researchers darted into and out of the lab to
the common areas on the floor. The cold room, warm room, and
stockroom were shared with the other third-floor labs, as was the
small conference room with its cheap chrome and wood-grain
furniture, good for meetings and naps. But this Friday no one left
the lab, not even the lab techs, Aidan and Natalya. Gofers and
factotums for the postdocs, these two belonged to a scientific
service class, but no one dared treat them like servants. They were
strong-willed and politically aware, attuned to every power
struggle. They kept darting looks at each other, as if to say “It’s
time to go downstairs,” but they delayed going to the animal
facility for fear of missing something. The lab directors, Marion
Mendelssohn and Sandy Glass, were meeting in the office down the
hall. They had been conferring for half an hour, and this did not
bode well. One of the postdocs was in trouble.
How bad was it? No one spoke. Prithwish kept his head down over a
tray of plastic tubes, eyes almost level with the avocado plant he’d
grown from seed. “My most successful experiment,” he often said
ruefully. Robin ducked out to look up and down the hall, then
brushed past Feng as she hurried back inside. The black and white
clock on the wall was ticking past three, but like the clocks in
grade school, this one was always slow. Natalya glared at Aidan, as
if to say “I went downstairs last time; it’s really your turn now,”
but Aidan turned airily away. It might have been funny, but no one
joked at the techs’ pantomime.
“Cliff.” Suddenly, Marion Mendelssohn was standing in the doorway.
She stood there, fearsome, implacable, dark eyes glowering. “Could
we have a word with you?” Cliff smiled tightly and shrugged, a
desperate little show of nonchalance.
The others looked everywhere else, as their lab director led Cliff
away to the office she shared with Sandy Glass.
Cliff’s cheeks were already burning as he followed Marion down the
corridor. At six foot three, he was more than a foot taller than
Marion. Still, he was entirely in her power, and he dreaded what she
and Glass were about to say. For years he’d been developing a
variant of Respiratory Syncytial Virus and had dreamed of using his
modified RSV to transform cancer cells into normal cells. His
experiments were not working; Sandy and Marion had ordered him to
give them up, and he had disobeyed.
The door closed behind him, and Cliff was standing in the tight,
cluttered office.
“Now, Cliff,” said Glass, “did we or did we not have a discussion
about your continuing trials with RSV?”
Cliff stood silent.
“Maybe you don’t remember our conversation,” said Glass, smiling.
Cliff did remember, and he knew better than to smile back. Always
cheerful, brimming with the irrepressible joy of his own
intelligence, Sandy Glass smiled most when he was angry.
“I said you had to stop using RSV,” Sandy reminded Cliff. “You said
you understood.”
Cliff nodded.
“We established RSV has some effect in vitro,” Glass said.
“Congratulations. You’re on your way to curing cancer in a petri
dish. But what have we established when we try injecting RSV into
living mice?”
Cliff looked away.
“You’ve established nothing. You injected fifty-six mice with RSV,
with no effect on tumors whatsoever. Therefore, Marion and I asked
you to stop. We asked you nicely to move on. What did you do next?”
“I tried again,” Cliff said, staring down at the floor.
“Yes, you did. You tried again.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sandy ignored this. “We told you to stop wasting resources on RSV.”
“I didn’t want to give up,” Cliff said.
“Look, I realize RSV was your baby,” Sandy said. “I realize this was
two years’ work developing the virus.”
Two and a half years, Cliff amended silently.
“We understand you put your heart and soul into this project.” Sandy
glanced at Marion, who looked anything but understanding. “The point
is, RSV does not work. And now, yet another set of
experiments-against all advice, against our specific instructions.
What were you thinking, Cliff? Don’t say anything. Perseverance can
be a valuable trait, particularly when you’re right. But we see now
that this third trial is showing every sign of failing
spectacularly. No, don’t apologize. Just tell us what you were
thinking. Tell us your thoughts, because we really want to know.”
Why had he tried twice more with the virus after it had failed? They
were expecting an answer, but Cliff could not speak. The truth
shamed him; it was so simple: he could not bear to jettison work
that had taken so much time. The hours, the thousands of hours he’d
spent, sickened him. How could he confess to that? The scientific
method was precise and calibrated. A scientist was, by definition,
impassive. He cut his losses and moved on to something else; he was
exhausted, perhaps, but never defiant with exhaustion. A scientist
did not allow emotion to govern his experiments.
And yet Cliff had been emotional and unrealistic about his work. He
had behaved unprofessionally, taking his long shot again, and yet
again. How could he explain that? There was only one reasonable
explanation: he was not a scientist. This was what Mendelssohn and
Glass were driving at.
“Did we or did we not agree,” said Glass, “that you would end the
wholesale extermination of our lab animals?”
“We don’t have the money,” said Mendelssohn, and she didn’t mean
funds for the mice themselves, which cost about fifteen dollars
each, but the money for the infinite care the delicate animals
required. “You’ll recall we asked you to work with Robin.”
“She could still use another pair of hands,” Glass said, and Cliff
hated him for that, and for the patronizing, slightly prurient tone
in Glass’s voice.
“I deserve my own project,” Cliff said, raising his eyes.
“There is no such thing as your own project in this lab,”
Mendelssohn declared.
“Look, this is a team,” Glass said, “and you need to pull your
weight, not drag everyone else down with your personal flights of
fancy.”
Down the hall, in the lab, the others gathered like near relations
at a funeral.
“They wouldn’t fire him,” Prithwish said loyally. He was Cliff’s
roommate, after all.
“They will not fire him,” Feng agreed.
Natalya thought about this. “My feeling is Mendelssohn would not,
but Glass would.” She was Russian and had been a doctor herself,
before coming to America. Natalya had never taken to Glass.
“They’ll be arguing, then,” said Prithwish.
“They’ll let him stay,” Aidan predicted, “and make him so miserable
he’ll leave by himself.”
“He was miserable before,” Prithwish pointed out, but the others
hushed him. Cliff was coming back down the corridor.
Instantly his friends scattered, vanishing into the clutter of
glassware and instruments like rabbits in the brush. All but Robin,
who pulled at Cliff’s sleeve. Silently they slipped into the
adjoining stockroom, the lab’s poisonous pharmacological pantry.
She closed the door behind her. “Are you all right?”
His cheeks were flushed, his eyes unusually bright. “I’m fine.”
She drew closer, but he turned away.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “They’ve already tried to pawn me off on
you.”
“They suggested that you work with me?”
“Six months ago, but I said no.”
She was surprised, and hurt. “You never told me that.”
“What was the point? I didn’t want to work on your stuff.”
She folded her arms. “What’s wrong with my stuff?”
“Nothing!” he lied.
She had spent five years working on what had once been considered a
dazzling project, an analysis of frozen samples of blood, collected
over the years from cancer patients who had died of various forms of
the disease. Sandy Glass had been convinced that somewhere in these
samples was a common marker, a significant tag that would suddenly
reveal a unifying syndrome underlying his patients’ tragic and
diverse conditions. Glass had presented the project to Robin in her
first year with a flourish, as if he were bestowing upon her a great
gift. He’d told Robin he was convinced there was a Nobel Prize in
this work; that this above all was the research he himself had hoped
to do if his clinical duties had allowed. Then, having bestowed his
blood collection along with a great deal of disorganized
documentation about each donor’s illness and death, he’d left her to
work alone.
He’d chosen her for her fierce intelligence, her passion for
discovery, her ambition-and, of course, Glass had always liked a
beautiful postdoc. Robin’s eyes were a warm brown, brilliant under
pale lashes, her blond hair silken, although she tied it back
unceremoniously with any old rubber band she happened to find. Her
features were delicate and easily flushed, her teeth were small and
almost, but not quite, straight. On the upper right side, one tooth
overlapped another slightly, like a page turned down in a book. With
her fine eyes and shining hair, she’d always seemed to Cliff like a
girl out of a fairy tale. Still, even she could not spin Glass’s
dross into gold.
“So there’s nothing wrong with my work, but it’s not good enough for
you,” she challenged Cliff.
“No, I didn’t say that.”
“That’s what you were thinking.”
“Look, if I ever thought that, I’m sorry. Just, please …”
Gravely, she turned on him. “But you aren’t sorry.”
“Stop!”
“I just thought …” she began.
“Don’t think anything. Just leave me alone.”
He strode back through the lab and out into the hall. How could
Robin expect him to talk to her? What did she want from him? To beg
her to let him work on her dismal black hole of a project? To break
down sobbing on her shoulder so she could comfort him? He still
heard the humorous disdain in Glass’s voice. He saw the hard
disappointment in Mendelssohn’s eyes. They had not ordered him to
leave; they’d even allowed that he might stay, but they had made him
suffer. They had held up the evidence of his disobedience and
failure, then tossed whatever scrap of a scientist he’d been upon
the garbage heap and all but called out “Next!” There was Prithwish
coming after him down the corridor. Cliff was not going to suffer
his condolences. He escaped into the stairwell and bolted down the
stairs.
Outside the institute, the snow had stopped. The December sun was
setting, and the world was strangely still. He’d run down four
flights of stairs, and stood for a moment, breathing hard. Then he
caught his breath and his anger flared again. He kicked his way
through the snow, mouthing retorts. Who do you think you are? Who do
you think I am?
He walked without noticing distance or direction. Startled, he saw a
red neon sign, LIBBY’S IQUORS, and realized he was in Central
Square. A bus swept past, but there were scarcely any cars on the
road. Stores were closed, and clean snow blew over the empty taxi
stands. All alone, Cliff walked on.
He walked over a mile, as far as MIT, and then turned around and
started back again past shuttered Victorian factories converted into
warehouses, redbrick ramparts lowering in the shadows of taller
office buildings. He thought about calling his parents, but what
could they say to him? They owned a stationery store in West Los
Angeles. They’d always encouraged Cliff. He’d attended University
High School, gone to science camp in summers, practiced
triangulation on sunbaked tennis courts, built his own weather
station, cooked homemade versions of Silly Putty, toothpaste, and
glue. His parents had paid for chemistry sets, and student
microscopes, and even Stanford. They were well educated; both had
gone to college, but Cliff was the first person in his family to
earn a PhD. His parents knew nothing about bench work or lab
politics. He thought of his thesis advisor, now dead. What would
Professor Oppenheimer have said? He’d have laughed, of course,
showing off his yellow teeth. He’d say, “What do you expect? You
don’t listen to the lab director, you get busted. You screw around
with someone in the lab; of course you’re gonna end up fighting
later. You get what you deserve. How many times do I have to tell
you? Don’t shit where you eat.”
His hands were cold, even in his pockets. He walked and walked up
Mass Ave, and then along the Charles River, and his heart began to
calm. The cold air began to smooth and smother his angry pride; numb
despair overtook indignation.
He imagined he would keep walking forever in ever-widening circles,
but as the river curved, he came upon the Weeks Footbridge, and
there on the bridge he stopped. The Charles stretched out in the
dark; pure, white, frosted with snow, like an ancient road now
forgotten.
Cliff was overcome with a profound idea. He would walk across the
river. Invisibly he would walk across the invisible river and leave
his own footprints in the white snow on the frozen water. In the
middle of the city, he would wander alone as if in the country, the
slight crunch of the ice under his feet. He would walk to the other
side.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Intuition
by Allegra Goodman
Copyright © 2006 by Allegra Goodman.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
The Dial Press
Copyright © 2006
Allegra Goodman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-385-33612-8
