Extract

Here are a couple of short extracts from a piece I started writing in the summer on the subject of research fraud. One day I will find the time to pick up work on it again. By this stage in the story is has been established that the narrator is a European student, the setting is the Midwestern United States, and "Jeff" is the narrator's boss, an Assistant Professor.

It is a banal coincidence that Sabriena and I celebrate the anniversary of our birthdays on the same day of the year.  The day happens to fall in the second week of August, nine days after Kate and my arrival.  Aside from Sabrina herself, the only person who wished me a happy birthday on that occasion was the large bored desk clerk at the Social Security Administration.  Kate and I had taken the afternoon off and the bus downtown to queue up for an hour in order to receive the magic number that opens up the exciting possibilities of bank accounts, pensions, and legitimate salaries.

And so I turned twenty standing in a queue just so that a clerk could fill in some forms on my behalf.  Afterwards, Kate went out to spend the evening exploring the downtown area of the city; for me, however, finding out just how soulless and depressing that city centre is would have to wait for another day.  I had to ride the bus back up the hill to the university.  I had been asked to.  Well, not exactly asked to.  It was simply assumed that I would.  Jeff had already given me the work to do.

When I arrived back, shortly after five, Sabrina was still working too.  Working rapidly but with great skill.  Transferring micro-quantities of liquids between millilitre Eppendorf tubes with a speed and accuracy that was thrilling to watch -- a skill that I would soon acquire myself.  Sabrina had two young children and a birthday dinner appointment that she couldn't miss.

I had no such excuses.  That would be the first day that I would work through to eight, and it would not take long for this to become normal.  Jeff seemed like a nice enough guy, just a little hard working, hard driving, and ambitious.  I was fine with that; I might have to learn to say "no" if ever I found myself with other things to do, I thought, but otherwise I didn't mind the work.  And he was friendly and jolly with everybody.  He shared jokes about the latest publications with the professor emeritus who sometimes toured the building in his wheelchair.  He shared jokes about last night's basketball with the cleaner.  The kind of person who, when he asks you how you are, you don't even notice that he couldn't care less.

So I found myself spending an evening in the cramped and crowded culture room, one of several small rooms that doubled as a partition between our half of the wing and our neighbouring lab.  This room, ten feet by eight, was stuffed with two incubators, similar in size and design to the standard upright fridge-freezer, and two great laminar flow cabinets. These latter devices provide a a metre by half-metre working space with a glass screen and aperture to insert one's arms, surrounded by an array of bulky nineteen-eighties machinery for maintaining the correct pressure and airflow for sterile technique.

I wasn't alone, of course.  Often I would find myself last to leave the laboratory, but as often there would be somebody still to bid goodnight to at seven, eight, nine o'clock.  On this occasion it was the post-doc Earl.  He was occupying one of the cabinets, processing fresh surgical explants ready for his experiments.  I silently gave thanks to be working with a long immortalised population of cells, happily growing suspended in nutrients in a jar, free from the grisly details of life in a complex multicellular organism.  I settled down where the fresh flesh -- the bloody fatty cancerous lump -- would be out of sight.

Over those three hours or so of repetitive mixing of liquids, swirling of dishes, counting of cells and centrifuging of tubes, Earl and I chatted.  About our projects and our governments, the places and the people that we knew.  He was a proper American, from Biloxi Mississippi.  Wide and freckled, bald and bearded and southern-accented.  An educated liberal, of course – everyone was.

And we talked about the lab and its people, past and present.  We talked about the prof, Adam, who had been born Adolf in 1930s Germany; the other post-doc, John, from Oregon, who rose at four each morning to ensure that he could always be home for dinner with his daughters; the students, Sabriena and Tanya, and Kara and Billy who had married in Vegas; Pam the laboratory manager; and Jeff.  It wasn't the first time that I had heard stories about Jeff.  But up until then the advice had been vague, delivered with a smile and a wink.

Earl took no such trouble.  He was never rude to Jeff, but he was the only person I had seen return Jeff's charm with a blank face that asked "why the fuck is this guy still talking to me?” Jeff and Earl talked about politics in exchanges that would be described as "robust".  As a reaction to his Chinese upbringing, Jeff had fallen to the opposite extreme of American libertarianism, and he was probably the only academic in the building who had supported the war.  But Earl didn't hate Jeff for his politics.  He could handle robust exchanges.

It was hypocrisy and shallow charm that Earl hated.  The way Jeff talked to Sabrina when an experiment failed.  The pressure that he put on her to work late and not see her children, when he was driving home to his own.  And it was the loss of the previous laboratory manager, Joannie, who had been under Jeff's management.  She had quit without giving notice after only a few months of it, and nobody ever found out the exact reason.  A straw just broke the camel's back, they supposed.  Despite his distance from those events, Adam had at least had the sense to take direct responsibility for Pam when she was hired in Joannie's place. "Don't let him bully you," Earl said.

--

By the end of August, I was largely left to manage experiments and get on with them myself.  I had been taught all of the basic procedures and scribbled notes in a file labeled “Joannie's Protocols”, so Jeff disappeared to his office.  He would occasionally come down to the lab to look at some results, declare them unsatisfactory, and give orders for a repeat experiment, or some variation with a different drug or concentration.  Cell culture experiments take some time.  Not because the procedures are complicated and intensive -- though they can be -- but because cells need to be grown for several days, exposed to drugs for hours and given a day or more for the effect of the chemicals to become apparent; proteins separated on paper need to be incubated with antibodies overnight; photographic films left for hours to pick up faint sources of luminescence; and stocks of cells need feeding at three day intervals – no more, and no less.

The job of the cell biologist is therefore not a nine to five monday to friday affair.  Working at weekends -- just the essential tasks as part of ongoing projects -- is normal.  Everybody does it sometimes.  It was the last saturday in august that I got on my new bicycle and rode off into the heatwave at ten in the morning.  There was an hour of essential tasks to see to, and perhaps some less essential ones, which could really wait until monday, but which involved results that people were very keen to see.

When I wondered in, Adam was making a rare visit to the shop floor.  He stood at the edge of a very large puddle almost shouting at the man in the sleeveless shirt and tool belt who stood beside him staring at the water.  Jeff and Earl were moving soggy cardboard boxes up onto shelves.  Billy had headphones on and was standing in the puddle working and ignoring everything that was happening around him.  Ten minutes later Adam and the facilities guy were joined by Karen, head of the neighbouring lab, who had come to collect her barrel of distilled water from the water distillery that we shared with the rest of the wing.

It transpired that the second-year undergraduate student who did odd-jobs in Karen's lab several evenings each week had set the distillery running the previous evening.  Only that day returned from the summer break, by the time he had completed his other chores he had forgotten about the machine and went home.  Overnight, a gallon of water each hour bubbled over the top of the barrel, tumbled down the sides of its trolley, and slowly spread across the watertight black linoleum floor.  Most of it had accumulated in the little tissue culture room, whose wooden furniture would still be damp and beginning to smell on Monday.

On the Monday morning I saw that undergraduate for the first time. Karen led him in to make an apology to Adam.  Short and shy, he was trying to disappear behind her, but she pushed him out to stand in front of everybody and speak.  I didn't care what damage his flood might have done.  I was far too distracted by his blue eyes, scruffy hair, hint of beard, and the nerdy pun on his t-shirt.  I lent on a bench and tipped a jar crashing over the floor before he could finish his apology. But by then nobody else really cared what damage his flood might have done either.  Reports of the first levee breaches were on the radio and eastern New Orleans was already under water.

Hurricane Katrina destroyed Biloxi Mississippi, and the fungal contamination that grew in the damp tissue culture room destroyed hundreds of hours of carefully prepared surgical explants.  Three days later, while Earl threw piles of flasks and dishes into a biohazard bag, Jeff stood in the doorway of the tissue culture room complaining about the sudden rise in gas prices.  Earl broke his nose, walked out, and never came back.