The Last Rose of Summer

I spent all of Easter weekend on my experiments with Rh2, pulling an all-nighter on Sunday night. I was making minor corrections to my slides as people started filing into lab that morning, which was a bit nerve-wracking, but I was having to contain my excitement at what I had just found after two years of laboring with a weak demethylating agent: now we had a nontoxic agent whose potency, in these preliminary findings, rivaled that of the toxic gold standard drug. It seemed we now had the Holy Grail of this entire field of research.

And so, the sun rose over Greenville, and it was time to present my data. All four grad students, and a few of the postdocs, literally sat staring at me, open-mouthed, as I presented the results. Dr. Cromm was grinning like the cat that ate the canary.

“This happens sometimes in science!” he said, laughing. “You work for two years and then get all your results in a few days.”

Well, it happens if you’re forced to work with the wrong drug for two years, I thought, though I kept this to myself.

Dr. Everton, who regularly saw patients with lung cancer and who performed a more purely scientific than political role in lab, watched the whole thing with a satisfied but impassive expression. This was serious.

On this occasion, a prominent plant epigeneticist had been invited and was present with her entire lab. After asking me several questions about ginseng and the known roles of this chemical in the plant it came from, she asked me, “What effect does it have on methylation in the plant?”

“That’s not known,” I told her and then added in an excited voice, “but it would be a great question to investigate.” Her whole lab looked at each other, nodding.

Victor Orrin looked fascinated and delighted, and he congratulated me afterwards in a calm and serious, but completely heartfelt, tone of voice. I thanked him for his congratulations— and for not heckling.

Once I’d finished my slides and answered all the questions from the audience, a medical resident who was rotating through the lab ran over to me, excited and happy, and started to ask me more questions. I told him, laughing, that I’d stayed up all night to get the results ready for lab meeting since I had still had experiments running as I was preparing to present. I hadn’t slept at all and had just given a taxing presentation. Could we possibly talk about it tomorrow?

He laughed too, very sympathetic to the issue of sleep deprivation, and he let me go. Meanwhile, the grad students were looking at me with a new respect instead of the good humor that had characterized most of our time together. The postdocs looked interested and excited as they separately congratulated me on a job well done.

“Mary, that was a really excellent presentation,” Dr. Cromm said as he joined me at my lab bench afterwards, genuinely happy as I had seldom seen him. “I couldn’t have done it better myself. The only thing I’d say to change is…well, you have a very vivacious personality,” he continued with a chuckle, “and you’ll have to remain calmer in your future presentations. Some people might not take your results seriously, and they’re so serious we’ll be shooting for a top tier journal.”

I apologized and agreed. I had been a bit punch drunk from sleep deprivation and stress, besides the elation of the discovery; also, I was among friends, and those friends were far too intelligent to judge a presentation based on style or the physical characteristics of the presenter. Victor, after all, had ummed and ahhed his way through his entire presentation, and nobody had cared. They knew me, and they were more than competent to judge the facts for themselves. Dr. Cromm was correct, and I did intend to rein it in for future presentations, but I’ll plead the above arguments in my defense.

Strangely, Tetsuo, the single smartest guy in the lab if you took into account both political and scientific sophistication, had been sitting almost doubled over in his chair, looking like he wanted to die. He’d come into the room looking perfectly fine but had seemed to grow more anxious and distressed as I’d continued talking. He wandered off alone after I finished. I knew something was wrong, and as I caught up to him afterwards, I noticed his eyes were bloodshot and teary.

“Tetsuo, what’s wrong?” I asked him, finding him by himself.

“Nothing, nothing,” he said, looking away. I assumed that he was responding that way simply because, in many cultures including Japan’s, men are not supposed to show grief or other emotions.

“No, you’re not well,” I persisted in a low voice, wanting to know what was wrong and knowing that no one else would help him with whatever it was. “It’s okay. You can tell me. I won’t tell anybody else,” I reassured him, but my concern only seemed to make him more upset. Eventually, I gave up, confused.

Looking back now, this all makes perfect sense. Everyone who got the science was thrilled. But the one man who was smart enough both to grasp the science immediately and then predict the political outcome had just about wanted to die. He knew that I cared about him as a person and not just as the exceptional talent everyone wanted to exploit. He foresaw what they would do to me, and he couldn’t do anything to save me; he could only endanger himself. He was going to have to watch it.

I didn’t know at the time that, by showing him kindness, I was only twisting the knife.