The classroom for the lab wasn’t a classroom at all: it looked like a bona fide laboratory, though I later learned it was a teaching lab, a sort of Fisher Price version of the real thing. Six rectangular black benches—three on each side of a central, square bench—stood in the middle of a room lined with shelves of glassware and industrial-looking vents. We were each assigned the right or left side of a bench as we walked in the first day. There were twelve of us, and while we would share the benches for ease of use when it came to large pieces of equipment or distributing supplies, we’d be working alone, and I felt weirdly relieved by that—by having total control over my own space.
Our professor, Dr. Kaufmann, was a biophysicist, internationally recognized as a leader in population ecology. I’d looked up each professor running a section of the lab once I was able to register, and I signed up for hers because she was, technically, the only immigrant: she was born in Germany but came to the United States for her Ph.D. and stuck around after falling in love with our beaches (her faculty Web page said exactly that). I realize this was a stretch—thinking of Dr. Kaufmann as an immigrant the way my parents were—but I saw my very presence at Rawlings as a kind of stretch, and besides, I was basically from the beach, and maybe she’d sense that somehow and see it as a positive.
Dr. Kaufmann was very tall—six-two or six-three—easily the tallest woman I’d ever seen in real life and the only born-in-Germany person I’d ever met. As she assigned us to our benches, I couldn’t guess her age. She was already a fixture at Rawlings, but if I’d seen her on the street I would’ve guessed she was twenty-seven or twenty-eight—impossible considering her rank in the department, which implied enough time there to put her closer to forty at the youngest. Her eyes were small, hidden as if always squinting from a smile, and she gave the same smile to each of us as she told us where we’d be standing all semester (the only chair in the room was behind her bench). She’d been featured on the Rawlings Web site for her groundbreaking study on plankton populations, and I’d read her write-up of the project twice, enthralled by her findings but also a little envious that she got to spend her time researching questions so simultaneously complex and simple: How did these get here? What does that mean?
Dr. Kaufmann spent the first half of day one orienting us to both the lab (This is the eyewash station; this is the emergency shower; pray you never need to use either.) and to the project we’d work on all semester: isolating genes from one organism and learning how to express those genes in another. She showed us a series of slides illustrating the steps the project entailed.
—The project itself is not exactly the point, of course, she said when she reached the last slide. But it will expose you to much of the lab’s equipment, and that is our aim.
She pointed up to the slide, which featured a single-celled bacterium.
—For our final organism, we typically use bacteria such as these, but there’s a chance this term we’ll use C. elegans, a type of tiny roundworm.
The guy at the other end of my bench yawned behind his hand. I didn’t know what C. elegans looked like and so hoped, for exactly that reason, that’s what we’d get. As if reading my mind, she said, It will depend on what we have on hand when we reach that week, but let us hope for roundworms.
She raised the lights and went on to review how to properly keep a lab notebook, which she described as a research scientist’s single most important tool. I’d bought mine already, and it was thicker than any notebook I’d ever owned because every page was backed by a carbon copy sheet. She explained why: we would tear those out and submit them to her each week without surrendering the whole notebook.
—You will always be working, so you can never be without your lab notebook, not even to submit it for review.
As she listed them off, I wrote down each of her lab notebook guidelines as if they were tomorrow’s winning lottery numbers: always begin with the date; don’t skip any pages or leave space to go back later and add things—you should represent your work in the order it was actually performed; keep track of every single step and everything you use—an outsider should be able to replicate whatever you do just from reading your notebook; never, ever use pencil.
—Can anyone guess why? she said.
Knees and ankles cracked as people shifted in place instead of answering; we’d been standing for almost two hours. She held up a lab notebook, raised it to face level, and let the pages flip past us. Several entire sheets were crossed out.
—This is mine, she said. As you can see, it is messy and has lots of scratching out, lots of mistakes.
She put it back down on the table and patted it like a pet.
—This is good, she said. We never, ever use pencil because we never erase anything. You must keep the mistakes there. Mistakes are vital to every scientist’s process. Just put a line through whatever you did incorrectly and keep going.