“It’s time, Professor Guyer,” Bark said. “It’s happening.”
That cleared away the cobwebs. There weren’t that many eureka moments in science. Mostly it was just hard work, data collection, the slow and steady roll of progress. And she loved it. She genuinely liked spending time in the lab, in observation and notation. Back in high school she was the only kid who thought titration exercises were interesting, and then as an undergrad and a grad student, even when she was bored by the grind, she’d been able to maintain her concentration. She was brilliant, there was no disputing that, but there had been a couple of other students in her graduate program who were equally brilliant. The difference was that they didn’t carry the same level of discipline she did. She’d become famous in her field because she was able to make the logical leaps that pushed the science forward, but she knew that at the core, she’d been successful because she was a grinder. She didn’t just come up with ideas; she was able to prove her theories through methodical research.
But no matter how much she was willing to grind, no matter how disciplined she was, there was nothing, absolutely nothing that compared with the excitement of a breakthrough. And if she was being honest, it had been a while since she’d done anything exciting in the lab.
Yes, discovering the medical use of venom from the Heteropoda venatoria two years ago had been a great follow-up to the work that had made her what passes for famous in the world of entomology in the first place, but as much as she was still fond of the huntsman spider, she felt as though she’d finished that avenue of research. It was time for something new.
Despite her annoyance at her graduate students yesterday when they’d ambushed her outside the classroom and reminded her of her drunken rambling about Peru and the Nazca Lines, she’d clearly been onto something. To say what was happening with the egg sac was interesting was an understatement. This was potentially one of those scientific moments that could define a career. There was an evolutionary ecologist in Oklahoma who’d started trying to resurrect dormant eggs back in the 1990s, and he’d had early success with eggs that were decades old. By the early 2000s, however, he was hatching eggs a hundred years old, and by 2010 he managed to get eggs more than seven hundred years old to hatch. Okay, admittedly, from what she remembered about the article, he’d been working with water fleas, which were quite a bit simpler than spiders, but still. The idea wasn’t completely insane. So if it was interesting enough just to have found a calcified ten-thousand-year-old egg sac at the Nazca site, to have it hatch was at another level all together.
This could be huge. The cover of Science or Nature huge.
She gave her face a wash in the lab sink. She could have taken a quick shower in her private bathroom in her office—that bathroom, in and of itself, was reason enough to come to American University, forget the fact that she needed to get to DC for Manny or that American University made her the best offer—but if it was time, she didn’t want to miss anything.
The three graduate students were huddled along the back wall of the lab. The insectarium was next to a cage containing a rat that Patrick had nicknamed “Humpy,” for the cancerous growths on its back. On the other side of the insectarium, one of the students’ laptops was playing a live stream of the news, the words a low mumble washing over them. Julie was bent over and writing something down in her notebook.
“All right,” Melanie said. “What’s new?” She reached over and snapped the lid of the laptop shut. She didn’t need her lab to be silent, but she wasn’t a big fan of background noise.
All three students stood up and looked at the laptop, making an array of distressed sounds. “We’re kind of just keeping that going to listen to the news because of the nuclear explosion,” Patrick said.