Page 12 of The Botanist's Assistant
Like a bloodhound on the trail, Margaret does more tests. There is residue on the bench where Zhang and Calvin worked. It’s on the refrigerator door handle, the analytic scale, a shelf of beakers, the lab doorknob and the faucet at the sink.
What didn’t Zhang touch?
She pauses as an idea strikes, and there it is: carbon 14 residue on the coffee mug Zhang uses but not on Calvin’s cup.
She feels a moment of triumph.
Now all she needs is to check Dr. Deaver’s office and the bottle of atropine in the cabinet for residue, although she has the key to neither.
She peels off her gloves, records her findings in her data notebook and gives one last glance around the room.
Some part of her knows she should let the carbon 14 traces remain so investigators can run the same tests and confirm her results. The thought of leaving those radioactive footprints to contaminate the lab, however, fills her with an anxious kind of dread. She abhors dirt and disorder the same way some people react to snakes and spiders. It’s made even worse when the uncleanliness is in her lab.
She pictures the carbon 14 residue as dark blobs that mar the room like gravy stains on a white tablecloth. A shiver of unease runs through her. How can she ignore the contamination? And yet, what kind of justice would be served if she took sponge and cleaner to the very clues that might help find a killer?
She heaves a great sigh.
Soap, solvents and sponges call to her from the supply closet. She thinks of the detectives in her mystery novels who move through crime scenes like smoke. They don gloves and booties. They leave no trace of themselves. They observe and preserve. Certainly, none of them would pick up a sponge and begin to clean.
Walk away, she orders herself.Let it be.Truth should never be sanitized no matter how uncomfortable it is.
She steels her resolve and shoulders her purse. She will leave things as they are. She will go home. Only she can’t.
It’s as if her feet have rooted themselves to the floor. In all her years, she has never knowingly left a lab in this condition. Sloppy workspaces breed sloppy science. It’s what she tells every grad student and postdoc who comes into the lab. A memory rises.
She is thirty-five and living in a small converted garage that smells of boiled cabbage—although Margaret had never once boiled cabbage there—and is working as a junior lab tech for a microbiologist at a well-known university. She has labored her way from intern to go-fer and finally to her current position and hopes, one day, to earn her PhD. This, meanwhile, is her dream job, although it’s not without its faults.
Her boss is demanding and quick to anger, and even though she’s worked in his lab for six years, embroidered her name on her lab coat and is only two years younger than he, he still refers to her as “that girl” and sometimes simply “her.”
Margaret, however, never corrects him. She is just grateful to be a cog in the great wheel of science. Perhaps she feels that way because she was so late to research. First, she spenttwenty-two months caring for her dying mother—an event that forcedher to drop out of college her senior year. The next four years were spent answering phones in a muffler shop while she slowly finished her bachelor’s degree and started on her master’s. Degree in hand, she found herself in the lab that would eventually betray her.
Her downfall began at the height of her boss’s career.
He was a few months away from submitting what promised to be a groundbreaking paper on immune-system function when Margaret decided she would show her boss that she was a self-starter by doing a confirmational test on one of the paper’s early experiments. (A grad student and postdoc were handling the more technical tests.)
Deciding to stay late that evening, she reran the experiment. Margaret’s results, however, were different from what had been reported. She did the test again and obtained the same outcome. A third rerun was no different.
Bleary-eyed from a long night in the lab, Margaret duly reported the problem to her boss the next morning, expecting to be thanked for catching an important error. Instead, the scientist yanked the data sheet from her hand, said he didn’t know why an “uninformed lump” like her was meddling in his research and assigned her to mouse duties—a lowly job that entailed breeding, feeding and cage cleaning and was never to be spoken of or even acknowledged as part of the campus.
That spring, the scientist’s paper was published to great acclaim.
A month after that, however, as Margaret was searching through files to verify the breeding background of a certainmouse, she discovered a sheaf of papers stuffed inside an unmarked folder. Her pulse quickened as she skimmed thepages, realizing she had not been wrong about the experiment she’d rerun.
Her boss’s paper contained what appeared, now, not to be sloppiness, but a deliberate error.
Quickly, she shoved the pages inside her shirt and went home.
For two days and three sleepless nights, she wondered what to do. Finally, she approached her boss with the damning pages, saying that the published paper must be corrected and, if it wasn’t, she would be forced to notify the administration. The integrity of scientific research was more important than personal glory, she told him. She couldn’t stop her voice from shaking.
Her boss claimed he was unaware of the data she’d found and asked to examine the papers, which she handed over.
The very next day, she was called into his office and told that she could either resign or he would file a formal complaint against her, charging theft (for removing university-owned research documents from the campus) and safety violations (performing unauthorized experiments). Either way, he said, her career in academia was dead.
A shell-shocked Margaret submitted her resignation, tucked tail and retreated north to her old job at the muffler shop.
When the shop closed unexpectedly a few years later, she found employment at a nearby garden center, where she worked for the next five years. It was there that she met and was befriended by Dr. Deaver, who was a regular at theestablishment. He’d ask her to order specialty specimens and fancy fertilizers and seemed impressed by how she’d reorganized the plants according to not only type but also season. He alsoapplauded the lengthy handwritten notes about each plant’s quirks, phylogeny and care that she posted for customers to consider.
One day, over a flat of impatiens, he coaxed Margaret’s academic history from her. He called her former boss “the Mr. Burns of science,” in reference, she learned later, to the corrupt and egotistical character onTheSimpsonsTV show, and said he’d heard the guy had been fired a few years ago for making antisemitic comments to one of his grad students.
