Page 2 of The Botanist's Assistant
Margaret has tried to ease his anxiety by sending him research articles on meditation and jogging, but it’s like trying to calm a jumbled sea with a tablespoon of oil. Calvin says the only thing that relaxes him is smoking and, with today’s world the way it is, he might as well be a vampire for how much acceptance smokers get.
“You could try to quit again,” Margaret says. “I understand six times is the charm.”
She’d seen a university study citing that particular number, which made her wonder why people kept insisting it was three.
Calvin shudders. “Even if I could quit, can you imagine what would happen? I’d weigh three hundred pounds. I’d rather take my chances with pneumonia. At least I’d die thin.”
Margaret doesn’t tell him that he should wish for tuberculosis instead of pneumonia if he wants to die a waif. Instead, she watches him peel off his sweatshirt to see that today, besides his usual outfit of stained red sneakers and faded gym shorts, he’s wearing a T-shirt that proclaimsScience Is Like Magic but Real, which no serious scientist would say, let alone shout from his or her clothes.
Where does he get such things?
Margaret herself wears sensible skirts and cotton blouses printed with nature themes. She has five such shirts, one for each day of work: dragonflies and ferns for Mondays, a spray of monarch butterflies on Tuesdays, roses and wrens for Wednesdays, twists of clematis vines with tiny hummingbirds concealed in the plant’s lush purple flowers for Thursdays and cheery golden California poppies on Fridays. The blouses remind her of the power of plants and the beauty of her garden, which is where she finds the most peace. The schedule of shirts also saves time that otherwise might be wasted by staring into a closet and wondering what to wear.
Margaret is just returning to her data when Calvin mutters, “Where the heck is Zhang?”
“Not here yet,” Margaret answers, which, to her mind, isnot something you should necessarily regret. She’s seen years of grad students—smart ones, shy ones, loud ones, plodding ones—but never anyone as prone to accidents, mistakes and spills as the graduate student Travis Zhang.
Zhang came to the lab seven months ago and, during that time, has managed to jam the sixty-three-thousand-dollar mass spectrometer, causing a five-hundred-dollar repair bill, set off a small lab fire when he put a flask of petroleum ether too close to a lit Bunsen burner, and regularly contaminates samples by sneaking bites of sandwich while attempting extractions (high metabolism, he claims). Three weeks ago, he added water to acid instead of the other way around, causing a glass beaker to explode with a sound like a hand grenade going off.
Anybody else would have pointed him toward the door, but her boss, the understanding and brilliant Dr. Jonathan M. Deaver, has allowed Zhang to stay, requiring only that he be continuously monitored while performing tasks in the lab.
A week after that decision, however, Zhang filed a harassment claim against Dr. Deaver, charging that the order was degrading and put his academic career in jeopardy, which means Zhang now must be treated as carefully as the glass Erlenmeyer flasks he regularly breaks (nine so far).
“He better get here soon,” Calvin says. “I can’t do anything until those dishes are washed.”
By “dishes,” Calvin means the two plastic washbasins filled with used glassware—column-shaped graduated cylinders, squat beakers, bulbous volumetric flasks—which Margaret has just spotted, and which Zhang has apparently triedto hide under his workstation rather than clean them as he was supposed to do.
“I’m not staying here till midnight because he doesn’t do his job,” Calvin says. “Not for what I get paid.”
Calvin might be right about the pay, but he is wrong to expect that long hours are not part of science. Dr. Deaver, in fact, is known for his extended work schedule, which is why he is a rock star of botany. Not only here at Roosevelt University but throughout much of the country.
Charismatic and handsome, with a PhD in botany and a master’s in biochemistry, the forty-three-year-old Professor Deaver has made his mark by discovering bioactive compounds in plants that can be used in the treatment of certain diseases. Think Taxol, which is used to fight ovarian and breast cancer and was derived from the bark of the Pacific yew tree.
In his eleven years at Roosevelt, the gifted Dr. Deaver has published twenty-six papers, is regularly cited by other researchers and is now on the cusp of a discovery that could change the way cancer is treated.
And for ten of those eleven years, Margaret has worked as a research assistant II or, as Professor Deaver says, “right-hand woman II.” She oversees and performs experiments, manages supplies (including sleuthing out which member of a neighboring lab snuck out with an entire rack of pipettes one year), records data, makes sure Dr. Deaver has everything he needs to do his important work and basically holds the hand of every grad student who walks through the lab’s scuffed door. In her spare time, she also helps Dr. Deaver with grant applications and scientific papers.
For all this, Margaret has received neither raise nor promotion, and while another person might have felt unfairly treated, Margaret focuses instead on the importance of thework. Besides, who says a fancy title or fat bank account will automatically make you happy?
She prefers the simple life anyway.
She drives a twenty-year-old compact Toyota pickup, shops at the discount grocery store, buys her clothes at the local thrift shop and can spend hours kneeling amid the honeysuckle, hollyhocks and roses in her garden, so there is no need to attend concerts or visit museums or go to the movies (which she believes are a waste not only of money but also of time).
Margaret knows that most of the grad students call her Big Bird behind her back, a play on her last name and the fact that she is tall and big-boned. Close to six feet by the last measurement.
Dr. Deaver, however, calls Margaret Ms. Eagle Eye because of the very attention to detail that she apparently abandoned last night as she prepared for the next day of work. According to him, she also has extraordinarily steady hands, uncanny lab technique and the ability to organize almost anything.
“You are no finch, Finch,” he’s said more than once.
Right now, with the lab poised on the edge of what could be a once-in-a-lifetime discovery, every skill she has is being tested. Over the past year, Dr. Deaver has isolated a compound in the stinging leaves of a rainforest bush in Brazil that causes long-lasting and almost unbearable pain when ittouches human flesh but appears to have important tumor-suppressing properties.
Or, as Dr. Deaver likes to tell his students, “There’s only one letter that separates ‘toxic’ from ‘tonic.’ ”
To Margaret’s mind, scores of letters separate Dr. Deaver from other scientists. Letters that form words like “creative,” “confident,” “genius” and “generous.”
She is about to tell Calvin that science waits for no man or for dirty dishes either, when Zhang slouches into the lab. He is followed by a humanities undergrad named Emily Frost whom Deaver has allowed into the lab as an intern. (“We must bring diverse and creative minds into science if we want to think beyond boundaries,” he says.) Margaret, however, suspects the girl is only here because she wants to write a novel with a handsome scientist as her protagonist. (Margaret has heard her asking Dr. Deaver to repeat certain pithy quotes and then spotted her scribbling them on a yellow legal pad she keeps in her backpack.)
At the sight of the slender and dark-haired Zhang, Calvin hisses, “It’s about time, dude.”
