The People in the Trees: A Novel Page 6

  There were usually around fifteen of us—and Smythe, of course—in the lab at any time, and although I had been somehow, romantically, anticipating a free and creative exchange of ideas and theories (I was that naive), it was in truth strictly hierarchical; although a controlled environment and peopled with only a very narrow sliver of society, it hewed slavishly to the formalities and distinctions of rank of the outside world. At the top was Smythe, and what he said—or what his immediate inferiors said he said, which was more often the case—had to be followed without questions or debate. But Smythe was a less and less frequent presence by the time I arrived, more interested, it seemed, in giving interviews to the New York Times and to Edward R. Murrow.

  The next most important people in the office were the two chief residents, Walter Brassard and Monroe Fitch, both M.D.’s and both (as they managed to remind you every week or so) handpicked by Smythe to run his lab. It was their job to supervise the experiments, write first drafts of Smythe’s research papers and handle them through their eventual publication, and administer the daily goings-on at the lab, which included the hiring of medical students and undergraduates. Both of them disliked me, Brassard more than Fitch, but I had been hired directly by Smythe, and so they were forced to tolerate me. Both of them—again, Brassard more than Fitch—were not unknown in their own right; at school I had heard professors speak of their brilliance and promise. They were sometimes called “the Turks,” and it was thought that they would be the scientific minds who would succeed Smythe and in the meantime carry his projects to fruition. The two of them rarely spoke to each other and, I saw, were quite competitive. Each disdained the other for the supposed inferiority of his education (a curious thing, as they had been classmates from prep school through medical school), his intellectual vivacity (again, both seemed equally unimaginative to me), and, it became clear, for his relative favor with Smythe at any moment.

  Beneath Brassard and Fitch were four junior residents, also M.D.’s, named Parton, Nesser, Ulliver, and Curtis. The four of them were in their way even more insufferable than Brassard and Fitch, who had chosen them (with Smythe’s approval). All of them too had gone to boarding school (though not Brassard and Fitch’s), and all of them walked about the lab with an expression that aspired to solemnity—a gently furrowed brow underneath hair still cut in a schoolboy style, their hands clasped behind their backs in an approximation of greatness—but that was, despite its ambition and seriousness of intent, unable to conceal the slight smiles they wore when they thought others weren’t looking, that admiring preen that women affect upon encountering a mirrored surface. I was assigned to work with Parton, whom I liked best of the bunch, for his smooth, fat-cheeked face and messy shirt (for which he was always being rebuked by the Turks, to whom these sorts of details mattered) and for the fact that he left me alone, forgetting for days that I was assisting him with his experiments and that he was therefore responsible for monitoring my movements and, as they called it, daily output of activity.

  After the junior residents came the two medical students: me and a fellow named Julian Turnbull, who was a great favorite of the Turks’ and who never once spoke to me, as if my very inappropriateness were a condition he might be able to contract by even the briefest communication. So he stayed away, and that suited me fine; I knew he was in my year, and that he was from somewhere in Connecticut, and that he had a fiancée at Wellesley, but I knew nothing of how he thought nor where his intelligence lay, for he never spoke of those matters, almost as if they were incidental to his life at the lab.

  Next came two undergraduates, both of them usually biology majors at the college (these turned over so quickly and were at any rate so interchangeable that none of us ever bothered to learn their names), both of them headed for medical school, both of them always looking rather frightened: to be working in Smythe’s lab as an undergraduate was an almost kingly honor, and they wore on their faces expressions of fear and pride. Looking at them, I sometimes wondered what promises had been extracted from them to win them these slots, what tests they had had to pass with their advisers, what obligations they now carried.

  After the undergraduates came a man named Dean O’Grady, who, in the humor of the day, was known as Fat Irish because he was fat and Irish. Fat Irish was the person in the lab whose work was the most visible and qualifiable: while the rest of us took notes and flicked our fingernails against air bubbles in syringes and extracted blood and took more notes, Fat Irish took care of the animals, and did the things we would not. He cleaned the monkeys’ cages and fed them a slurry of browned bananas and oatmeal. He changed the mice’s water and cleaned weeping scabs from the dogs’ eyes. I was impressed by his impassivity: he was neither an animal lover nor a sentimentalist (the lab had once had one of those, I learned, and it had ended disastrously when Fitch had discovered him late one night trying to shoo the dogs from their cages and into his waiting truck), nor did he seem impressed by or interested in the lab itself. You sometimes had animal caretakers—as I would have myself one day—whose hatred for the people who ran the lab was visceral. It was not because they were animal lovers (a job application from anyone who admitted to loving animals was immediately thrown away) but because they abhorred science and the people who practiced science, all of us in our white coats and what they considered our despicable arrogance, though whether it was our education they hated or what we were doing with our education (they considered one excessive and the other self-indulgent) was difficult to say. They were not people capable of superior cognitive reasoning, and because they were unable to understand what it was we were doing and yet were equally unwilling to admit their limitations, they found it easier to call us names and detest us. (It is not only animal caretakers who behave like this, but also journalists, and animal activists, and priests, and politicians, and housewives, and artists—people, in other words, for whom every mystery must be attributed to human arrogance and evil.)

  But to return to Fat Irish: he would arrive at four every afternoon and begin his work, and when we came back the next day, messes would be cleaned, water trays filled, and the labs would smell more intensely of their signature perfume, the eggy scent of detergent and the sweetish fragrance of stale feces. Sometimes, working late, you would see Fat Irish and nod at him, and he would nod back. He would not try to make conversation. If you asked him a question directly, he would answer in the most perfunctory way—not rudely, but not foisting on you the sort of chatter (about the weather, working hard, their various aching body parts) of which janitors and waiters and various service staff in general seem to have an endless supply. Instead it was “Good morning, Fat Irish.” “Good morning.” “Basset Four [meaning the basset hound in cage 4] croaked last night.” “I’ll take care of it.” And that was all.

  After Fat Irish we come to the bottom: the lab techs, David and Peter, the two of them granted neither last names nor desks, although they did have white coats. They went from station to station, cleaning flasks, cutting pieces of mesh, scrubbing spoiled biomatter from test tubes, delivering mugs of burned coffee, fetching mice from cages, returning mice to cages. I tried not to use them too frequently: first, it was faster to do the work myself, and second, they were both loquacious, fond of telling you about their women, or about the meal they were awaiting that night, or about how sick of their jobs they were. They were not needlessly cruel to the animals, but they were sloppy: they clutched the mice so tightly that they squealed and kicked their small feet in the air; they forgot which dog went into which cage; they knocked over Bunsen burners and swabbed up their ensuing mess imperfectly, so that you were for the rest of the day forced to pick your way around your own desk until the night janitor came to clean what they had missed.

  The lab was located on the first floor of a building called Chase Hall, ten stories, red brick, ugly and utilitarian; it was destroyed some years ago. There was a main room, about twelve hundred square feet, a long rectangle with four windows looking out onto the green bey
ond. In the south corner, farthest from the roar of the building incinerator, which abutted our lab, was Smythe’s office, a small, glassed-in square in which sat a burled desk (perfectly, suspiciously clean-surfaced), a metal filing cabinet, and a metal bookcase. Just outside his office, running along the east side of the room, beneath the windows, were front-to-front metal desks for each of the chief and junior residents and for the medical students and undergraduates. The remainder of the room was dominated by eight long metal countertops fitted with sinks and crowded with Bunsen burners and flasks. The floors were linoleum and the walls a pale butter that always made me crave bread or potatoes—something starchy and floury.

  Behind the main room, running its length, were the two animal labs. The first, to the south side, was the mice lab, windowless, about three hundred square feet, and lined on three sides with cages stacked some seven feet high along the walls, which were here a shiny, curdled, charred orange color. The mice lab, like animal labs everywhere, stank of damp newspaper and feces and the moldy, algaeish stench of wet fur. Every night the floors were swabbed with disinfectant, but it seemed only to intensify the room’s native odors, which were so impermeable they seemed to have been baked into the walls. Adjacent to the mice lab was the dog lab, almost twice as large but with the same smells, the same rust-colored walls, the same wire cages, although here they were stacked all the way to the ceiling. There were thirty-six or so cages, and they were all small, about two feet square, so that the dogs (usually hounds, for some reason) were unable to stand and spent their days on their sides or crouched, front legs spread open, in a way that made them appear drunk and unseemly. Then there were about ten or twelve taller cages, and these were reserved for monkeys, which we had with some regularity, but not frequently enough or in large enough numbers to merit their own lab. What I remember most about those labs is their silence—one heard the mice’s frantic, shrill peeping, the dogs’ futile, squealing whimpers, only when they were being removed from or replaced in their cages. The rest of the time they were silent, staring at their paws and waiting. Only the monkeys complained and chattered and screeched all day, shrieking at nothing. They were a bother for that reason, and for the enormous mess they made, and for the intensity of their odors, although they were of course more valuable specimens to work with.

  I spent most of my time with the mice. One of Parton’s ongoing experiments—the exact parameters of which I never did discover, because strangely, although I was trusted with much, I was apparently not seen as consequential enough to learn what it was I passed most of my days doing—involved infecting mice with various sorts of viruses in the hopes that they would provoke a cancer. You began with, say, a dozen mice, one mouse per each numbered cage. Then you would take a virus and inject it with a mix of saline into each mouse. And then you would wait. Every day you would weigh and measure and observe them. Did they seem torpid? Were they eating and drinking properly? Were they growing any strange nodules (you certainly hoped they would, but it never happened, not in any of the tests I conducted)? I recorded the results in my notebook, which Parton might have asked to see but never did. Boredom made me fanciful: “No. 12. White mouse,” I would write (they were all white), “chalky in complexion. Nose and pawpads: rose pink from yesterday, when carnation pink. Personality: dull.” (They were all dull. They were mice, after all. They spent their days doing mousy things.) After a certain point, around three months, you would kill them, autopsy them, and begin with a fresh group.

  I rather enjoyed killing the mice. There were surprisingly few ways to do so: drugging them took too long and was too expensive; drowning them was messy and also tedious. (And at any rate, either method would compromise key tissues we would need to study.) It was Ulliver who taught me how to kill them. What you did was hold a mouse by its tail and twirl it in a circle like a lasso until it was dizzy, its head lolling sickly from side to side. Then you’d put it on the table and with one hand hold its head behind its ears and with the other hand pull it up by its tail. A little crick! and the neck would be broken. Sometimes Julian Turnbull and I would stand at either end of the long counter that ran down the middle of the mice lab, both of us whirling four or five mice in each hand, killing them in batches. It was a satisfying task, a small but real accomplishment to mark a day that, like so many other days, seemed devoid of structure, or progress, or meaning.

  Then you’d take the mice to the main lab and spread them on one of the countertops, stomach up. You’d cut out each spleen—a tiny, savory-looking thing, richly, meatily brown and the size of a slender watermelon seed—and place each in its own Petri dish with a bit of saline. You’d have next to you a springy pile of fine wire mesh, cut into one-inch-square pieces, which you’d sterilize over a flame, and then you’d rub the spleen against it into another Petri dish to obtain a single cell suspension. Spleens, of course, are soft and pulpy, like foie gras, and you had to be careful to only brush them against the mesh; anything more vigorous and you’d find the organ smeared over your fingers, sticky and dark as fudge. You might do this a few times, or until the organ had turned liquidy; then you’d pipette some of the sauce into a tube, examine it under a microscope, and record how many cells there were per milliliter.

  The main point of these experiments was, as I’ve noted before, not only to prove that cancers were caused by viruses (note that I have not said whether cancers were caused by viruses; Smythe, whether through his own arrogance or because he had decided to make the terrible error of believing what a science writer—always an oxymoron—had written about him, seemed to have convinced himself that his theory was impregnable. His lab was not interested in proving or disproving him; Fitch and Brassard and the rest were interested only in the specifics of his supposition rather than in its inherent veracity) but also how to establish a cell culture. If you could prove that, say, Cancer X was caused by Virus Y, then all you’d have to do was create a vaccine, which would eradicate the cancer. (I’m simplifying, but not by much; this is really how they thought at the time, not just in medicine but in all the sciences: you make a bomb; you drop it on a troublesome people; the troublesome people are no more.)

  One experiment I was made to repeat involved kidneys, whose malformations were easy to identify—easier than spleens’, for example. You’d take a mouse’s kidney (a more fibrous organ than the spleen) and snip it into bits into a test tube. Then you’d take those pieces and pass them through layers of increasingly fine screens to try, again, to reduce it to a single cell layer, which would be distinguishable by its smeary quality. After that, you’d pulverize the tissue with saline and fetal calf serum nutrient—which of course helps promote growth—before placing this in a sterile bottle with a flat surface and incubating it at 37 degrees. The cells, in suspension, would then attach to the surface of the bottle, appearing in flat, starry clusters. Once you had a thriving monolayer of cells, you’d introduce a virus, inoculating the cells. After a few days, you’d then centrifuge the whole batch and remove the supernate—the noncellular part—as your vaccine.

  That was the thinking, anyway. And I have to admit, at the time this method seemed sensible, logical. Perhaps, in retrospect, a bit too sensible, a bit too logical, but it was more plausible than many of the prevailing theories of the time, although as I would learn shortly after, what is most plausible is not necessarily the most correct or worthy of the most consideration. More often it is the outlandish theory, the one that seems so improbable, that you find yourself returning to again and again, paying it an outsized share of attention largely because you find yourself intrigued by the originality of thought behind it.

  I was twenty-four; I was infecting dogs. I took syringes of various viruses and injected them into dogs’ kidneys. They were very keen on organ transplantation in those days, and so soon I was doing real surgeries, albeit on dogs, and I was able to do them unsupervised, right there in the canine lab (sometimes Parton would walk in, gaze at me dolefully, as if he’d no idea who I was and it was not his righ
t to ask, and then shuffle out without saying a word to me). I opened up the dog and tied off the artery to its kidney and stitched it closed again. A few days later, when the dog was in kidney failure—it moaned and whined; its urine was treacly and venomous in appearance and leaked out in fat, viscous, reluctant drops—I redrugged it, removed its dead kidney (now the bruised, sheeny blue of rotting meat), and tried to transplant into the dog a kidney I had infected in another dog. I sewed both dogs back up. The donor dog I had incinerated. The one that had received the transplant soon expired as well, although whether from the infected kidney or from my poor surgical skills I was never quite certain. I observed it and took notes on its decline in my notebook, and when it died, I harvested its organs of interest and preserved them for further analysis and then had its corpse incinerated too.

  This is how day after day passed. I realize I sound bored recounting it now, and perhaps even a little dramatically fatalistic, but at the time it was interesting enough, both the work itself—for at times I truly did feel, as a good lab with a charismatic leader encourages its fellows to feel, that I, as much as anyone, perhaps more, was on the inevitable verge of a discovery of a small but important sort, something that might change science forever—and because I was learning from my days in the lab and the lives of those around me that it was not a life that I would choose. It is a funny thing, working for someone else in a lab: you are chosen because you are the best in your class or the most promising in your field or an interesting thinker, and you are put in a room full of others like yourself. In some of your colleagues you see your past, the student you once were, and in others you see your future, or at least a template for your future, although you yourself, you assume, will be better and brighter and more talented than they.