Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

Author:Hope Jahren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

10

“WHERE THE HELL have you been?” Bill hollered at me when he came around the corner and saw me standing in the lab.

I blinked at him numbly. “I’ve been in a funk,” I tried to say offhandedly even as I choked on my shame. I had been lying in bed crying for thirty-six hours after crashing down from my latest throbbing mania, this one triggered by the corticosteroid injections necessary to quell an acute allergic reaction. We had been studying plants along the Mississippi River, traveling through Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana while trying to sample our way through an unbelievably lush gauntlet of poison ivy.

Plants sweat while they photosynthesize, and our textbooks teach that—like us—the hotter it gets, the more they sweat. Along the Mississippi River there are thousands of trees of the same species growing along a tidy temperature gradient: the farther south you travel, the hotter it gets. We’d developed a method to measure sweating rates by comparing the chemistry of the water in the stem with that of the water inside the leaf, which is where the sweating (or “evapotranspiration”) takes place. We were startled to find that as spring progressed into summer, sweating rates went down and not up, even though the weather was getting hotter and hotter at all of the sites. It didn’t make any sense to me, and the more I sweated over the problem, the more the trees did not.

We had done the field trip three times already, and my allergic reaction to the rampant poison ivy had gotten worse each time. Nonetheless, we kept anxiously wading through the waist-high fields of ivy in order to find the stubborn trees that we’d first fixed upon for sampling. I wouldn’t and couldn’t let the study go, and the horrible itching that I felt was nothing compared with the discomfort that I felt when each dataset looked completely different from the way we thought it should.

During our most recent trip, a rash had raged up my neck and onto my face, giving rise to a massive edema at my right temple that not only made me look like the Elephant Man but also pressed against my right ocular nerve until I lost partial vision in that eye. I knew it was really bad when Bill stopped taunting me with the nickname “Meathead” while we drove tensely back to Atlanta from Poverty Point, Louisiana (a real place), stopping only to drop me off at the Emory Hospital emergency room.

After obtaining my written consent for photographs, because “we could probably publish this,” the doctors injected me with methylprednisolone and then brought in the cameras. They positioned me on tissue paper and clicked away while I tried not to giggle at the absurdity of the idea that our hopeless plant study might result in a publication after all.

After a few more hours of waiting around, I realized that I didn’t have the cab fare to get home and started to wish that I had asked Bill for some cash when he had dropped me off.

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