“I’ll bet you don’t miss all this,” she said.
“Actually, I do,” I said. I unsnarled my purse and brushed a mist of off-white plaster from the strap.
She gave me a strange look. Wait until you’re retired, I thought.
Unlike medical facilities, which made me nervous, hard-science laboratories always gave me a thrill. I loved the buzzing and humming of motors and power supplies, the permanence of the oversized, marble-patterned log books on the benches, and even the smell of burning electrical insulation—a sign of something gone wrong. As we passed offices and machine shops, I saw piles of boxes yet to be opened. I pictured new optics nestled in Styrofoam molds, a special software package with a three-inch-thick manual, or a tiny chip that would make a big difference on a technician’s chassis.
Andrea’s cubicle, located in a corner of a large electronics shop room, had some of my favorite posters. One featured Albert Einstein on a bicycle riding through a Southern California campus; another was a collage of the great inventors of the twentieth century—Thomas Edison, William Shockley, the Wright brothers, Philo T. Farnsworth, Guglielmo Marconi. Today I’d brought her two additions to her décor, posters I’d found and bought on-line.
“For balanced gender representation,” I said.
Andrea seemed pleased by the new prints—one of Hedy Lamar, 1930s actress and co-inventor of a torpedo guidance system that was two decades before its time; and the other of Mary Brush, who received a patent for the corset in 1825, one of the first women to receive a patent in any field.
Andrea sucked in her breath and waved her hands as if she were tying an elaborate system of boned fabric onto her ample midsection. “They don’t make corsets big enough for me,” she said with a shy smile.
“Be glad,” I said.
Andrea, in her usual wide black pants and colorful tunic, took a seat on a rickety metal stool by her raised bench, leaving me to sit below her in the good chair, a government-issue, once-padded, gray metal number with scratched arms. I thought I saw a smidgen of rouge on her round cheeks and wondered idly if she had a lunch date with Peter. He’d finally stopped trying to reinvent me once he met Andrea. I knew there was a double date in our future, but didn’t look forward to it.
My gesture toward dressing up for the lab visit was an appropriate scatter pin from my “science” collection, which Andrea always enjoyed. Today’s was a mixed-metal montage of transistors, wires, and diodes Rose had brought me from a crafts fair, part of her campaign to lure me into attending one with her.
“What do you think is the ratio of metals to lace at one of those events?” I’d asked Rose, getting only raised eyebrows in reply.
Andrea patted the top of a pile of papers stacked on the side of the bench. “From the reference room,” she said. “All you ever wanted to know about the fullerene-related research team.” She sighed, looked up and to the right, as if to connect with a fond dream. “Imagine having a molecule named after you!”
“And it was named Molecule of the Year, by Science magazine, a few years ago,” I said, as one who kept track of those awards the way Rose knew who won the Oscar for best movie every year.
Andrea and I played around with cabriniene and lamerinoene for a few minutes, choosing the configurations of our own namesake molecules. I was reminded of my equally amusing “science is fun” session with MC a few days before and realized what I missed more than equipment deliveries was the camaraderie and the injokes of a research team. Who else would have fun thinking up interesting arrangements of atoms?
We finally got to work and looked through the papers, sifting through grant proposals and monthly reports, all of which had been filed, according to protocol, in the lab’s library collection. I read how a new federal initiative that funneled a large budget into nanotechnology had made it possible for Lorna Frederick’s team to garner an impressive amount of research money, some of it directed to small-molecule therapies—medicines that were able to distinguish healthy cells from diseased ones.
The proposals started with the thesis that diseases, like cancers or AIDS, should be classified by their molecular composition rather than by their location in the body or their particular symptoms. The nanotech revolution that started with the discovery of buckyballs now gave us hollow tubes that could transport medicines. Nanotubes. I pictured a particular “medicine molecule” finding its way directly to the “disease molecule.”
By the time Andrea and I were finished, I had nearly filled a yellow-lined pad with notes, references I planned to check on-line, names of researchers who were co-authors or copied on the reports. I was still in the dark about why the deceased PI Nina Martin might have been in Revere with the Galiganis, the FDA, and Lorna Frederick in her pocket, but I was in awe of the possible medicines of the future.