Lab Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

gave rise to both a splendid exhaustion and increased desperation during the usual setbacks and demi-failures. The chemical reaction that we were tweaking was difficult and recalcitrant: it was easy enough to get the nitrogen out of the explosives residue, but converting the oxygen attached to it proved much trickier than we had assumed, and we had trouble keeping track of the neutrons during the manipulation. In fact, no matter what we analyzed, once we attached it to the mass spectrometer, the readout gave us almost identical values. It was maddening, like asking a human subject to identify a red versus a green light and then having him respond “green” every time, regardless of what you showed him.
    At what point do you escort your befuddled subject to the door and begin anew with a different recruit? Well, never, if you are as pigheaded as I am. We had slowed down and become more careful, hoping to exclude the careless imprecisions that a more robust experiment might have tolerated. Soon after that, what we had projected as two-hour tasks in the lab were taking four days to complete, and eight days to complete correctly. We also had to squeeze all of this lab work in between watering, fertilizing, and documenting the growth of a hundred plants every day.
    I’ll always remember the night that we finally got our explosives analyzer successfully synced up with the mass spectrometer, and it started giving us the standardized values that we knew it should—similar though it was to many other nights of my life. It was a Sunday evening, at the late hour when one first feels Monday begin to threaten. As usual, I was obsessing over our budgets. Because the project was drawing to a close, I could calculate the exact day that the lab would run out of funding. I was sitting in my office poring over chemical prices, casting spells on dimes and trying to alchemize them into dollars, but I still couldn’t push back bankruptcy for more than a few months.
    The door opened and my lab partner, Bill, came bounding into my office. He plopped himself down in a broken chair and threw some papers onto my desk. “All right, I’m ready to say it. The motherfucker works, and it works beautifully!” he announced.
    I began to leaf through his stack of readouts, unsurprised to see that each of the different gas samples now displayed a different, and accurate, value. I am usually ready to pronounce something a success long before Bill is. He always wants to run one more set of standards and do one more calibration before he admits that we’ve conquered failure.
    Bill and I grinned at each other, knowing that we’d pulled it off, yet again. The whole project was a fine example of how we work together: I cook up a pipe dream, embellish it until it is borderline impossible, pitch and sell the idea to a government agency, purchase the supplies, and then dump it all on Bill’s desk. From there, Bill produces a first, a second, and then a third prototype, protesting all the while that the idea is an impossible pipe dream. When his fifth design shows promise, and his seventh works (provided you turn it on while wearing a blue shirt and facing east), we are both seduced by the smell of success.
    From there, we enter a period of me working days and him working nights, and both of us Tweeting, texting, and Facebooking every single data readout until our homemade creation has proven itself to be as accurate and reliable as my grandmother’s Singer treadle sewing machine. Then, after Bill does one more battery of tests—or two, or maybe just also a third one—
then
we are done. It is now my job to revise history for the final report: to narrate the supreme ease with which we’ve gotten our baby up and running and to itemize what an excellent investment this has all been for our benefactor. With the new fiscal year, we start all over again—an even more ambitious goal supported by a budget that might get us halfway there, if we’re frugal.
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