“Where do you live?”
“Cathcart Road.”
He pauses for a moment, long enough for me to sense that he needs a hint.
“It’s quite close to Hampden?”
“So you get all the football traffic?”
I give him a yeah haha I guess so kind of answer. I don’t think it will advance the conversation very much if I point out to him that I don’t drive, and that there’s only a game at Hampden every two months or so.
“There will be another student joining you shortly,” he says, walking me through the empty lab, “but not from Biochemistry.”
Gwyn was our class co-ordinator last year and knows everyone by name. Our class is the same as last year except for a handful of integrated masters students returning from their placement year.
“This will be your bench,” he says as we reach the far end of the room, the dark and dingy corner bordered by two large fridges where I will spend the next 11 weeks. It’s more cosy than claustrophobic although there is a general aura of filth, age, and disorder in the place, like an alchemist’s basement. There are marks and stains on the countertop in various colours: Ponceau Red; Coomassie Blue; some pink spots that might come from Virkon powder; some black and blue ones that are probably just plain ink. The silicone seals between the panels have paled and the white paint on the gas and water taps is cracked. The shelves above the worktop are filled higgledy-piggledy with bunsen burners, gel tanks, wires, vortexes, syringes, cables, electrodes, probes, and a multitude of boxes with indecipherable labels: NucleoKit Plasmid Kit DNA Extraction Kit Isolation Purification Kit Gel PCR Clean-up Kit Mini Midi Maxi Prep Spin Column Kit, etc, etc, etc. On the worktop and on the shelves are bottles upon bottles of buffers, salts, and solutions with the contents scribbled on ragged fragments of autoclave tape or directly on the glass: Lysis Buffer, Elution Buffer, Transfection Buffer, Wash Buffer, Electrophoresis Buffer, Stacking Buffer, Resolving Buffer, Sample Buffer, PBS, TBS, TBE, TENS, Staining Solution, De-Staining Solution etc, etc, etc.
This is not the bright, spacious, and tidy teaching lab on the top floor of the Boyd Orr.
“...and of course, just make sure that you always tidy up after yourself,” continues Gwyn, giving me a look to highlight that he doesn’t expect me not to, but he merely has to say it as a formality. I note the squeezy bottles of ethanol and distilled water, the ubituiqitous blue roll, and the little beakers filled with Virkon solution.
As the day goes on, Gwyn gradually introduces me to everyone. There are Peter and Paul who are both extremely tall, but while Peter is handsome, polite and soft spoken, and his face has that kind of angelic glow that makes him look potentially gay, Paul looks mildly bitter, jaded, and antisocial, insofar as you can see his face at all from under his Beatle haircut. There is Laura the technician who is so ethnically Glaswegian that if the shipyards were still open you would assume her husband worked there. There is the German girl – Schinke, Schalke, Schlinke, whatever – who is the most senior of the PhDs, and has all the emotional maturity to match it. Finally there are the two BHF newbies, both blondes – one a sort of anime meme type, the other an Instagram type.
Now that I know the full team I slip into a sort of routine, beginning with seemingly menial tasks. Peter, Paul, and Schilke take turns showing me how to do cell culture.
“Do you see the cells?”
I could lie right now. I really could. I see something but I have no idea what it is. The silence is enough and my demonstrator senses that I’m struggling even before I can consider going with the lie. I twist a couple of knobs and finally the picture comes into focus; the sickle-shaped fibroblasts appear out of the haze.
Now that we have identified the cells we can proceed with the next step. Paul opens up the fridge and pulls out a bottle of the most delicious looking fluid I’ve ever seen in my life. It looks like cranberry juice only redder, cleaner, and sweeter. The strange polygonal shape of the bottle only adds to the allure. We get into the culture suite and Paul has me sit down on the backless swivel chair with my hands inside the hood. What follows is almost liturgical. I purify my gloved hands with ethanol and he starts passing me all the instruments I will need. There is a rationale for where everything goes as you need to be mindful of where the vents are, what direction airflow is, and where your hands will go. You must place everything so that your sleeve never passes over an open container.
“This is seeding. When you’ve seeded a new culture, you will have […] days until it becomes dense again and then you will have to seed again.”
I try to pretend that I understand what he’s saying but in reality my focus is fully on what my hands are doing, like a mindfulness exercise taken to the heights of extremity.
Before I know it, I slip into a routine, being passed between the PhDs like a basketball. I’m with Peter, then I’m with Paul, then I’m with Silke, then I’m with Laura. At some point during the first week Melissa, the other undergrad appears. She is as plain as a loaf of Warburton’s, and vaguely congenial. Straight away she gives off the impression of not being exceedingly intelligent, and soon I begin to worry that she will struggle in our new regime.
I’m in a dim, cramped room in a forgotten corner of the Joseph Black building for a lab meeting. The scary Russian PhD makes her presentation with a million extensively annotated graphs and I do my best to pretend that I’m following along. The presentation ends, a few people ask some relevant questions, and somebody makes a joke about Brexit. We head back to the Davidson building and I’m in the brightly illuminated culture suite. I take my cells out of the incubator and look at them under the microscope. They’re still here. I put them in the hood. I go into the fridge and pull out some tubes, double and triple checking the barely legible label to make sure that it matches the name in the protocol. I grab the pipette and the tips and the rack and anything else that I think I will need. When I have gathered everything and sprayed and wiped my hands with the alcohol, I begin.
Blessed are you Lord, God of all creation for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you...
I’m differentiating the cells. It doesn’t register in my mind what a strange procedure this is. I will add a selection of chemical reagents, mix and leave the cells for a few days.
Blessed are you Lord, God of all creation for through your goodness we have received the wine we offer you, fruit of the vine and work of human hands...
After the designated time has passed, I will repeat the procedure, and then after another similar time period I will repeat it again.
Pray my dear brothers and sisters, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God the Almighty.
When that period has passed, I will examine the cells under the microscope and I will see that they have transformed into a different type of cell, with different size, shape, and properties. In this moment none of these things are on my mind, as I have to finish this step of the protocol ten minutes to the hour at the latest so I have enough time to clean up, pack up and walk over to the Bower building for my lecture.
Ite missa est...
I arrive just on time and plonk myself into the hard plastic chair. I pull out a notepad and pen although this is mostly an act. I always find that scribbling down every jot and tittle is incompatible with actually understanding, and the lectures at this level demand a heroic cognitive effort to be fully understood. Gwyn stops on yet another slide with about half a dozen different figures and begins explaining them one by one. I feel an admiration that is almost approaching filial love as I travel with him through a series of experiments which demonstrated the role of Protein X in process Y. I feel my heart swelling as he explains the techniques that were used, the clever choice of controls and experimental design. My head is filling up with images of proteins floating inside a cell that I’m hastily painting in my mind’s eye.
I’m already tired enough as it is. It’s about 4:30pm and I’ve spent half the day under the nauseating lights of the cell culture room. I’m clutching my cup of coffee like a raft. The intellectual work of following Gwyn on his magical scientific journey through the world of membranes and lipids is only adding to my fatigue.
“Jan can explain to us how coimmunoprecipitation works!”
I jolt awake, my protein painting is thrown aside. I make tentative eye contact with Gwyn, a sort of coy invitation to clarify the question. He restates his purpose and I begin to understand what he wants from me. My peripheral vision disappears and I put my hands in motion, literally and metaphorically, as I take the concept from a drawer in my memory and unfold it for my classmates to see. Gwyn seems to be satisfied. The class may or may not be satisfied, but I don’t care. As soon as I finish, I retreat into my caffeine castle in the hope of making it through the rest of the lecture awake.
The semester continues very much like this as I go about bumbling from the lecture to the lab and back again. A haze descends on my mind like an autumn fog and suffocates me into a state of perpetual exhaustion. It’s 8am and I’m in the basement of the reading room with Josh and Chloe as we prepare for our presentation. It’s 6pm and I’m in the cold room putting my samples away to incubate overnight. Before I realise it, the straight line of time folds into a circle and everything becomes the same forever and constantly. A moment comes when I realise that only the Christmas break can liberate me from this monstrous and myopic samsara.
Eventually the day of freedom approaches. My thesis gets closer and closer to completion, although I send my draft to Gwyn somewhat late. These December days in Glasgow when you leave the house in darkness and come home in darkness are so bleak and cruel that anything will do, anything is good enough as long as you can survive until the next day. In this time I also need to make contact with a supervisor for next semester’s literature review. For some half-baked reason I chose Professor Nimmo. I came into his office half awake, half high on caffeine, practically begging for help in getting started on the assignment. Nimmo looked at me, reclining in his chair, surrounded by a menagerie of beautiful and exotic plants, strategically placed in every corner of the office which wasn’t already covered in books and papers. I could see the pity in his eyes when I failed to answer some of his simplest questions.
What do you want to do?
I don’t know.
What do you know about this already?
I don’t know.
What are you interested in?
I don’t know.
I chose him in part because I remembered his biotechnology lectures from the previous year, and the talk I had with him for the Head of College Scholars programme. He seemed like a perfectly nice and knowledgeable man on those occasions. Now he is like a wicked bureaucrat, an inscrutable mandarin, a veritable sphinx looking at me from across the desk, so invincibly comfortable in his age and wisdom and experience. He speaks slowly, pointedly, and every word that comes out of his mouth has the perfect tone and inflection, is weighed with scientific accuracy. His great bald head is like a formidable shield to the age-old knowledge contained within and the two perfectly spherical glasses with their thin metallic frame, and the little tufts of hair behind his ears add a peculiar flourish to the whole picture. He asks me some questions about my lab project, about Gwyn, and a few other things, which lightens the mood. Eventually he surrenders some advice, an idea, a nucleus of a project which I am grateful for. When the course resumes in the new year I will try to develop what he gave me into something useful and gradeable.
When I have answered enough of his riddles, he lets me go and I slowly escape his lair in the Bower Building into a cold and drab December afternoon, carrying inside my head a seed of a thesis which will germinate over Christmas. There is no winter exam diet for fourth year students, so I leave without a rush – I have done everything I need to do for a while, and I can rest. I tuck my neck deeper and deeper into the collar of my coat and make my way down University Avenue towards the bus stop. It is not rush hour so I have to wait a little longer before the 4 finally arrives. I don’t see Steven or anyone else I know, although I hardly do these days.
This is a serialised fiction project published fortnightly with my friend Ross Anderson at The Broken Quill.