Task #1: Pick Red Worms.

I’m searching, searching, searching, found it—sitting right in front of me. I pick up the thin, dying Sharpie and scribble my name on what I think is the next line of the notebook. Maybe I skipped a line. It’s difficult to tell because I’m writing in the dark. The only door to the 10-by-10-foot room is barely cracked open to let a diffuse beam of light through. I refrain from turning on the overhead light to avoid disturbing the grumpy postdoc at the microscope next to me.

Thankfully my watch has a light on it. 1:17pm. I write it in the next column, cap the poor marker, and flip the switch on the light box to my left. It whirs to life with a happy, inexplicable rattle, and I see its little green spotlight appear on the microscope’s stand. I flip on the light box to my right, and a broad white circle of light overlays the green one. Gingerly, I lean back in my rolly chair and blindly search for the pedal under the table. I find it and scoot, scoot it toward the base of my chair where I can reach it with my foot. I press it,

click

and the white light goes off, leaving only the special green light. I release it,

clunk

and the white light comes back on.

Content that everything is working, I turn to the stack of little plastic plates of Jell-O-like agar. Each plate holds a few hundred tiny C. elegans worms wiggling through a spot of bacteria. I squint at the labels I’ve scribbled on the back. Reading them in the dark wouldn’t be so difficult if my handwriting weren’t so small. I pick out the right strain and open it under the microscope. I open a fresh plate next to it. Where did my pick go? Finding a pencil-sized glass tube on a black table in the dark is difficult. Hmm…we ought to have a flashlight in here. That’s the same thing I thought to myself yesterday too. My pick has rolled up against the microscope, so I grab it and check the thin wire that sticks out of one end. I settle the plates in my hand: one between my middle and forefinger, the other between my forefinger and thumb. Finally ready to pick worms, I lean forward and look through the eyepiece of the microscope.

The worms are swimming along, completely oblivious. I softly dip the end of the wire—an enormous paddle through the eyes of the microscope—into the edge of the bacteria spot where it is stickiest. I scan over the worms, looking for one about the right size. Found one. I press the pedal,

click

the plate goes dark as the white light turns off, and I see the world of fluorescence under the special light alone. Unfortunately, this worm does not light up, so I let it be. I release the pedal,

clunk

and the white light is back on. Here’s another worm, medium-sized, right on the cusp of adulthood. I ready my bacteria-coated pick.

click

clunk

No light. I scan around again.

Who decided this was a good idea anyway? Who said, “I need to pick up this microscopic worm without hurting it. I think I’ll use a wire”? Probably Sydney Brenner. He was the one crazy enough to use C. elegans in the first place. Well ,not crazy, brilliant. I’ve never met the guy, but he had to have been smart to sit down and make a list of everything he wanted in a model organism for biology research: small, fast-growing, transparent, cheap to feed, easy to manipulate…tall, dark, and handsome. He found the perfect mate for genetics research. Certainly, he could figure out how to pick it up.

I’ve found another unsuspecting adolescent worm,

click

clunk

but it doesn’t light up either. Try again.

I wonder: Why am here? Why am I sitting in here in the dark chasing after worms? Well…picking worms is boring. But it’s part of the job. Start from the beginning. Because of a class in high school, I got the internship; because of the internship, I applied to the college; because of the college, I got the email; because of the email, I got the job, came to lab, learned the basics, fell in love with the art of problem solving, and now I’m sitting here in the dark, chasing worms in order to answer an intriguing question. It’s amazing how, searching blindly in the dark and confusing world of college, I ended up doing something I love.

Now, I’ve found another worm. Hopefully this one’s good.

click

and I see the outline of the worm light up red like a downtown neon sign. Now Showing: The myo-3 Expression Pattern.

clunk

I pick up the worm before it can run away and transfer it to the fresh plate.

Let’s find another.

My mind continues to wander.

click

clunk

click

clunk

I continue picking worms until I have about fifty on the plate. I carefully label it, write the time in the last column of the book, and flip the microscope off.

Task #2: Fill Out Safety Form.

I look at the safety training form with its list of checkboxes, an administrative scavenger hunt for all of the life-saving devices we routinely forget about as we walk through the halls every day. It is a formality every student in the program has to complete—even the theoretical math students whose greatest danger is a paper cut. Every so often, a rare lab accident from somewhere in the world makes the news, scares my mom, and bumps up the level of butt-covering safety measures.

They exist for a good reason though. I remember a friend’s stories about my apparently indestructible Nobel laureate chemistry professor. In the 1970s, before safety measures were as strict, he washed his hands with cancer-causing solvents and smoked cigarettes while running highly flammable reactions. People have experienced major accidents and serious health problems from doing the things he did. But not him. Still today, he saunters through his lab in a t-shirt while his students buzz around in their obligatory lab coats, safety goggles, gloves, and long pants. Luckily, the chemicals I use are fairly safe. My greatest danger is catching my hair on fire, so I wear it in a ponytail every day.

Back to the safety form. I look up and spot the emergency booklet by the phone. Check. I glance at the eyewash station by the sink. Check. I poke my head out into the hall and see the fire extinguisher and shower station for chemical spills. Check. Check. I turn to my lab mentor.

“Who is supposed to sign this sheet?”

“What does it say?”

I show him the sheet. The signature line is preceded by the heading “Safety Officer.” I’m pretty sure we don’t have one of those.

“Oh yeah, that’s Dave. You should go talk to him.”

I walk two doors down the hall to ask the grad student if he can sign my paper.

“You haven’t been safety trained before?” he asks.

I’m only an undergrad, but I’ve been in the lab for two years—longer than he has been safety officer for the lab.

“I safety trained myself.”

He pauses and gives me a look as if he can’t decide if he should laugh or smack his forehead.

“Okay. We’ll do the abbreviated version.”

We spend the next ten minutes with him quizzing me on where the emergency booklet, eyewash station, fire extinguisher, and emergency shower station are. Check, check, check, check. When it becomes apparent that I know where all of the safety items are and how to use them, he moves on to telling stories.

“You know, you never know when you might accidentally set yourself on fire.”

It was my turn to decide between laughing and smacking my forehead.

“When Phil was younger, his dad showed him how to pour rubbing alcohol on his arms and light them on fire. Then it would look like his arms were on fire, but it didn’t hurt or anything.”

Great trick. Dave grins at me and lifts his chin a little, getting ready for the good part. I’m trying to picture my professor at 10 years old. He probably had hair then…

“So one time, he was in lab as a grad student, and he thought it would be funny to do this trick. He put rubbing alcohol on his arms, lit it on fire, and started screaming. Because there was one problem. What’s the difference between when you’re a kid and when you’re an adult?”

Well, Dave. There are many things.

“Arm hair!” he says. “Before, it didn’t hurt him, but when he was an adult, he lit his arm hair on fire, and it burned.”

Wow.

“So don’t light your arms on fire.”

“Okay. I wasn’t planning on it.”

“Well, you never know. One time, I was sitting at my microscope…”

Here we go again.

“…and I was flaming a spatula with ethanol to clean it. I thought, ‘my hand feels funny,’ and I looked down, and the fire was running down onto my hand.”

“Oh. That’s no good.”

“Yeah.”

He looks down at my safety form for a few minutes, still grinning while I stand there awkwardly waiting.

“Do you have a pen?”

Finally. I gladly hand him the pen that has been waiting, uncapped in my hand for quite a while. He scribbles his name on the line and hand the paper and pen back to me.

“Thanks,” I say.

I feel so much safer now.

Task #3: Go to Lab Meeting.

According to my watch, there are ten minutes until lab meeting. I look at the stack of boxes on the bench, each with its own tape label: Katie. Katie’s clean worms. Katie 25˚C. Katie (contaminated). Mutants 20˚C. I should put them away so that they aren’t sitting at room temperature during our two-hour lab meeting. While the worms might not mind the balmy 23˚C room, my 25˚C mutants will not be subjected to the warmth that encourages their phenotype, and my 20˚C mutants will become sterile. As temperature increases, the protein cogs in the cellular machine can start to fall apart. Most proteins can handle this small shift, but my delicate mutant strains will suddenly lose the ability to produce living progeny. Better put them away.

Each shoe-box-sized plastic container houses about 50 plastic plates, each filled with a little disk of agar. Each agar disk holds a different population of worms—larvae, mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers swimming around together, eating the bacteria. Each strain, the family of worms containing the same basic genetic traits, will help me answer important questions about how cells work. They are the stars of the show, and they don’t even know it. They swim and eat, swim and eat, oblivious to my cameras, computers, charts, and tables trying to monitor how healthy they are. Hello. How are you feeling today? Swim, swim, eat. That’s very good. How is your energy level today compared to yesterday? Eat, swim, eat.

I pick up two boxes of my little patients. The quiet hum of my room fades when I enter the hallway. As I walk the rows of the red stone tile floor, voices drift out through the open doors on either side.

“So you cross that strain with the dumpy strain, and you get dumpy unc mutants. Those are the ones you want.”

Dumpy unc. I chuckle to myself. The short, fat worms called dumpy mutants bend side to side in an effort to swim, and they look as silly as their name sounds. I’ve never seen an unc mutant before though. Unc, short for “uncoordinated.” Those double mutants—worms with both of these genetic traits—probably look really funny.

I turn right, into the room full of incubators, walk around the puddle below the ice machine, and open the 25˚C incubator. During my first year in lab, I called them refrigerators because that’s exactly what they look like: tall boxes with tan, crinkled plastic fronts and fake wood handles. I set my boxes on one of the white plastic shelves and push the refrigerator door shut. Not refrigerator, incubator. The temperature monitor on the top flashes from 25 to 5 to 25 to -13 to 25 again. It’s always confused. I avoid the puddle and enter the hallway again.

“Dude. The mustache makes everything better.”

Sometimes, lack of context makes these snippets of conversation better. I walk the hall’s length again and make a wide arc into my doorway to avoid crashing into anyone who might be walking through with a delicate experiment. I pick up the last three boxes and return to the hallway. This stack of boxes is kind of tall. Maybe I should have made another trip. I tilt my head so that my face is next to the precarious stack, and I see a cartoon someone has drawn on the new whiteboards:

Inject well. Inject bravely.

Above the block letters, the animated postdoc holds a giant needle above a reverent cartoon nematode who says, “Wow! So brave.” The postdoc looks like he’s about to give the worm the worst vaccination in the history of medicine. I wonder what it’s like to do injections. I have heard about how you have to combine the DNA for your experiment with a “marker” DNA fragment to tell you that you’ve done it right. The tiny needle has to be positioned just right to inject the DNA into the worm without harming it. Easier said than done. Maybe I’ll learn to do injections next summer. I turn right, into the 20˚C storage room this time, and set the stack of boxes on a shelf. I check my watch again. Five minutes until lab meeting. Out the door, back into the hall, wide arc into the room, grab my notebook. I hurry downstairs with the hope of getting a good seat. The odds are good, since everyone always arrives three minutes late.

Yes, the room is empty except for one grad student sitting in the back of the small room, playing on his phone. I survey the seats. Okay, the professor always sits there, so if I sit here, I’m directly in his line of sight…and he’ll expect me to answer his questions. Nope. Can’t sit there. If I sit at the table, I have to turn to face the screen. Hmmm. I sit next to the grad student, turn my phone on silent, and doodle in my notebook until everyone else arrives. When the room is full and the snacks circulated, the nervous first-year grad student greets everyone.

In a hesitant voice, she introduces herself, needlessly. Everyone knows her. Everyone knows everyone in the lab. The fifth-year who presented last week simply launched into the background of his project before sharing the progress he’d made since he last presented, two months before. And other members comfortably interject, “Wait a minute. Are you sure about that?” This is academic biology’s version of a staff meeting.

Everyone shows up to lab meeting three minutes late because, to them, it’s a chore. They have experiments to run and papers to read. But when everyone shows up, they break out the science and discuss it like a family talking politics over the dinner table. This is exactly where I want to be. While the first-year explains her new project, I quickly become lost. I have a lot of classes to take before all of this makes sense, but I will get there one day. I am an undergraduate student hoping to eventually get a Ph.D. and maybe someday become a professor. But instead of learning science from a textbook this summer, I am watching it happen—making it happen. I am on the cusp of academic adulthood. I do my best to take it all in and make my own contribution, even if that today that just means picking worms. I have always been full of questions, and now I am learning how to answer them. Some day.

Knowing my boxes are safely tucked away in the incubator, I sit back and let the science wash over me.