In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  No. The question was: If his name had not been Paul Novak, would the committee believe, from the evidence submitted, that he was likely to get results?

  Kate had run into Paul many times over the last decade. They were often at the same conferences, giving talks in the same sessions. He sometimes spent a week or two at Cold Spring Harbor in the summers with his wife and small children. Lots of people brought their families, who swam and lounged and played tennis while the husbands talked science from breakfast till late into the night, with occasional breaks for a set of afternoon doubles. Kate had had the pleasure of beating Paul on the tennis court. Once slim and muscular, he had grown gradually soft around the middle, doubtless from exchanging the corn field for the fly room. Not to mention his pretty blond wife’s cooking.

  Paul had become famous. His one gene–one enzyme paper had made him a star in the genetics firmament. He had been elected president of the Genetics Society of America, and last year, at the startlingly young age of thirty-nine, had been inducted into the National Academy. He had gotten tenure at Harvard. He had taken up sailing. Now, apparently, he was being nominated for the Prize. Did he really need funding for a study of eye color in drosophila?

  Kate didn’t approve of the way so many people talked about genes nowadays, as though they were a kind of divine hand which nothing could countervail. It seemed to her that Paul—Paul’s work—was a big part of the reason for this, and that too much of the scientific community had begun to accept uncritically everything Paul said. It dismayed her to see science falling prey to fads and biases. To cults of personality.

  Also in the pile was a proposal by someone called J. S. Lezniak, who was studying Arabidopsis, an unprepossessing member of the mustard family, sometimes known as mouse-eared cress. Arabidopsis, Lezniak argued, was a perfect model organism for geneticists because of its ease of growing, its small number of chromosomes (five), its production of many seeds (thousands), and its short generation time (about seven weeks). Not the twenty minutes you got with bacteria, but pretty good for a plant. Plants—Kate felt strongly about this—should not be shut out of modern science just because they took a little longer to grow. After all, they had been good enough for Mendel.

  There was a lot of intriguing data in J. S. Lezniak’s proposal, which Kate had ranked ninth out of the forty. Some of the charts were very interesting, if you delved into them. But Kate suspected that her colleagues on the committee were unlikely to have delved far. It was true that the proposal could have been written more engagingly; it was, in its own way, as unprepossessing as Arabidopsis itself. But surely it was the job of the committee to look beyond writing style, as it was their job not to be dazzled by names and fancy institutional affiliations. So Kate thought, sitting in her deluxe hotel room in the soft white robe, arguing as though there were someone sitting beside her arguing back. When, in fact, she was quite alone.

  CHAPTER 33

  In addition to Jax, Kate knew two of the other review panel members, Hal Volkner and Les Abernathy. That left the institute director, Claude Mikkleson, who was chairing the panel, and two others she didn’t know. One was an elderly fly man who wore a cravat, the other a big, bearlike person with unruly black hair named Nelson, who had made some interesting discoveries in yeast. Seated across from Kate at the long glossy table, he seemed to be trying to catch her eye during the introductions, which made her wonder if she was supposed to know him after all.

  Mikkleson called the meeting to order with a little gavel and explained the procedure for awarding funding. He himself would briefly summarize a proposal then ask for discussion, at the end of which each member would assign a rating from one to ten. Mostly the panel members seemed to be intelligent, thoughtful men—even Jax, Kate had to admit, though he talked too much, weighing in even when everything he had to say had already been said by someone else. Except for the maize proposals, which she understood better than the others did, Kate mostly agreed with the group, and when she explained the holes in the corn ones, they deferred to her expertise.

  At noon, when they broke for lunch, Nelson, the yeast man, came over to Kate. Unlike the other panel members, he was dressed as if for the lab in khaki trousers, a blue work shirt, and lace-up boots. His black hair fell across his forehead, and more hair curled up out of his collar. Kate greeted him in a friendly way, trying to think where she might know him from. It turned out it wasn’t him she knew.

  “I’ve been charged with passing on greetings from an old friend,” he said. “My wife asked me to send her regards. She says you shared a house once, in Ithaca, when you were students. Thea Gold, she was then.”

  Kate’s mind scrabbled to make sense of what he was telling her.

  He put his big palm out flat at the level of his breastbone to indicate his wife’s height. “Not too tall. Light brown hair. Sunny personality. Most of the time.”

  “I do,” Kate said faintly. “Remember her.” She looked up at the burly man, but what she saw was Thea in her blue dress in the house on Myrtle Street saying, If you don’t take the class, I’ll be the only one. Thea lying on the bed in Kate’s tiny room, reciting the parts of a flower. Thea in her fitchskin coat outside the biology classroom, holding out a letter.

  “We met when I was in graduate school and she worked in the science library,” Nelson said.

  “Ah,” Kate said.

  “She was such a pretty girl. Half again as bright as most of my classmates, and she knew twice as much about botany.”

  “We were lab partners in Intro Bio.” But she was still thinking science library! Was that as close as she believed she could get?

  “So she told me. Kate Croft and my wife as lab partners! Imagine that.” He laughed.

  Yes, Kate thought, imagine it: the room with its scarred black lab benches and faint stink of formaldehyde. Thea bending over the microscope, the pink ribbon at the end of her braid. Kate nudging her out of the way to look down the optic tube for the very first time! The universe in a drop of pond water.

  “She’s worked in my lab for years,” Nelson said. “She started once the children were in school. Never formally trained, of course, but sharp as a tack. When I switched from maize to yeast, she kept right up.”

  “How is she?” Kate asked. “Thea.” The most mundane of questions, yet her face grew hot.

  “She’s back at the hotel,” Nelson said. “She said to tell you, if you wanted to see her, she would be in the lobby at the end of the afternoon session.”

  “She’s here?” Kate tried to catch up. “In Washington?”

  “She often travels with me,” Nelson said. “She says it makes a change.”

  In the afternoon, they sat around the table just as they had in the morning, but everything felt slightly different. The voices of the men seemed to reach Kate from a distance, while the colors—the yellow of Mikkleson’s tie, the burgundy of the curtains, the green of the apples in a bowl in the middle of the table—were almost too bright to look at. She was finding it difficult to collect her thoughts. Her eyes kept drifting up to Nelson. He was such a big man. Even his hands were big, with black hair curling over the knuckles as he tapped a handsome fountain pen against his stack of file folders. Had Thea given him the pen? Had she typed the labels on the folders and affixed them with glue? Had she picked out his shirt with its fine, mossy green stripe?

  The fourth proposal of the afternoon was J. S. Lezniak’s request for funding for further study of Arabidopsis. Hal Volkner, a cheerful, no-nonsense man with plump, gesticulating hands, opened the discussion. “There’s nothing here,” he said. “We’ve seen X-ray-induced mutations like these before. He doesn’t propose to do anything new.”

  “I agree,” Jax said. “There’s nothing new here. No big ideas. I give it a three.”

  “The trouble is that the proposal is backward-looking,” Nelson said. “We need to be looking to the future. What some of these men are proposing to
do with viruses is amazing! That’s the future of genetics.”

  “No, no,” Kate said, rousing herself. “You miss the point.”

  Nelson looked at her with a big, friendly-seeming smile. “Do I?”

  “It’s about the organism,” Kate said. “About developing a new plant model.” The eyes of the committee—old and young, curious and impatient—were all fixed on her, and to her annoyance she felt her face color. “The mutation work may not be new, but it’s solid. It’s interesting.” She began to explain what she had seen in the charts and graphs, and what the mutation work promised, and why it would be useful to add a plant like mouse-eared cress to the tool chest of the plant geneticist. She could hear herself, as if from a distance, droning dully on. It was hard to keep track of her own words. Sentences tumbled out. She hoped they were all right. “Studying bacteria—studying viruses—it’s all well and good,” she heard herself say. “But there are some aspects of genetics that plants are ideally suited to tell us about. In my view, Lezniak makes a strong case. The work is careful, which is more than I can say for many of the proposals we discussed this morning.”

  “I’d say his work is dull as a doorknob,” Jax said.

  A noise came from Sturgis Myers, the dapper elderly man with the cravat—perhaps a sneeze.

  “Pardon?” Claude Mikkleson said politely.

  “I said, she,” the old man said. “Joanne Lezniak was my colleague at the University of Wisconsin before I retired. A reputable researcher.”

  Kate wanted to laugh. One proposal from a woman, out of thirty proposals! One, and she was the only person in the room who liked it.

  Jax turned to Kate. “I guess you knew that.”

  “I certainly did not,” Kate said sharply.

  “Why were you defending it, then?”

  “I think it’s strong. Plant genetics need a new model organism. This one looks very promising. Seven weeks may sound like a long generation time to you, but from our point of view, it’s the blink of an eye.” Hadn’t she just said all of these things?

  Jax yawned. “I don’t understand why anyone bothers with plants.”

  Kate laughed, though she knew it wasn’t a joke.

  Claude Mikkleson rapped his gavel. “Gentleman. Dr. Croft. Let’s return to a discussion of the merits.”

  “What merits?” Hal Volkner said. “As Nelson says, it’s backward-looking. Our job here is to underwrite the future of genetics.”

  “There’s more than one way to underwrite the future,” Kate said. “It’s hubristic to assume we know what the future will hold and can see the best road for getting there.” Her voice was rising, which she knew would help nothing. She took a breath and said more calmly, “Any number of roads might turn out to be the right road. I’d suggest it behooves us to ensure that many alternate routes remain open.”

  “I can’t agree,” Nelson said (Thea’s husband!). There was a new bullying note in his voice as he leaned across the table. “We have been asked to make judgments. Hubristic or not, our charge here is to predict the future and determine which roads we believe will be most productive.”

  “There is a great deal still to be learned from plants,” Kate said coldly. The intensity of her dislike for this man took her by surprise. She sat up straighter in her chair and spoke to him the way she spoke to the poor slow graduate students who sometimes came to her lab to ask her to explain the intricate clockwork of chromosome nine. “Despite the current prejudice in favor of simpler models. It’s precisely because plants are complex that studying them will help us understand the complexity that underlies biology. If we only study what is simple, we’re going to miss crucial insights.”

  Nelson’s face shut itself off from her. She could see he did not like her tone.

  Volkner was shaking his head. “We have to walk before we can run,” he said. “We have to work out the simple things first. They’re going to be hard enough.”

  “I don’t agree,” Kate said. She looked around the beautiful table with its bowl of green apples at the faces of the men, who were watching her politely or impatiently or with half-concealed hostility, but who had obviously made up their mind about Arabidopsis. Who had obviously made up their minds about her.

  “Gentleman,” Claude Mikkleson said again, louder. “Dr. Croft. It seems to me we’ve reached the end of productive discussion. I suggest each of us rate the proposal according to his own estimation and that we move on.” He looked at her to make sure she had taken his point.

  Let it go, she told herself.

  Let it go.

  The shuffle of papers filled the room like the sound of a flock of birds rising and resettling. Kate scribbled down an eight, one point higher than her original assessment. Not that it would make the slightest difference.

  The next proposal was Paul’s request for funding to study eye color in fruit flies. A chorus of approving voices rose up from around the table and drifted toward the decorative plasterwork. Volkner said it was a pleasure to read a proposal that stated so clearly what it was about and what its author intended to do. Jax agreed. Abernathy, a drosophila man himself, said that eye color was the wedge that was going to open up understanding of the mechanism of gene function. Nelson said that Paul Novak’s work was always forward-looking, exactly the sort of work the institute ought to be funding.

  “As you say, always was,” Kate remarked, more brusquely than she’d meant to.

  Nelson looked at her. “Pardon?”

  “You said that Paul’s work always was forward-looking. Past tense. That seems a crucial point. Just because something always was in the past doesn’t mean it always will be in the future.”

  “I’d call that splitting hairs.”

  Kate looked away from his big unkempt head. She looked around the table, appealing to the others. “The proposal seems pretty slender to me. He talks about what he wants to do, but he doesn’t give much evidence that he’ll be able to do it.”

  “We know he’ll be able to do it,” Jax said. “You should know it better than anyone.” He turned to Abernathy, who was sitting beside him. “Kate and I were at Cornell with Paul Novak. He was brilliant even then.”

  Kate looked at Mikkleson. “My presumption is that we’re supposed to rate these proposals according to what’s in front of us, not using any private information or supposition.”

  “You should use whatever criteria you judge to be appropriate,” the director replied. “We have not adopted formal ones.”

  “Then I would suggest that, in the future, proposals be judged anonymously,” Kate said.

  “I can’t agree,” Jax said. “Knowing who is proposing the work is crucial to judging his ability to do what he says he is going to do.”

  “Let’s confine ourselves to the subject at hand,” Mikkleson said.

  That Paul had put so little effort into his proposal made Kate angry. He clearly didn’t think he’d needed to bother, and he was clearly right. She was angrier still that reputation carried more weight than substance—in this room as everywhere. Now that J. S. Lezniak had been revealed to be a woman, it seemed to Kate that she had known this fact all along—that all of them on the panel had known it—and that that was the reason the others had rated the proposal so low, and this made her angriest of all.

  Still. Did she think Paul’s study of eye color in drosophila was likely to be productive? She did.

  She looked up and saw Jax staring at her with his smug, snub-nosed face—the same face he had worn that afternoon in Thatch’s office when he’d swatted Paul’s coffee mug to the floor.

  What had he said? She’d forgotten. She’d made herself forget. But the words came back to her now.

  Crazy bag.

  Know-it-all.

  I bet you’re not even getting any!

  They seemed to ring out in the room for everyone to hear.

  “Dr. Mi
kkleson,” Kate said.

  “Dr. Croft?”

  “I really have to object to the way this proposal is being evaluated.”

  There was a sigh from across the table—Nelson, or someone else.

  “Dr. Croft, everyone has the opportunity to judge the proposal as he sees fit. That’s how it works.”

  “I know how it works,” Kate said. “Believe me, I know. Paul—Professor Novak—is an excellent scientist. No question. Also, he’s charming and he has a lot of friends. So he knows he doesn’t have to bother to write a strong proposal. He just tosses something off and expects the panel to fund him.”

  Jax laughed. “What did Paul do to you, Kate, to make you want to punish him?”

  Very slowly—or perhaps it was very quickly— she turned to look at Jax. She could see the ghost of his twenty-five-year-old face just under the surface of his current one, the past always there, inexpugnable. “Punish Paul?” she echoed. “By not giving him a few thousand dollars he doesn’t really need? Is that your idea of punishment?”

  Mikkleson leaned over the table. “Miss Croft,” he said mildly.

  “I’m not the one who’s out of line,” she told him, though she was beyond knowing whether that was true or not. Around the table, the faces of the men blended into one face: set, irritated, uncomfortable, disapproving. How could you hold on to truth in a room like this? Yet what else was there to hold on to?

  Mikkleson said, “You’ve had your say, Miss Croft. Please sit down.”

  When had she stood up? She had no idea, and that made her laugh. Yes, she was out of control, even as every muscle in her body tightened, twitching with the effort of discipline. Her body was rigid, but her mind was drifting up. She could feel it, almost like a cloud of cool vapor lifting out of the top of her skull. From somewhere near the plasterwork scrolls and filigrees, she looked down on the men slouching around the table in their suits and ties. On her own thin body in her old green dress.