Intuition

by Allegra Goodman

  “Sandy doesn't want to sit down with Robin,” Marion told Jacob that night at dinner.

  “Really.”

  “What do you mean, ‘really'?”

  “Nothing,” Jacob said.

  She and Aaron looked at him across the kitchen table. It was just that Jacob never spoke without meaning something by it.

  “He's worried about what Robin might say, given an opening.”

  “Are you worried about her?” Jacob asked.

  “I'm worried for her,” Marion said.

  “Ah, that's something different,” said Jacob.

  “She's become very . . .”

  “Depressed?” said Jacob.

  “I was going to say desperate.”

  “She's never struck me as the desperate type,” he said.

  “How does she strike you?”

  He didn't answer immediately. He was remembering the afternoon Robin came into his office. He had given her a gift that day. He'd had no idea how she would use it, but he'd given it to her anyway—a bit of knowledge; not a fact, but a piece of his own perspective. Cliff's results were too good to be true. She might have thrown away the offhand remark, small and cutting as a piece of glass. And yet he'd known she would not discard his idea. She had been prepared to hear it, and understood its significance. She'd picked up the broken shard he'd offered her and she'd begun to use it as the lens it really was. She'd begun to question Cliff's rushed data collection, to challenge the procedures, if not the results in the great R-7 paper.

  In his gentler moments, Jacob felt a twinge of guilt for arming Robin in this way. He did not care about Cliff, or Sandy, but he did fear he'd opened Marion to attack. He had given Robin a dangerous gift; he had given her his own skepticism. He had not known how far she would carry his point of view. But he did know that Marion would purge herself of anything or anyone interfering with her work. Ultimately, Marion's research was far more important than R-7 or Sandy's claptrap about someday curing cancer. As far as Jacob was concerned, his wife's work was basic science. Cancer was her instrument, not her enemy. The disease was her reveal, framing and displaying the workings of the cell.

  “How did Robin strike me?” Jacob mused. “I would say . . . disciplined. The opposite of Cliff.”

  “Why do you say Cliff isn't disciplined?” Marion asked sharply.

  “It's just my impression,” said Jacob. “Do you disagree?”

  She cleared her place unhappily and took Aaron's empty plate with her.

  “Hey, wait, I wasn't done. I wanted seconds,” Aaron protested, and with baffled affection Marion forgot Cliff and looked at her little boy, her chess champion, now almost six feet tall, ready to wolf down another helping of chicken.

  “Here. I'll get it for you.” Jacob retrieved the plate from Marion.

  His hopes for his wife were even more audacious than her own. He had a tendency to wish his own fierce brilliance upon her, and to foresee her unconditional success in his imagination. Such brilliance and success had been wished on him when he was a boy, and in his heart he knew the vanity of such wishes, but he couldn't help himself. He loved Marion selflessly, and demandingly, and not quite fairly. At times, as he had behaved with Robin, he took advantage of Marion for her own good. And yet his actions were so subtle, there was no way Marion would have guessed. He loved his wife, not merely with all his heart, but with all his mind. Marion accepted his sacrifices for her, had come to expect them as her due, but fortunately for her, she could not read minds, not even Jacob's. She would have been frightened by the devotion to be found there.

  Overruling Sandy's objections, Marion calmly marked her calendar for Uppington's meeting. Despite Cliff's shoddy record keeping, she'd bolstered her confidence in him by speaking to Feng privately.

  “Feng,” she'd begun as she sat with him in the office. “I want you to know that I will hold anything you say here in the strictest confidence. But I wanted to ask you, because you have worked so closely with Cliff, whether you've sensed anything not quite . . . anything even slightly out of the ordinary in his work.”

  Feng started back in alarm, and with some remorse Marion saw the position in which she'd placed him: possible informant on his colleague and friend.

  “I only ask,” she said, “because I want to understand how the data got muddled and the numbers transposed. Good practices in the lab are my responsibility. If there was a lapse, I blame myself. I suspect the pressure to get our grant submitted had a great deal to do with it. Did you feel rushed? Did you feel that the experiments could have gone . . . better?”

  He watched as she took up her knitting, an elaborately textured sweater of ecru wool. “They could always go better,” he said.

  “Well, yes, of course, but there comes a point when the outcome is endangered,” Marion pressed him. “From your own experience with Cliff—did you ever find yourself uncomfortable with his practices?”

  A great many thoughts and images flashed through Feng's mind: Cliff's tense behavior in the animal facility, his late hours, and particularly his insistence on injecting the animals himself. Feng remembered the morning he had arrived to find Cliff had already finished the injections. He had resented Cliff's proprietary behavior, although he understood it. However, he dared not confess this to Mendelssohn, even as he deigned not show Cliff his true feelings. Mendelssohn had given him an opening to air his grievances, but he was not Robin.

  He had a well-earned abhorrence of this scenario—one researcher pulled out to inform on another. His father had been denounced in this way by his own colleagues, and forced to wear a dunce cap painted with his crimes. His father had been paraded up and down and forced to recapitulate the errors of his ways. At that time, Feng's mother had taught him to lie. She'd brought down the family photos and taught him to lie about each person in them. The two of them practiced until the lies were second nature. All this because they were the wrong sort of people—wealthy, intellectual, and landowning. His father's disgrace had nothing to do with science. The colleagues who had betrayed his father had been coerced themselves, and in the course of time, the betrayers were themselves betrayed. The whole charade had ended years before, but no one in Feng's family had ever been the same.

  “He was pushing hard toward the end,” Mendelssohn suggested.

  “He worked very hard,” Feng conceded.

  “I'm afraid he may have done his work too fast,” she said.

  Feng nodded but said nothing, and his silence steadied Marion. There was no one in the lab she respected more than Feng. His integrity seemed to her unimpeachable, and just now his deep involvement with Cliff's work comforted her more than she could say. With her knitting gathered in one hand, she stood to see him out, and she thanked Feng for meeting with her, which he had never known her to do before. She didn't seem herself. She was thanking him and apologizing all at once.

  8

  THE MEETING took place in a borrowed Harvard seminar room both airy and dusty, painted ivory from its cornices to its radiators. Cliff came in with a pile of notes, and Feng followed after him, and they sat next to Mendelssohn and Glass on the far side of the dark wood conference table.

  Robin could barely keep her hands from trembling as she sat there, nor could she look at Cliff. Art Ginsburg, once Marion's nemesis, now a Harvard professor, came in and shook Sandy's hand, greeted Uppington as an old friend, and kissed Marion on the cheek. Robin knew Professor Ginsburg had stolen Marion's ideas in the past. Years ago, hearing of her metabolic work with mice, he'd pursued a similar line himself and then presented his results first at a major conference, effectively stealing her thunder. Robin couldn't help shuddering to see him. Working for Marion, she had been brought up to distrust him. He was arrogant and lanky, with curly gray hair, a haughty nose, and deep brown eyes that ranged in their expression from bemused to pitiless. He wore a tweed jacket over corduroys and had a habit of opening his mouth wide and then shutting it again, as if he were trying to clear his ears after a long flight. He took ou
t a sheaf of papers and busied himself with a red pen, even as Uppington called the meeting to order and Jeremy Choi burst through the door.

  “I'm terribly sorry!” Choi was a young professor at BU and a protégé of Uppington's, which meant he was bound to come to the meeting even though he was busier than Ginsburg. He had been raised in Hong Kong and trained at Cambridge, and his English accent was far more pronounced than Uppington's, whose words and tones had flattened and smoothed like river stones from his long years in America. Choi's accent had not had time to mellow like that; he had no time for anything. “Have you already begun?”

  “Not at all,” said Uppington.

  Ginsburg announced, “I'll have to leave at eleven.”

  “Well, let's get started, then,” said Uppington, and he nodded at Robin. “Let's begin with just a brief outline of your observations and your concerns about the Nature paper.”

  He gave Robin the floor, and smiled encouragingly. Still, in the long, sickening moment before she began to speak, she felt all eyes on her, and heard Ginsburg's watch ticking. How odd she must seem, unruly and quixotic, tilting at errors no one else could see. She had been granted a hearing, but she was nothing to these men; she had no rights or reputation, no useful results to offer, only her critique, her niggling doubts about a fine research paper, her failure to reproduce what Cliff had done so well.

  Choi produced a yellow legal pad and printed the date in the top right corner, and Ginsburg opened and shut his mouth. She was sure if she'd been a fly he'd have swallowed her on the spot. She wished she could have flown away; she devoutly wished to disappear, but she began to speak instead, and she spoke brilliantly.

  She spoke of her high regard for Cliff's paper and her desire to see his experiments reproduced in her own lab and elsewhere. She spoke of her difficulties duplicating Cliff's work, first with pancreatic cancer cells and then with breast cancer cells from his own cell line. Was the problem her equipment? The cell lines she was using? Her own technique? She had eliminated each of these factors in turn, when suddenly, accidentally, she stumbled on three pages of notes. “I think perhaps the data in these pages was not accurately transcribed in the final drafts of the paper,” she told the group. “The raw data conforms better to my poor results than to the excellent results the lab has published.” And she passed around photocopies of Cliff's notes along with annotated copies of the journal article. “The discrepancies are highlighted in yellow,” she explained as the scientists studied the evidence in front of them. Column by column, line by line, point by point, she referenced the data missing from the paper. “The data from Cliff's draft notes suggest a different outcome from the one published in the article,” she said.

  “How different?” asked Ginsburg.

  “I've drawn two graphs illustrating the differences,” said Robin, passing them around.

  Uppington harrumphed at this approvingly. Choi leaned forward and took the two graphs Robin offered him. Even Ginsburg unfolded his reading glasses.

  “The first graph displays the published results from R-7, and the second shows what the curve would look like if all the results from the raw data were included. As you can see, the published results cluster beautifully. However, when we take the published and unpublished data points together, they . . . scatter. In the published results nearly sixty percent of the mice are cancer free. When we take the published and unpublished results together, we find only thirty percent of the animals are cancer free, and almost seventy percent still have cancer after treatment with R-7.”

  Her manner was controlled, her arguments rigorous. The care she'd taken with her evidence, the graphs she'd drawn, the clear expression of her ideas—this was Robin at her best. No one heard the beating of her heart. Only Cliff noticed the slight tremor in her fingers.

  He nearly shook with anger. Robin was accusing him of cheating—and how artfully she made her case. Not a word betrayed her jealousy; every phrase supported her claim to dispassionate judgment. By her account, she did not seek out his notes, but found them by accident! She did not directly accuse him of misrepresenting his results, but suggested he had transcribed them incorrectly. Naturally, she did not mention spying on him in the animal facility or prying into his lab book. She did not bring up the fact that she had taken notes that belonged to him, and photocopied and distributed them without his permission. She was the model of restraint. He wanted to jump up and set the record straight. But he saw how well Robin's calm manner served her; how acute her observations seemed, refined with understatement. How would he look if he attacked her? Cliff held still and scribbled down her points so that he could reply to each in turn.

  “I don't have any charts or graphs,” he began. “Just a simple apology and an explanation. The apology is for the notes that Robin found, which include data from several different sets of experiments. I jotted numbers on scratch paper in the dissecting room, and then as soon as my hands were free I copied them over into my lab book. My scratch paper has been lying around in disarray for far too long, and I recognize that this was both messy and misleading. In writing up my results, I never referred back to those scraps, but only worked from my lab notebook, which I've brought with me today. It's an open book for anyone to see. Now, to begin with Robin's first . . . her first concern . . .”

  One by one he took on Robin's assertions and, it seemed to her, sidestepped each in turn. He confessed he had been careless. He had been rushed. Marion Mendelssohn nodded here. He had been sloppy because he'd tried to do too much himself. He turned to Feng, as if to say he could attest to that. Then he opened up his lab book on the table, and there the dates and data matched up precisely. As he showed his lab book and interpreted the numbers there, his voice was lively, his enthusiasm infectious. The tortuous connections Robin had attempted gave way to a scientific argument so natural, so compelling and intuitive, that everyone in the room seemed to relax. Choi leaned back and took a handkerchief from his pocket to clean his glasses. Sandy Glass knit his fingers together with bemused pride. Even Ginsburg twisted his mouth into a wry semblance of a smile.

  And Robin watched the meeting slip away. Her graphs lay forgotten on the table. She had spoken well, but Cliff spoke better. He had the more compelling argument, because his results were beautiful. Her results were negative, her argument distasteful. He worked in the bright empirical realm, and she had mucked about with dark, dubious, moral forebodings. Perhaps Cliff's record keeping had been poor, but his achievement was tangible; his mice had been sick and now they were well. Even as he spoke about his work, Robin felt the mood shift. With a flick of the wrist, the meeting became a research seminar. Ginsburg and Choi and even Uppington looked at Cliff with true interest, as if to say “Now, here's the real thing; here's matter for discussion.” How delighted they were to return to science.

  Marion delivered her admonitions about observing the proper forms in future, and Uppington thanked Robin for speaking up about possible confusions. Ginsburg suggested imperiously that the minutes of the meeting should be written up and distributed. Cliff whispered something to Feng, who smiled and shrugged. They all preached about rigor, Robin thought, but they based their work on trust. Cliff was so intelligent, so winning—he would be a star. And why did she mind so much that he was messy going about it? Many, many researchers were messy. Lab directors could not put their fingers on every scrap of paper in their labs at every minute of the day. There was the book way of working, and then there was the reality. There was the presumption that everything that touched the nudes was sterile, and the reality that equipment was often only fairly clean. There were the rules and regulations posted in the lab and animal facility, and then the general standards of the community. Robin's case against Cliff might as well have been a case against the status quo, an argument against the natural bumps and jolts of the creative process. If only she could pin him down, hang him by the thumbs until he told the truth. Even as she held still at the table, all her rage welled up inside of her and she wanted to
lunge at him and seize him by the throat until he cried out and confessed. But what weapons did she have? What recourse was left to her? She would always be the diligent little malcontent, while he was the creative one. Feng was the favorite in magazines for his immigrant success, but in the scientific community, Cliff's story of perseverance was the one everybody loved to hear. Poor record keeping in the past actually made Cliff's triumph brighter. He was the postdoc who finally made good, Prince Hal throwing off his shoddy workmanship and showing his true colors, coming of age at last.

  Heartsick, she gathered her papers together.

  “I thought you handled yourself very well,” said Uppington.

  That afternoon in the lab, Robin knew she could not stay until the spring. She could not continue across the room from Cliff, swallowing everything she knew and felt.

  Through the windows the October light seemed hooded; the sun shone furtively. Deciding to leave, she began to feel a measure of peace. She had that power, at least—to turn away and go. Still, even in that moment of release a flood of regret rushed over her. She was going to have to leave the institute with her bone tumor project unfinished. Her work belonged to the lab. The cell lines and the equipment and the animals she'd used could not be moved.

  She would probably give up any hope of a first-tier academic job. She was sorry about that—although she knew that after all these years and all this meandering, such a position would have been a long shot, anyway. She was sorry that the others were going to perceive her leaving as mostly personal, the outcome of her breakup with Cliff. She winced at that, but she could not stay.

  She didn't say good-bye that evening, nor did she take anything from her lab bench but her purse. Still, she looked once around the room quickly, shyly, in a kind of farewell. Then she walked out into the hallway and down the stairs.