Fact-checking my scientific origin story

My contribution to the 2024 Atheneum Fellows Reading

For the past 9 months, I’ve been part of a wonderful cohort of Atheneum Fellows at the Attic Institute here in PDX. Yesterday was our graduation, by way of a live reading at The Rose City Book Pub. Each of us read 1000 words from our fiction or nonfiction projects, and I loved hearing what my writer friends are working on. Here is the piece I read, which I envisioned as a possible prologue to the book I’m working on. The first few paragraphs might seem familiar to you, as I’ve written about this before. But I encourage you to keep on reading . . .

I remember the exact moment that I fell in love with science. It was during a high school Biology class, and playing the role of cupid was Mr. Smith. A stolid, grumpy man in his 60s, he was an instructor of the old school, unwilling to entertain any disruptions to his lesson plan—including questions. Now, as I’m approaching the age he was when I took his class, I look Mr. Smith up in my dusty freshman yearbook. There he is, in a single black and white photo, a square-faced man sitting at his desk and looking stonily away from the camera.

The night before this particular class, I dutifully read the assigned section of our textbook. We were learning about photosynthesis. I don’t recall which textbook we used, but I’m certain it contained a classic--a drawing of the cross-section of a leaf that demonstrates the way different cells are organized into functional layers. Stacked like the slabs of a thin, green birthday cake, each layer has its own characteristics and functions. Epidermal cells form the outermost layer, are small, tightly packed, and coated with a waxy substance to prevent water loss. Palisade cells, full of the green chloroplasts that do photosynthesis, line up in an orderly fashion below. Just underneath them are the spongy mesophyll cells, large and loosely arranged around the air pockets that allow gas exchange between leaf and air. At this point, it was just a drawing to me, something to memorize in order to get a good grade.

But when class began, Mr. Smith instructed us to look at slides of actual plant leaves under a microscope. An electric charge ran through my body as I looked through the eyepieces and saw: a cross section of a plant leaf that perfectly reproduced the picture I’d studied the night before. I could identify each cell layer! There were the flattened cells of epidermis, punctuated by small round guard cells. There was the solid wall of rectangular palisade cells pressed up against each other. There was the lacy arrangement of spongy mesophyll below. I looked up from the microscope, locating Mr. Smith at the front of the room, hoping for a moment of communion, but he was reading the school paper and did not look up.

Something about the coherence between what I’d seen represented in a textbook and what I was seeing with my own eyes was thrilling to me. It meant that there was an objective truth underlying the structure and the function of the world, invisible to everyday observation but knowable and verifiable to anyone who chooses to look. It didn’t occur to me that the dead slice of plant leaf on the slide could no longer do photosynthesis, I didn’t know that leaves of other types of plants would look totally different in cross-section. I only knew that what had previously been purely academic was now science, and it was, really, love at first sight.

At least, that is how I remember it.

Over the years, I’ve polished this scientific origin story like a microscope lens. I put it in the essay I wrote to get into graduate school. As I rose through the academic ranks, I included it in presentations about my career path that I gave to eager young students and junior professors. And now, even though I’ve quit academia, abandoned my plants and my research program, I can still feel that electric moment of recognition.

I decide to get some actual data on what happened, and dig through the boxes of memorabilia stacked in our garage. Underneath my letterman’s sweater and next to a shoebox full of rattling cassette tapes from The Stone Roses and The Cure, I find my high school journals. I read every word, but, unbelievably, there isn’t a single reference to biology or plant leaves, or science. I can’t understand this. How could I fail to record such an important moment of self-discovery?

Digging past dried corsages and cross-country trophies, I find more journal entries. I read how my English professor father, impatient with my lackluster academic performance, told me I needed to find something to be passionate about. “I just got told by Dad that I am “nothing” because I don’t show any interest in school,” reads one line. Wait, what? I have no memory of this conversation, and reading these journal entries feels the way it must feel to find out you’d been cheated on by your spouse. “ I am just average, won’t do good in college.” Reading this now, I am as mortified as my father would be to see that I used an adjective as an adverb.

Biologists know that the organisms we study are altered by the very act of investigation.  We drown them in stains to visualize individual cells, grind them up with a mortar and pestle to isolate molecules, asphyxiate them so we can remove their organs for a better look. Or we let them live, but trap them in a greenhouse, a cage or a petri dish. We recognize that we are not seeing them as they evolved to flourish, that we can only patch together stories based on incomplete and indirect information. But we press on, because we want, more than anything, to understand our beloved plants, our insects, our rainforests, our virulent bacteria.

These days, I’m still in love with plants and science, still captivated by the knowledge that there is an objective reality running like bedrock underneath the visible world. But I do not love the person I became in order to be a successful science professor. I no longer love the hero stories I’ve told about myself, and now that I can see the reality running underneath the university system, I don’t love academia either. This book is an attempt to tell a different story about myself and about academic science. Like all stories, it will represent the truth as incompletely as a cross-section of a leaf represents a plant. But, it is a place to start.