Negative Pressure

A memoir-y meditation on the push and pull of laboratory spaces

The brown metal door to the lab is surprisingly hard to open. Maybe it’s because labs are kept at negative pressure. Surely it’s that slight pull of air into the lab, designed to prevent volatile chemicals from flowing into hallways and offices, that makes it so difficult to enter.

I yank it open anyway, and step into a long room that runs the length of the building and holds my research space along with that of two other faculty members in my department. Through the windows in the far wall, I see a snowy parking lot and the red bricked St. Louis neighborhood beyond. Perpendicular to these windows are my eight lab benches, long waist-high casework topped with durable, chemically impervious black countertops. At the end of each bench, the countertop drops down to form a desk for computer work or recording data in a notebook. These lab benches are where the hands-on work of a laboratory gets done, where experiments are planned, executed, and interpreted.

My entrance has gone unnoticed by my lab group, who are sprinkled throughout the space and engaged in various aspects of our research. My technician stands at a work station, the brim of a Cardinals baseball cap pointing down towards the protein gel he is loading. A postdoc hurries past, a tray of plants in her hands, headed for analysis on the microscope. A graduate student and an undergraduate lean against a bench, pointing at tubes in an ice bucket as they plan an experiment.

I don’t say anything to draw their attention, just hover in the doorway and survey my lab with affection. It is messy, stuffed with all the necessary paraphernalia of plant molecular biology research. Benches are strewn with boxes of gloves, devices for dispensing tiny but accurate drops of various liquids, brightly colored racks filled with plastic tubes, equipment for mixing and separating, heating and cooling, plastic trays of plants that are drying down before seed collection. Above each bench run four long shelves, each filled to overflowing with square glass bottles of solutions labeled in colorful tape, Tupperware containers of drying seeds in miniature manila envelopes, and cardboard boxes of parafilm (a stretchy plastic material that is fantastic for sealing containers and absolutely should be available in grocery stores). At the end of each bench, laboratory glassware hangs on pegs to dry like the transparent quills of a porcupine.

There’s quite an olfactory clutter, too. The smelly feet of bacterial cultures mixes with the fish sauce of TEMED and the funk of potting soil. The terrible sweaty poop smell of Escherichia coli—that ubiquitous microbial workhorse of molecular biology—made my eyes water when I first started washing dishes in a microbiology lab the summer between high school and college, and I wondered if I was going to have to abandon my dream of doing biological research. But I stopped noticing the stench after the first few days, and at this point in my career the jumbled sights and off-putting smells just feel cozy and familiar, like an adorably messy cottage garden with a stinky but effective compost heap. I’ve run in and out of labs for more than two decades and felt total belonging to each one.

My first few years as a faculty member, I worked at my bench a lot. I helped order and organize the clutter on those lab shelves, and gathered most of the preliminary data for my first grant proposal. But as the lab filled with students and postdocs and technicians, the burden of funding them and their research got heavier. Planning and preparing lectures (and recovering from presenting them) took up a lot of time. As these and all the other responsibilities of a faculty member settled on my shoulders, I’d I found it harder and harder to find the time and energy to do experiments.

A few years ago, I’d finally conceded to the prevailing winds, given my lab bench to a new postdoc, and retreated to my office. It felt like the end of an era; I’d had a bench of my own almost continuously since the age of 17. What would it be like to hear new results secondhand, to never again be—at least briefly—the only person in the world who knew a particular thing about plant mechanobiology? As it turned out, it was fine. I still felt ownership of and excitement about new data, whether I produced it, or a student did.

I wonder why, given my healthy acceptance of a diminished role at the bench, I am hesitating now at the door, and a memory surfaces. My graduate advisor Erin, walking into her lab in Gap jeans and running shoes. She is very young, hasn’t yet become one of the most powerful people in US biomedical science, still has time to check on her students’ progress. “What’s going on?”, she asks, leaning into my personal space, flipping through my lab notebook for results, losing the page I was referencing as I set up an experiment. We graduate students, bonded over the intense pressure to produce data while surviving in San Francisco on poverty wages, find this ‘data harvesting’ extremely annoying—and we have developed a strategy to stop it. One of my labmates heads to the wall phone and calls Erin’s office. She hears it ringing and sprints away. He hangs up before she answers, but she gets distracted by something on her desk, or remembers what administrative task she was supposed to be doing instead of wandering the lab, and stays in there. Leaving us to snicker to each other, and return to our experiments.

Standing at the threshold of my own laboratory, I take an involuntary step back, wondering if my lab members see me as a pest, too. When I started my faculty position, a friend told me, laughing through the phone, “I knew I was a real professor when I walked into the lab, heard someone say ‘ssshhhh!!,’ and everyone fell silent!”. I don’t have the same benevolent humor about this. Instead, I feel self-conscious and afraid of what my lab might be saying to each other about me. I also feel indignant: isn’t this my lab? Haven’t I earned respect from my students and my postdocs? Don’t they know how hard I work on their behalf?

I could ask a different set of questions—questions about who really owns a space or a group of people or what they produce, questions about the ways that hierarchy and power structures complicate respect and connection. But I don’t, not yet. I turn and walk out, the laboratory door slamming shut with a loud bang behind me.