But this Friday no one left the lab, not even the lab techs, Aidan and Natalya. The cold room, warm room, and stockroom were shared with the other third-floor labs, as was the small conference room with its cheap chrome and wood-grain furniture, good for meetings and naps. On ordinary days, the researchers darted into and out of the lab to the common areas on the floor. There was scarcely enough to pay the postdocs. There wasn't enough money to buy new equipment. The centrifuge, designed for spinning down cells in solution, was clunky as an ancient washing machine. Dials and needle indicators looked like stereo components from the early sixties. In 1985, the Philpott was famous, but it was full of old instruments. The laminar flow hood was shared, as was the good microscope. Peeling walls and undercounter incubators were covered with postcards, yellowing Doonesbury cartoons, photographs from a long-ago lab picnic at Walden Pond.
The glass beakers were foil topped, like milk bottles sealed for home delivery. Glass beakers stood above on shelves, each beaker filled with red medium for growing cells. Lab benches were covered with ruled notebooks and plastic trays, some blue, some green, some red, each holding dozens of test tubes. There was scarcely an inch of counter space.
They were operating sinks with foot pedals, measuring and moving solutions milliliter by milliliter with pipettes, their exacting eyedroppers. Two to a bench, like cooks crammed into a restaurant kitchen, the postdocs were extracting DNA in solution, examining cells, washing cells with chemicals, bursting cells open, changing cells forever by inserting new genetic material. In the Mendelssohn-Glass lab, four postdocs and a couple of lab techs were working. Cambridge schools were closed, but the Philpott Institute was open as usual. The undergraduates camping there for Harvard's divestment from South Africa had packed up their cardboard boxes, tents, and sleeping bags and begun building snow people. The sober Vietnam vet on Mass Ave had retreated to Au Bon Pain for coffee. The punks at the new Harvard Square T stop had tramped off, bright as winter cardinals with their purple tufted hair and orange Mohawks. Snow muffled every store and church drifts erased streets and sidewalks.
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