Fancy Footwork

Saturday, July 13, 2019

Not merely the undergrowth


Not merely the undergrowth
Trophy hanging here on this fence,
Vibrant and luscious Tropaeolaceae
From a parking lot, infiltrating a bed
Wandering alleles bedazzle me,
In their red, orange and yellow array
Nectar stripes guiding your ancestral partners,
Down vertical, zygomorphic lines
To dust and be dusted
They redefine petal fashion
Deeply-stained daggars,
Are mirror images pointing north, south, east and west
Necessary adaptations,
In an unforgiving time for your kingdom
Part of me wants to crush you and your self-fertilized family members,
To reveal your molecular mystery on a Coomassie stained gel
How do you achieve such solid burnt orange and sun kissed yellow lemons?
Homozygosity, heterozygosity, polymorphic displays -
Posttranscriptional, posttranslational modifications?
Splicing and dicing? RNA editing?
How do you smear and spray color like that?
Gentle displays of variation along rows,
Families clearly marked by clones,
Each patch designated by a coat of arms
I wish I can find out myself,
For now, I will relish in these peppery vapors
And nibble when there is time,
Like today




 



































   



Tuesday, July 09, 2019

An Extension of Shyamala


An Extension of Shyamala
Students know a whole lot about their teachers: how they walk to the front, how they move their hands, their clothes, quirky things they say, whether their voice is steady or trembly. We study our teachers carefully, we remember every single one. I remember the middle school teacher who hid from us behind his desk. I can barely recall what the actual class was for, maybe typing? Though, I can’t remember any typewriters. I really cannot remember any content or activity aside from this male teacher who wore gray slacks, nasally voice, baldish head. I remember him reprimanding us at times but his voice squeaked like a mouse and this made everyone laugh. We had no empathy, no care at all for him as a person. I distinctly remember pouring Jean Naté perfume bought from Thrifty’s Drugstore into his brief case. I remember him crying more than once. Growing up, my mom would often say to me: “payback is a bitch”. She was right because now I am a teacher. At times, I have felt like crying in front of students too.
There are school teachers and there are life teachers. Some of these teachers never know us at all but we remember them and they mark us. Shyamala Harris did not know me. She may have seen me around the lab and recognized me as a new grunt. I knew her though. She kind of scared me. I was a graduate student, sitting in on symposia and taking care of a plethora of transgenic mice in a mouse colony at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I knew Shyamala by her mice first, because I was tracking a possible connection between a phenotype I observed in a transgenic mouse that resembled a mouse model her laboratory was famous for characterizing. I read every single paper her laboratory published on the progesterone receptor and I was drilled by her mentor, our shared academic PhD advisor, when I defended my Ph.D at CAL. His first words to me when I became his shared graduate student were “Data is data, don’t forget that.” Be honest with yourself, is what I understood.
When Shyamala walked in the room conversations crystallized. She sat close to the front of the lecture room, across from my mentor. These two women were not your typical powerhouses – their glances were piercings. They questioned everything. Meetings took forever. They quarreled over what may seem like minutia to the untidy biochemist. They held every single person accountable, whether they were an aspiring “Dr”, “Principal Investigator”, a “Distinguished”, or a “Nobel Laureate”.
In the lab, I overheard postdocs and graduate students preparing their presentations, anxious chatter about Shyamala being there. My advisor could rip a few holes through you, but Shyamala wouldn’t let you sit down after decimation.  She could spot holes blaring through data. “Bring the raw data – not the Photoshop”. “Why are there bands like that on the bottom?” “What is that mark on the top?” “Where is this control and that control?” “Why aren’t you showing us the other gel?” “Why do you think that?!!” “How can you think that?!!!” I did not look forward to my turn in the hot seat. It was coming, I knew it. I knew I would need more evidence to convince her of a connection between my protein of interest and her famous progesterone receptor.
How life throws you a boomerang and BAM, there it is coming right back again as projected. But never as you ever thought it would. Now I am the teacher in the room. Walking around listening to my students’ conversations and hoping to hear them ask each other probing questions, “how come?” questions. To my delight, there is an extension of Shyamala on the screen. Her daughter, Kamala Harris. Questioning, just like her mom. Demanding evidence and answers. Wondering “how come?” and “why can’t this be done, differently?” My heart goes out to Kamala for all that she represents and is fighting for. My heart goes out to her for so much overlap I have experienced with her, years on Channing street in Berkeley. Sending my own children off early, on a school bus, to be sent across Berkeley on a day I had to be a single mom, too. But I only had to do this a few times when my husband went to a conference. Shyamala weathered two impossible jobs in an impossible generation – being a female scientist and being a single mom. What a hero, she must be for her daughter. A vicious cycle of heroines from Berkeley, sounds like a new Marvel character to me.