I have always been a klutz, the kid in elementary school who misses catching the baseball and gets a purple goose egg on his forehead. When I found my non-sport playing friends, they nicknamed me Dexterity 3, which is the same as calling someone butter fingers if instead of playing football, you play roleplaying games. Except that missing that baseball wasn’t due to a lack of coordination, it was due to a lack of patience. I had imagined I already caught the ball when it was still screaming towards me. I was ready to throw when it clocked me in the forehead.
My lack of patience almost killed me once. I was working in a lumber mill trying to make money for college. When you start off in a lumber mill you have some pretty crappy jobs but most of them involve getting wood from point A to point B where either point A or point B is a saw. It’s like running a marathon with people throwing sticks at you. One Saturday, I was working overtime and running miscut lumber into the quad saw. The Quad Saw usually cuts big pieces of wood. Everything was moving smoothly. And then the saw went back in its case. I looked at the saw operator. He pointed to a piece of wood, diagonal on the rollers, out by where the saw used to be. I quickly got to work standing on the few blocks between the rollers trying to reach for the wood. The angle wasn’t quite right so I leaned way forward pushing my butt out to the left. I felt my ass touch something but I grabbed the piece of lumber and quickly set it straight. I turned around. The saw operator was ghost white. The lunch whistle blew and as he walked by me he said: “Brown you scared the hell out of me.” He looked down at my butt. I reached down to feel my ass to find that I had sawed the back pocket off my pants. The guy who had been pointing wasn’t telling me to fix the saw. He was just telling me to go to lunch early. I totally misunderstood. It was as if I was getting my picture taken at the Grand Canyon and when the photographer made the okay sign, I interpreted it to mean take one step back and…. splat. I had almost cut myself in half. I needed a safer job.
I took the money from the mill and enrolled at the University of Puget Sound, home of, ironically enough, the Loggers. I worked as an undergraduate research assistant for Ken Rousslang. Rousslang’s research involved shooting light at different proteins, and seeing how long they would glow for. I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to build a protein from scratch and then test its properties.
Here is a little chemistry, proteins are chains of amino acids. Amino acids have two sides – let’s call them Ernie and Bert. Under the right conditions, the Ernie side of one amino acid and the Bert side of the other can form a bond. This bond is critical for both life as we know it and for my story tonight.
Here’s the thing – proteins are really important. For example, you need growth hormone (look up) to grow, but obviously you don’t want to grow all the time. There’s a protein that tells your body to make more growth hormone. It has the unimaginative name Growth Hormone Releasing Hormone, and it’s 44 amino acids long. I wanted to know how an artificial version – one with only SIX amino acids – could be just as effective as the real one.
My impatience got me twice. Halfway through synthesizing the artificial protein, I turned to the containers of amino acids and realized I had used the wrong one. I asked Anne Wood, the biochem professor who was helping me with the synthesis, if I could fix it. She said, “No. That’s why a PhD takes 6 years.” I blew it and I didn’t have six years I only had a few weeks left to make this protein and run my experiments in order to finish my undergrad thesis and graduate.
I returned to the lab and worked like crazy, but as usual – impatiently. If you throw all the amino acids together at once, you get a huge mess. What you do instead is keep the Ernie end and the Bert end from reacting, using something called a protecting group. We then add the amino acids one at a time, remove the protecting groups, and let them react. To check that the protecting groups are gone we add a chemical that turns purple it finds any free Ernie ends. Detectives also use it to look for fingerprints on documents. The proteins in your skin that are left behind when your finger touches a document will make a nice purple stain.
I didn’t know this at the time. What I did know was that after a day of non-stop peptide making, I removed my lab gloves to find that my right hand was purple. Not just a little purple. No, like Muppet purple. A deep, deep purple called Ruhemann’s purple. I must have poked a hole in my glove. If I had been working with more toxic chemicals, I could have been in serious trouble. If my life were a comic book, I also would have injected myself with that artificial growth hormone I was working on and turned into a 9 ft tall purple Hulk whenever I became impatient. The alternative wasn’t much better – I had probably coated my hands with all types of carcinogens and the only thing that left a visible trace was the thing that turned my skin purple. And I had no way to cover it up.
What was I going to say to my adviser? Was I going to be kicked out of lab? Would I be fired? Would I be able to graduate?
What should I say to my girlfriend when I see her? How do I hold hands with her? How I am going to cook food for my housemates? I imagine putting on a yellow dishwashing glove over my right hand as I dish out spaghetti.
But most importantly, if I had been working with something actually dangerous I would be dead. Twice my general lack of patience had almost killed me. First with a saw, second with that purple dye. I needed to do something safer.
And so I did. I decided to become a theorist. To do my science with pen and paper and on a computer, in-silico. I spent the next five years in a PhD program writing equations and writing code. It was great. Very safe. In the process of finding bugs in the code and squashing them out, I learned patience. I learned that coding as fast as possible was a mistake. I learned that I should take the time to think, to do things carefully. Little did I know that bug finding was my Mr. Miyagi. Like the Karate Kid I was waxing on and waxing off, slowly becoming more and more… patient.
At the end of everyone’s PhD thesis there are two things they want more than anything. 1) finish your thesis and 2) do anything other than finish your thesis. These things are not compatible but that is how it is. I was procrastinating by hanging out in the lab of my experimental collaborator, Dan Stamper-Kurn. He was building a very small magnetic trap and needed to make small conductive coils. The plan was to take flexible thins strips of aluminum and oxidize them so they had an insulating layer. The problem is that it makes it very inflexible and hard to make them into coils. It requires some patient testing of the chemistry and patient coiling of the wire. The new graduate student was having a terrible time at it. He kept snapping the coils or frying them from lack of insulation. I was trying to do anything but write my thesis so decided to try my hand at it. Somehow all those years of fixing bugs in code translated to a new patience in the lab. I handled the acid and base baths with ease. I worked out the right timings and was able to make the coils and celebrate with a few Crane Kicks. And in that moment, it all came back to me – how much I enjoy working with my hands, and how much I like doing lab work. And I realized that when I was patient, I was actually pretty good at it. I decided for my postdoc to go back to doing experiments and I’ve used my hands in the lab ever since. And I love it. Though I still leave sawing lumber to the professionals.
Story told at The Story Collider event at the Atlanta Science Festival in 2014. Thanks Ari Daniel for editing it.