A Drop in the Ocean. Jenni Ogden
6th began in precisely the same manner as all my birthdays over the previous fifteen years—Eggs Benedict with salmon, a slice of homemade wholemeal bread spread thickly with marmalade, and not one but two espressos at an Italian café in downtown Boston. On my arrival at eight o’clock sharp, the elderly Italian owner took my long down-filled coat and ushered me, as he had for more years than I care to remember, to the small table by the window where I could look out on the busy street, today frosted with a late-season snow that had fallen overnight and would soon be gone. He always greeted me with the same words: “Good morning, Dr. Fergusson. A fine day for a birthday. Will you be having the usual?” as if he saw me every morning, or at least every week, and not just once a year.
Perhaps the unusually deep blue cloudless sky, almost suggesting a summer day, should have warned me that something was not quite as it should be. But superstitious behavior is not a strength of mine, and after my indulgent breakfast I walked to my laboratory in one of the outbuildings of the medical school, taking pleasure in the crisp winter air and stopping to collect my mail—in this e-mail era, usually consisting only of advertising pamphlets from academic publishing houses—before entering the lab.
Rachel looked up from her desk with her hesitant smile and gave me a beautifully wrapped parcel—a good novel, as always, the thirtieth she had given me. One for every birthday and one for every Christmas. I have kept them all. “Happy birthday Anna,” she murmured, not wanting to advertise my private business to the others in the lab. Two of my four young research assistants were already at work, hunched over their computers. The other two would be out in the field interviewing the families who were the subjects of our research program. Huntington’s families, we called them.
The research I had been doing for the past twenty-four years—first for my PhD, then as a research assistant, and finally as the leader of the team—focused on various aspects of Hunt-ington’s disease, a terrible, genetically transmitted disorder that targets half the children of every parent who has the illness. Often the children are born before the parents realize they carry the gene and long before they begin to show the strange contorted movements, mood fluctuations, and gradual decline into dementia that are the hallmarks of the disease. Thus our Huntington’s families often harbored two or three or even four Huntington’s sufferers spanning different generations.
Thankfully I was spared having to deal with them; I have never been good with people, and especially not sick people. I didn’t discover this unfortunate fact until my internship year after I graduated from medical school. But as they say, when a door closes, a window opens, and I became a medical researcher instead. Of course it took a bit longer, as I had to complete a PhD, but that was bliss once I realized that my forté was peering down a microscope at brain tissue.
So there I was on my forty-ninth birthday, looking at the envelope I held in my hand and realizing with a quickening of my heart that it was from the medical granting body that had financed my research program for fifteen years. Every three years I had to write another grant application summarizing the previous three years of research and laying out the next three years. Every three years I breathed a sigh of relief when they rolled the grant over and sometimes even added a new salary or stipend for another researcher or PhD student. I had become almost—but not quite—blasé about it. The letter had never arrived on my birthday before; I had not been expecting it until the end of the month. So I opened it with a sort of muted optimism. After all, it was my birthday.
“Dear Dr. Fergusson,” I read, already feeling lightheaded as my eyes scanned the next lines, “The Scientific Committee has now considered all the reviewers’ comments on the grant applications in the 2008 round, and I regret to inform you that your application has not been successful. We had a particularly strong field this time, and as you will see by the enclosed reviewers’ reports, there were a number of problems with your proposed program. Of most significance is the concern that your research is lagging behind other programs in the same area.”
I stared glassy-eyed at the words, hoping that I was about to wake up from a bad dream with my Eggs Benedict still to come.
“The Committee is aware of your excellent output over a long period and the substantial discoveries you have made in the Huntington’s disease research field, but unfortunately, in these difficult financial times, we must put our resources behind new programs that have moved on from more basic research and are able to take advantage of the latest technologies in neuroscience and particularly genetic engineering.”
My head was getting hot at this point; latest technologies and genetic engineering my arse. Easy for them to dismiss years of painstaking “basic research,” as they called it, so they could back the new sexy breed of researcher. No way could they accomplish anything useful without boring old basic research in the first place.
“A final report is due on the 31st July, a month after the termination of your present grant. Please include a complete list of the publications that have come out of your program over the past fifteen years. A list of all the equipment you currently have that has been financed by your grant is also required. Our administrator will contact you in due course to discuss the dispersal of this equipment. The University will liaise with you over the closure of your laboratory.
We appreciate your long association with us, and wish you and the researchers in your laboratory well in your future endeavors.”
The other tradition I kept on my birthday was dinner at an elegant restaurant with my friend Francesca. I could safely say she was my only friend, as my long relationship with Rachel was purely work-related, except for the novels twice a year. I was tempted to cancel the dinner and stay in my small apartment and sulk, but something deep inside wanted to connect with a human who cared about me and didn’t think of me as a washed-up old spinster with no more to discover. Fran and I had been friends since our first year at medical school, when we found ourselves on the same lab bench in the chemistry lab, simply because both our surnames began with ‘Fe.’
Fran Fenton and I were unlikely soul mates. She was American, extroverted, gently rounded, and ‘five-foot-two, eyes of blue,’ with short, spiky blond hair. I was British, introverted, thin, and five-foot-eight, eyes of slate, with straight dark hair halfway down my back, usually constrained into a single plait, but on this occasion permitted to hang loose. Fran was also, in stark contrast to me, married, with three boisterous teenagers. She worked three days a week as a general practitioner in the health center attached to the university where my lab was, and we did our best to have lunch together at least once a fortnight. I once went to her house for Christmas dinner but it wasn’t a success; her husband, an English professor, found me difficult, and her teenagers clearly saw me as a charity case. But the birthday dinner was always a special occasion for Fran as well as me, I think.
When she read the letter she was satisfyingly appalled, and said “swines” so violently that there was a sudden hush at the tables around us. When the quiet murmur in the room had resumed, she reached over and put her small, pretty hand over mine. I felt the roughness of the skin on her palm and blinked hard as I realized what a special person she was, never seeming rushed in spite of the massive amount of stuff she did—including slaving over a houseful of kids. Her eyes were watering as well as she said softly, “It’s so unfair. How could they abandon you like this in the middle of your research? What will happen to all your Huntington’s families?” Sweet Fran, always thinking of the plight of others worse off by a country mile than people like us, whereas all I’d been thinking about was myself and how I’d let down my little team. I blinked hard again and turned my palm up and grasped her hand. I’d been aware how close to tears I’d been all day, but of course I hadn’t allowed myself to succumb; not my style at all. In fact my brave little team all remained tearless as I gave them the news at our regular weekly meeting, which just happened to be today. Rachel had disappeared into the bathroom for a long time as soon as the meeting was over, and when she finally reappeared looked distinctly red-nosed. That’s when she told me that she would take this opportunity to retire and go and live with her elderly sister in Portland. Dear Rachel, loyal to the end.
Fortunately, the last PhD student we had in the lab had submitted her thesis a couple of months ago. I’d promised my four shell-shocked researchers that