Chapter 6
"Hey, you still at it?" a voice called from the doorway to the lab.
Billy recognized the melodious intonation by her Trinidadian accent. He looked up to see his mentor and doctoral professor peer over her brown-speckled framed glasses. Her face surrounded by dark brown tight coils streaked with slivers of silver and auburn. She was slightly shorter than he stood, but her presence always made him imagine her as much taller.
He was unsure if he should share what he was observing in his calculations and took great care in his choice of words. "I wanted to double check a few of my calculations while I was in the lab. Aisha and I went over the PCR results this morning and we were able to ascertain the anomaly to the missing yields. I finished freezing the samples, but I wanted to be sure I would have enough to carry out the experiment."
She walked into the lab and sat on the stool at the workbench near the incubator, placing her bag on the counter.
"Billy, your calculations are fine," she said, facing the whiteboard where most of the lab's calculations were written, "If you are seeing something wrong, it could be a zebra in the experiment."
"Zebra? I'm not sure I'm following."
She turned to face Billy, who was sitting at the opposite counter, hovered over the lab's computer.
"You have considered all possible explanations and can rule each of those out of your observations. Well, it is time for a new approach. You may need to consider the impossible as an explanation."
"Dr. Montoya, the anomalies…I think they're spreading beyond the thermal cycler," he said, quietly.
She raised an eyebrow, "Where are they now?"
Billy reached over to the printer to grab two sheets of paper, one with a large graph and the other with several explanations. He promptly handed each sheet to Dr. Montoya, who pulled her glasses down to read the data.
"…the monocytes are differentiating without growth factors…no external causes can be found…" she read aloud, "Are you sure?" she said, not looking up from the data tables.
"Aisha and I went over my last incubation and plating. When I looked at the cells under the microscope, they were all adhered to the plates. There were clear pseudopods and a few were…" Billy stopped, uncertain even of his next statement to himself.
She looked up to meet his eyes, "Yes? A few were, what?"
"Well, a few were undergoing active division."
Dr. Montoya glanced back at the data printout without a reply. She drew in a quick breath and leaned into the counter. Billy could tell she was lost in deep thought, turning the wheels of all possible reasons for the irrational write-up she was re-reading. Monocytes in cell culture can divide. However, cell cycle rates for most dividing human cells take hours to complete and for some cells, a couple of days. The mere minutes he and Aisha witnessed this culture complete all stages of the cell cycle would not have even correlated to human embryonic tissue or budding yeast cells. He wondered if she would come to the same conclusion he and Aisha thought of earlier after she pointed out the mitotic figures to him under the inverted microscope. If Dr. Montoya even hinted at that conclusion, he would gladly spill his heart's worth of theories about how this could happen. If she dismissed it, he knew it would be the secret he and Aisha kept from everyone until they had a clear and rational answer.
"You saw the cells in active division, you say here," she pointed to the top paragraph, "You are sure you did not add any growth factors? Nothing that could have caused this? And that you only cultured monocytes without contamination from another cell line?"
Billy nodded, diligently.
Dr. Montoya handed the pages back to Billy as she gathered her things. "Well, it looks like a Zebra my dear. But I don't know how to explain it. Monocytes are finicky little things. They need so much! Sleep on it over the weekend and we'll tackle it on Monday."
"Do you want me to run anything this weekend?" Billy asked as she turned to leave the lab.
"No. With what we are seeing, I don't think I want to culture anything else or run any other experiments until we have an answer to these numbers. Good night and go enjoy your weekend. It is rare a graduate student gets to do that, you know."
Billy silently waved as she exited the lab door. He sat watching from the stool, her silhouette still visible and gliding down the hall to the stairs in the dim light just outside the room.
She never said the words, but he knew the data he recorded was not going to make for an enjoyable weekend.