10

A Day in the Life of a Biologist

I GOT UP particularly early one morning in order to stop by a marine biology lab on my way to work to pick up a couple of octopi for Tom, a postdoc at Caltech who was studying their behavior. I love octopi and was looking forward to seeing them.

I dressed in my usual sweatpants and T-shirt because it didn’t make sense to get all gussied up to work with animals. I’d just wash my face and brush my teeth and wait till the end of the day to shower.

Wesley played in the water while I got ready and then settled down on his perch to sleep while I was gone. It was hard to leave him behind in the mornings, but I always gave him a snuggle and kissed him good-bye on the curve of his smooth, warm beak as I left.

After being stuck in Los Angeles traffic, barely moving, I finally reached my destination, the marine lab at Occidental College, which smelled like a hundred years’ worth of fish and formaldehyde. I was surprised to find only one container waiting for me, because I had expected two. Octopi need to be kept separate, as some species will eat each other, but the scientists were already loading diving equipment into the vans, getting ready to head out to the research boat for the day.

I waved at one of my old Occidental classmates, Lisa, who was getting ready to go diving with the group. Lisa could walk right up to a bloated, decaying seal carcass on the beach, reach into the black, liquefying flesh up to her armpit, fish around in there, and pull out a bone. “Hmm,” she’d ponder. “The bones were weak.” Everyone else would be running away retching. This proclivity has helped her in her future career, as she has spent her life doing autopsies on dead sea mammals to figure out what’s killing them off and how to try to protect the living—a job she was born to do.

“Why are the octopi in the same container?” I asked one of the lab assistants. “Won’t they eat each other?”

“Well, it’s only fifteen minutes to Caltech, so if you hurry it’ll probably be fine. We just now put them in there,” he replied.

I loaded the container into my car and looked inside. There, swimming in the seawater, was one huge octopus and one small one. Not good. I drove to Caltech as fast as I could and parked in the loading zone. The ice chest was heavy, but I lugged it out of the car and rushed toward the back door of the building.

“Stop right there! What are you doing?” I looked up and there was a stern cop standing in my way. “This is a loading zone,” he barked.

“I’m unloading,” I said.

He took out his ticket book.

“I’m unloading octopi,” I insisted.

“Yeah, right.”

“Listen,” I blurted out, “I have two octopi in here. One is much bigger than the other and will eat the little one if I don’t get them into the lab right away,” and I yanked the top of the ice chest off.

To my dismay, the big one had already eaten the small one and was undulating around, happily changing colors, as they do to express emotions. He reached one long tentacle over the top edge of the container and began feeling his way out using his suction cups.

“Oh, no” I yelled loudly. “It’s already happened! He ate the little guy. Now, what am I going to do? Look, there’s only one pathetic little tentacle left floating on the—”

I looked up to see the cop stumbling backwards, making choking, guttural sounds. He jumped into his car and burned rubber out of the parking lot.

This is how stories get started about secret laboratories doing experiments on aliens.

I set the container near the lab door then went upstairs to get Tom. A wave of chemical odors mixed with the pungent aroma of animals hit me. I would always love that combination of smells. As we took the ice chest up the elevator I explained the tragic demise of the smaller octopus.

“That’s a real loss,” he said.

“I know, I should have insisted they separate them, but they thought it would be all right.” At least we had this one, and into the aquarium he went, full and content.

I went off to start my workday, cleaning animal cages and feeding the owls and songbirds. It was also my responsibility to check all the animals for signs of ill health and other anomalies. It took about four hours to make my rounds, which gave me a lot of time to think.

I loved being at Caltech. It had been a part of my life since I was eight years old, but recently I had begun to worry about my financial future. There really wasn’t any way to have a career at Caltech without a PhD. An aerospace company was recruiting me quite persistently and they were starting to turn my head with their offers. The position was out of my field but paid a lot by my standards, and they would train me to work with UNIX operating systems. The sky was the limit as a UNIX specialist, although biology would always be my first love. It would break my heart to leave, but I had spoken to Dr. Penfield about it and he had assured me that the lab would still welcome my observations of Wesley. In that way I’d still be involved with the lab, which kept me from feeling that I was losing everything.

I went back up to the main building for some supplies and dropped by the lab of John, a postdoc one floor down from us owl biologists. As was my habit, I leaned against the door of his small lab area to chat. I never went all the way inside for fear of bumping into one of the crowded shelves and bringing their contents down on my head. His lab had thousands of black widow spiders living in thousands of petri-like dishes that had been made into little spider habitats, stacked high on shelves that went up to the ceiling. I hated to think what would happen in an earthquake.

John particularly doted on his “nursery” of egg sacks and newly hatched babies. Clucking and fussing over them like a mother hen, he would separate the babies using a glass tube. He gently sucked one baby spider into the tube, transported it to a new dish, then carefully blew it out into its new home. I always feared the little spider would run right up into his mouth, but it never happened.

John spent long hours sorting out all the babies when they hatched, more hours than he spent with people. He thought it was sooo adorable when they hunched up, right before they jumped. I finally conceded that, if you watched them long enough, you could see their tiny faces, which had an alien sort of “cuteness” to them. He would say, “Oh, look, they’re so precious when they’re little!” And the babies were, in a strange way, delicate, perfect miniatures. Not lanky like the adults, but more, uh, cuddly looking.

At some point I think maybe John lost perspective. He started taking the black widows home. Then he got to where he refused to allow any yard work whatsoever because it disturbed the wild spiders, so his yard became completely overgrown and covered in huge, thick, active spider webs. Eventually he became a professor of biology at another prestigious university.

John was not married, although he was charming and gorgeous. What a waste. But I couldn’t imagine dating a guy with this specialty. After all, how would you raise children in a home filled with black widow spiders?

So many interesting people from all over the world came through Caltech. Jane Goodall’s lecture there changed my life when I was eight. Her discovery that chimps made and used tools shook the world of science to the core and showed how close these primate relatives are to us humans. To me, Dr. Goodall is the Galileo of behavioral biology. Every year for nearly ten years my sister, dad, and I went to hear her lectures whenever she came to Southern California.

Dr. Goodall’s biggest influence on my life has been her refusal to see animals as simply instinct-driven, stimulus-response mechanisms, which has been the dominant view of many scientists since the overly reductionist Enlightenment scientist, Descartes, declared that animals had no real feelings, and his twentieth-century descendants, the behaviorists, led by B. F. Skinner, described them as little more than furry automatons. Goodall has proved that each chimp is a unique, sentient being, and other scientists have taken courage from her and have studied other animals, such as elephants, orangutans, gorillas, and wolves, proving that these creatures, too, exhibit individuality and personality. This encouraged me to go beyond just studying Wes, and to experience him as an authentic feeling, intelligent, and even spiritual individual. I was Wesley’s friend, not a superior observing a specimen. The emphasis on empiricism in behavioral biology often keeps us from seeing clearly, and may actually bias and block us from observing the very truths we seek.

Many scientists who will never be as famous as Dr. Goodall make important contributions to science through their own particular specialties, which can seem quite odd to laypeople—even odder than studying black widow spiders. For instance, one of my favorite professors at Occidental College spent his entire life studying the ovary of the Pacific surf perch. That was his passion. As he got ready to retire, I used to joke to him that he had spent his life studying the right ovary of the surf perch, and now he would be free to study the left ovary (they’re the same). When he did retire, he indeed moved to a house next to the ocean, set up a lab, and continued to study the ovary of the Pacific surf perch.

When I was a kid, my dad was friends with Richard Feynman before he’d won his Nobel Prize in physics. Always an iconoclast, Feynman never let anyone tell him how to act or behave. He would go to topless bars to sit there and do calculations on the tablecloth. He wasn’t there to look at naked girls; he just liked the ambiance. Even after he won the Nobel Prize, he didn’t let it go to his head but still taught freshman physics. He was so entertaining that he eventually wrote a popular science book that became an enormous bestseller, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and his lectures still sell to physics students worldwide. His ability to see clearly, without bias, enabled him to demonstrate memorably to Congress why the O-ring shattered and caused the tragic Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986.

Yet another physicist at Caltech insisted on working in the buff in his office. There was a picture in one of the hallways in the physics department of him sitting naked at his desk, taken tastefully from the side. I used to see a man striding across campus decked out in an authentic-looking court jester’s costume from the Middle Ages. He had the funny hat, striped bloomers, purple tights, and velvety purple shoes with the toe curling up over the top, decorated with a jingly bell. No one ever looked twice as he walked by. I don’t know who he was, but people treated him with respect.

When I returned to the big barnlike owl building after my chat with John, I noticed that the adolescent wild owls, the most unruly of the bunch, who were housed together in one large aviary, were particularly restless that day because of the Santa Ana winds. Hot, desiccating winds that come in from the desert, the Santa Anas fill the air with static electricity and generally irritate everyone, including animals. I decided to play some soothing music so I tuned the upstairs radio to a soft classical station. Then I went in to clean the adolescents’ aviary wearing a helmet, face shield, rubber boots, and my lab coat.

The birds finally settled down into their favorite perching areas and I started working. I didn’t notice that the music had changed until a soprano started screaming at the climax of some opera. Terrified, the owls flew around frantically as the singer’s voice topped out at the highest notes and the orchestra hit a sustained crescendo with crashing timpani. Dozens of owls were bumping into each other and smacking into me, tumbling to the ground. Several landed on me, then panicked even more when they realized they were standing on a human being. Some owls attacked me, hitting my shoulders and arms.

I slipped out the door and raced up the stairs to turn off the radio. The owls calmed down, some of them just sitting on the ground panting. I sat on the floor, weak in the knees, trembling and laughing a little hysterically, covered with dots of blood where the terrified owls had pierced my lab coat with their talons. I decided the place was clean enough for the day and finished up by feeding them, still shaking.

It was time for lunch, so I cleaned my wounds with a solution of iodine and went back to the office building. I avoided the cafeteria, aptly called “the Greasy.” Like others, I tended to bring lunch from home and join my colleagues around the conference room table exchanging stories. As we ate, tame owls flew in and out whenever they wanted, checking on their humans and each other. None ever interrupted us with a “Screamer,” the disciplinary letters that owls delivered to Hogwarts students in the Harry Potter books.

After lunch I hurried down the hall and almost ran into Steve. This is not something you’d want do to physically because Steve’s skin was infested with parasites. A member of the Caltech primate group, where I had worked before switching to the owl project, he studied owl monkeys, so named because they have faces like owls. Steve was a Jane Goodall–type field ethologist—a wild animal behavioral biologist—who went deep, deep into the Amazon jungle alone. Just getting there over land and by canoe took some six weeks. His research area was a dense swamp, so he would be up to his knees in water from the Amazon, which was a stew of parasites. All night, every night, he watched the owl monkeys up in the trees, which was not good for his neck. His boots would rot off his feet within the first month. After his boots rotted off, his feet rotted, too. Steve slowly became part of the jungle itself, a human host for the parasites and hangers-on that the Amazon had to offer.

I don’t know how long he was there, but it was a long time. Long enough to become kind of “Amazon-ed.” Changed. Altered by the experience. Not one of the regular folks anymore, if you know what I mean. He had a different outlook on life. Steve had so many different kinds of parasites that I hadn’t even heard of many of them (and I had studied quite a few). The most impressive was a creature that laid eggs right in his flesh. The worms that emerged from these eggs grew to maturity just under his skin. You’d be standing there trying to have a straightforward conversation with the guy with worms moving under his skin. Steve just left those worms alone until they were ready to “hatch” to the next level in their life cycle—in which they poked through his skin. He would know when they were ready because they would make the spot itch so that he would scratch and create a little opening for this fat 2-inch-long worm to crawl out. Sometimes the worm would poke its head out and when he tried to grab it, the thing would dodge back into the hole in his skin. So he had to almost catch them off guard. He did this quite matter-of-factly, as if everyone in the world had worms crawling out of his skin. To him it wasn’t an issue. No problem.

“Carry on, what were you saying now?” he’d say as he rummaged around for a jar. He’d save the worms he hatched for doctors who specialized in tropical diseases, to whom these worms were real treasures, appearing as they did right here in Southern California. A human petri dish, Steve had attracted a whole troupe of tropical disease specialists who were thrilled to have the opportunity to study him. Sharing their scientific curiosity, he was very cooperative.

Steve told me about another postdoc who was going to be heading off into the jungles soon.

“Once he gets his appendix out he’ll be good to go,” he said.

“He has appendicitis?” I asked.

“No, no,” he laughed. “Most people get their appendix out before going into remote areas, didn’t you know that? Think about it. What would happen if you were six weeks away from help and you got appendicitis? You’d die. It’s not worth the risk, so most people just have it out.”

There are an awful lot of people studying in the Amazon, and these are the chances they take. No one at their institutions or universities is checking up on them to see if they need anything or are still alive—just “he should reappear in about a year’s time, we think, but we have no idea where he is.” These field biologists are so fascinated by the creature they are studying that they devote everything to their science.

Another female friend studied a more “domestic science,” doing research at a medical center trying to develop a birth control pill for men. When they finally figure it out, we’ll all hear the announcement, “Scientists have discovered a birth control pill for men,” but almost no one will wonder or hear about who or what was actually involved in making this discovery.

My friend’s work entailed studying the attributes of sperm as it worked its way through a sort of assembly line in the factory that is the testicle. Each spermatozoon starts out as a nonspecific cell and goes through some fourteen or so distinct stages of development before actually becoming a sperm cell. The researchers were trying to find a way to interrupt this process so that the sperm cell would not fully mature. That’s the aim, but the actual work went like this:

Every day she was presented with a “bucket o’ balls,” the testicles of some of the John Does and other men who had donated their bodies to science. The first thing she did in the morning was empty the bucket into a large blender, much like the one you have at home for making smoothies. And that’s what she made: a testicle smoothie that she would then run through a machine that separated the developing sperm cells according to fourteen or so types. Then she took the fourteen or so sperm soups and studied them and the effects of experimental medications upon them.

Scientists often find themselves in the most extraordinary situations and want to tell people about them. Yet most nonscientists are easily grossed out or simply aren’t interested, which can be frustrating.

Let’s say that you are a married entomologist (such luck!), and your husband asks you to pick up the takeout order you placed. Off you go in the “good car,” which is a rare treat in itself, because you drive a clunker to work. (You simply cannot see why anyone would need anything more than a clunker, just to get from point A to point B, or to transport your boxes of insects.) Off you go.

You get to the restaurant and, outside, after you’ve picked up the food, you see the most amazing thing on the restaurant’s porch. To others, it would look like two bugs, but you see that it’s a fight between a carpenter ant and a fly. You stop to watch for just a little while. You drive home with the food and can’t wait to tell your mate the whole story. You’ve really built up a head of steam over this thing and you’re eager to describe every detail. You pull in and race into the house all excited.

Your mate is oddly cold and distant. He says, “Why did it take you two hours to pick up food from a restaurant one mile away?”

“Oh!” you answer. “Just listen to this. I saw the most extraordinary fight between a carpenter ant and a fly. I am not kidding you! I think it’s unprecedented. And you’re not going to believe this—the fly started it!”

“Just gimme the damn food,” he snaps, grabs it out of your hand, and stomps into the kitchen.

You hear cupboard doors slamming, silverware being thrown forcefully onto the table, the microwave whirring to reheat your dinner. You sense that you might not be able to tell your story until you get to work tomorrow with the other scientists, who will understand completely. You lie awake all night rehearsing and rehashing the incident in your mind, trying to make sure you get all the details right for when you tell the gang. They won’t roll their eyes.

And you are right. Not only do they share your enthusiasm, they press you for more details on exactly how did the ant come at the fly in the 123rd pass. Was it from the right? Did they appear to learn from trial and error? Was the fly on its back or did it rear up on its hind legs? How did each animal use its mouth parts, and to what end? How did they protect their antennae—pretty soon there are objects on the table and a group of scientists gathered around. This actually happened, by the way.

“Okay, now this eraser is the fly and the soda can is the ant…” The crowd around you grows as the news races throughout the offices.

“Go to the snack room! Someone is describing a fight between an ant and a fly. It’s unprecedented!”

The other scientists drop everything and sprint to the snack room. Arriving breathless, they ask, “What’d we miss?” and there’s a murmur as someone fills them in on what has happened so far. Excitement fills the room. You wonder why you don’t get this reaction at home. What is wrong with your mate?

 

VISITING BIOLOGISTS FROM all around the world would come to Caltech for a year or so to study our work. Some of them were from cultures that did not hold with our American habits of hygiene. You would think that with our lack of concern about guts and animal smells, biologists would not be sensitive to human odors, but for some reason this is not so. In our lab the line was drawn at not bathing. We may be able to dig maggots out of the flesh of a living rescued animal to save it, while enduring a stench that would cause most people to pass out, but we retch at the scent of an unbathed person. Even those of us who worked with monkeys in an atmosphere reeking of primate often could not stand the smell of a stinking human.

Ignorance of the actual dynamics of daily life can be bliss sometimes. Because we know chemistry and biology, we knew that when we smelled something, the molecules from the source of the smell had actually entered our noses and taken up residence on our receptors. So when we smelled a dirty person, this meant that some of his filthy molecules had actually gotten into our nasal passages. This bothered us. We didn’t want to know that person that well, and we certainly didn’t want his disgusting molecules in our nasal receptors.

Gagging coworkers finally put up a protest, and our boss elected one of the supervisors to give “the talk” whenever an unbathed individual reported for duty. The talk said, basically, that the rules of the lab were that you had to shower thoroughly each and every day without fail, including washing your hair, and you had to use soap. And you had to wear freshly washed clothing every day, whether your clothing from the day before looked clean or not (we had learned that if there was no actual dirt on a garment, some scientists would wear it forever without washing it) and that included underwear. The visiting scientist also had to brush his teeth and use a deodorant and antiperspirant daily.

Some of the visitors were quite taken aback by these rules, but our scientists remained steadfast in their insistence that these standards be laid out and enforced by management. A sheet with full hygiene instructions was given out to each scientist. This was groundbreaking stuff for some folks and it seemed outrageous to them. But we stood our ground.

After my encounter with Steve, who was very clean other than his parasitical hangers-on, I was quite happy to go up to the labs, where all the freshly scrubbed biologists were working, and do some microsurgery under the tutelage of my supervisor. It was a real privilege to be doing such leading-edge work, including many intricate procedures, for example, to inject a tiny finch egg with a microscopic glass needle using a foot-controlled microscope. We would insert monoclonal antibody tracers into the developing embryo so we could track later which neurological cells were developing at the time of the injection. With careful record keeping, we could see how the brain developed in the embryo at each stage. After inserting the tracers, we had to reseal the egg with a tiny drop of candle wax, all while managing not to kill the embryo inside. Then we returned the eggs to their nests where their parents hatched them and they led normal lives. In another delicate procedure, we had to sex the finches, since we were keeping breeding pairs. Sexing involved threading a microscopic optical filament between two tiny ribs to look down into the sex organ area, which is inside the abdomen near the diaphragm below the lungs, to see whether a finch had ovaries or testicles. We always used full anesthesia—of course—which necessitated learning another odd technique, mouth-to-beak-resuscitation.

Anesthesia on a very small bird is tricky, and if a bird were accidentally injected with too much, it would stop breathing; then you had to be able to breathe for the bird until the anesthesia wore off, which, thankfully, it did quickly. Whenever a finch died of natural causes we would practice this technique in order to perfect it in case we needed it for the live finches. Right…My mouth on a dead bird’s beak. Our motto was “No Waste, No Pain, No Harm,” and we interpreted the “No Waste” part to include getting some use out of the dead finch. The trick was to blow carefully so as not to burst the lungs. I am proud to say that I never have burst a lung of any animal, not even a dead finch. I don’t think we ever made an anesthesia mistake, but if we had, we were ready. That was Caltech—thorough.

We were also called upon to sex birds from other animal centers because our techniques were so advanced. If a zoo had an extremely endangered pair of ruffled toucans, for example, and they wanted to see if they were male and female so they could start breeding them, the caretakers came to us rather than to a vet. In those archaic days, twenty-some-odd years ago, vets would make a long incision and open up the bird like a book, killing it half the time, just to see what sex it was. Zoos and top breeders obviously preferred our microfilament techniques.

While absorbed in these procedures, my supervisor and I would chat about all kinds of things. One day, I decided to ask him if he knew other biologists whose work had affected their way of life.

“Oh, do I ever,” he said. “Soon after the vulture lab was attacked and those poor birds released, there was another attack on a facility that was doing research on childhood leukemia. It had taken ten years to breed a mouse that was crucial to the study, and all those mice were released. That means children will die because the results of this research will have to wait another decade.”

“That’s horrible,” I said.

“Yes. Scientists all over started getting worried about their own lab animals. A primatologist I know was so attached to his monkeys that he couldn’t bear the thought of any harm coming to them during the night. He tried sleeping in his lab every night, but that couldn’t last, so he started taking them home, one by one. Talk about a change in lifestyle. First, his very favorite monkey. Then another one that he just couldn’t stand to lose. Then it snowballed. The last time I visited this guy he had laid down a foot and a half of sawdust throughout his house and there were fourteen monkeys living freely in the home. You could smell the place from half a mile away.”

“What did the neighbors say?” I wondered.

“Fortunately, he lives way out in the country or he could never do this. The monkeys do have cages, but they’re not used except for time-out.”

“What’s time-out?” I asked.

“Well, the monkeys are like children, they’re so smart. And they love to torment his dogs by pulling their hair then leaping out of reach. The primatologist figured he’d have to teach them not to do this, so he established a rule where the monkey in trouble had to go sit in his cage for five minutes if he pulled the dogs’ hair.”

“Did it work?” I asked

“Only for a few days. Then the monkeys would just pull the dogs’ hair and go straight to their cage and sit for five minutes without being asked. They figured it was part of the routine. It was no deterrence whatsoever.” He laughed. “This guy has these monkeys sitting around the table in the morning eating toast and marmalade with the family.”

“I hope he doesn’t try to dress them up and make them act like humans,” I said.

“Oh, no, no, he’d never do that. They have a great life, and the dogs are there to guard the place so that no one will mess with his precious monkeys.”

“Wait—family? You mean he’s married?” I asked.

“Why, you want his phone number?”

“No, I’m just wondering if people ever do find someone who will put up with the way they live.”

“Oh, yeah, he’s married. She’s a primatologist, too.”

Aha. So that was the key. You had to marry someone just as weird as you were. Hmm.

After I finished my work with my supervisor, I wandered down the halls to check on some of the animals. Suddenly a closet door opened right in front of me, and a furry man walked out. He was what we called a “troll.” Unshaven, his beard and hair both reached his belt. He didn’t appear to notice me at all. He shuffled down the hall and disappeared into one of the bathrooms.

Theoretical mathematicians and physicists, trolls are ubiquitous at Caltech and go as far back into its history as anyone can remember. Caltech was built in the 1800s and was heated with steam that ran through a labyrinth of tunnels with all kinds of twists and turns. The steam and hot water pipes still run through the tunnels, making them warm in winter and comfortable in the summer. The trolls live deep in the labyrinth, rarely coming aboveground. That is their home and it’s okay with everyone. They receive grants and their meager style of living doesn’t cost much.

Each building has secret doors in certain closets that lead into the labyrinths so the trolls can go from building to building and use the locker rooms. People say Caltech is as close to Hogwarts as one can get in the real world, and I’d have to agree. I’ve been down in those tunnels, and as I walked through the darkness, I’d occasionally come upon a bluish glow, the computer screen of a troll. Next to the computer screen, in a small alcove, would be a twin bed, some blankets, piles of books and papers, and the computer. That was it. Some of them live their entire lives this way. Productive genius theoreticians, they tend to keep to themselves and publish their work. Some of them clearly have what’s now referred to as Asperger syndrome, a mild form of functional autism, but they are happy in their secret cubbyholes, doing calculations and making discoveries. After all, theoretical scientists do not require a lab—only a piece of paper, a pencil, and a fantastic brain.

 

MY WORKDAY OVER, I hit the LA traffic once more. Home at last, I was greeted by the usual chorus of geese and horses. Wendy was in the living room, playing her guitar, working on a song. Annie was drawing a crayon project on a big sketch pad. Omar, Wendy’s umbrella cockatoo, sat on the back of a chair and bobbed his head to the beat, occasionally screaming, his idea of singing along.

As soon as Wesley heard my voice, he screeched and I went straight to him, as I always did, kissed him on the beak, cuddled a few minutes, then let him off his perch to play.

I had gotten several cages of Syrian ground squirrels, better known as teddy bear hamsters, after the disaster with the finches. The hamsters were much larger than finches and Wesley didn’t see them as prey. In fact, he seemed to be entertained, seeing them as a sort of “owl television” brought in solely for his viewing pleasure. He didn’t even appear to mind my playing with them. He assigned himself as their guard and would screech to let me know if one somehow escaped its cage, so I would immediately come put it back in. As surprising as it was, we coexisted quite well. I needed multiple animals around me and loved the sound of Wesley and all the hamsters playing at night. The room thrummed with life and I felt like I was sleeping in a forest instead of a suburban bedroom.

Stacey kissing Wesley; Wesley nervous about the photographer. Connie Fossa.

That night, I stayed up late reading, and just before retiring checked the hamsters. One of them seemed to have died. Wait, she was just “mostly dead”—she wasn’t breathing but still had an occasional heartbeat—maybe one per thirty seconds. Her temperature was normal, which meant she wasn’t going into a dormant, or hibernating, state. I checked her air passage and it was clear, so, holding her in my right hand, her tongue out and secured by my thumb, I started doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Wesley watched all of this quite calmly from his perch, where he was tethered.

Still breathing for the hamster, I ran with her into the kitchen, scribbled a note for Wendy, leapt into my car, and sped down the freeway toward an all-night exotic animal hospital forty-five minutes away, hamster in one hand, driving with the other. I started compressions with my right fingers, since her heart was barely beating and I needed to get the oxygen into her organs. I’d covered her entire face with my mouth, doing tiny puffs, peering over the wheel. Thank God for all the practice on finches.

I was weaving like a drunk driver, trying to focus on the hamster, the car, and drive with one hand, but there was no one on the road at 3:00 a.m. so I wasn’t too worried. But suddenly I noticed lights and sirens behind me. Unbelievable. The second cop of the day. I had become a menace to society.

I stopped, rolled down the window, continuing resuscitation, and one of the two officers who’d come up to the car said, “Do you know you’re driving like you’re drunk?”

“Yeah, I realize that [puff puff]. I’m sorry [puff puff]. I’m doing CPR on a [puff puff] hamster and trying to get her to the all-night animal hospital!”

“You’re what?”

Out came the flashlights. Seeing the hamster lying belly up in my hand, her head back, tongue out and held down by my thumb, they leaned into the car and watched as I did compressions and mouth to mouth. The cop hit the hood of my car.

“Go go go! I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire career! If that doesn’t—”

I didn’t hear the rest of what he said because I was already speeding down the freeway again. When I got to the hospital my hamster was in a seizure-induced coma of some kind. I continued resuscitation for a full hour until she cough, cough, coughed and started breathing on her own. She lived a long, productive life afterward. The vet there couldn’t believe it. “Where the heck did you learn to do that?” he asked.

Well, I’m a biologist at this lab at Caltech…