) and head out.
“You excited?” I ask Rocío when I pick her up.
She stares at me darkly and says, “In France, the guillotine was used as recently as 1977.” I take it as an invitation to shut up, and I do, smiling like an idiot. I’m still smiling when we get our NASA ID pictures taken and when we later meet up with Guy for a formal tour. It’s a smile fueled by positive energy and hope. A smile that says, “I’m going to rock this project” and
“Watch me stimulate your brain” and “I’m going to make neuroscience my bitch.”
A smile that falters when Guy swipes his badge to unlock yet another empty room.
“And here’s where the transcranial magnetic stimulation device will be,”
he says—just another variation of the same sentence I’ve heard over. And over. And over.
“Here is where the electroencephalography lab will be.”
“Here you’ll do participant intake once the Review Board approves the project.”
“Here will be the testing room you asked for.”
Just a lot of rooms that will be, but aren’t yet. Even though communications between NASA and NIH indicated that everything needed to carry out the study would be here when I started.
I try to keep on smiling. It’s hopefully just a delay. Besides, when Dr. Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1903, she didn’t even have a proper lab, and did all of her research out of a converted shed. Science, I tell myself in my inner Jeff Goldblum voice, finds a way.
Then Guy opens the last room and says, “And here’s the office you two will share. Your computer should arrive soon.” That is when my smile turns into a frown.
It’s nice, the office. Large and bright, with refreshingly not-rusted-through desks and chairs that will provide just the right amount of lumbar support. And yet.
First of all, it’s as distant from the engineering labs as possible. I’m not kidding: if someone grabbed a protractor and solved for x (i.e., the point that’s farthest from Levi’s office), they’d find that x = my desk. So much for interdisciplinary workspaces and collaborative layouts. But that’s almost secondary, because . . .
“Did you say computer? Singular?” Rocío looks horrified.
“Like . . . one?”
Guy nods. “The one you put on your list.”
“We need, like, ten computers for the type of data processing we do,”
she points out. “We’re talking multivariate statistics. Independent component analysis. Multidimensional scaling and recursive partitioning. Six sigma—”
“So you need more?”
“At the very least, buy us an abacus.”
Guy blinks, confused. “. . . A what?”
“We put five computers on our list,” I interject with a side look at Rocío.
“We will need all of them.”
“Okay.” He nods, taking out his phone. “I’ll make a note to tell Levi. We’re heading to meet him right now. Follow me.”
My heartbeat accelerates—probably because the last time I saw Levi my brain confabulated that he was carrying me An Officer and a Gentleman–
style, and the previous came on the tail of a year of him treating me like I’m a tax auditor. I’m nervously playing with my grandmother’s ring and wondering what disaster of galactic proportions this next meeting has in store for me, when something catches my eye through the glass wall.
Guy notices. “Want a sneak peek at the helmet prototype?” he asks.
My eyes widen. “Is that what’s in there?”
He nods and smiles. “Just the shell for now, but I can show you.”
“That would be amazing,” I gasp. Embarrassing, how breathless I sound when I get excited. I need to follow through with my Couch-to-5K plans.
The lab is much larger than I expected—dozens of benches, machines I’ve never seen before pressed against the wall, and several researchers at various stations. I feel a frisson of resentment—how come Levi’s lab, unlike mine, is fully stocked?—but it quiets down the instant I see it.
It.
BLINK is a complex, delicate, high-stakes project, but its mission is straightforward enough: to use what is known about magnetic stimulation of the brain (my jam) to engineer special helmets (Levi’s expertise) that will reduce the “attentional blinks” of astronauts—those little lapses in awareness that are unavoidable when many things happen at once. It’s the culmination of decades of gathering knowledge, of engineers perfecting wireless stimulation technology on one side and neuroscientists mapping the brain on the other. Now, here we are.
Neuroscience and engineering, sitting in a very expensive tree called BLINK, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
It’s hard to communicate how groundbreaking this is— two separate slices of abstract research bridging the gap between academia and the real world. For any scientist, the prospect would be exhilarating. For me, after
the mild shitshow my career has put up in the past couple of years, it’s a dream come true.
All the more now that I’m standing in front of tangible proof of said dream’s existence.
“That’s the . . . ?”
