Taking the Leap

 My interest in pharmacology was born on the beaches of Manabí, Ecuador.  I was staying in a family-run inn outside of the tiny town of Canoa, the type of place that encouraged lively dinner discussions among its guests.  One evening, my friend Jenny and I ate with a family from Atlanta. 

            “What are you studying?”  The mother asked me.

            “Chemistry,” I replied.

            “Do you want to go to medical school?”  She asked.

            “No,” I answered, “I’ve heard medical school is pretty intense.  I don’t think I’d like it much.”

            The two adults exchanged knowing, quietly amused looks. 

            “So, what do you two do?”  Jenny asked them.

            “I do clinical trials on new tuberculosis drugs for the CDC, and Joyce is an internist,” the father explained.

            Prior to the conversation this exchange sparked, I had associated TB with the 19^th century, or with the poorest parts of Africa.  The World Health Organization estimates that 1/3 of the world’s population, approximately 2 billion people, are infected with the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, and that 10% of these people will develop an active case of the disease in their lifetime.  I learned about the global implications of infectious diseases like TB and malaria, the challenges of treating these diseases when drug mismanagement causes the bacteria to develop antibiotic resistance, and the massive amount of manpower necessary to develop new pharmaceuticals.  "There are tons of opportunities to get involved in pharmacology as a basic scientist.  For every drug that makes it as far as a clinical trial, there are probably 100 or more that don't," the doctor told me.  Somehow I found that statement comforting instead of ominous: a sign that the work was challenging and important and--hey--job security!  I had yet to take an organic chemistry course.

            I found my sophomore-level study of organic chemistry moderately traumatizing.  It is a methodical shifting of lines, dots, and arrows from one complicated configuration to an equally abstract one.  As I looked at a page of reaction mechanisms, my mind would start to deconstruct the tidy rows of hexagons and sharp angles into a swirling mass of simple shapes.  Soon, they would undergo a surrealist transformation, smearing and splattering across the paper as rounded, newly formed objects that vaguely resembled my homework assignment.   

            Every week I would sit down with my textbook, open it to the most recently assigned chapter, and read the opening remarks with great enthusiasm.  Then I would turn the page, and the figures and diagrams would immediately leap into their familiar tailspin. Sometimes this struggle with my homework would make me nervy and upset.  Other times I would just fall asleep and drool on the book.  My high school chemistry teacher once told our class that organic chemists had an unusually high suicide rate, and suggested it might be because, upon seeing the infinite possibilities wrapped up in something as simple as carbon, they were eventually driven to madness.  Personally, I chose muddling through the class over making that leap into the infinite.  Just like that, a dream died.  It was probably for the best that I killed it so young, considering how weak my spatial intelligence is compared to my verbal intelligence.  Before my high school foreign exchange to the Czech Republic, I remember whining to my father that I was absolutely sure I could never learn to speak the language.  "You'll learn to speak Czech," he told me.  "Either that, or you'll learn to read a map and develop a sense of direction."  I learned to speak Czech. 

            When I started doing research at the University of Wyoming, I learned that it wouldn't be quite that easy to give up on o-chem, because all synthetic chemistry involves organic chemistry.  Though I was working in an inorganic lab, the most involved portion of my project was the development of organic molecules to attach to my metal salts.  When I turned in my first progress report, there was a long section detailing two different synthetic routes I had tried to use to make a single organic ligand.  Both had failed, so I included a few sentences describing what I might do to salvage those experiments.  I never finished that compound.  

            When I started writing applications for summer research programs, I put a lot of time and effort into it.   I had never written a college admissions essay, but some of the cover letters I sent away with those summer applications went through many drafts.  The only program I was considering that mentioned the words organic chemistry was, of course, located abroad.  I completed that particular application quickly, almost as an afterthought.  After all, I was no organic chemist, and my transcripts reflected that.  The Thai Research Experience for Undergraduates, run by the University of California-Santa Cruz, was the first program to respond to my application.  When the program director called to offer me the position, I told her I was honored to have been selected.  “Well, you had a very strong application,” she told me.  “You should be very proud of the work you’ve done.  You’ve got an excellent transcript… in everything except organic chemistry, strangely enough.” 

            Since she was correct, I was genuinely confused.  I wanted to ask, ‘Then why are you offering me this job?’  Luckily, I just said, “Yeah, funny, huh?”  I took the offer, and learned that I would be working in a research institute that studied natural products, including traditional Thai medicinal plants, and used the biologically active ingredients to try to design new drugs to combat malaria, HIV, and cancer.  Just like that, an impossible, half-baked dream was revived.

            In truth, I knew about as much about Thailand as I did organic chemistry.  I’d seen The King and I, both the Yul Brynner and the Jodie Foster versions, the latter more than once.  I had heard that the film had been banned in Thailand, because it is a crime to speak ill of the royal family.  My mind had trouble wrapping itself around the idea that any country could be so archaic as to ban a movie for speaking ill of the king in the happenin’ year of 1999.  Personally, I was so disturbed and fascinated by the grace and brutality of the scene depicting the beheading of a young slave that I do not remember any details about how King Mongkrut was portrayed.  He remained a background character to me. 

            I did not know that this monarch, who has sometimes been described as backward by Europeans and Americans, was one of the most influential figures in modern Thai history, and the primary reason that Thailand was the only country in the region never colonized by Europeans. I didn’t know that one of the kow-towing children from the film, Chulalongkorn, would eventually have one of the nation’s most prestigious universities named after him. Of course, I also didn’t know that speaking ill of the king could result in a three to ten year prison sentence, or that stepping on a dropped banknote to keep it from blowing away in the wind is considered disrespectful, because the money bears the king’s image.

            I had only had one other brush with Thailand.  One of my aunts had visited Bangkok and Chiang Mai in the late 1980’s.  She brought me a silk fan with a pair of hand-painted birds on it.  That fan has been hanging on my wall for as long as I can remember, though I’m not really sure why.  I don’t have any strong attachment to it.  The shape of the birds is reminiscent of old-school, rockabilly swallow tattoos.  Maybe I was a sailor in a past life, and those swallows were calling me to return to their homeland. 

            I thought I knew what I was getting into, even if I didn’t have a clue where I was going or what I would be doing.  After all, I’m jaded and experienced and I had traveled alone on three continents before turning twenty.  I had navigated Prague without getting robbed.  I had survived eight-hour South American bus trips without throwing up.  Maybe I didn’t know the first thing about Asia, but what could it possibly throw at me that I hadn’t seen before?

            A dress code.  The email came months before I was set to leave: Asia reaching out to throttle me for copping an attitude.  Since the Chulabhorn Research Institute is presided over by its namesake and founder, Her Royal Highness Dr. Chulabhorn Walailak, youngest daughter of the Thai king, a strict dress code is enforced.  Men are required to wear collared shirts and dress pants (no jeans), and women are required to wear sleeved blouses and skirts (no options).  When I read that email, I owned one skirt and two or three tops that could be qualified as a “sleeved blouse,” although the wording made me cringe a little. 

            Science doesn’t have a dress code!  It was one of the things I’d been counting on since choosing my major.  Scientists aren’t required to match.  Scientists wear tie-dyed lab coats!  Scientists wear acid-wash jeans that they make themselves, in the lab, by accident.  “You’re going into the right field for someone with your fashion sense, Jordan,” my father once advised me.  “You’ve gotta get yourself a button-down shirt to wear when you accept your Nobel Prize, and the rest of the time you can look however you want.”  I was banking on that.  So is my friend who plans to get a large tattoo across her neck.  We both figure, if the research is solid, who cares what you look like while you’re spilling concentrated acid on your pants?  The princess of Thailand cares, apparently.

            I spent three or four—or maybe fifteen—minutes cursing my fate.  I’d gotten other internship offers.  I could have spent the summer doing something less scary than organic chemistry at a fancy school in a big city.  I could have gotten away from Wyoming for the summer and broadened my horizons without signing up to wear a skirt to work every day for three months.  I wanted to complain or challenge the dress code or refuse to go.  Then, somewhere around minute sixteen, I realized how petty I was being.  I’d gotten myself an impossibly good deal: the program was buying me a plane ticket to Asia, introducing me to locals, and giving me more spending money than I could possibly spend in a single summer while living in the land of one-dollar calamari dinners.  All I had to do in return was show up to work from 9 to 5, write a report, and give a set of three twenty-minute presentations.  Surely I could do it wearing a skirt.

            It was perhaps the first paradox of my trip: landing this research position in the hard sciences had also earned me the costume of a 1950’s housewife.  I was a bit surprised.  I was willing to give up something I always considered a basic personal freedom, the right to dress myself as I pleased, for the chance to do research in a field that I’d already decided was too subtle and intricate to suit my tastes.  All this for a free plane ticket to a place I knew nothing about. 

            I figured I had better start the trip with a clean slate.  I gathered up every notion and assumption I had been formulating, both about Thailand and about myself, and tossed them.  This was a whole new beast, one that my previous experiences and perceptions could not tame.  I left the States with an open mind and an empty agenda.

            What I found in Bangkok was a laundry list of paradoxes.  I wanted to label the country as a friendly place.  Its self-given nickname, “Land of Smile,” seemed stunningly appropriate, given the warmth and politeness of the local people.  I can’t quite reconcile that image with the national sport, though.  Muay thai boxing is incredibly bloody, and both the athletes and the spectators in the betting section exude aggression and hostility.  Of course, boxing matches are nothing compared to the underground fights of which I heard whispered rumors, where young men supposedly chase each other around with chainsaws. 

Thailand represents thousands of years of uninterrupted cultural development, but its capital is completely modernized.  Although most of Thailand has not been industrialized, you can buy anything in Bangkok, from Dr. Pepper to Chinese gold to tiger cubs, if you know where to look.  There are temples in the parking lots of shopping malls.  At the major tourist sites, there are orange-clad monks snapping pictures with their camera phones.  Imposing, intricate structures commemorate the most simple principles of Buddhism.  This is a nation where outward displays of anger and emotion are simply not tolerated, but where homosexuality and transgenderism are practically mainstream.  A sex-change operation can be obtained for as little as1600 USD, and I learned that from a large advertisement in a widely-circulated English-language newspaper I picked up in Starbucks.  Then there are those pesky royals: no one has anything critical to say about them, but even if they did, they would never dare to say it.  Basically, any conclusion or generalization that I tried to make about Thailand was contradicted before the thought had even finished forming. 

Why am I surprised, given that I cannot consider myself an expert on the culture I have lived in for 22 years, that a summer was too short a time to become an authority on either Thai or scientific culture?  I have no great epiphanies to share, only humble and humbling observations. I have more questions than answers, more problems than solutions.  I set out to discover and conquer the whole world, and instead I came back less sure about the things I thought I knew. In one respect, I suppose, this is a sign that I am well on my way to becoming a good researcher.