This week we’re being the opposite of overachievers and re-running some classic Story Collider stories. In this week’s episode, both our storytellers are dedicated to going the extra mile for science.
Part 1: As a new, super competitive, graduate student Aditi Nadkarni thinks she has the perfect way to impress her advisor and labmates ... until one night it spirals a tiny bit out of control.
Dr Aditi Nadkarni is a biomedical scientist, market research and business strategy consultant, artist and storyteller who is passionate about science awareness, human and civil rights, access to education and bridging disparities in healthcare.
This story originally aired on July 28, 2013.
Part 2: While completing a community service requirement in high school, comedian Wyatt Cenac puts a drunk driving simulation to the test.
Wyatt Cenac is a comedian and a former correspondent on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” He has also released multiple standup specials, most recently on Netflix, and appeared on film and TV. He regularly hosts a standup evening in Brooklyn called “Night Train with Wyatt Cenac.” Follow him on Twitter @wyattcenac.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
Before I tell you the incident that I'm going to describe today, let me tell you a little about myself so it would help to know why this sort of shit happens to me.
If you haven't noticed, I'm Indian. That's part of the explanation. But, also, being an Indian, you have 1.5 billion people who are very willing to replace you if you don't prove your worth. So that makes all of us very competitive, sometimes in situations where you don't need to be competitive.
Like, for example, I'll very rarely go to the gym. But when I do, I'm always like on the elliptical, looking over my shoulder at the level that the other person is on and then I'll go one level up. It helps if they're old and unfit. So that's it.
This used to be much worse. About ten years ago when I was a graduate student and I was fresh off the boat from India, I didn't know a whole lot about working in a research lab. I had just joined this very competitive lab. I wanted to prove a point. I wanted to show everybody that, hey, I deserve this. I deserve to be part of this lab.
And this was not easy because there was a senior graduate student. His name from now on I will refer to him as The Phil. Phil the Great was quite a bit of competition. He was a senior graduate student. He had identified a gene, a new gene, and he had characterized its function. it basically means it was a big deal.
And he had just been interviewed, the week that I got accepted into this lab he had just been interviewed by Toledo Blade. It was Toledo, Ohio. And Toledo Blade is a big thing in Toledo, Ohio. Just take my word for it.
So he was interviewed by the Toledo Blade and The Phil was the talk of the town. Everybody at University of Toledo was like, “Oh, my God. The Phil got into the newspaper.”
I wanted to be in the newspaper. I was a fresh graduate student and I didn't know anything, but I still wanted to be famous and be known. I was just this newbie and everybody was just trying to get me out of the way or watching over my shoulder making sure I wasn't electrocuting myself or something.
One day, I decided I'm going to do something. I have to start my own project. And so I decided I'm going to take the gene that Phil made and make a mutation in it and then see what happens to that gene. It's the elliptical all over again and I just one up.
So I decided, okay. And, you know, if you tell somebody who has even a year of experience working in a genetics lab, they'll say, “Oh, that's easy. Take some genetic material drawn on PCR, make a mutation.”
But to a fresh graduate student, this seemed like a big thing. Like it was a big plan. I thought I was a genius to have come up with it.
But I wanted to keep this whole thing a secret so I started working after hours, which is like after six. Everybody used to be gone and stuff, but I was very excited about this project.
Aditi Nadkarni in the lab. Photo courtesy of Aditi Nadkarni.
Now, when this particular incident happened, that was the day that it was a pretty big milestone for my experiment. I knew I had gotten the mutation but I needed to check it. And in order to check, it I had to put it into bacteria and then take those bacteria and grow them on plates.
Now, if the mutation was there, the bacteria would grow in colonies on the plate the next day. So all I needed to do, all that stood between me and that mutation was plating those things on the plate.
And I was working after hours. It was about midnight. I hadn't eaten anything. I was excited and sometimes the excitement blends with the hypoglycemia. It does. It really does. In science, it happens a lot.
So I was working. I was so excited. I forgot that all I'd had was cereal for breakfast and hadn't eaten anything. So in order to do this, what you do is you have a Bunsen burner. Make sure it's sterile so that the other naughty bacteria don't grow on your plate instead of your bacteria. And you have this beaker of alcohol in which you dip the spreader and then you run it through a flame and then you spread your bacteria. Pretty simple, right?
Well, I got everything started. I chose a nice area, put a Bunsen burner, took my beaker, but I was hypoglycemic. So instead of dipping the glass rod into the beaker of alcohol and flaming it, I flamed it and then dipped it into the alcohol.
And just like that, like one splinter of glass hit that beaker of alcohol, and it was a monstrous beaker. In hindsight, I don't know why I needed such a big beaker just to… but, you know, I used a big beaker. It was suddenly in flames. And this big, orange flame just was standing in front of me.
You know how there is this moment where you are like, “I'm not a genius. I'm an idiot. Just save me.” That was my moment.
It was awful. Suddenly, I realized this was midnight. Nobody's here. There's a beaker on fire and I realized that I had not chosen a very good area to do this because there were electrical wires everywhere. And there was a live gas line and there were papers hanging. It was a very old biomedical lab. You have like papers hanging from everywhere and then this big flame trying to light everything up.
If I were not hypoglycemic, maybe I would have picked something heavy, you know, like a glass plate, and put it on the beaker and it would have been gone, but I just couldn't think of anything. And I was so hungry that I was thinking of doughnuts and I was thinking of the fire and I just didn't know what was going on. And I didn't want to die in a beaker fire. Who wants that, right? But I couldn't just leave with the beaker on fire.
So I went to the phone, the lab phone, and I dialed the emergency phone. I can't remember what I said. There was like this flood of words in a very thick Indian accent. I was like, “There's a beaker that's on fire.”
And she said, “Do you want me to call Code Orange?”
I was like, “Oh, I don't know what Code Orange is.” I was like, “Okay, okay. Fine.” And my eyes were on the beaker so I hung up and went to the beaker and started like moving papers away and moving the wires away. I tried touching the beaker, which was stupid. I burned my fingers. And then I backed off because I realized how dangerous the situation was.
And I don't know. It seemed like it must have been 20 seconds, but it was probably more than that. Suddenly, half a dozen firemen dressed in like complete gear— I mean, to somebody from India, they look like astronauts. They were wearing masks and they had hoses and stuff. And there's a beaker with a fire.
I was like, “Oh, my God,” and they were like, “Ma'am, we need you to get out of the way.”
So I tried to move but I wanted to say, “It's just a beaker fire,” but they were trying to ignore me and I felt pretty stupid for having done this.
So they were like, “Ma’am, ma'am, you need to get away. What are the contents of this beaker?”
I don't know if you've noticed this like law enforcement and people who are in control they use this unnecessarily formal terminology. “What are the contents of this beaker?” And when somebody says that, you forget what's in the beaker. So it happened to me.
So I said something which was between ethanol and ethyl alcohol. He looked at me stammering and he is talking into this radio and he goes, “There is an unidentified chemical in the beaker.”
And I was like, “No, no. It's not. I will identify it.”
At that point, they're just like shushing me and moving me away.
And then they wear these thick gloves that they have and they pick the beaker up and they take it and put it in the middle of the hallway. And then they convene and are talking to each other what to do about this unidentified chemical fire.
Now that it's in the middle of the hallway, it looks like an aromatherapy candle because there's nothing around it. It's not going to do anything.
So I'm looking at it and I'm like, “Okay, I'm okay now. I'm fine.’
Suddenly, I'm like, “Oh, the glass cabinet. That's going to have the glass plate.”
So while these people, the officers, are talking, I go to the glass cabinet, take a glass plate and I run and put it on the beaker and the fire is gone. And the firemen are just like, “Oh, okay.”
And there is this one guy who is with them but he seems like he is dressed in pajamas and he's like taking notes. I assumed it was a safety officer. I mean, he's taking notes. He asked me, “What's your name, ma'am?’
I gave him my name. He wrote down the name of the lab and, “What were you working on?” And so he wrote all that down. And just as soon as they had arrived, they were gone.
I went into the coffee room and stole somebody's protein bar and then I felt better. I mean not about stealing but just having eaten I felt better.
Then I came back and then, again, I was in my mutant gene mode. So I did what I was supposed to do. I plated everything, put it into the incubator and then went home. And I said to myself, “You know, if there are colonies on the plate tomorrow, none of this shit is going to matter. I don't have to tell anybody about this. I mean why does anyone have to know about this? The fire is gone. Nobody died.”
The next morning when I wake up, I'm all about the colonies. I'm thinking, “Oh, do I have colonies? Maybe I have my mutant gene.”
So I go to lab really excited. And on the way to the lab, I stop at the incubator and there were colonies. Beautiful, sexy, fat, plump colonies. As far as colonies go, flat and plump is sexy.
And then as I'm going to my lab to announce to my boss that you know I did this, I see that there is this little crowd of people gathered at the entrance of my lab. And I was like, “Maybe they saw the colonies too.” Because at this point, I'm just thinking of my own genius, right?
So I go and Doug is standing there, Doug, my advisor. And he is laughing so hard that he has tears coming down his eyes. I was like, “Maybe he's just happy that I got a mutant gene.”
He looks at me and I go, “Did you see them?”
And Doug goes, “Yes, I saw.”
And I was like, “Isn't it amazing?”
And he was like, “Really? Why is it amazing?”
I look confused and I realize from the corner of my eye that there is this roll of paper that's being passed around and all these other people in a crowd and I start to figure out that maybe they're all not happy about my colonies.
So I look around and Doug goes, “Oh, my God. She has no idea.”
I was like, “No idea about what?”
He takes the newspaper and hands it to me. And among the headlines of the Toledo Blade it says, “Campus Officer Extinguishes Beaker Fire.”
I look at the article and I say to myself, “I really hope my name isn't in there.” And my name was in there. I was humiliated. And it said there that I was doing this at midnight. It explained exactly what I was doing.
And, upon reading this, I had to save face. The competitive edge was still there. So I go, “He did not extinguish it. I did. I put the glass plate on it. They were talking about someone…”
And they just laughed. They laughed. They were like, “Really, it's not even about that. Your name is in the paper.”
So I became pretty famous for this because I set fire to a beaker. They named me Pyro Aditi. That was my gangster name. And then they invited me to the university's safety class. I was a keynote speaker at their safety class. That was nice. I mean that's pretty important, right?
Anyways, but, you know, there's a positive spin on this. The colonies that I told you about, that funded my grant and got me my PhD. I mean I deserved the PhD, even though I set fire to a beaker.
But just for your entertainment I'm going to tell you this. If you go to Toledo Blade website and you search my name, it comes up. So have fun with that. Thanks.
Part 2
I grew up in Texas, which, for those of you who don't know, Texas is one of those states that gets to determine what your children's textbooks are like. It's true. So now, if you open your kids’ textbook and there's something in there about intelligent design, you're welcome.
Intelligent design it's in textbooks now and that's such a strange thing because I feel like it invalidates all the work of talented paleontologists like William Hanna and Joseph Barbera through their work with The Flintstones, realize that dinosaurs don't talk. Well, Brontosauruses don't talk. Other dinosaurs, a Pterodactyl that's also a lamp can talk but not Dino.
Which before any of you write in and say, “Hold on a second. Dino wasn't a Brontosaurus. He was a Snorkasaurus.” That's true, but the taxonomy is basically the same.
Wyatt Cenac shares his story at The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at WNYC in New York on May 10, 2016.
I'll just say I grew up in Texas and science was not one of those big things for me. My high school science wasn't that big of a deal. We had biology class and we learned how to dissect a frog to use it for meat. And we had chemistry where we learned the compounds of the periodic table that we might need to use if we wanted to make our own ammunition.
But, for the most part, science wasn't that big of a deal. That's not to say that Texas people don't care about science or even that at my high school we didn't care about science. We did. My high school, it was a progressive place in its own way and I learned a lot. It was actually in high school where I learned that sexuality is a fluid concept.
I went to a Catholic all-boys’ high school and a priest taught me that. Oh, not just me. He taught a whole classroom of boys. He was my English teacher. Still not…
Here's the thing. So I had an English teacher who, one day, decided to explain to us that sexuality it's fluid and that there is a spectrum. He said people aren't just gay or straight. It's not as cut and dry as that. It's a spectrum and to think about it as like a scale from one to ten. And say one might be all the way gay and ten might be all the way straight. He said most people fall somewhere in the middle there.
And he said a seven might be if you were, say, sitting on the toilet and decided to stick your finger up your own butt. This is a real thing he said.
I'm sure there are some of you right now that are thinking, “Well, wait. If that's a seven, what's your eight and nine?"
For me in that moment, I was thinking, “Wait a minute. I've been to masses where you were handing out communion. And I also don't know what this has to do with the James Joyce book we were reading.”
So my high school, not the most science‑heavy high school. We were more into service. That was one of those things that graduate high school we all had to complete 40 hours of community service, which is kind of a nice thing to do at an all‑boys’ Catholic prep school. It's a nice way to give back to the community but it's also a nice way to prepare your students for the day that they get arrested for a fraternity prank gone wrong, which is going to happen.
Wyatt Cenac shares his story at The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at WNYC in New York on May 10, 2016.
So we all had to do community service. I remember they gave us this list of different places that you could choose to serve at. There are places like soup kitchens and old folks’ homes. And, full disclosure, I did not want to do any of that because I was 17 and I was selfish, but I also felt like I live in Texas. I don't know why we're serving hot soup to people in a place that's already hot. And I don't want to go work at an old folks’ home and read to old ladies because that feels a little like Driving Miss Daisy cosplay.
I just wasn't into it and I had to find something. And I found one thing on this list, and it was a huge list and I found one thing. I was like, “Oh, okay. This one is for me. This is the thing I want to do because I've fancied myself a man of reason.”
It was a place of science that was on this list. And I knew it was a place of science because it was called The Science Place. I wasn't sure what The Science Place was. I really hoped that it was maybe a lab where I could work with a scientist that maybe everyone else had just kind of written off as mad, but I knew they were just driven. And then maybe I could work with that scientist. Maybe work on some experiments. Maybe I bring a bag of spiders and we have a lab accident and I become the Incredible Hulk.
And you might be saying, “Hold on a second, Wyatt. What do spiders have to do with becoming the Hulk?” Look, I'm not the scientist. I was just a kid who made a bad investment on some spiders.
The Science Place was not a laboratory. It was a children's museum. And given what I told you about Texas and how we're helping your textbooks, you should know The Science Place, it was not a fancy museum. It was a rinky‑dink little place that had some geodes and then a bunch of animatronic dinosaurs that didn't really work all the time, so much so that when we would have to explain to children, we would say, “Well, when the dinosaurs went extinct, so too did the technicians,” and make the Tyrannosaurus rex's head move.
So we were there and so we had to give tours. We had to give tours at The Science Place and I was mainly stationed in the health sciences room. And the health sciences room was just a room dedicated to teaching children the dangers of drugs and alcohol. They would do that, they just had a bunch of photos around of like what your lungs look like and then what your lungs would look like if you were smoking and like cirrhosis of the liver and all great things to send an eight-year-old home thinking about.
So that was mainly what was there, but the one centerpiece, there was a driving simulator. And the driving simulator, it was a simulator to show you how you would drive if you were drunk.
To a 17‑year‑old, I didn't see it as much as a simulator as I saw it as a video game because, the way it would work, you would get in and you would get in the car and then you would punch in your gender and your height and your weight and then, before you started driving they would ask you like how many beers would you like.
So you put in a number and then it asked you, “Would you like some harder alcohol?” You put in a number and it'd kind of show you what you could choose from. I was like, “How about some weed, some coke,” which I don't know how eight-year-olds knew all about that but everything about it seemed like a setup to me.
So you put all this stuff in and then you get to drive and then, depending on how drunk or high you are, it affects how the wheel moves. Like the wheel will get loose and then it'll get like really stiff and the brakes won't work sometimes. And sometimes you put on the gas and it'll just floor it. You really have to work really hard and pay attention so that you don't crash.
And the moment that you would crash, the screen would just flash at you and you would get reprimanded with this message about the dangers of drinking and driving. That would happen any time you crashed, whether you crashed after a minute or whether you crashed after an hour, which I kind of feel like if you did it for an hour, I feel like you shouldn't get a reprimand. You should get just like a, “Wow. We got lucky. Let's not do that again. Also, let's maybe not drink so far away from home.”
And that was the thing. No matter how long you drove, like the idea was to get home but you never got home. So I started to wonder could you get home? Can you win this game? Is there like a kill screen where you don't get killed? Like a videogame version of a kill screen.
So now, this became my experiment. And week after week, instead of helping children, I would climb into the simulator and I would try to see if I could beat it. I started out and I was like, “You know what? What I'll do is I'll be the biggest person I can be. I'll be a seven‑foot tall man, a seven‑foot tall heavyset man and I'll just have one beer. Let's see what I can do.”
I was like, “Could I drive for five minutes?” And I could drive for five minutes. I could drive for ten. I'd do 10, 15, 20. I could drive for a really long time. And then I never got anywhere.
And you can't just pull the car over and be like, “I'm done.” Even if you try to do that, it still crashes and the screen flashes at you and it's like, “This is the dangers of drinking and driving.”
Wyatt Cenac shares his story at The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at WNYC in New York on May 10, 2016.
To me, it was like, “No. Wait a minute. Are you telling me that a seven‑foot tall, 300‑pound man can't have one beer? I'm basically Shaquille O’Neal right now and you're saying I can't handle a beer. I handled the Eastern Conference.”
So then it became a challenge. I was like, “How could Shaquille O’Neal drive on two beers? Or how could Shaquille drive on like three beers and a couple shots of whiskey and maybe some weed?”
And the thing that started happening, I never got home but I got really good at driving as drunk Shaquille O’Neal. So then I found myself thinking, “Well, who else could I drive really well drunk as?” And I was like, “What if I was a tiny lady? What if I was like Mary Lou Retton?” And so I punched that in. And I got really good at driving as a four‑foot tall, 90‑pound coked out lady.
Then I just started to see like who else could I drive as and I started just inputting different people. And then, all of a sudden, I was like, “Oh, wait a minute. This is the scientific method. I get it now. This is the experimentation phase. Got it.” And I just kept doing it.
Let me just say. At that time in my life, I didn't drink. I didn't do drugs. But I got really interested in trying to prepare myself for the time when I could do all that, and not just do it. That just in case if I wanted to go all out with it, if I wanted to become a junkie, I could still become the kind of junkie that other junkies would trust to get them home safely. Yeah, I might steal your stereo to sell it for drugs, but I'll get you home to the shelf where it used to be.
And I got really good. I graduated high school and I graduated high school with this sense that I'm a really great drunk driver, which I feel like was not the intended purpose that they had when they made that machine. But I felt like, you know what? I never found that mad scientist. I became the mad scientist and I gave myself super powers.
As an adult, like trust me. I am amazing. I could drive drunk so well. But at the same time, I also walked away realizing, you know what? This is my gift. I've seen enough comic book movies, I've read enough comic books to know this is my great power. And with great power comes great responsibility, a responsibility that you don't have in a cab, unless you throw up in that cab. Which then it's only just throw $20, get out really fast and run away.
All right. Thank you very much.