After her father, a well-known intellectual, passes away, neurobiology PhD student Eva Higginbotham tries to live up to his academic standards.
Eva Higginbotham is a 3rd year PhD candidate on the University of Cambridge’s ‘Developmental Mechanisms’ programme. She works with fruit flies to discover how neurons decide on their neurotransmitter phenotype during embryogenesis, but has been fascinated by all facets of developmental biology since her undergraduate degree at the University of Manchester. Born in Boston to American parents, she moved to England as a child but travels back every year to enjoy family, friends, and food.
This story originally aired on June 15, 2018 in an episode titled “In Honor of Father's Day.”
Story Transcript
So I’m sitting in a dark room, alone, staring down a microscope at more than a hundred fruit fly larvae whose brains are glowing a bright, fluorescent red. I had made my first recombinant fly.
I’m a developmental neuroscientist because I love thinking about how you make something immensely complicated, like a fruit fly brain, from something relatively simple. A fertilized egg. And my PhD project required me to generate an immensely complicated fly in terms of its genetics, and this was the first step using homologous recombination which, in short, is a way of getting two genes that you're interested in, into one fly. Now, these two genes were going to work together to make certain cells of the brain glow red.
I grabbed my supervisor, he looks down the microscope. Now, we expected that about 3 to 5% of the larvae would have these glowing, red brains that would tell us the experiment had worked and what we were looking at was more like 75%, which I thought was great. Clearly, I had made loads of recombinants. But my supervisor kind of questioned this miraculously high percentage and so I went to the fly room to check on the flies that I used in the experiment.
I’m standing there with two vials of flies in my hands. One says cha-t2a-lexa-qfad. One says cha-t2a-qf2. I realize I used the qf2 flies, the wrong flies. An entirely different genetic system. It was all completely worthless. Three months of work wasted.
I sat motionless in my chair, surrounded by hundreds of vials of thousands of flies. My jaw started aching. I was grinding my teeth and I couldn’t stop thinking about how stupid and careless I was.
As a scientist, you expect things to go wrong in the lab, but it’s different when you make the mistake yourself and the mistake is just not reading the label properly.
And I started thinking about my dad. My dad died suddenly six months before I started my graduate program in Cambridge. He was a famous philosopher and linguist. It’s because he moved to Oxford University from MIT that I grew up in England at all.
He was an old-school, incredible intellectual. Our last conversation was on the phone about a week before he died in which he congratulated me on my success in getting into Cambridge and corrected my actually already correct pronunciation of Newnham, my assigned college.
He taught himself Brazilian Portuguese in less than two weeks in preparation for a conference in Brazil, which meant that he could chat happily with the men who rescued him during an accident where his car broke down. But the thing is, he didn’t really know how to talk to his own children without making them feel out of their depth.
I was both very close to and not close at all to my dad. He was very hard to be close to. He once played twenty games of chess simultaneously against twenty grad students at MIT and won them all, but he was content to just see his kids for a few weeks every year.
After he died, I started thinking that I'd been wasting my life, but not in the way you might expect. I had spent so much time on family and friends when I should have just been working on seeing what I could achieve academically as my dad had. I had boyfriends and girlfriends that I spent time with. I should have just been culturing my brain, ignoring the little things in life, like health and happiness and family.
When I started in Cambridge, I spent weeks in a new lab crying silently while pipetting to classical Christmas music. And every failure in the lab showed me again and again that I didn’t deserve to be here. I refused to tell my temporary supervisor that my dad had just died for fear that it would make me look weak or like I was using it as an excuse for subpar work. For me, it was one or the other. Either be an intellectual and focus on your work, family be damned, or be a weak, emotional person who needed people and would never reach their potential.
When we buried him in Los Angeles where he lived for the last fifteen years of his life, I wrote a letter to him and slipped it into the breast pocket of his jacket. I don't remember much of what I wrote but I do remember saying that I was going to be the best scientist that I could be.
A couple of days after he died, my mom and my siblings flew out to Los Angeles. We took a taxi to the hotel we were staying at and we’re standing in the lobby and a man walks over. He's wearing a kippah and he's sweaty and exhausted. This was David.
David is my older half-brother on my dad’s side. He's in his forties, he converted to Judaism in his twenties, and he lives outside Boston with his wife and two sons. There's a photo of me in a stroller and long-haired, skinny, tie-dyed T-shirt-wearing teenage David kneeling next to me, but bar an afternoon visit when I was nine, we hadn’t spoken, let alone met until my dad died.
We all head up to our rooms and, a few hours later, my mom asks me to run a message down to David. So I head downstairs, I knock on the door just intending on passing on the message and then heading back upstairs to my room. But David opens the door and says, “Come in.”
I’m sitting on the mini sofa and he's sitting on the bed and the curtains are drawn but the lamp is on and it’s warm and dark inside. And we start talking. We talk about my brothers and my sister. We talk about how on earth I’m going to finish my undergraduate degree now my dad has died a few weeks before my final exams. We talk about his years spent studying at the rabbinical school in Israel, and we talk about dad.
We talk about what it’s like growing up with an emotionally distant father, about what it’s like being left as a young child. Despite twenty years age difference, despite his growing up in Boston and my growing up in Oxford, our aches and pains and joys in the father we shared were the same.
And David never had a sister, never had someone he could talk to who understood what it was like growing up with dad. For me it was like looking to the future, talking to someone who had seventeen extra years of dad-processing time.
We stayed in touch and a few months later I traveled to Boston to stay with him for a week. I was nervous because, although we'd been talking a lot, I was going to be meeting my sister-in-law, getting to know my nephews.
David looks so much like my dad. He says, “Hmm,” like my dad. He thinks and analyzes like my dad.
After my dad died, my grief felt wet and hot and like I was looking over the edge of a never-ending black pit, and as terrible as I felt and as unlucky I felt, I also knew that I was lucky because I was gaining a brother.
During that visit, David and I are sitting at the kitchen table and Elli, my nephew comes rushing in. He's coming back from his first day at a new middle school. Elli is running around the kitchen and putting together crazy combinations of food in the new toaster oven and David is asking him how was school, how were the teachers, and Ellie is chatting away.
And David also gently checking in with Elli because Elli is in a new school now away from most of his friends, if not all of them.
Now, I know that my dad loved me very much, but witnessing this familial scene of father checking in on son just reminded me of the fact that that’s not how my dad expressed his love. He bought me books on my birthday and we sang Gilbert and Sullivan in the car when I was ten with my brother. And he taught me blackjack and rummy and chess, and I will cherish those memories and I will love and miss my dad for the rest of my life.
But he wasn’t around to see if I understood my homework, he never hugged me if I was sad, he never told me everything was going to be okay. He didn’t know how to. And as an adult, that makes me so sad for him. It makes me wish that I could go back in time and say to him, “You know, maybe everything could be okay.”
Whereas David could switch so easily from dad-making-dinner mode to intellectual mode. We would go on walks in the woods in the summer sunlight, Starbucks in hand, and he would tell me about Jewish mysticism and American politics and theology and philosophy. We would go from discussing the Watergate Scandal to laughing hysterically as I explain to him that in England how much milk you put in your tea and whether you have sugar or not is something people will subtly judge you for.
On my last day of that visit, David and I sat down on the sofa in the living room because he wanted to tell me that the night before he'd been lying in bed and been overcome by a feeling of love for me, and with the knowledge that he wanted to know me, he wanted to be there for me, and he wanted to be there to help me if ever I needed it. In that moment, I knew I hadn’t been wasting my time all these years investing in my relationships because David showed me any failure in the lab I didn’t have to automatically compare to my dad’s success and my dad’s ambition.
Fourteen months later, after that disastrous day in the lab, I’m sitting in another dark room, alone, staring down a much more expensive microscope at a single fruit fly larval brain. I'd redone that recombination that failed, and many others, all to try and make my fancy complicated super fly.
I’m on my last slide of the day. I've already accepted the fact that I’m probably going to have to redo at least one stage at this process for what feels like the hundredth time, but this time I’m not panicking. I’m not grinding my teeth. It’s just another day in the lab. And I've actually learned that losing three months in the first year of your PhD is not that bad.
I’m staring at the computer screen and I can see the cells of the brain, some of them are glowing red, some of them are glowing green, and some of them are glowing blue, each for a different key neurotransmitter in the fly’s central nervous system.
My heart starts racing. I’m up and pacing around the room, dancing with myself because I cannot believe that I've done it. I have made my super complicated fly.
I run downstairs to tell my supervisor, I take pictures on the computer screen and send them to my family and friends who all respond saying, “That looks nice,” which is good of them because I gave them no context whatsoever, to explain that I had spent a year-and-a-half working towards that moment and I had done it.
I still had a long way to go in my PhD, and I still do, and in those intervening months I had moments of total self-doubt, total lack of belief that I belonged doing a PhD, that I was good enough for this. But I also grew and changed in so many ways that cannot be measured on an expensive microscope.
I had realized that being a compassionate person didn’t automatically make me a bad academic. In the end, I choose my priorities over my dad‘s. I choose my happiness, my family, my friends over my ambition. I can care about fruit fly brains and I can care about people too. Thank you.