One year, my mom was to give a keynote at the Annual Meeting and Science Innovation Exposition of the AAAS—that’s the American Association for the Advancement of Science—in Baltimore. The annual meeting is a science circus, delivering the full panoply, from the anatomy of ancient ammonoids, to policy or politics, all the way to the swift retreat—that’s the redshift or z—of the remotest objects in the cosmos. The meeting is part celebration and part public outreach, bringing together the makers—the Stephen Jay Goulds and the John Holdrens and the Ginger Mascarpones—and the moochers—the journalists and teachers and the science-loving public. For most of a week every winter, there are meetings and lectures and demonstrations, some targeted for AAAS officialdom, some for educated nonspecialists, and some for laypeople and children.
Our own home was its own circus. My mother’s professional colleagues from around the globe were frequent overnight guests. In my pajamas, I shared cereal with many Nobelists-in-the-making, also in their pjs. Even more frequent were visitors for whom my mother cooked dinners and planned parties, where conversation ranged from lymphocytes to mast cells—in other words, all immunology, all the time. Not true. Not true. My father had his own non-overlapping cast of computer scientists, mathematicians, and artists, and he always drove the conversation into political territory.
While himself not a child of the Great Depression, he says he is an honorary member of the Association for Adult Children of Children of the Depression. He speaks as if he'd lived through it—its days of six cents per pound ground beef, and people too poor to buy it—so deeply ingrained in him are his own long-gone parents’ own experiences. He would fit right in among the card-carrying Communists of the 1930s if they were still around.
While other kids were taking winter breaks in Bermuda, he took me on a tour of Works Progress Administration projects from the McKissick Museum in Columbia, South Carolina, to the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. We didn’t need a holiday to go see Camp David; that was done one Saturday before I was ten. When we all went west in my eleventh summer, be sure we saw the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and the Timberline Lodge at Mount Hood, and heard Isador Stein’s lectures and those of the tour guides, too, on the wonders of the WPA. In fact, I was so conditioned to the presence of that agency that it wasn’t until the Great Recession hit, and we needed it again, that I learned it had been shuttered. So much for the conventional wisdom that all government agencies live forever.
We were not skiers, so it was easy to find time one Presidents’ Week break to chill in the Deep South. Not only were we dragged through the cities of Civil Rights Era fame, but we also made a pilgrimage to Hale County, Alabama, site of James Agee’s poetic prose and Walker Evans’s photographs of sharecropper poverty, courtesy of that other Depression stalwart, the Farm Securities Administration. On the West Coast trip, driving from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon, we detoured off the spectacular Pacific Coast Highway in San Luis Obispo County to visit Nipomo, where Dorothea Lange, working for the selfsame agency, took her iconic photo, and we must have been the only visitors in years. My mother, whose political conversation was limited to issues of fairness in medicine, made up a narrative about that picture. “Rani. That woman could be Sikh, don’t you think? One of her children must be sick, too. I’ll bet she’s waiting to see a doctor. She looks worried. She has no money to pay, but what’s she going to do? She can barely feed them on what her husband makes picking peas. Look at their clothes, Rani. What does that make you think?” We had a cheap, framed reproduction of Migrant Mother hanging in a hallway at home. All of which is to say that my father has the conscience of a liberal and he imprinted me and my sister with it like so many ducklings.
By the time of that AAAS meeting, I could be counted on not to throw a tantrum or make a scene, and on a good day my parents would say they were even a little bit optimistic that I would not grow up to be a beggar or a criminal, so they said they would take a chance and bring me along to see my mother perform before an adulatory crowd. The Vice President, Al Gore, was speaking the same day. My parents thought it would be enriching for me, they said, if I heard him too, and thus I got a day off from school and spent it with a bunch of grown-ups, many of whom I had already met at home. I thought it was no big deal.
Gore did get my attention, and at the special reception for him, the plenary speakers, and some very select others, I managed to get his. I was trying to balance my Mad Libs, spiral notebook, plastic case full of pencils and sharpeners, plate of tiny chocolatey desserts with colored glazes artfully applied, and plastic champagne glass of sparkling apple cider. Tripping on my own leather shoes—my parents wouldn’t let me wear my favorite pink tennies—right in front of the Vice President, I made the scene after all. I will never forget how he reached down and offered a hand to pull me up. He was a big man, smelled better than my dad, and had a surprisingly friendly face. “Well, hello there. You didn’t have to work so hard to introduce yourself. I’m Al Gore. What’s your name?”
My parents looked terrified and were about to intercede with apologies, but once I was back on my feet, all those cordial handshakes and conversations at home served me well. “Excuse me, Mr. Vice President. It’s an honor to meet you,” I said. Then, sotto voce for his ears only, “I am so clumsy. My parents are going to kill me.” And back to normal volume, I announced, “Please call me Lakshmi, sir.” Then Gore, seeing my parents, stepped forward to introduce himself and make them prouder (of me) than they had ever been. Camera shutters were clicking away. A film crew moved in.
“Call me Al, Lakshmi,” he said. “And what did you think of today’s proceedings?”
“Mr. Vice President, I agree with your remarks about the importance of government support for science. The need for scientific advances only grows as billions of people in the developing world enter the middle class.” It sounded erudite, but all I was doing was stitching together snippets of what I’d heard during the day. “If America is going to maintain its leadership in the world, it must lead in science. America cannot stand pat.” My father had always broken out in hysterics whenever he used that Nixon-era line, and my little speech had the same effect on everyone within earshot. Departing from the wooden scripting he’d been given, the VP’s big face melted into real laughter. He whistled and slapped his thigh before he put his arm around me. He pulled me close beside him for the photo op, which made the first page of the Baltimore Sun and page three of the New York Times and some local-color segments on the evening news broadcasts.
It was a big deal after all. Al Gore and I were pen pals through the next general election cycle, and I became a regular at the AAAS Annual Meeting. I took a week off from school each January or February, and my parents traded off shuttling and chaperoning responsibilities year to year when we traveled to Seattle, Anaheim, San Francisco, Philly, DC, or Boston. It was at these events that I developed my journeyman’s appreciation for the full gamut of contemporary science. I heard and even met so many of its practitioners, just as I did at my own house, that I lost any sense that the best, even the greatest, were different from me. My mother was my mother, and I never completely appreciated what she’d accomplished. I wasn’t going to be a scientist just because my mother was one, nor because my father was, either. What finally inspired me to become a scientist was the troupe of young beauties, the crop of women who had grown up after the gender barrier had been cracked open. They were mostly chemists and biologists, so much so it was even a cliché, but a few were physicists and engineers. In my mind I tried on their different lab coats, assessing the fit of each.
The last meeting I attended was in Denver. I no longer needed (nor would accept) a chaperone, and went instead with my high school boyfriend. He wanted to turn it into a ski boondoggle, so we had some words over that. I shouldn’t have gone at all. Princeton was too demanding. My diving coach was unhappy with me for missing so many days of practice. I couldn’t give myself to the meeting and leave my own thoughts and work behind. The whole experience had an unexpected effect on me that began during a session on new developments in dna sequencing. Ginger Mascarpone was the featured speaker. I’d heard of her, and heard she was riveting—that’s why I was there—but had never seen her. She was a theoretical physicist showered with honors and awards, and had devoted herself to the most abstruse foundations of the theory of time. Then she pivoted, as they say, and focused thereafter on molecular biology. Rumor had it there were suicides in the aftermath. The laurels kept on coming, from institutions in her new discipline and more yet from the former ones.
The meeting room was SRO, which didn’t surprise me, given the publicity that had surrounded her since she had flipped. When she got up to speak, her strawberry blonde hair flowed over the shoulders of her tailored linen jacket. She wore a simple gold necklace, weighted down by a pendant of uncut cinnabar. Her black V-neck blouse, probably sleeveless, plunged in parallel, not revealingly, but showing at its base the slightest, slightest hint of her bare abdomen. Her linen slacks fit perfectly over legs we imagined were equally perfect. The audience moaned. Her beauty, her worth—there was no other word for it—overcame me. I was blinded; I had to hold up my arms to cut down whatever it was she radiated. My boyfriend shuddered and put his head down, covering it with his hands as if in despair. Something went liquid inside me. My swoon was mirrored by everyone else in the room, too. Everyone.
Her talk rocked us on another level. The deceptively simple way she used her command of atomic physics and thermodynamics to explain the origins of life. Her lucid explanations of which problems would fall in the next few years, and which ones could be made to do so in the few that followed—if only some brave souls could be convinced to try their hands at them, or if the crippling cost of research could be reduced. She made me want to grow up to be like her, but she was different from me, from everyone. How could so much virtue exist in the world? That I understood. That it could exist in one person? That I couldn’t understand. Did she create virtue? Was her worth consistent with the Marxist theory of value my father believed in? Or had she lucked into it, some princely windfall that she—no more and no less than anyone else—didn’t deserve, yet still held fast to?
Before that moment, I had never, at least not consciously, wanted to kiss a girl. All that changed with the arrival on the podium of the iridescent fusion of Jodie Foster and Richard Feynman. Jodie? Sure, we all get that. But why Feynman? If I’d said Einstein, you’d be thinking of the white-haired grandfather figure on a bicycle, and that image wouldn’t convey the juiciness of Ms. Mascarpone. Feynman, about whom more later, was as much rock star as physicist, the sexiest man at Caltech.
Ginger Mascarpone made only the rarest of public appearances, each the subject of myth and legend. Still, one sighting was enough to awaken me. I broke up with my boyfriend that day. When I went back to Princeton, I quit diving, got serious about school, and started thinking about going out with some girls.