I was working in my “office” associated with Dr. Dillon’s lab. It wasn’t really an office, it was desk space in a busy, cluttered shared lab next to his lab. The door on the lab to my “office” was a huge, heavy, solid wood door that seemed to choose to open or close at random. So I used a sturdy steel cone about five inches in diameter, that looked like an artillery shell, as a doorstop. I found the stopper sitting in a dark corner of a closet in the lab surrounded by dust. I picked it up and was surprised by its substantial weight, but not surprised to see a dust imprint left where it had been standing for many years. It seemed to be a solid piece of metal, and made a perfect doorstop. I would pull open the door when I arrived for work and then kick the heavy doorstop in front of the door. This routine continued for several years. Occasionally, I would pick up the stopper and use it to crush a cockroach. The cockroaches in the building were notorious. They were very large, very strong and everywhere. The building had housed a cockroach colony for teaching and research purposes many years ago. At some point the colony had taken up residence in the building and these roaches grew to 2 and 3 inches long. I refused to step on them because the guts would be all over my shoes and I was afraid that if I squished a female cockroach carrying eggs, the eggs would stick to my shoe and I could bring them home. On the rare occasion I did step on them, they were so big the crunching sensation of the exoskeleton collapsing was unnerving—it felt like they were moving under my foot. So I killed them with the doorstopper, which made a loud thud on the floor but no sensation or crunch. I think the cockroach guts also made the stopper slide more easily when I was kicking it around.

I also discovered that alcohol killed cockroaches. We had rubbing alcohol in the lab in squirt bottles for disinfecting. One squirt would kill a cockroach instantly. I would still crush it with the stopper after it was dead. A friend, Dave Levier, collected some uncrushed cockroaches and spray painted them gold and silver. He mounted them on some string and hung them up in a cockroach mobile. I suggested making them into Christmas tree decorations, but he declined. Dave was a graduate student who was a year behind me and we had labs near each other and socialized a bit with the other graduate students.

While shoving the doorstop one day I almost knocked it over, and noticed it wobbled strangely before it fell on its side. I picked up the 20-pound-plus piece of metal to set it upright and it felt “loose” for some reason. I shook it and it felt like something was in it. I also noticed some writing on the side of it. The writing was very hard to read in the rust and flaked paint, but it was clearly text, and it said: “Contents: 2 liters Hg.” Hg is the chemical designation for mercury. I shook the doorstop and felt liquid mercury sloshing around inside. The top of what looked like an artillery shell was actually a screw top to a metal container of mercury. Liquid mercury is deadly poisonous and such a large amount, if it ever leaked out, would require an evacuation of the building. I had been kicking the bottle around for years thinking it was a solid piece of metal, but now I gently put it down and contacted building management to dispose of it. What surprised me most was that the faculty and staff were NOT shocked, surprised or aghast at the find. Most just seemed to chuckle wryly. The consensus was that in an ancient building that had been used for science experiments for so long that finding stashes of solid sodium metal, radioactive carbon and toxic mercury was common. I did learn one thing though. I learned where liquid mercury comes from. As the joke goes, ‘Liquid mercury comes from little mercury wells which are called “H.G. Wells.”’

The liquid mercury incident did not slow the progress of my research. Ann liked to tell her friends that I had been kicking around enough liquid mercury to kill the whole school. She asked if I was concerned as to whether the bottle might have broken and I assured her that there was a lot of metal holding in that mercury.

Even without a doorstop to help me kill cockroaches and enable quick access to the lab, my purification of creatine kinase was able to push forward. The first step in purifying creatine kinase was to put a bunch of frozen arteries in a big blender and blend them to a smooth puree. A lot of lab work is very similar to cooking. A scientist will follow a recipe like a cook and produce something at the end, like a cook baking cookies. The scientist will test his or her product and the cook will taste it. Testing and tasting become quite analogous for scientists and cooks I think part of the reason I like both science and cooking is because they have many similarities, which I enjoy.