Although Pia had learned to be patient in Rothman’s presence, she had her limits. After a few minutes had gone by Pia coughed lightly. She’d found by experience that coughing seemed to penetrate Rothman’s concentration more than anything else. Almost immediately he peered around the screen of his Mac and pushed a box of tissues in her direction. He had a phobia about people coughing in his presence. He was, after all, a firm believer in the “germ” theory. Pia took one of the obligatory tissues.

“Right. Miss Grazdani, for this month’s assignment . . .” He disappeared from her sight again. He resumed his two-finger typing but at least kept talking. She couldn’t see his face but she preferred it that way, which he did too as both had trouble maintaining eye contact not only with each other but with everyone else as well. “I want to move you over into our induced stem cell work. You’ve done a knockout job with salmonella, but it’s time you started in the other arena.”

A smile of anticipation appeared on Pia’s face. Rothman’s words were music to her ears.

“We’ve been making breakthrough discoveries of late involving organogenesis.”

Pia’s heart picked up speed. It was the first time Rothman had talked to her about his stem cell work. She knew what organogenesis meant as the word was self-explanatory. It was now the cutting edge of stem cell research. It was the last hurdle before creating organs that could be transplanted into patients—organs like hearts, lungs, and kidneys. It thrilled her to think that Rothman was making enormous leaps forward. And the idea that she would become part of the effort gave her chills down her spine.

“At this stage our biggest problem is that tissue culture techniques and fluids have not kept up with the breakthroughs that we’re making. Current tissue culture techniques were developed for sheets of cells, not solid organs. I’m sure you can gather what I mean. It relates to oxygenation and removing metabolic waste while maintaining acid base balance within extremely narrow parameters. It’s been basically a combination of pushing the limits of biochemistry and engineering. We have come up with some impressive hardware breakthroughs, but the involved fluids have not kept pace. The problem that is now holding us back is the acid base balance. My guess is that the pH is varying too much. We can’t figure out why. What I want you to do is to become a tissue culture fluid expert and figure out why we’re having this pH problem. Got it?”

“I think so,” Pia managed. She had learned that it was never a good ploy to question any of Rothman’s directives. Anything and everything could be discussed again, but not on the spur of the moment.

“Good! Get to it! And when I finish making these changes in the manuscript, I’ll see that Marsha gets you a copy for your final review. Now get out of here!”

Rothman’s typing picked up pace, a few keystrokes followed by several frantic deletions. Pia kept her seat despite Rothman’s final comment. She sensed that this was all the information she was going to get about her month’s elective at the moment, and it wasn’t much. Inwardly, she shuddered a little. She had expected to be working on some aspect of Rothman’s salmonella research as she’d done in the past. Tissue culture was a new discipline for her and what she was being tasked to do sounded like an entire Ph.D. project, not a month’s assignment. She was going to need a lot of help from Rothman and from the other technicians, especially Nina Brockhurst, whose job it was to take care of the physical plant of Rothman’s organ-growing experiments, which would include the baths. In the past Nina had openly resented Pia, claiming Rothman played favorites with her. Pia had taken the situation in stride as she knew there was always intrigue when people were forced to work together, especially when the boss’s signals were so hard to read.