My Wife Has Always Loved Working in a Wet Lab
My wife forgets things at home. The problem is that when she says “home,” she means her lab. We’ll be in our kitchen and she’ll say she left something at home — meaning the floor of a research building where she spends more waking hours than she does with me.
She has always loved working in a wet lab. Since before I knew her, since before any of this.
When she’s running experiments in parallel — which is most of the time — she runs through the hallways. Literally runs, between rooms, down empty corridors, because her protocols are spread across what amounts to the entire floor of a large building and she’s managing them the way a line cook manages a kitchen at full tilt. Three twenty-six-hour experiment protocols in the same week. I’m not sure I’m allowed to say that, but I’m saying it.
I’ve always known she would do great work, because she has always been doing the hard work to do great work. She keeps a pillow and a blanket in the lab.
She played life on hard mode before any of this started. All IB classes, all AP classes, mock trial, studying until one in the morning through most of high school. Then Boston — post-undergrad lab work to pay the rent while she applied to MD-PhD programs, shadowing doctors at MGH, checking every box that needed checking. She set goals that were simultaneously lofty and, somehow, attainable. Then she exceeded them and decided there was a better way and started again.
The first time we met, she was working on the vaccine strain of yellow fever — mouse models, trying to understand why a live attenuated virus keeps mutating back to virulence. Dangerous work. Old science. She loved it.
I knew immediately that she was remarkable. The spark, the presence, the laugh. I should be specific about the laugh: there are several, and they’re all distinct, and I have picked up some of them. I catch myself laughing in ways I never did before I met her, and I think — what better testament to love is there than this?
She also underestimates herself. I’ve thought about this a lot. It applies to three things in no particular order: her beauty, her ability to play word games, and her ability to load the dishwasher. The dishwasher is a real one. I’m not going to explain it further. The word games, she would win every time if she fully believed she was going to. And the first item on that list is beyond argument, so I don’t bother making it — I just let it stand.
We found out about her genetic status the day we were driving to the Adirondacks for my thirtieth birthday. That morning, we sat with the kindest genetic counselor — someone whose job is to tell a couple, a family, that a loved one carries a mutation where ninety-five out of a hundred people develop ALS or frontotemporal dementia by sixty-five. One in two by fifty-five.
It was a very surreal time. I wasn’t ready, in the way that you’re never ready, and also in the way that I’d been bracing for it since we’d learned her father had ALS. By Thanksgiving that year, her dad was using a lightweight foldable electric wheelchair. By then I’d stopped being able to concentrate on work for stretches at a time. We spent a lot of that birthday weekend hiking. I couldn’t really think. I couldn’t really communicate. We just walked.
There’s a layer to this that doesn’t get talked about much. We know so many families where one person gets tested and nobody else wants to know — siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles who are still alive. People don’t want to know because they feel knowing won’t do any good — there are no approved treatments for carriers today, and preimplantation genetic testing isn’t for everyone looking to have kids. But the math runs the other way: the more carriers who get tested, the more who can participate in clinical trials, natural history studies, biomarker research — and the better the outcomes become for everyone who carries this mutation. You hold the information alone, or almost alone, in a family ecosystem that has agreed not to look at it directly. The knowledge changes every conversation without anyone saying why. Yentli lives with that. I live adjacent to it.
The topic of whether, when, and how she will get sick is never far from either of us. I hope she doesn’t. That hope usually shows up as stress — for both of us — because the to-do list before a cure reaches patients, and then carriers, is still quite long. We are, in a way I didn’t anticipate having to think about in our early thirties, living with the unimaginable. You adapt. You’re surprised to find you can.
I’ve wanted to support Yentli in whatever way would be highest yield for both of us since the day we met, and she has always done the same for me. It’s always been apparent to me how extraordinary she is. That principle — whatever is most important today, do that for each other — turns out to be a surprisingly durable foundation for a marriage. Since we learned her genetic status, my spare time has increasingly gone toward helping her structure goals, organizing the research framework, serving as a sounding board, and making sure she’s making the most efficient use of her hours.
I am not a biologist. I never trained as one. But I’ve spent years trying to get fluent enough to be useful — This Week in Microbiology, This Week in Virology, a fair amount of YouTube lecture series, plus the most direct route available, which is just asking Yentli. She’s extremely good at explaining things. She can take something like the mechanism of repeat-associated non-AUG translation and make it legible to someone whose last biology class was in high school. I ask a lot of questions.
She doesn’t teach, really. She translates. That’s the actual field term — translational research, the work of moving discoveries from bench to clinic to patient. For Yentli that translation has a literal form: she makes YouTube videos about the science for other people who carry this mutation, and runs CureC9, her advocacy platform for the research that would save her. The patients are, in the most precise sense, her colleagues.
The learning changed what I could offer. I put together grant-proposal frameworks now. I coordinate meetings. I build computational tools for her workflows. There are as many non-biological things to work on as there are biological — organizational, technological, conceptual. I also wrote a song about TDP-43.
Early on, before I understood any of the mechanics, we were sitting in her dorm room, and she was copying and pasting DNA sequences on her laptop. Literally using command-C and command-V to move genetic material around. She’d been using the luciferase gene to make infected cells bioluminesce. You paste in the sequence; post infection, infected cells can be visually quantified. I sat there and thought: we can just do that. We can copy and paste genes into things. The casual precision of it.
Her Halloween costumes also tend to feature molecular biology. One year it was an mRNA — 5’ cap, poly-A tail, the whole structure. You can find yourself explaining to friends at a party what a poly-A tail is because of a costume choice, and then finding that you actually know, and then finding that your wife has done that to you.
I go back to that image. Whatever the work costs — and it costs something, every week — biology at this scale is genuinely astonishing. The upfront investment without knowing the outcome, and still loving every minute of the adventure. She taught me that. I’ve carried it into my own work in ways that surprised me.
Working together means we maximize our time together. That’s not an abstraction. That’s me at one in the morning in an Airbnb in a high-rise in Taiwan, working on my laptop so that we could spend the daylight in a place we’d always wanted to visit. It’s us on the couch, where she asks me a question and I start frantically searching the literature, trying to get up to speed on whatever she’s chasing that night. We can both be messy. We both dislike the messiness. But we accept it from each other, because we know what it costs and what it buys.
I don’t have a clean way to end this, because we’re not at the end of anything.
The version of the future I allow myself to imagine is one where we have all the time in the world — to devote to our children, to each other, to our families, to the communities we belong to, cultivate, and love, while continuing to contribute to the common good together.
That’s the version we’re both working toward. No matter the endpoint, it’s hard to imagine a more meaningful way to spend our lives together.