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Science flowed in Hikawa blood.
Sayo’s father was a surgeon, her mother a chemist, and more relatives than she could count held PhDs or MDs. Pursuing science was what was expected of her. She did not hold a particular like or dislike for it – it was all she knew, her very world view. She would grow up to be a scientist. That was her only path.
Her twin sister had already fulfilled this destiny, long before Sayo even got into grad school. Hina was a genius who completed her undergrad with the highest distinction at only the age of 15. She finished her doctorate before she even turned 20 and was now an assistant professor of astrophysics at a renowned institution.
In comparison, Sayo was a failure.
She could not remember the last time she had any “free time” to pursue her “hobbies”. The concept of hobbies in itself was foreign to her. Since elementary school, all she did was study, study, study. She managed to get through high school as a straight A student, but she was hardly the highest performing even in her own class, let alone the grade.
By college, she was struggling. She wasn’t failing any classes, of course. The shame would kill her. But her GPA was no longer 4.0. It was more a mid-B range. She had to take an extra year to boost her grades up to where it would be acceptable for grad school admission.
She had a hard time finding a supervisor willing to take her on. Her grades weren’t stellar, so it would be difficult for her to get a grant to support her stipend, and her practical lab experience was meagre, seeing as she hadn’t had that much time off studying in her undergrad years. She was lucky to have met a newly-hired faculty at a seminar and managed to convince him to take her on just because nobody else applied.
This was how she started at her current lab.
The lab was very, very small. Aside Sayo and the prof, there was only one other person. Her name was Minato Yukina. Dr. Minato was their post-doc, but she was the same age as Sayo – having done a PharmD before getting this position. The PharmD program Dr. Minato graduated from did not require the prior completion of a BSc, so though she was a post-doc, Sayo expected her level of proficiency to be similar to her own. Sayo was wrong.
Dr. Minato was brilliant. Maybe not the same kind of genius as Hina, but she was definitely talented and very hardworking. Where Sayo struggled to come up with a thesis project even after reading hundreds of papers, Dr. Minato had a list of a dozen research ideas on her desk after her first day. When Sayo finally got handed her project by her supervisor after reporting her failure, she struggled through every part of it. Experiments wouldn’t work. She would repeat them, but they still wouldn’t work. She would try to come up with solutions, but her ideas were mundane and hardly ever solved the problem. By then, Dr. Minato was already starting to write her first manuscript. As much as Sayo had been jealous, she shoved down her pride to ask Dr. Minato for suggestions.
“Why do you think your experiments are not working?” Dr. Minato asked.
“Because they did not yield the expected result.”
“Then maybe the hypothesis is wrong?”
“But…”
But the hypothesis was the prof’s. He couldn’t be…wrong, right? At least the chances of him being wrong were much slimmer than Sayo’s.
Sayo didn’t know if she were making a funny face as she contemplated this, but Dr. Minato narrowed her gaze in irritation.
“You are too unconfident. The only bad results are inconsistent results. If the results consistently reject the hypothesis, then most likely the hypothesis is wrong.”
It was not the answer Sayo wanted to hear. Even if the hypothesis were wrong, then what should she do now? She could not come up with a new project idea. What if her prof had no more ideas to offer her?
“You have doubts on how to proceed?” Dr. Minato asked again. Sayo could just nod. Dr. Minato answered bluntly, “Look into why the hypothesis is wrong. Isn’t that the obvious course of action?”
Sayo had no choice but to concede to Dr. Minato’s suggestion. She didn’t think anybody would care about this research even if she completed it. Imagine it this way: if the goal initially had been to create a cancer drug, then all Sayo showed was that this method wouldn’t work. Why would anybody care how not to make a cancer drug? It was a stupid question to ask.
But Sayo followed through with it. She poured hours into doing the most repetitive tasks and came up with a bunch of dot plots as her figures; they looked so boring even on posters that nobody would visit Sayo’s presentation during conferences. While Dr. Minato already had a second manuscript under revision at a top-class journal, Sayo was formatting her manuscript for an obscure specialty journal and crossing her fingers that the editor would even pass it on to the external reviewers. He didn’t. The manuscript was rejected in a week and Sayo resubmitted to a journal with an impact factor of 1.3. It might as well be the Random Journal of Bananas.
It did manage to get accepted on its second round of review after Sayo’s prof complained Reviewer 3 on the first round was biased. It had been pretty obvious, because Reviewer 3 left a scathing 50-word insult of Sayo’s “unsophisticated” vocabulary, of all things to criticize in a scientific article. Did they get an elementary school bully to write this so-called review or what!? As they celebrated Sayo’s first paper at a lab party, Sayo downed the champagne with more bitterness than pride. Hina’s first paper had such impact that it was reported on the local news. Sayo’s? Their own university press didn’t have interest covering it.
Sayo stumbled back into the lab after the party. She had planned to do more experiments, but it was impossible in her current state of inebriation. What a piece of trash she was. She made herself more useless than she already was. She collapsed onto her chair and smacked her forehead onto her desk, jostling her desktop awake to show the pathetic thesis proposal for her upcoming qualifying exam. She almost wanted to throw her keyboard into the monitor.
“Sayo.”
Sayo raised her head to find Dr. Minato at her bay, looking on with that usual apathetic face of hers. She wanted very much to be angry at her, much like all those times she would angrily shout at Hina to go away in the past. But she couldn’t. Hina made it easy by always accidentally chiding Sayo for her failures. “I don’t understand why Oneechan can’t do this.” “Effort? I didn’t put in any effort. It was too easy.” This gave Sayo some sort of legitimacy to be an asshole. But Dr. Minato was not Hina. For every ounce of talent she had, there was four times that in sheer determination. She did not lose to Sayo in the amount of time she spent labouring in the lab, day in, day out, on the weekends, during the holidays. She never overstayed in the pantry, only there to shove down a quick microwave lunch or dinner before getting back to work. Sayo knew Dr. Minato deserved the success. She respected her for it.
So Sayo pushed down her sour feelings of inadequacy and answered in a most polite tone. “What is it, Dr. Minato?”
“Your paper. Do you know which issue it will be published in yet? If not, do you have the DOI? I need to cite it.”
“Cite it?” Sayo couldn’t help but raise her voice, her feelings not so easy to control under alcoholic influence. “My stupid paper in your piece of extraordinary contribution to humanity? Isn’t it accepted with minor revisions at a journal with an impact factor of 35?”
Dr. Minato remained impassive. “Why does it matter - the impact factor of the journals?”
“I just want to know why you would take interest in my garbage. Are you pitying me?”
“I am citing it for the protocol you gave me last time. In an earlier version of the manuscript, I put you down under acknowledgements, but now that you published the methods, I am citing it as I should. Pity is the last thing I would have considered.”
“Is that so?”
Sayo turned her back to Dr. Minato. A frustrated tear had rolled down her cheek and she didn’t want her to see it. She hated herself. Why was she so untalented? Why was she so worthless? What even was she doing with her life?
Just when Sayo thought Dr. Minato had already left, the latter spoke again. “And I do not think your research is garbage. You may not have the most creative initial ideas, but the way you carry out your investigations is organized, reasonable, and efficient. Your protocols are robust and replicable. I highly admire your capability.”
Sayo couldn’t help but look back at Dr. Minato just to see what expression was on her face. Indeed, there was no pity. Her expression told Sayo that she was just reciting a solid truth.
Sayo softened her tone. “But Dr. Minato wouldn’t want to be me…”
“And why would I want that? We have different expertise. My research may have higher impact stemming from higher interest in the subject currently. But that does not make your research inferior. In fact, my research cannot occur without the guidance of yours. However…”
“However?”
“What I think is unimportant. It is your research. You are the one who invested time in doing it. Therefore, you are the only one who can assign its value.”
With that, Dr. Minato walked back towards her own bench. Sayo stared back at the thesis proposal on her screen. Her research. Her value. She wondered about Dr. Minato’s words. Could she really come to appreciate her own work some day?
She didn’t know. But for now, she would like to continue on this path that she had taken for so long, this time not for her parents, not out of spite for Hina, but for herself.
“Dr. Minato!” she shouted across the room.
“Yes?”
“I will send you the citation now. And…thank you for everything.”