Publish and Perish, part 37: Office hours, continued

[Context: read the previous part or start at the beginning. TW: bad amateur fiction!]

Gerald recognized the approaching student but was not completely sure of her name. He thought it was Susan, but, this late in the semester, he hated to be wrong or admit he wasn’t sure.

“Hi!” he greeted her. “Are you here to see me?”

“Yeah,” responded Presumably-Susan. “I mean, I was coming to the building anyway to meet with my study group, but…I also wanted to thank you for something.” She paused.

Gerald gave a half-smile, trying to downplay his interest in being thanked.

“Well, you’re welcome!” he deadpanned. “So, um, what did I do?”

“Do you remember that little rap you did earlier in the semester?”

“Yes, I do recall, ah, departing from my usual lecture style to speak rhythmically and in rhyme for about 30 seconds.” He added with half-hearted self-deprecation, “In a momentary lapse of judgment.”

“Well, I thought it was really cool!” she enthused. Not necessarily the specific lyrics, or your performance, but the idea of celebrating a scientific achievement like that.”

“Well, thanks!”

“It got me thinking about what other scientific discoveries might be worth celebrating artistically, and whether I could do something like that. I’m not a rapper either — no offense — but I have some training in dance, and so I thought, could I make a dance about something like, the discovery of micro-RNA’s and how they regulate gene expression? And, long story short, I choreographed something for my dance class, and it was really fun, and it turned out really well!”

She added, blushing, “The professor said that it might be the most interested he’s ever been in a scientific concept.”

“Wow,” marveled Gerald. “That’s just about the best compliment you could get, isn’t it?”

“Yup. It was an assignment where I didn’t even worry about the grade too much because I knew I had done something cool. Although it was nice to get the ‘A’ too,” she admitted.

“I’ll bet. Say, are there any, uh, artifacts from this dance that a curious person could check out?”

“Oh, yeah, I made a video and put it on YouTube. I’ll send you the link if you want…”

“Sure, that’d be great.”

“OK, no problem!” She whipped out her phone and completed several keystrokes in what seemed to be less than a second. “Done.”

“Thanks!” said Gerald. “Boy, this conversation turned out really differently than I expected. I thought you were coming by to ask about the homework.” He studied her for a second. “But perhaps you don’t have any questions about the homework…”

“Uh, not yet,” said Presumably-Susan. “I think I will eventually, but I haven’t started it yet. No offense!”

“None taken!” said Gerald mildly. “I understand that not every assignment can be a literal dance through the material.”

She smiled.

“Anyway, thanks for telling me about this,” he said earnestly. “It was great — really great — to hear how you took my momentary lapse of judgment and, you know, took it in a fantastic new direction.”

She blushed again. “OK. See you in class!” As she headed down the hall, Gerald wondered whether there was an extra skip in her stride.

He sat back down at his desk, found a new email message from Susan Smith (yes, of course her name was Susan, how could he have been unsure?), and opened the link to her video.

Despite his general discomfort with dancing — his wedding’s “first dance” song, “At Last” by Etta James, had been chosen primarily for its brevity — Gerald found himself captivated by the video. Susan was one of several dancers, most wearing clothing with nucleotide sequences printed on the upper and lower limbs. Complementary sequences on different people’s limbs gently zipped together and drifted apart. It was genuinely affecting, he thought. The movements were informed by scientific facts but, somehow, were also aesthetically pleasing, even to him.

Then Gerald noticed that although the video was only a few days old, it had already garnered more views than the video of his rap that the other student had posted. “Well, good for her,” he thought.

He shook his head in wonder. He was always trying to help his students enjoy biology by highlighting ways in which the material was interesting or funny or dramatic, and sometimes he succeeded, but his successes seemed unpredictable. The idea that one day he would burst into a little rap, and that a student would then be inspired by it to create a legitimately superb dance? That would have seemed absurd six months ago, but now it had actually happened.

“I wonder if this is part of the long tails that Cissy was talking about,” he mused.

[Update: the story continues with part 38.]