Page 27 - The Love Hypothesis

cockroach scurry under the credenza even though their apartment was

already full of traps. Or the most crucial one: the fact that her research
project had reached a critical point and she desperately needed to find a
bigger, significantly richer lab to carry out her experiment. Otherwise, what

could very well become a groundbreaking, clinically relevant study might
end up languishing on a handful of petri dishes stacked in the crisper drawer

of her fridge.
Olive opened her laptop with half a mind to google “Organs one can live

without” and “How much cash for them” but got sidetracked by the twenty
new emails she’d received while busy with her lab animals. They were

almost exclusively from predatory journals, Nigerian prince wannabes, and
one glitter company whose newsletter she’d signed up for six years ago to
get a free tube of lipstick. Olive quickly marked them as read, eager to go

back to her experiments, and then noticed that one message was actually a
reply to something she had sent. A reply from . . . Holy crap. Holy crap.

She clicked on it so hard she almost sprained her pointer finger.

Today, 3:15 p.m.
FROM: Tom-Benton@harvard.edu
TO: Olive-Smith@stanford.edu

SUBJECT: Re: Pancreatic Cancer Screening Project

Olive,

Your project sounds good. I’ll be visiting Stanford in about
two weeks. Why don’t we chat then?

Cheers,

TB

Tom Benton, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
Department of Biological Science s, Harvard University