Page 232 - The Love Hypothesis

him repeatedly that he’s terrifying and antagonizing, and that all his

students hate him. “And your adviser didn’t?”
“I never quite understood what he thought. What I do know now, years
later, is that he was abusive. A lot of terrible things happened under his

watch—scientists were not given credit for their ideas or authorship of
papers they deserved. People were publicly belittled for making mistakes

that would be normal for experienced researchers—let alone trainees.
Expectations were stellar, but never fully defined. Impossible deadlines

were set arbitrarily, out of the blue, and grads were punished for not
meeting them. Ph.D. students were constantly assigned to the same tasks,

then pitted against each other and asked to compete, for my adviser’s
amusement. Once he put Holden and me on the same research project and
told us that whoever obtained publishable results first would receive

funding for the following semester.”
She tried to imagine how it would feel, if Dr. Aslan openly promoted a

competitive environment between Olive and her cohorts. But no—Adam
and Holden had been close friends their whole lives, so the situation wasn’t

comparable. It would have been like being told that to receive a salary next
semester, Olive would need to outscience Anh. “What did you do?”

He ran a hand through his hair, and a strand fell on his forehead. “We
paired up. We figured that we had complementary skills—a pharmacology
expert can achieve more with the help of a computational biologist, and

vice versa. And we were right. We ran a really good study. It was
exhausting, but also elating, staying up all hours to figure out how to fix our

protocols. Knowing that we were the first to discover something.” For a
moment, he seemed to enjoy the memory. But then he pressed his lips

together, rolling his jaw. “And at the end of the semester, when we
presented our findings to our adviser, he told us that we’d both be without

funding, because by collaborating we hadn’t followed his guidelines. We
spent the following spring teaching six sections of Introduction to Biology
per week—on top of lab work. Holden and I were living together. I swear

that I once heard him mumble ‘mitochondria are the powerhouse of the
cell’ in his sleep.”