Calling All Emersonians
For those hoping to become a transparent eye-ball, there’s finally a non-yuppy-in-the-woods model to follow—the sea urchin!
One of my grade school friend’s dads was a biologist (Boston biotech represent), and would let us play around in his lab. Besides the general memory of killing time in almost empty offices (a good 30% of my childhood), I remember:
- Inflating rubber gloves by nozzling them to beakers filled with dry ice. There was a huge waist-level freezer filled with it in the hallway.
- Watching an array of monitors hooked up to their electron microscope. I don’t remember what we looked at.
- And finally, relevantly, holding sea urchins that the dad would fish out of the giant holding tanks, feeling like koosh balls that had been dipped in cold glue. We always left the lab with dried out exoskeletons—cherished the same as bird skulls found in the woods, or hoarded silver dollars from christmas—that would always break within a week.
