LEFT BRAIN, RIGHT BRAIN

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With a B.S. degree in Chemistry and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Biochemistry it’s a pretty good guess that I’m predominantly left brained.  My wife Elaine is excellent at all kinds of crafts and is an accomplished weaver.  It’s a pretty good guess that she’s predominantly right brained.   We can see the ‘he’s from Mars and she’s from Venus’ stuff when she edits my manuscripts.  I tend to plot and write linearly while she craves visual scenes and better realized minor characters.  We had several excellent examples of this dichotomy in the current WIP, “The Deadly Dog Show”.  For example I originally wrote a scene in Chapter 2 with Roger introducing Suzanne to hot pastrami sandwiches in a stereotypical New York City Delicatessen as follows.

My Strangest Patent---Just Add Water

            A long time ago, right after I finished my postdoctoral training, I took a job with a large pharmaceutical company to see what earning a decent salary felt like.  One day after I'd been there for several months we had our first crash program where we all were supposed to drop whatever we had been working on and turn our efforts to solving a big problem related to developing a new product.  Not to be technical, our organic chemists had developed 25 steps of a complex synthesis of a new antibiotic.  They were stuck on the 26th step, so they turfed the problem to someone else, the group of biochemists and bacteriologists I was in.  My job was buying a bunch of enzymes from Enzymes R-Us (to be honest, the company was named Sigma, but doesn't Enzymes R-Us have a certain ring to it?), and testing all of the enzymes at random to see if any of them could make that elusive 26th step happen.

             A week or so later the enzymes arrived and it was time for me to do something to earn my paycheck. The day before I ran my first experiment in this crash program, I stuck my head into my older and wiser colleague's office.  He had been helping me adjust to life in the real world, rather than the ivory towers of academia, by giving me advice on what was expected of scientists in this setting.  I asked something that translated into: "Should I just go through the motions, or should I do things very carefully, like I was doing a real experiment?"