It is past midnight. A large opossum crosses Ackerman
turnaround in the dim yellow flood of street lamps, unbothered and
unobserved. Bruin Walk is still, and the tables of Kerckhoff
Coffeehouse have long since emptied.
And somewhere in the Life Sciences building, Stephen Knowles
carefully pours liquid nitrogen from a frosty canister.
Knowles will be in his lab until 3 a.m. And for him, that counts
as a shift that ends early.
The fifth-year graduate student makes his way back and forth
between his lab and a room full of tiny green life where the lights
are never turned off. He is researching circadian rhythms
““Â the internal clock in all organisms that dictates
bodily processes and living habits.
That clock ticks 24 hours a day, and in alternate shifts, so
must the researchers.
Every four hours, Knowles collects a sample of leaves from
growing mustard plants and freezes them in liquid nitrogen,
providing a snapshot of the cellular activity at that exact moment
in time. He places tubes full of tiny green leaves into a tray
labeled “1 a.m.”
“You could basically live here,” he says, pointing
out a coffee machine along the hallway and a bathroom with a
shower.
Knowles has grown accustomed to making himself at home in the
laboratory during long sleepless nights.
“Sometimes I bring my dog to keep me company,” he
says, smiling.
Every now and then, he’ll bring a DVD to watch on the
projector that they use for lab meetings.
“It’s not all work,” he said. “But I
have to be here.”
Knowles sometimes brings an air mattress and an alarm clock,
waking up during four-hour intervals to collect the samples.
It’s hard to get up when the alarm goes off at 4 a.m. and
again at 8.
“It’s sometimes hard to think when you’re in
that state,” he said. “You jump out of bed in your
pajamas, do what you have to do and then go back to bed.”
Knowles isn’t the only one who works the graveyard shift
in the labyrinths of UCLA’s South Campus buildings. When
nearly everyone else has gone home, there are some who continue to
burn the midnight oil.
“I really love doing this kind of work, and I
wouldn’t do anything else even given the chance,” said
Surekha Kundu, a postdoctorate researcher who, like Knowles, has
pulled her share of all-nighters in the lab to collect the green
samples.
The duties that come with any kind of lab research seldom fall
within the regular 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Though graduate and
postdoctorate students are usually the ones who keep the late
hours, some professors also stay late because of the rigors that
come with the job.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m taking four final exams
every day of my life,” said Bob Goldberg, a professor in
UCLA’s department of molecular, cell and developmental
biology.
“Most students don’t really know what professors do.
There’s just a tremendous amount of stuff to do if you want
to do it excellently.”
Goldberg often stays on campus until 5 a.m., dividing his
attention and time between grant proposals, research papers,
upcoming lectures or new experiments.
“But I do it because I love it. I do it because it’s
challenging,” he said. “Burning the midnight oil is the
only way to do all these tasks; there’s no way that I know to
shortcut anything.”
That same dedication has provided postgraduate researcher Ali
Jazirehi with the energy to keep an occasional 36-hour shift in his
microbiology lab.
“Research is nothing but mental satisfaction from doing it
and putting pieces of the puzzle together,” he said.
As a former amateur boxer in Iran, he has found inspiration for
his work from a sweeter science.
“I learned the most valuable lessons of life from boxing.
I learned to be humble, to be determined and tenacious,” he
says, gesturing to a poster of Mohammad Ali on the wall of his
lab.
Jazirehi has worked for several years on immunotherapy for a
type of cancer called lymphona in hopes of increasing the
effectiveness of known treatments. After earning a doctorate in
three years, Jazirehi keeps his eye on the bigger picture.
“We have to make a contribution to the body of science and
society. In my particular case, I am super ambitious,” he
says. “Nothing comes easy in life.”
Late into the night, Jazirehi passes time between experiments by
listening to classical music and staying caught up on recent
scientific literature.
Goldberg regularly embarks on midnight jogs around the
perimeter, becoming familiar with the serene atmosphere of UCLA
nightlife that many people never see.
“I love interacting with the custodians, the carpenters
and the policemen,” he said. “I know everyone. I know
the people that change the light bulbs in the buildings.”
Teaching an honors collegium course, “Genetic Engineering
in Medicine, Agriculture and Law” this quarter, Goldberg also
encourages his students to visit him in the wee hours of the
morning. Quizzes for the class are sometimes due at midnight or 1
a.m., and students will wander in to his office to turn them in at
the last minute.
“There’s a greater informality at night,” he
said. “It’s not as formal as office hours in the
daytime.”
Often the owner of the last car parked at night in a deserted
UCLA parking lot, Goldberg firmly believes his working hours make
life more enjoyable.
“There’s never any traffic at 4 a.m.,” he
said. “I never feel the Los Angeles that other people feel. I
couldn’t live in this city if I had to sit in
bumper-to-bumper traffic.”
Knowles avoids the traffic by riding his bike to campus for a
late-night shift, after first going home to have dinner with his
wife. Juggling family life sometimes proves difficult for
researchers who are tied to their labs, Knowles said.
But when living this nightlife of nitrogen and plants, Knowles
tries his best to make sure he is not missed by his daytime
counterpart.
“She usually goes to bed early, and I’m going to be
back home at 3:30,” he says as he plunges another plant
sample wrapped in foil into the steaming liquid nitrogen.
“She’ll never know I’m gone.”