{"id":61283,"date":"2025-12-10T10:00:28","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T16:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=61283"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:02","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:02","slug":"the-empty-lab-in-science-and-in-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/the-empty-lab-in-science-and-in-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"The Empty Lab, in Science and in Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

A harried scientist, Alice, works behind closed doors. Her jealous lover, Philip, is aggravated to discover his own needs eclipsed by the rigors of Alice\u2019s scientific work. But when Philip takes the unusual step of tracking Alice to the lab to win her heart, he bursts in only to discover \u2026 nothing. Actually nothing.<\/em> As it turns out, Alice belongs to a team that accidentally created a small bubble of nothing: a literal void, an emptiness that can only be produced in the confines of the laboratory. This absence\u2014known casually as \u201cLack\u201d\u2014hungrily expands in size until it threatens to consume Alice and her fellow scientists entirely.<\/p>\n

For all its postmodern play, Jonathan Lethem\u2019s 1997 novel, As She Climbed Across the Table<\/em>, contains serious insights about how laboratories work. In a very fundamental sense, the aim of the laboratory is to erase itself. It should contain nothing in particular. The perfect laboratory is not a place at all: it is an abstract space, a delimited zone where the human mind exerts control over all elements of the environment. In the lab, scientists practice a rigorous form of environmental exclusion. They designate what aspects of reality will be allowed into an experiment, then decide which of those will be kept stable (the controls) and which will be precisely altered by human agency (the variables), all with the goal of better understanding the workings of reality. And for such non-places to contribute to science, the experiments they house must be replicable at any number of loosely equivalent laboratories anywhere else in the world. That means that every entity within the lab that is not part of the experiment must be ruthlessly neutralized and rendered inconsequential.<\/p>\n

This erasure is codified in the conventions of scientific writing itself. Scientific papers explain the components of a given experiment, but they say nothing of the countless other social or material features of the individual laboratories where each experiment takes place. The absence in Alice\u2019s lab, in other words, mirrors the rhetorical and ideological strategies of scientific discourse. These strategies train us to see the lab as a sort of vacuum, an empty stage whose portable, replicable drama might be reenacted just as effectively anywhere else.<\/p>\n

No one captures the oddity of the lab\u2019s absences better than Jonathan Lethem. But, in fact, many writers who incorporate scientists into their fiction avoid <\/em>depicting the laboratories where their characters spend their days. There are both practical and literary ways of explaining this avoidance, but the end result is the same.<\/p>\n

When literature about science refuses readers entry into the lab, it leaves them with lingering suspicions about what happens there\u2014suspicions that threaten to undermine public trust in a scientific community that is already under siege.<\/p>\n

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The problem with science fiction is that it so often relies on fictional science.<\/p>\n

The genre\u2019s scientists are reduced to stereotypes, crude cartoons evenly divided between Einsteins and Frankensteins\u2014wild-haired theoretical geniuses on one side, heartless experimentalists on the other. The science in such stories is equally untethered to reality. It tends to manifest as a thick paste of technical terms slathered across holes in the plot. Real science, the daily labor of trained professionals around the world, fights for elbow room in a genre packed with popular but misleading tropes.<\/p>\n

That, at least, was the frustration that led Jennifer L. Rohn, a cell biologist and writer, to launch the website Lablit.com in 2005. Concerned by the inaccuracies she saw in science fiction, Rohn coined the term \u201clab lit\u201d and founded the corresponding website to drum up interest and support for \u201ca small but growing genre of fiction in which central scientific characters, activities and themes are portrayed in a realistic manner.\u201d<\/p>\n

A smattering<\/a> of press<\/a> followed. In the intervening years, lab lit has developed into a niche but handy genre label for the more accurate representations of science in fiction that Rohn champions. There is now at least one book-length scholarly collection on lab lit; Rohn herself has published three novels in the genre. Lablit.com recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, and the site continues to update its ever-expanding LabLit list<\/a> of books that fit Rohn\u2019s vision.<\/p>\n

Reading through the list suggests, however, that the name \u201clab lit\u201d is a bit of a misnomer. For all its efforts to humanize scientists, lab lit is reticent to address the work they actually do in their labs. As a result, the genre proves surprisingly conducive to anti-scientific paranoia. In an era when science is consistently under fire from do-your-own-research dilettantes and dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorists, lab lit does as much to stoke anti-science conspiracy theories as it does to allay them.<\/p>\n

Perhaps because it\u2019s a crowdsourced compendium, the LabLit list contains a number of thrillers, mysteries, and science fiction titles that don\u2019t perfectly align with the criteria Rohn originally proposed. But even among the titles that do meet the strictest lab lit standards, many focus on historical naturalists or the perils of fieldwork, leaving their fictional scientists little time to spend in anything resembling a modern laboratory.
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For all its efforts to humanize scientists, lab lit is reticent to address the work they actually do in their labs.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n


\nThere\u2019s nothing inherently wrong with either of these ways of representing scientific labor. Fieldwork possesses an obvious draw: it promises readers intimate access to wild nature without the hassle of leaving our seats. Many instances of lab lit invite us to tag along with scientists venturing far from home to research subjects like river dolphins in the Sundarbans (Amitav Ghosh\u2019s Gun Island<\/em> [2019]) or chimpanzees in the Congo basin (William Boyd\u2019s Brazzaville Beach<\/em> [1990]). Lab lit that doesn\u2019t whisk readers away to an exoticized place often relies on an exoticized time instead\u2014typically, a historical period when scientific work wasn\u2019t confined to a credentialed group of specialists the way it is today.<\/p>\n

Andrea Barrett\u2019s lovely collection Ship Fever<\/em> (1996) is a good example of the allure that bygone science holds for writers and readers alike. Barrett sets her loosely interlinked stories about scientists mostly in the 18th and 19th centuries, eras when the lines between science and art were charmingly indistinct and the idea of the laboratory was still in its infancy. The most rigorous experiment narrated in the book is not the product of scientific institutions but rather of their subversion. In \u201cRare Bird,\u201d two women sick of being snubbed by academic acquaintances develop a secret scheme to test one of Linnaeus\u2019s claims in the family stables. There is only one modern laboratory in the book. It appears in \u201cThe Marburg Sisters,\u201d where it provides the backdrop for a reunion between the biochemist Rose and her estranged sibling. Experimentation happens there, but not of the scientific kind. The sisters meet in the lab outside work hours to drink, reminisce, and dabble in drugs, an eye-opening experience that prompts Rose to abandon the lab entirely for a quiet career teaching high school students.<\/p>\n

This individual exodus from the lab reflects a broader impulse of lab lit as a whole. The comparatively small number of realist fictions devoted to modern laboratory research share a decided reluctance to invite readers inside the places where so much science is practiced. A typical example is Cantor\u2019s Dilemma<\/em> (1989), by the writer and chemist Carl Djerassi. The book focuses on the fraying relationship between a cancer researcher, Isidore Cantor, and a postdoctoral fellow in his lab, Jeremiah Stafford. When Cantor makes a theoretical breakthrough that opens a path to curing the disease, he entrusts Stafford with the task of experimentally validating his hypothesis.<\/p>\n

The novel is impressively frank about the politics of professional competition in academic life. It includes subplots that explore how the murky power dynamics between professors, lab workers, and students enable economic, intellectual, and sexual exploitation. The book\u2019s frankness stops at the laboratory door, however. In fact, the whole story depends on treating the lab as an opaque space, a site of unexplained but intense work\u2014a wing just offstage where characters conveniently disappear for extended intervals. Stafford\u2019s recondite work in the lab ends up threatening his more representable relationships with both his romantic partner and his mentor. The intrigue of this fast-paced narrative hinges on the suspicion that Stafford\u2019s lab work may have involved malpractice\u2014a contagious doubt shared by both Cantor and the reader until the novel\u2019s resolution. Almost two decades later, the plot of Allegra Goodman\u2019s bestseller Intuition<\/em> (2006) would follow a strikingly similar trajectory.<\/p>\n\n

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Related readings<\/div>\n\n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
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\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Atomic Achilles: On Benjam\u00edn Labatut\u2019s \u201cThe Maniac\u201d<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Alex <\/a>\n \n Alex Streim <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

If lab lit elides laboratory work as a rule, there are occasional exceptions. The most fascinating and fully textured portions of Brandon Taylor\u2019s Real Life <\/em>(2020) occur across the 50-odd pages where Wallace, a graduate student, attempts to work with his strain of nematodes in the laboratory\u2014a place he once found comfortably insulated from the pressures of, well, \u201creal life.\u201d The novel\u2019s depictions of the lab and of Wallace\u2019s experiments are interwoven with his feelings and memories to magical effect. The spell is broken when altercations with his benchmates remind Wallace there is no actual way of isolating the laboratory from the racism, classism, and homophobia he has faced since childhood.<\/p>\n

Rohn commits even more consistently to representing lab work in her fiction. Labs prove central to the action of Experimental Heart<\/em> (2009), a novel where the researchers\u2019 carefully delineated research programs are shown to be inextricable from the larger context of their lived experiences. In her plot as in an actual lab, each procedure and instrument has its own unique spatial and temporal requirements, and those functional demands in turn affect where and how the story plays out.<\/p>\n

Rohn\u2019s attention to such matters may indicate her desire, or even her perceived need, to exemplify the tenets of lab lit in her fiction\u2014she coined the term, after all. But most writers of lab lit are far less interested in portraying the internal workings of their stories\u2019 laboratories. If anything, their novels exploit the idea that such spaces are beyond representation. They embrace the kind of artificial absence that is so delightfully satirized in Lethem\u2019s story about the emergence of Lack in a physics lab.<\/p>\n

In Lethem\u2019s novel, the lack inside laboratories is given a name and elevated to the level of literary self-consciousness. Lack becomes recognizable as an absence that is both mystifying and problematic for the plot. It would be easy, given both the protagonist\u2019s humanistic leanings and the novel\u2019s publication date, to read the story as a commentary on the excesses of post-structuralist theory\u2014a field obsessed with figurative absences, deferrals, and lacunae. In the story, though, Lack is a real material entity, one that is generated by the specialized technology of the science lab. The novel hints at the way that absence or placelessness is endemic to the laboratory. But it also suggests that this artificial creation of placelessness should become visible and thinkable when literary methods are brought to bear on it. If few authors of lab lit seem willing to follow Lethem along this line of investigation, that may be a symptom of a larger problem in realist fiction: a tendency among writers to treat their settings as essentially irrelevant, to sterilize them in much the same way a scientist might sterilize a laboratory.
\n<\/p>\n

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Even those realist writers most committed to mapping interactions between idiosyncratic people, places, and things necessarily struggle when confronted with the laboratory, a site purposefully evacuated of its significance…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n


\nJust as scientific writing minimizes the lab, a certain line of literary realism minimizes the significance of its own settings. The critic Georg Luk\u00e1cs diagnosed this tendency as a characteristic of fiction written after the mid-1800s, associating it with the influence of the writers Gustave Flaubert and \u00c9mile Zola. The realist and naturalist traditions that took inspiration from their works often included detailed descriptions of settings, Luk\u00e1cs pointed out, but such settings mattered little to their stories. As these writers strove to dramatize timeless universals of human experience, they reduced the particularities of place and history to inconsequential scenery\u2014what Luk\u00e1cs called \u201cmerely background\u201d or \u201cmerely \u2018setting.\u2019\u201d Such inattention to setting was, he argued, a symptom of diseased literature, a lamentable turn away from art that strained \u201cto make literature scientific\u201d by adopting a \u201cspurious objectivity.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ruthless elimination of environmental influences really is a tool for efficient, effective science. But if realist authors try too hard to imitate such science\u2014if they prize above all else the representation of generalizable patterns of human behavior\u2014they cede fiction\u2019s unique power to convey the specific, incommutable influence of particular places and histories on human lives. Even those realist writers most committed to mapping interactions between idiosyncratic people, places, and things necessarily struggle when confronted with the laboratory, a site purposefully evacuated of its significance, a place meticulously stripped down to approximate the Newtonian ideal of uniform empty space.<\/p>\n

No wonder, then, that lab lit so often treats the lab as an unimaginable elsewhere. Labs really are supposed to be nowhere and contain nothing in particular. It makes sense, too, that novels would frame these non-places as sites of suspicion, opaque portals that serve only to introduce unforeseen surprises and doubts into the narrative. Even Rohn and Taylor\u2014writers who stand out from other lab lit practitioners for their willingness to take readers inside labs and show us how they work\u2014end up including plots about potential malpractice occurring unobserved within the very places they take us.<\/p>\n

There is, in short, something to be learned from fiction\u2019s insistence on treating laboratories as unexplored and unexplorable territory. But there is something insidious in that treatment, too. As science comes under mounting political scrutiny, this blackboxing of the lab risks reinforcing a strain of popular paranoia about what, exactly, could be happening there. From chemtrail truthers to the anti-vax movement, today\u2019s conspiracy theorists don\u2019t only oppose science with unshakeable faith in other modes of knowing. They also adopt a superficially scientific skepticism toward science itself. That position dovetails nicely with the anxieties about unseen research that lab lit encourages.<\/p>\n

One of the benefits of lab lit is its potential to slow the pathological creep of anti-scientific sentiment, its capacity to help people from all walks of life understand and identify with scientific workers. Ironically, however, it has settled into a convention of treating labs themselves as sites of suspicion. Now that lab lit is cohering into a stable, identifiable genre, it is time to think carefully about its conventions and ask how they work\u2014or don\u2019t work\u2014to mount an effective response to the current historical moment. As a scientist might say: when it comes to representing the laboratory, further experimentation is needed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When literature refuses readers entry into the laboratory, it fosters suspicions of science itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":61298,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[168,20,143,46],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1132],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-61283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","tag-labor","tag-literature","tag-science","tag-science-fiction","section-literary-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Empty Lab, in Science and in Fiction - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When literature refuses readers entry into the laboratory, it fosters suspicions of science itself. 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