Freezing and Thawing

In The Song of the Cell, Siddhartha Mukherjee narrates an amusing incident from his younger days. He was still a very junior person in the medical chain, and his mentor was an Italian postdoc, Enzo Cerundolo, a garrulous man who nonetheless barely spoke to Mukherjee:

“He rushed around the lab, navigating his way past me as if I were some irritating piece of equipment that someone had off-loaded in the wrong place.”

 

One aspect of the project the lab was working on at the time involved repeatedly freezing, then thawing a sample. The sequencing mattered – two thaws in a row, or two freezes in a row would kill whatever was in the sample. Unfortunately for Enzo, the assistant in charge of it (also an Italian) had gone on vacation. Nobody knew if the next step was to freeze or to thaw.

 

Mukherjee asked to see the tube. On its bottom, in barely visible ink, he saw the letters C, S, C, S, C, S. He asked Enzo what the Italian word for “freeze” was. Congelare. And the Italian word for “thaw”? Scongelare.

 

Mukherjee had cracked the code! The Italian assistant had written the actions already performed via the first letters of the Italian words. The next action should be a C – Congelare – freeze.

 

Enzo’s opinion of Mukherjee changed:

“Perhaps I wasn’t a waste of time after all.”

During the break, Enzo even made two cups of coffee. As Mukherjee puts it tongue in cheek:

“Something had thawed between us.”