Microwunderkammer

A short fiction for Valentine’s Day:  

Dedicatee’s preface to the First Report from the Blueberry Institute.

I don’t like the idea of billionaires.  As a class, their wealth almost always has some taint of unethical, immoral, or illegal behavior.  With their vision warped by wealth and their voice amplified out of proportion, they do untold damage to society.  In this era, it is difficult to identify positive things they have done.  To this critique, I will admit one exception—my wife.  

There are good things that one can do with hyper-wealth, if one’s soul is not poisoned by a vast amount of money.  One can fund charitable organizations, and she does that, anonymously.  One can patronize the arts, and she does that through various foundations that give her invisibility.  These applications are good, if unimaginative, and this path to using wealth for good has been taken by a handful of self-aware ex-spouses of the mega-wealthy who had the foresight to draw up strong pre-nups.  

Aside from the way in which my beloved helps these causes (I will preserve her and my own anonymity), she has drawn inspiration from an even smaller group of wealthy people.  In deciding how to use her wealth, she looked to individuals such as Peter Mitchell, Jaime Campomar, Svjata Msiseck, Charles Babbage, and Charles Darwin, who used their considerable personal fortunes to pursue research interests that were far enough from the mainstream that they would never secure funding, but could change the world.

I met my wife when we were both far from wealthy, as grad students in the sciences tend to be.  Our research interests barely intersected, but when we met…whew!  It was at a divisional colloquium, and even from a brief meeting while standing in line for the free mediocre pizza, we clicked:  the weather changed, heavenly choirs started singing, the earth got wobbly—every cliche you can imagine for love at first sight, we both experienced it.  I am honestly flushed, feeling an echo of that physiological response, just writing about it these decades later.  Such is love.

We both worked on our degrees, completing our theses at roughly the same time.  Both were pretty good; mine was impressive enough, and my advisor prominent enough, that I was able to land a very good postdoc position.  Hers was better and more imaginative, though the topic was niche and her advisor a young professor.  She was able to secure a lectureship at the same institution that I would be working at.  The middle chapters of her dissertation were adapted from patent applications for a technique she developed to pursue the main thrust of her research.  Five years later, those patents became instrumental for the development of a near-universal tool in all biotechnology, and she started to become very wealthy, and then very, very wealthy.  

All that time, and ever since, we have been besotted with each other, as well as devoted to research.  Twelve years ago, she quietly founded the Blueberry Institute (Blueberry was our dog—a vessel of pure love with fur and paws—who died a year earlier).  With a handful of picked colleagues she set to work on an esoteric and impossible problem that no sensible agency or foundation would fund.  An interesting group of people appear when you offer the absolute best and brightest young researchers virtually unlimited money, a beneficent Institutional Review Board, and a noble cause, in exchange for dedication, sharply curtailed publication, and utter discretion.  

I am, I must note, not professionally affiliated with the Blueberry Institute, nor should I be—my research in soil bacteria is far from its focus, and in all honesty, I am not the caliber of researcher that belongs there (she loves me just the same).  I do keep up with my beloved’s work as best I can, though, and I have been helping her with the editing of this, the Institute’s first publication, as academic spouses do.  Even so, I was surprised and pleased to find myself in the company of Blueberry, and Blueberry’s successors Eleanor and Dudley, as the dedicatees of these volumes, and named as their inspiration.  It is in that capacity I write this foreword.  

It turns out that the answer to “Who Wrote the Book of Love?” is my wife and her collaborators, and you are holding its first volumes.  She has channeled her vast wealth into answering a question planted in her beautiful mind at that grad school colloquium.  Over the last decade plus, she and her staff have subjected love to intense analysis—physiological, biochemical, psychological, metabolic, genomic, evolutionary, and more.  You read here the first fruits of this work.  

With wearable devices, her institute has captured the very moment of falling in love, located it in the brain, seen its flashes and sparks.  In the laboratory, she and her team has unmixed the intoxicating cocktail of love and lust, then put it back together.  She has distilled love’s literal essence from Buddhist masters, from teachers and students, from newlyweds, and from dogs and other animals (you probably won’t be surprised but dogs are full of it).  She has seen how love is basically the same constellation of material phenomena whether in suburban Los Angeles, a tribal setting in Myanmar, or a village in Siberia.  She can see the difference—and the underlying similarity—between a crush and devotion, between the bloom of young love and the maturity of love celebrating its golden anniversary.  She has seen lovers’ fights with unsparing detail, and how they can heal with love or curdle and turn sour.  

You may wonder, for the question is not answered anywhere in these volumes, whether she has subjected our love to this analysis.  She has not, for sound professional and personal reasons.  You may also wonder why she would devote much of her vast fortune and genius and years of her life to unweaving this particular rainbow—have not Shakespeare and others given us enough to think on?  As the person who loves her best, I can answer this, and if you ask this, you are probably not a scientist who has been in love.  She has a powerful drive common to most in the sciences.  We see something we don’t understand—in this case something unimaginably powerful and seemingly beyond comprehension—and we must understand it.  To her, to me, this is perfectly normal behavior, it’s just that no one before has had the combination of money and genius and technology to approach the work in this way (and to be sure, Shakespeare emerges from this unharmed).  

However, there is another, deeper reason for this subject to be my beloved’s life work.  Love is good.  My beloved doesn’t want to just understand love, but magnify it.  It turns out that this is another thing that can be done with lots of money if you have a good heart.  I won’t go into any detail, but the way many billionaires have used their money to support division, bigotry, hate, and degraded personal habits, my beloved is beginning to use her money and the fruits of this research to promote love.  The methods are subtle and barely noticeable, though Blueberry Institute research has proven them to be effective.  

My understanding is that these volumes are by no means the last report from the Blueberry Institute.   I am hopeful that subsequent volumes will document a deeper understanding of love, and project reports on the Blueberry Institute’s efforts at promoting love in societies around the world.  In the meantime, our personal project—the life and love shared by my beloved and me—remains as yet unfinished, and we pursue it with the same ardor and dedication that we have over these previous happy decades.  

Anonymously,

Blueberry, Eleanor, and Dudley’s dogparent, and my beloved’s spouse.