My first book, Blindsided, revolves around the murder of a local professor who, as it turns out, happened to be peer reviewing research regarding a new “super potato” that purportedly was able to fend off all manner of blight, thus increasing the potential yields for the farmers in Maine. It might seem like an unusual plot line, but as it happens, it’s based on an actual research project I briefly worked on while I was a freshman at the University of Maine.
One of the more interesting aspects of being a science major at UMaine back in those days was a one-credit course we were required to take called, appropriately, Majoring in the Sciences. Entering college, I had plans on being either a biologist or a physician, so it was appropriate then that whole idea behind the course was to expose students to the realities of what it meant to be a scientist. The faculty advisor I was assigned to turned out to be a fascinating person in his own right, a brilliant biologist who was pragmatic enough to understand that the key to keeping his funding at a land grant university was to produce research appropriate to the economy of the state. In our very frank discussions about what it took to run a lab, I discovered he’d actually wanted to do research in other areas but had settled on potatoes because he loved living in Maine, and knew it was an important enough area for the state that he’d be able to find funding for his lab. (As a case in point, he showed me the empty lab of a colleague that was just down the hall… and completely empty; apparently, research into bugs hadn’t been as financially sound.)
I spent a few hours two or three times a week working in the lab as a volunteer, helping to transplant potato seedlings or transferring bacteria from one Petri dish to another; it was in that lab that I stumbled onto my actual profession of application development when I became fascinated by the DNA mapping one of the Ph.D. students was doing at a bulky PC terminal off in the corner. While I may have left the idea of being a research scientist behind when I moved into the computer sciences, the way research was conducted — and how brutal the environment could be to those who participated — always stayed with me, along with the idea of a “super potato.”
At the time I was in the lab, I thought it was science fiction that my mentor would be able to craft a potato by shifting around some genes; now, decades later, I find myself buying genetically modified items at my local grocery store (whether I know it or not). I suppose that’s why I thought it would be at least believable that such a potato as depicted in my book could, in theory, be created by some enterprising scientist. It also felt right that if such a thing happened, it would be done by someone up in Maine — completely in honor of that hard working mentor I was privileged to meet back when I was young enough not to truly appreciate the full measure of the experience.