Geneticist C. Brandon Ogbunu contemplates the role race has played in his academic career after he is confronted by the police.

C. Brandon Ogbunu is an Assistant Professor at Brown University. His research focuses on evolutionary genetics and the ecology of disease. A New York City native, Brandon enjoys film, hip-hop, jazz and science fiction. He's an ex-very mediocre light heavy weight boxer, and slightly less mediocre experimental virologist. He has higher hopes for humanity than he does the New York Knicks. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @big_data_kane.

This story originally aired on December 6, 2019 in an episode titled “Justice.”

Story Transcript

Rule number one. When you see the lights at your back or in your eyes and they're unmistakable, stop moving. Raise your hands slowly from their side, five fingers extended so that they know that there's nothing in your hands. Stop, wait for instructions. You see, you have to think about the police report. You don’t want it to say that ‘he lunged’ or ‘he reached for something that looked like a weapon’ or, the mysterious, ‘he made a menacing gesture’.

“No, officer. I’m not carrying any weapons.” That’s rule number two. Use ‘officer’ early and often. Why? You have to let them know that you know the power dynamic. After all, they got the badge and the gun. You, you were just born with the wrong set of physical traits.

Officer Number One stood with the gun loaded, pointed towards me, ready to go, ready to be a hero. Officer Number Two approached, “Are you carrying any drugs, sir?”

Sir? I guess I would respect that. “No, officer.”

After a thorough search, and I mean thorough, the interest turns to the contents of my backpack, a black JanSport that had some bad graffiti on the small pocket.

I was a senior at Howard University, a Chemistry and Mathematics major at the time. And like most people at that stage, my backpack told a lot about me. There were some moldy potato chips, some sketchpads and some notepads, a copy of sorts magazines, a couple of mix tapes. I mean real mix tapes, not the stuff that you guys talk about. And much, much more.

Officer Number Two had to sift through the contents and I heard all the ruffling. Eventually, Officer Two emerged with an object of interest and slammed it on the hood of the car and under the flashlight it went, Lehninger, Nelson and Cox, Principles of Biochemistry, Second Edition.

Officer Two was persistent, however, and raised the book and shook it out trying to find the contraband. And Officer Two was successful. Down went several note cards that were placed in the chapter on Michaelis–Menten kinetics.

Officer Number Two was persistent, still, and ruffled through the contents of the bag and emerged with another item, a little bit smaller, slammed it on the hood of the car. A draft of my senior thesis, highly annexated with the title The Liberation of RNA.

Now, in this thesis I argue, in hindsight fairly correctly, that breakthroughs that were new at the time, like RNA interferences, ribosomal RNA, ribozymes and small RNAs had expanded our view of what was possible with regards to RNA. We had historically put RNA in a box, but RNA was bigger than that.

I conducted this research in the laboratory of Susan Gottesman at the National Institutes of Health. To this day one of my truest scientific heroes, both maybe the nicest and the smartest person I've ever had the pleasure of meeting, let alone working. She might have stood five-foot-three but she towered over the field. Her work used bacterial genetics to understand the kind of basic questions of bacterial physiology. And recently, she had discovered several small RNAs in bacteria and in E. coli. And I focus a lot of my work in my lab in that.

I owed a lot to Dr. Gottesman. She saw talent in me before I did. She believed in me and gave me an opportunity. And a lot of the greatness of Dr. Gottesman came out in my failures. I was coming from chemistry where like, yeah, you might have an explosion but there was no contamination, you know.

So I had fairly heavy hands in the laboratory and she would say things like, “You being smart is not going to make a correct bacterial growth curve, Brandon.” Or, even better, “Yeah, I think you l be a good theoretician one day.”

But I owed everything to Dr. Gottesman. I was young and naïve at the time but I understood that I was working for somebody very special and I was honored to be connected to her.

Fifteen or so years later, I’m sitting on a sectional couch in front of 60-inch HDTV 4k, at home. It’s January 2019. I got olive tapenade hummus, cauliflower chips and a local root beer, and I’m tuned in to watch a movie, PBS American Masters: Decoding Watson.

This documentary was about James Watson. Now, James Watson has been an asshole for decades and, presumably, I was tuning in because this is a good series. The American Masters series have been good and you can learn. There's always something interesting to learn about people. But, really, I confess that I was tuning in kind of like most people tune in when they're watching boxing. You can say, “Well, I want to see a match of styles,” but you want to see a knock out. You want to see something kind of dramatic happen, and James Watson delivered.

Doubling down on his 2007 comments where he said, “Though I hope people are equal, people who have to deal with black employees don’t believe this to be true.” He had further things to say about black people and white people, differences he attributed to genetics.

My visible demeanor oscillated between kind of horrified shuddering and kind of uncomfortable laughter, but inside I was hurting.

Interestingly enough, however, those comments were not the most notable part of that documentary film. What I noticed was several notable female, women scientists were in the film and had passed through his lab at various points, and we’re talking famous people. I was like, “Wow, this is very interesting,” given Watson’s similarly problematic past when it comes to gender and other topics, so I said that doesn’t quite fit my narrative. That’s pretty interesting.

And, to his credit, none of the women scientists said that working for him, that the environment was particularly toxic. They kind of had interesting things to say about his personality but I found that to be very, very interesting. So when the question emerged in my head, I wonder how many other famous women scientists worked for James Watson, I took my inquiry to Google.

James Watson academic family tree. Now, there are websites dedicated to be able to attract a genealogy academically the same way that you do with your family and there's this Academic Family Tree.org, I believe. I click on it.

At the top of the page, one of those classical James Watson photos with the insufferable smile and the bad hairline, right? My eyes went down the page. It said ‘Parents’. One of the parents, Salvador Luria. I said, “Oh, I didn’t know Watson worked for Salvador Luria. Interesting.”

My eyes scrolled down the page and it said ‘Children’. And the first name in the Children Section, Susan Gottesman, Research Assistant.

Now, my response was in my mother tongue, a highly technical language. “Get the fuck out of here! Wait. It can’t be true.” But it was true.

There was no section that read ‘Grandchildren’ because if there was, and there was no section because his grandchildren likely number in the thousands at this point. But if there was, one of them would have been an evolutionary systems biologist at Brown University who likes long walks in the park and open world video games, and whose mother experienced the the Jim Crown South and whose great-grandmother was born a slave.

But what are academic connections anyway, really? Like I don't know him. I hope I never know him. The connection is kind of nebulous and tenuous in these types of ways that kind of don’t matter, right? But the connection between me and James Watson is about more than the profession. And the connection between all of us and James Watson is about more than science.

James Watson was officers Number One and Number Two. James Watson is why you feel unwelcome in your job. James Watson makes you feel like an impostor. And, more broadly, James Watson tells people they're illegal. James Watson separates families. James Watson puts children in cages. James Watson, my academic grandfather.

The contents of my backpack was spread all over the hood of the police car at this point. Officer Number One and Number Two looked at each other what look like, “What the hell do we do now?”

Eventually, Officer Number One said, “You can get your things and go.”

Now, this was supposed to be humiliating. Here I am minding my business and I have to stop and put all my things back into the bag. But sometimes resistance is best dealt quietly, and so I figured out a way to make this work for me. I took my sweet-ass time putting my materials back into that bag, one by one. And with it I was saying two things. a) Them hands y’all got with no guns could help me put these things back in this bag. And b) The things I’m putting in this bag, the ideas they contain - some are mine, some from others - are valuable. I have people in the world who love me. I have dreams of one day being a great professor. And I had to be at work in the morning in the Gottesman lab.

As I was completing the process of putting the things in my bag, I looked at the last item, that thesis, The Liberation of RNA, and I put it in the bag and zipped it. I didn’t miss the opportunity for one last slam dunk.

I turned my head to the officers, said, “Have a good night.”

I slung the JanSport around my shoulders, I eased into a deep, New York strut on the road to a career in science, a very rugged fitness landscape full of peaks and valleys, successes and failures, friends and enemies, Susan Gottesmans and James Watsons.