The nightmare of losing the lab was all the more horrifying because it had been my only concrete dream. During my college years I had latched on to the idea that once I was a bona fide scholar (the main manifestation of that idea being a laboratory with my name on the door), everyone would acknowledge my credibility, some scientific breakthrough would logically follow, and life would be easy. I had raced through graduate school secure in my expectation of this reward. Thus I was bewildered by my failure during these early years of professorship and deeply worried, for the first time, that my
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