Chick Flick Read online

  Being a former scientist, I found he was of a like mind when it came to solving problems and trying to better the world. He was kind, and I felt genuine relief and thankfulness as he went through the process with us, giving us all the facts and figures we needed without any spin. He eventually sent us back outside and out of the city limits, into a local hatchery that his processing plant worked with, so that we could see how the egg-separating process took place. I steeled myself; this wasn’t going to be a happy thing for me to deal with.

  All in the name of progress, I said to myself, squeezing my hands together in my lap on the way out to the hatchery.

  Once we got outside of the city limits, the car felt more claustrophobic, not less. Perhaps this was because we weren’t on our way to an idyllic barn, but rather, a major cog in the machine that is the poultry industry. The plant loomed cold and gray in front of us as we slid into a visitor’s spot and began to go through the security process before we were allowed inside. Dean had called in advance of our coming, but there were still many papers to sign, liability waiver forms to initial, that kind of thing.

  The hatchery is a sterile place. As a doctor would scrub in before surgery, Todd and I were instructed to wear protective clothing—not for our benefit, but for the benefit of the product—donning a sterile hat, gown, and mask. They would take no risk of contaminating the thousands of eggs they had in incubation. Kept at a perfect thirty-seven degrees Celsius, the incubator rooms are nice and warm; it would have been a treat on a cold winter day, but in the summer, it felt like we were overdressed and lying on a beach. In the sea of egg trays, one thing struck me as odd. Our guide had mentioned there being thousands of eggs in incubation, but were there even a thousand eggs in this room? Would I even know a thousand eggs if I saw them? I started to count, doing the math while Todd talked to the hatchery worker.

  “Is this it?” I interrupted, not one for patience when it came to my projects.

  “Oh no,” the worker said, and I thought I saw the corners of his mask perk up as if he were smiling. The incubator is designed like the inside of a spiral shell. We’re only in one part of it.”

  We followed him to another room, where eggs at eighteen days of incubation were injected with vaccines. The room was cavernous, with a huge machine that accepts the egg trays loaded by conveyer belt and pulled gently into rubber suction cups. These cups register the inside volume of each egg, checking first if there’s an embryo inside. An egg without an embryo will be cold, owing to its lack of life. There’s no need to waste a vaccine on an empty egg.

  Once the fertilization status is marked, a long arm goes through and pulls each unfertilized egg out of the tray and onto a metal trough in the side. Each egg cracks with the pressure of the cold metal—imagine hundreds of sunny-side-up eggs waiting to be fried. These are waste products, of course.

  With the waste separated, tiny needles are pushed down into the suction cups holding the fertilized eggs, silently puncturing the shell. I’d seen this before, but Todd hadn’t; he was amazed that the shells didn’t crack.

  Our guide had seen that look of amazement before.

  “Pretty cool, huh? The chicks turn out perfectly fine. In the ’90s, RICPCom successfully built a machine that could provide inoculation against common diseases in ovo. They are the only ones who tried to do it in the egg,” he said. “Their plant is here in town, actually. They come out and do all the maintenance and support. It’s a closed system, and they keep a pretty tight lock on it, but it’s a bunch of friendly guys.”

  “Before they came up with that machine, was the inoculation done manually?” I wondered aloud.

  “Yup. What a pain, right?” He slapped his knee with the clipboard he was holding. “This is way better. They used to inoculate them as they were hatched, one by one. Now it’s efficient, and saves the handling of the chicks. Once the egg is in the suction cup in the proper position, the needle is calibrated to inject it in the shoulder. Or what passes for a shoulder of an embryo, anyway.”

  He led us into another large room.

  “It would be great if someone could figure out a better way to deal with this,” he grumbled.

  I knew instantly we were in the sorting room. On seven high chairs, seven women sat with gloves and covered heads as they separated out chicks, one per second, thirty-six hundred an hour. The chicks fall out of the shoot, and then make their way from the hatching trays to the round platform where they are circled, until they are picked up and segregated. Once the worker determines the sex, the male is thrown into another shoot, sliding along the cold platform onto the conveyer belts into baskets to be tossed away outside into the hatchery garbage. The females slide into baskets, which are taken to farms to grow and lay eggs. One for life, the other for death. I had to look away, and I saw Todd beginning to viscerally understand why this issue was so important to me. The males suffocate one on top of one another outside in the dumpster.

  At last, we were shown the hatching room, another warm room with eggs held together in baskets. It was like a bright Saturday-morning cartoon, watching the eggs rub against each other as they lightly hopped in place, hatching. It’s amazing to watch a little chick hatch, immediately standing on his own two feet as his brothers and sisters pop out of the eggs around him. If you look closely, you can even see them try to fly a little. Thousands of small, downy, yellow-feathered chicks appearing before my eyes out of a sea of whiteness—they were so adorable, I wanted to hug each and every one of them, or at the very least, give them a pet on the soft spot just above their beak between the eyes. I couldn’t help but coo a little, and I blushed when I saw that the hatchery worker had heard me.

  After we left the hatchery, Todd told me that now he understood more about the process, including the profit, but more important, my objections to the industry’s standard practices.

  “We can do this, Scarlet,” he said, excitedly waving his notepad around as we walked back to the car. It was closing in on dusk, and the summer heat was blessedly abating. “If we manage to automate this process, we can absolutely do it in a profitable way.”

  In any case, we were certainly more prepared to meet our next investor, avoiding the embarrassment we’d felt earlier. I had more to learn on the biotechnology end; I needed to know who else had tried to solve this issue and what stumbling blocks they’d run into. Before we left the hatchery, our guide was telling us about some of the inside information he had on other companies trying to develop techniques for their own sexing applications, but to no avail.

  “If there was a machine for that, believe me, we’d know about it. We’d have a couple right here in the hatchery,” he said.

  “It’s time to get started, Scarlet,” said Todd one day. “We can do this thing!”

  I felt the familiar tug of self-doubt inside me. I had been working on my own for so long; I knew that we needed to get going, but somewhere I still hadn’t accepted that we were going to take this leap. Turning a dream into a reality is frightening!

  But more than my fear, the excitement started to take over. I didn’t want to be one of those young scientists who got stuck in the fear of the unknown, freezing in my tracks and not trying. I knew then that the fear was part and parcel of this excitement, a feeling that I wouldn’t trade for any other, because that feeling came with HOPE. I would rather have hope, strive to achieve my dream, and fall on my face later rather than never having hope at all and never doing anything to make things better.

  So we took the plunge. We went downtown to a sleek high-rise, where a tall, elegantly dressed woman showed us to another conference room, this time, with a friendlier air.

  “Would you like something to drink? Coffee? Water?”

  We shook our heads. We were too nervous to hold anything.

  “OK,” she said, then smiled. “Lauralynn will be right in to see you.”

  We took in the view of the city as we waited for Lauralynn Franklin, the woman we hoped would be our lawyer. She had come highly recommen
ded, and after that first disastrous meeting, we knew our nascent operation needed legal protection. We owed that first great idea that much. The drop from the fifty-seventh floor was precipitous, but from our seats at the conference table, all we could see was beautiful clear blue sky. The feeling of possibility opened up before us. Looking out the windowed walls, I tried to catch my breath; I knew this was a rare moment, one to be valued. My head spun and I sat back down.

  When Lauralynn walked in with a smile, I felt immediately at ease. A petite woman with a big heart, which she clearly wore on her sleeve, she wasn’t at all what I had pictured. I’ve read my share of nail-biting crime thrillers, and lawyers always seem like wolves, emissaries of corporate greed. I could tell instantly that Lauralynn wasn’t like that. She was sharp, indeed, but with a straightforward, no-nonsense approach. I liked her immediately. I never thought she was trying to take advantage of us, even though she could probably see we were wet behind the ears.

  “It’s such a pleasure to meet you both,” she said, sitting not across the expanse of the glassy table, but right next to us, angling her chair toward us. “I was so interested when I read your prospectus. Tell me more about this idea of yours.”

  Normally, I might have let Todd do the talking, but something about Lauralynn put me at ease. I felt like she could be a mentor, a role model.

  “We’re developing a novel technique to differentiate between male and female chicks in ovo,” I said. “While still in the egg, that is.”

  She nodded, and listened intently as I went on with my explanation. I told her about the barbaric practices of the layer industry, what happened to the male chicks, and how I thought I could come up with a better solution. I appreciated that she was so interested; it wasn’t her job to fund the endeavor, and she could simply draw up the papers and take our money no matter what. But I could tell she really cared about what we were trying to do.

  “And the shares in the company—you’re planning to divide them fifty-fifty between you two?”

  “Yes,” replied Todd and I simultaneously.

  I could feel my heart beating in my throat. Signing papers. Starting a company. This was huge for a young scientist. It felt like something only “grown-ups” would do, people like those whom I’d spent my career so far working under. To work on a bench is one thing, but to sign contracts? To state publicly that I had something worth pursuing, worth giving to the world? That was a whole different ball of wax.

  Unlike the men and women we’d encountered so far on our journey, Lauralynn wasn’t sarcastic or hard-edged. She was respectful, curious and genuine. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, she made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.

  “I think I can help you,” she said. “Not only that, but I think I can help you without any money changing hands.”

  A little laugh escaped Todd’s lips; I self-consciously tried to rearrange my features into something less reminiscent of a grimace.

  “I’m not pulling your leg,” she continued. “I love this project, and I’m fortunate enough to be in a successful practice with a diverse array of clients. I can afford to help you pro bono for now, with the expectation that when you get investors on board, we can settle up our accounts.”

  Lauralynn’s belief in us floored me. More than that, it reassured me. Maybe this idea was as great as I’d thought. Maybe, as I would be fighting for this step by step, I wouldn’t have to do it alone. I would have people like Todd and Lauralynn on my side, for starters. After all, my friends hadn’t laughed when I told them about the start-up. I looked out at the blue sky surrounding us and felt, for a moment, on top of the world.

  “You’ll need more than just me to get this done, though,” she said.

  I started scribbling furiously on my notepad. Ever the eager student, I wasn’t going to pass up this education in opening our business.

  “You’ll need an accountant to go over the bills and help you prepare your tax forms. I can handle the registration of the company and any dealings you may have with potential investors or buyers, but we need to make sure the finances are in order,” she said, adding with a wink, “when there are finances, that is.”

  Todd nodded. We spent some time talking about the organizational structure, with Todd as the CEO and me as the CTO—chief technical officer. Of course, that meant I was also the researcher, the lab technician, the one to send the invoices, the one who made the coffee, and the one buying the sandwiches for lunch. It was a busy job, but someone had to do it . . . and I had to eat! The point being, it was a small operation.

  Lauralynn seemed to think this all made sense. “And what’s the name going to be?”

  “Spells,” I said, proudly. It was the “spell-checking” enzyme, after all, that had inspired me, and ever since then, I’d felt like a spell had been cast over me, running through my thoughts nonstop.

  The rest of the meeting passed by in a blur of paperwork and excitement. At the end of it all, it was official: Todd and I had opened our own company.

  But there would be little time to celebrate just yet.

  Even though it was getting late, I couldn’t wait to get back to the lab, throw on my coat, and dive into the research. I had to dig deeper into the literature. Todd had a different idea. He sounded as sure of this as I’d ever heard him sound about any idea.

  “Scarlet,” he said. “It’s time we contacted RICPCom.”

  The more cautious of the two of us, I felt my resolve start to shake. RICPCom was not just a major player in the business, they were a potential competitor, one of the two companies we knew of that were working on applications for automatic chick separation. It was a natural pipeline product for them, of course, since they owned the patents for injecting into the egg. It followed that at the time the needle entered for the inoculation, you could draw a sample to sex the chick.

  “You’re nuts,” I said, trying to laugh off my visible stress. “We’re not ready for that!”

  “Scarlet, I know you like to look before you leap. I totally understand that,” Todd said, gently trying to talk me down. “We’ve got to do this now. They are potential collaborators, or customers, at the very least. And it takes time to develop a business relationship!”

  I think he could tell right away that I wasn’t convinced, because later that day, he disappeared from the office for a while, serendipitously contacting RICPCom reps from his car . . . or trying to, anyway. They were harder to get ahold of than one might assume about a relatively small company. After he’d been told that the CEO was out of the country, he was connected to Caroline Peters, the CTO. After haggling with her for a few minutes of her time, he was able to secure a time for us to connect with her and her chief researcher. I have to credit Todd’s ingenuity with getting in touch with her at all; as simple as it is to pick up a phone and call rather than send an e-mail to solicit meetings, nobody thinks to do it anymore. And, after all, it’s harder to say no on the phone.

  Typical Todd, miracle worker. Despite the fact that he only had a couple minutes with her on the phone, he managed to give her a clear and compelling pitch about what we were working on. No doubt he got her attention by mentioning that our application would add value to their already valuable injection device.

  “She pushed back a little bit,” Todd admitted, “hinting that they were working on their own stuff, of course, and that they would have a conflict of interest. But I convinced her to hear us out when I told her our application was based on DNA, rather than simply hormones.”

  “Accuracy equals potential profits, right?”

  “Exactly. You’re getting the hang of this money thing,” he said playfully.

  Even though we were just set up for a conference call rather than a sit-down meeting, I still felt a lump forming in my throat. When I was on my bench day in and day out, doing my work, it seemed only a pipe dream that I’d be talking to someone so important as Caroline, someone who supervises the research and development (R&D) team of a company, where a groundbr
eaking product such as the in ovo inoculator was invented. What would someone with her degree of responsibility and experience say about our little project? Our venture seemed so small by comparison. But it was ours nevertheless, and we truly believed in it. To prepare for the call, I studied relentlessly as if I were working toward taking the Bar Exam. Late at night, lying in bed unable to sleep, I tried to anticipate questions and the answers I might give. There was so much at stake, and it felt like we were newly hatched, pun very much intended.

  We didn’t want anyone overhearing us in the lab, and we didn’t want to bother Lauralynn again; she’d already given us so much and asked for nothing in return. So we did what scrappy, tiny start-ups did, and we worked with what we had. Which was, in this case, the interior of Todd’s family sedan. I was stretched out in the back, he, in the front. I traced my fingers over the bright stickers that his four kids had stuck to the windows and clenched my teeth with something like anticipation and dread, waiting for the line to connect.

  The dial tone terminated, and then came the telltale click of a speakerphone being activated somewhere far away. An authoritative voice rang out clearly, surrounding us through Todd’s car speakers.

  “Caroline Peters.”

  “Caroline!” Todd said with steely bravado, doing a wonderful acting job. It was like they were old buddies from business dealings past. “How’s everything on your end?”

  “It’s fine,” came the curt reply.

  “Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us,” he continued. “I’m here with the brains of the operation, Scarlet.”

  He threw a teething toy into the back of the car, trying to wake me from my reverie. My voice sounded like it was coming out of a pillow of down, the thick fog of sleep.