By Seth Mnookin | Smithsonian Magazine
Pardis Sabeti pulls a BMW SUV into the breezeway at Harvard’s Northwest Laboratory, an airy, minimalist structure of smooth concrete, tropical hardwood, and lots and lots of glass. The 36-year-old hyperkinetic physician and geneticist renowned for her computational approach to studying evolution and public health directs a 22-member laboratory that occupies prestigious top-floor space in this citadel of science. On this Sunday afternoon in October, she is meeting two of her graduate students to work on, of all things, a holiday greeting card. (The tradition began in 2008 when she bought everyone cheesy holiday sweaters from Kmart for a group photo; last year’s card featured a full-blown re-enactment of Raphael’s famous Vatican fresco The School of Athens, depicting the accumulation of knowledge through reason.) Daniel Park, 33, is already in the passenger seat of Sabeti’s car when Dustin Griesemer, a 24-year-old MD-PhD candidate, climbs into the back. Sabeti, wearing modishly rectangular eyeglasses and brown knee-high boots, starts the five-mile drive to Sky Zone, an indoor trampoline park.
Twenty minutes later, Sabeti, Park and Griesemer are snaking between packs of grade-schoolers to check out a pit called the Foam Zone. They sit down at a metal table near the snack bar and Griesemer explains why this year’s card should play off the viral music video “Gangnam Style.” Sabeti takes out her phone and watches on YouTube as an impeccably dressed South Korean rapper named Psy dances in horse stables, saunas, buses, motorboats and subways. The group is in agreement: A “Gangnam Style” homage will be impressive even if lab members aren’t hurtling through the air. The trampoline park will have to wait for another time. Read More...