The Secret Lives of Martinos Folk Carol Barnstead & the Center’s cast of colorful characters Gary here, stepping out of the third person for a moment to tell the story of a conversation I had a while back, a conversation that neatly summed up one of my favorite things about working in the Martinos Center. It feels appropriate to include the story here, near the end of this book and near the end of our narrative about what makes the Center so unique and so special. I have this theory that you need to be a character to work at the Martinos Center—you have to be a bit of an oddball, albeit in a fun, quirky kind of way. I’m not sure whether this is a prerequisite enforced during one of the hiring steps or is simply the result of some kind of self-selection process. Whatever the case, I know it in my bones to be true: people who have no imagination or appreciation of others’ eccentricities just won’t cut it here. In late 2019, I ran my theory by Carol Barnstead. Carol had retired from the Center a few months before, after some 31 years of helping keep it afloat by overseeing the assignment of visas and managing other HR concerns. It was a warm, early fall day in September and she and I were sitting on a bench in the Charlestown Navy Yard, watching boats glide across the water and chatting about her many experiences in the Center as it
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grew from a handful of researchers in a shadowy subbasement of MGH to the major facility it is today. I figured if anyone could confirm the theory, it would be her. She laughed when I explained my idea— though, notably, she didn’t try to refute it. “Well, if you’re not a character when you arrive,” she said, “you will be shortly after.” We sat for a while, teasing out the theory, turning it over and inspecting it from various angles. Our conversation was wide-ranging, blithely skipping from one topic to the next. We talked, for example, about the propensity toward tardiness in the Center. In what is known colloquially—and probably euphemistically—as “Martinos Time,” researchers often view meeting start times not as the bullseye in the middle of the target but as one of the outer rings: kind of close but by no means where you were actually aiming. “No one is ever really on time at Martinos,” Carol said. “They never have been, since day one. You could tell them there’s free cake and they would show up a half hour late.” There’s
