The door says Wise Laboratory, and they aren’t kidding around.
When walking in, you could be greeted by its director, Dr. John Wise Sr., who relocated the lab from Yale in 2002.
Or by his wife, Sandra Wise, who acts as the Director of Cytogenetics and Genomic Instability.
When I enter, fixed at the very end of a row of computers by its entrance is John Wise, Jr., a freshman biology student with a thick mop of blonde hair sticking out from beneath a winter hat.
The facility’s full name is the Wise Laboratory for Environmental and Genetic Toxicology, and the younger John Wise has been working here alongside family members since his sophomore year of high school.
Midway through his first year at USM, he talks about his introductory semester as though it were mostly a lesson in time management.
“I was just meeting everybody and making new friends, learning how college works,” he says smiling, tucking a section of hair back behind his ear. “I had a lot of distractions.”
That’s no exaggeration either. As midterms were approaching, so was the deadline for submissions into NASA’s Microgravity University program, something Wise had been eyeing over the previous year.
In preparation, it was his job to come up with a protocol for determining whether “hyper- and microgravity increase cellular uptake of chemicals by facilitated diffusion and phagocytosis.”
By the time finals rolled around, news had arrived that yes, NASA understood what he was talking about, and yes, he would be the first student to lead a team from Maine into their undergraduate research program.
Wise admits he was excited by the acceptance, but he has a laid-back presence while describing it all.
Prior to taking off on NASA’s “weightless wonder” in July, he will be spending a month in the Bahamas studying coral reef cells. When he returns to the lab in August, before his second year of college gets underway, he’ll be assisting in even more NASA-related research to understand the potential health hazards of moon dust-a lengthier project that could keep him occupied for up to three years.
In the meantime, John Jr. is trying to focus as much energy on his philosophical ambitions as on his professional ones.
At around the same time that he was transferring to Cheverus for his senior year of high school, Wise remembers feeling a strong pull beyond the biological implications of life and into the spiritual.
Over time, and largely through the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, that has developed into a practice of the Buddhist faith.
“Buddhism has taught me to be more patient, more peaceful, to worry less and to focus my attention on the present moment,” says Wise. “That’s all we are guaranteed-life in the present moment.”
It’s a form of spirituality that suits his lifestyle-not only in the patience required to endure long hours in the lab or filling out grant proposals, but also his chief extracurricular interests: walking around the beach and woods, reflecting on his work (“the study of life,” as he puts it), and trying to hash out the nature of existence among friends.
“I do not advise or pressure him to be like me, or different than me,” says his father, who invited young John to work in his lab when he was nearing age fifteen. “He must follow his own heart. My role is simply to point out opportunities and answer his questions when he asks.”
John Jr. is just as likely to minimize his father’s role in how he got where he is today, painting his dad as only a helpful source of guidance and an invaluable connection.
Though sometimes, says John Jr., that guidance is more blunt than others. He recalls one of the more turbulent periods of last semester, when his social life began to look like it might overwhelm the workload.
“One day, he brought me a 3 by 5 sheet of paper with a sticky note on it. On both the sheet of paper and the sticky note, he had written the word ‘Future.’ I had my pick of which one I wanted.”