In nuclei of your target cells, I saw the aldosterone man. He nodded slowly and then they blindfolded me and brought me into his lab, made me sign a consent form holding a pen in my teeth, made me wait until the transcriptional activity began.

There were translocations and I was sandwiched between the lanes of RNA molecules, sucked into his world, he kept calling his “nuclear envelope,” and I was trafficked inside their cytoplasm with all the other poor nuclei, lost in that envelope. They tried to transport me using structure-function analysis at the subcellular level, trying to keep me quiescent and saturated, stimulated in my cell, removed me for treatments with with atomic-force microscopy, culturing my cells, injecting them with currents. They took photos of me pretending to stick radioactive hearts where my kidneys should be then exposing me to high levels of the aldosterone man’s aldosterone and testosterone and other sterones too numerous to count, until the pores on my surface had outer diameters of 330 +/- 19 nm (n = 1250, P < 0.01) And they brought me back to my cage and told me to wait until the final paper was published.

© Richie Smith