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Lottie Hart, cradling a cage of rats, gently coos the nursery ballad Lullaby and Good Night to calm the nervous rodents as she transports them to her lab where she will, without remorse or regret, slice off their heads with a tiny guillotine. Four children wait for Lottie at home: an eighteen-year-old daughter, a fourteen-year-old stepdaughter, and two sons, ages five and two. With this introduction, Arlene Heyman, author of Artifact, reveals the competing forces that war inside Lottie: maternal urges, with their compelling and complicated gratifications and responsibilities, and the steely determination to sacrifice what she must in order to pursue a career in science. In another early scene, Lottie is giving her rambunctious young sons a bath while she fantasizes about a letter she will write to the editor of a scientific journal who has rejected her research results. Throughout the book, Lottie careens between her two loves: science and family. Artifact explores the losses and achievements of a middle-class woman growing up in mid-century America who is internally driven toward a life in the sciences.
The critique of Lottie's research is that her findings are simply an artifact of the buffers, the fixatives, and the additive combination of agents she uses to perform her experiments on the salivary glands of rats. She is hoping to discover whether the glands serve an endocrine function. Boys bathed, toweled, and handed off to their father, Lottie's second husband, Jake, she types her reply to the editor. “It should be clear to anyone with experience in this business that all one ever deals with is artifact, and that one's skills in creating and interpreting artifact are largely the measure of one's abilities as a morphologist/scientist” (p. 9).
Arlene Heyman is a scientist herself, a medical doctor and psychoanalyst. Her facility with scientific processes and language makes reading Artifact a sort of primer on the scientific life as experienced by a woman
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