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Caroline Baird leaned against the stainless steel counter of her small, custom-built lab and ate her first meal of the day.
A snack baggie filled with plain almonds.
A cup of very welcome coffee.
She needed to stop working sometimes. Let the ideas stop swirling in her head.
But it was hard to stop. There was still so much left to do.
She was fifty-five, with shoulder-length wavy gray hair and cloudy brown eyes that seemed to be getting worse every month.
The lenses in her glasses were so thick now, they required special frames.
The yellow particle microbeam couldn’t help her eyesight. She knew that. It would blind her completely.
But the urge was always there to just try.
Instead, she adapted. This lab was part of it. Just eight hundred square feet, filled with two long stainle
