The failed science experiment that haunted Aparna Nancherla for years

Today, Aparna Nancherla is a successful comedian who has appeared on “Inside Amy Schumer” and written for “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” But in the late 1990s, Nancherla was a high school student at a Virginia magnet school specializing in science and technology. It was there, early in her freshman year, that Nancherla and two of her classmates found themselves covering up a grisly science lab massacre, and keeping the secret — until now.  

As Nancherla puts it, the school was stacked with smart kids: “Some of them didn’t have the social skills to remember to wear two shoes every day. But they had the ability to create a robot that would do it for them.”

And while Nancherla says that her STEM-focused classmates knew what they were doing at the school, she didn’t, having taken the admissions test at her parents’ urging. But when it came time for the science fair, which was mandatory for freshmen, Nancherla found herself swept up in what could be called high school’s great equalizing tidal wave: randomly assigned project groups.

“My group was a very hodgepodge mishmash,” Nancherla says. “I would say there was one girl who was very popular in my group — let's call her Kelly. And then there was a very responsible achiever girl, let’s call her Michelle. I guess that makes me Beyoncé.”

Nancherla’s girl group planned a project that would observe how aluminum nitrate, a compound found in fertilizer, affected populations of organisms in water. For the model organisms, they chose to experiment on paramecia.

“If you're not familiar with paramecia, they’re a one-celled organism similar to amoeba in that they're completely dispensable and considered free range for any type of scientific experimentation,” Nancherla says. “So our project was pretty straightforward. Basically, we had these solutions of paramecia in water, and then every day we would add a little bit more aluminum nitrate and see how the populations were affected. And you're like, oh how did you get paramecia? That’s a great question. Like most one-celled organisms, we got them from a biology catalog order. Or you could also get them on Tinder I guess now.”

The project was proceeding smoothly until it hit an unexpected setback: school vacation.

“Basically, one of us had to take the data home and do the project from home,” Nancherla says. “And we were like, Kelly, you haven't really carried your weight until now, so maybe you take it to your house and you know … in her favor, she did agree to do it. But then the paramecia never actually made it to Kelly's house, because she left them outside during tennis practice, and I'm sad to say they all perished in the cruel sun.”

The group held an emergency meeting, and determined that there was not enough time to start the project over. Instead, they would use their earlier data, and extrapolate the rest.  

“We all knew it was empirically wrong, but what choice did we have? If anything, we were operating on the plus side of plus or minus scientific error — but you need that half,” Nancherla says. "So even though we didn’t want to work together before, now we were bonded in together in this sick, low-stakes version of 'I Know What You Did Last Summer.'”

The girls took their paramecia back to the lab, where they carried on as if nothing had happened.

“I kept adding aluminum nitrate every day like a true psychopath mad scientist,” Nancherla says. “Like everything’s going great.”

But fate had a twist in store. When it came time for the science fair, the group’s project won third place — qualifying them for a trip to the regional competition.

“Now, the stakes were even higher,” Nancherla says. “It was like, now there’s really no way we can come clean, because a scandal this big could unravel the scientific community as we know it. The only honorable thing to do is to go to the regionals, lie through our teeth, boldly misrepresent ourselves — confidently, it’s the American way. And of course that's what we did.”

But at regionals, their project did not impress judges. And so Nancherla’s group and their expired paramecia retreated back into the shadows of American high school science — until now.

“I've thought about this story often, because it's not something I'm proud of,” Nancherla says. “But I was trying to think — what lessons can you call here? And I think one of them is definitely, at the end of the day, to pick a career where you can spin your lack of integrity into a cheeky life lesson.”

This article is based on a performance that aired on PRI's Studio 360.