LANDSCAPE WITH CONFLAGRATION
I’ve reached a sticking point in my homework, the background reading that must take me inside the man. Not a barrier to comprehension: I remember, flexing my intellect again this season, that given time, I have the capacity to tackle anything, however formidable. And I have more than enough time—time spreading from sunny sahara mornings alone over onion bagels and oranges to arctic nights, postponing sleep as long as possible, armed with only thick books and a headboard lamp. I’ve hit a barrier not to comprehension but to credulity. How can an assortment of invisible threads inside one germ cell record and pass along the construction plans of the whole organism, let alone the cell housing the threads themselves? I’ve grasped the common metaphor: the blue-print gene somehow encodes a syntactic message, an entire encyclopedia of chemical engineering projects. I feel the thrill of attaching abstract gene to physical chromosome. But it remains analogy, lost in intermediary words.
The task Dr. Ressler set himself was merely—and only he could have thought “merely”—to capture the enigma machine that tweaks this chromosomal message into readability. Did he believe that nothing was lost in translation as signals percolated up from molecules in the thread into him, that brain, those limbs, that hurt, alert face? Searching for his own lexicon required faith that the chemical semaphore could serve as its own rosetta, faith that biology too could be revealed through its particulars. Faith that demonstration could replace faith.
It grows like a crystal, this odd synthesis of evolution, chemistry, and faith, spreads in all directions at once, regular but aperiodic. By Ressler’s birth, enzymes—catalysts driving the chemical reactions of metabolism— were identified as proteins. The structure of proteins—responsible for everything from the taste of sole to the toughness of a toenail—strikes me as ridiculously simple: linear, crumpled necklaces of organic pearls called amino acids. What’s more, the protein necklaces directing all cell processes consist of series of only twenty different amino acid beads.
It seems impossible: twenty can’t be sufficient word-hoard to engineer the tens of thousands of complex chemical reactions required to make a thing live. But lying in bed under my arctic nightlight, carrying out the simple arithmetic, I see how the abject simplicity of protein produces more potential than mind can penetrate. A necklace of only two beads, each in one of twenty colors, can assume any of four hundred different combinations. A third bead increases this twenty times—eight thousand possible necklaces. I learn that the average protein necklace floating in the body weighs in at hundreds of beads. At that length, the possible string combinations exceed the printed sentences in man-made creation. Room to grow, in other words.
The protein bead string folds up, forms secondary structures determined by its amino acid sequence. The shape of these fantastic landscapes, fuzz-motes as convoluted as the string is simple, gives them their specific, chemical power. Their jungle of surface protrusions provides—like so many dough forms—niches for other chemicals to assemble and react.
But if these cookie cutters—in countless possible fantastically complex shapes—build the body, what builds the builders? The answer appalls me. The formula for the builder molecules as well as its implementation are contained in another long, linear molecule. This time the beads come in only four colors. It says something about my progress in scientific faith that I accept the calculation showing that the possible combinations in one such foursquare informational molecule exceed the total number of atoms in the universe.
But I hang up on the idea of such a linear molecule encoding a breathing, hoping, straining, failing, aging, dying scientist. I find as I read that I’m in good company. If I still ran the Quote Board, I’d use tomorrow that gem of Einstein’s when meeting Morgan and hearing of his project to mechanize biology:
No, this trick won’t work … How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?
But I no longer run the Quote Board. I run nothing now except the Jan O’Deigh Continuing Education Project. And for that, I have only more history. When counting aminos fails to put me to sleep, I charm insomnia by reading Beadle and Tatum’s 1940 work on the bread mold Neurospora. Only seventeen years old when Ressler got his brainstorm, it must have read like a classic to a student raised on it. While the world once more indulged its favorite occupation, Beadle and Tatum dosed mold with X-rays to induce mutations. Raising thousands of test-tube strains, they produced mutants that could no longer manufacture required nutrients. Mutated chromosomes failed to produce necessary enzymes.
With an excitement that penetrates even the sober journal account, they crossed a mutant that could no longer make enzyme E with its normal counterpart. Half the offspring had the mutation and half did not. Enzyme production precisely mirrored Mendelian inheritance. One gene, one enzyme. Each time I read the conclusion, I hear his perverse question: “What could be simpler?”
A unique gene, coding for a unique enzyme: Cyfer inherited as dogma what actually arose only through recent, bitter debate. The limited informational content of DNA—the four bases adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine—did not seem adequate to build the fantastically varied amino acid necklaces. For some time, the size of DNA was underestimated, and even after the enormous molecular weight was correctly determined, many scientists believed that the four bases followed one another in repeating order. Redundant series carry no more information than a news program repeating, “Earlier today, earlier today …”.
DNA was long rejected as the chromosomal message carrier. Some researchers believed that proteins themselves were the master blueprint, even though every protein would require others to build it. Avery blazed the trail out of confusion. His 1944 paper showed that the substance transforming one bacterial strain to another was not protein but DNA. Inheritance was rapidly being reduced from metaphor to physical construct. DNA was a plan that somehow threaded raw amino acid beads into proteins. These protein chains in turn catalyzed all biological process. Cyfer’s question—the coding problem—was how a long string of four types of things stood for thousands of shorter, twenty-thing strings.
Before the problem could even be posed, scientists had first to determine a structure for DNA that fit the evidence. The structure fell the year Ressler attained legal adulthood, one of the most celebrated solutions in science. X-ray diffractions of crystalline nucleic acid suggested a helix. The beautiful Chargaff Ratios demanded the amount of adenine equal that of thymine, guanine equal cytosine, and G + A equal C + T. DNA presented too many structural possibilities to be cracked by standard organic analysis. By starting with the constraints in Franklin’s and Wilkins’s data, Watson and Crick tinkered with cutouts until the shoe dropped. They hit upon the double helix, where complementary base pairs—G pairing always with C, A always with T—form the spiral rungs.
Temperament, coded in long strings of base pairs, plays a big part in any interpretation of data. The full ramifications of the model were not quickly grasped. It followed neatly that chromosomes were just supercoiled filaments of DNA. Mendel’s genes were simply sections of chromosome, a length of spiral staircase—say ten thousand base-pair rungs spelling out auburn hair. But using four letters to convey the content of all living things seemed like transmitting every Who’s Who of this century in staticky dots and dashes across a copper filament.
How was the message read? How to determine the language of the cipher? Understand that question and I’ve understood him. Dr. Ressler, receiving intact the work of the structurists, trained his temperament on the smallest end of the genetic spectrum, the connecting link. The task given him was to determine how twin-helical sequences of four bases
strung amino acids into enfolded protein:
… threonine-valine-tryptophan …
Dr. Ressler’s question was not primarily cytological or chemical or even genetic, although it was all these. Heredity’s big hookup lay in information, pure form. It float
ed agonizingly close in the air, an all-expenses-paid trip to Stockholm taped to the bottom of some chair in the lecture hall. Yet prestige played no more than ironically in Ressler’s mind. His was a drive deeper than recognition, a need to cross that hierarchical border, that edge, that isomorph, that metaphor, to get to the thing itself, to arrive at the enigma machine, reach it on pattern alone, reach down and take into his hands the first word, name it, that string of base-pairs coding for all inheritance, desire, ambition, the naming need itself—first love, forgiveness, frailty.
CANON AT THE SECOND
I know that need. It keeps me up late, reading. It ruins the best hours of the day, as I run downstairs every fifteen minutes to check the mail. But no further word from Franklin. Only that northern scene, the lovely, faraway village with the fire forever frozen in gesso, proves to me the man ever existed. The painter known only to him, me, and a dozen experts in esoterica: Herri met de Bles, Frank Todd’s coding problem. How to find, in the work of a forgotten artist, evidence of that same message Dr. Ressler looked for, the same link, only from the other end, writ large in the outside world.
Frank’s problem from the start was convincing himself that skill of hand and eye was its own best excuse for using it. He was temperamentally incapable of believing his own ingenious proofs. He was already in danger of disappearing before I met him. The pointless proliferation of voices, dispersed over the map, shouting, conjugating, declining, declaring nothing except look at me, look at all this, lost and leading nowhere except to their own noise, led him to a place where I can’t trace him.
Already too long out of training, I remember I own a book that might be good for something besides proving that people I once worked with actually liked me. I go to my private reserves and pull out the Times Atlas, goodbye gift from my old life. I flip through the maps and locate the pages corresponding to his landscape: Dinant, the Meuse, Namur province, Wallonia, Belgium. I slip my finger up an inch, over the language line into Flanders: Leuven, Mechelen, Antwerp, a world away. What does it tell, the geometrical isomorph, the representations drawn impeccably to scale? Does it help to know that Franklin, on 7/6/85, by the post-mark, was near the tip of my fingernail?
I need more. I return to the shelves, pull out a bit of esoterica of my own. I fish about in my two-volume historical atlas for that contradiction in terms, the same place at a different time. I find the cartoons—Low Countries, Burgundy, Hapsburg Sphere. I follow the ebb and flow of colored lines, picture Herri moving through this Gobelin tapestry of economic confusion and geopolitics. But I can’t recover the place, realize it in imagination. I sidetrack myself on imagining Franker in his self-described liberation of new words. I studied French for four years in school, during which time I never met a native speaker. All my classes were taught in English, and all I can remember is the cheat of making a sound intermediate between “le” and “la” and the insistence of the texts that one uses the formal form with everyone except intimates, small children, and animals.
Yet I must have retained some spark of the secret life of words, Franker’s excuse for more study. Because I also remember being able to translate, fluently and without prompting, the one French sentence Dr. Ressler claimed to know. He rolled it out wistfully as early as the second visit I made to their mechanical hideaway, and he repeated it at odd moments in the course of the year I was his friend. “Je ne fais aucun mal en restant ici.” I do no harm by remaining here.
He claimed only one other standing bit of foreign-language repertoire, Bach’s favorite saying: “Es muss alles möglicb zu machen seyn.” All things must be possible. Tenuous assertion at best. Both Dr. Ressler and Todd sacrificed themselves to a corollary translation: All things that are possible are real.
VII
BREAKTHROUGHS IN SCIENCE
The daily papers have never been kind to his field. They cover the developments well enough, in an Ike’s coronary kind of way. They lay out in lay terms the birth pangs of the science, but wind up promising a bevy of mail-order life forms by the end of the decade. The subject matter itself isn’t beyond reporters. The logic of inheritance is straightforward. Beadle and Tatum are more coherent than the Mideast. However complex science becomes, it remains at least internally consistent.
The trouble with science journalism lies in time scale. The average news story wraps up in a week to ten days. News confuses significant with novel. I was shocked to discover, at twenty, that news carefully culled not the day’s most important events but the most alarming and unusual. Lingering separatist movements are not news, except to today’s corpse. Species extinction is too mundane to report. Every “event” in molecular genetics is made out to be a fast-breaking story, conspiring toward an end. A sneak preview of a biological revolution on Monday implies that the derivative consumer good will hit the shelves by week’s end.
His science has done its share to aggravate expectations. Genetics has evolved more in the three decades since Ressler worked it than in the previous three millennia. It’s easy to think that discoveries will continue to pour out in saturation patterns. But journalism errs in equating development with advance. A new postulate is no more news than a new poem. What news reports as fundamental progress in knowing the world may be only a subtle rearrangement of best analogies.
A new relation is not conquistador’s plunder. Science is not about control. That is technology, another urge altogether. The pursuit of living pattern that possessed Ressler has nothing to do with this year’s apotheosis of bioengineering. He once remarked that mistaking science for technology deprived the nonscientist of one of the greatest sources of awe, replacing it with diet as filling as Tantalus’s fruit. I had only to hear the man talk for fifteen minutes to realize that science had no purpose. The purpose of science, if one must, was the purpose of being alive: not efficiency or mastery, but the revival of appropriate surprise.
Separately, the three of us relearned that truth more times than I thought a body capable. If Dr. Ressler lamented the commercialization of science, he despaired even more over the science of commerce. He told us of legislation that had come before the 85th Congress in the wake of the Civil Rights Bill—the White Coat Ruling. In the few years that it took sponsors to bail out of radio’s Official Detective in favor of TV’s Name That Tune they’d developed a trick that threatened the public’s ability to discriminate. Advertisers found they could dramatically boost sales of just about anything by having a man in glasses and white coat hold it up for view. Weed killer, rubber tires, lipstick: a few Erlenmeyer flasks in the background, and a sales pitch became news.
A well-meaning legislator decided that blind trust was, like Robeson and Oppenheimer, a national security risk. He introduced a measure that would require every televised commercial where someone held up anything that bubbled or doodled anything resembling trig on a chalkboard to bear the caption “A Simulation”. The difficulty in the bill lay in the shadiness of implication in the first place. Commercials worked because actors never came out and said, “I’m a scientist.” Credentials were left to the audience to infer. If the bill passed, opponents reasoned, any endorsers who donned a smock of any kind would have to prove they weren’t simulating. “It’s one thing to legislate on poultry, race relations, and atomic energy,” Ressler said, with that tightening of mouth muscles that passed for irony. “But legislating inference is another matter. Simulation beats legislation nine falls out of ten.”
He remembered the insignificant bill with the precision that locked his half century into his brain. As he tossed off thirty-year-old details with accuracy, I felt I’d gladly suffer aphasia at fifty for a few decades of that memory. “They passed an invitation around Illinois, asking for expert witnesses to fly to Washington. They wanted white coats to sell the bill to the legislators! None of us volunteered, of course. I imagine your generation is too sophisticated to realize what a betrayal of calling it would have been then to attempt to legislate thinking. The bill eventually passed, but did nothing to s
top the human mind from reifying every conceivable sales pitch.” All things must be possible. And all possible things are real.
It hurt, listening to him, to think he never wrote anything but that little sampler, that one article giving so little glimmer of who he could be in speech. Starting with a Resslerism, I would search for a simulation for my day’s quote:
If we saw as much of the world as we do not see, we should be aware, in all probability, of a perpetual multiplication and variation of forms.
I used Montaigne to obliquely acknowledge that Ressler aphorism, from deep in a night’s simulated conversation, too disturbing to post publicly as news, about how we differ more from ourselves than we do from one another.
COUNTERCHECK QUARRELSOME
In weeks, he has struck an acquaintance with everyone on the team. Only Ulrich, like all effective leaders, remains aloof. Strange: Ressler actually enjoys the person he becomes in the company of his colleagues. He drops without thinking into a different personality with each—sardonic father to Lovering’s brashness, clowning younger brother to Blake and Eva, sympathetic cousin to Woyty’s low-grade paralysis, and child craftsman to Botkin’s omnivorous intellect. With Cyfer’s last member, Jeanette Koss, he somehow falls into awkward reserve. Not his ordinary, comfortable quiet, but incapacitating self-consciousness. Irritating to him and certainly confusing to the woman, who has gone out of her way to be pleasant.
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