I thawed the tube at my bench. I set up a rack of samples from a family in New Jerusalem, cut the DNA with enzymes, and pipetted each person’s fragments into a separate lane on a gel. When the gel finished running, I would transfer the fragments to a nitrocellulose blot and hybridize the whole thing with a radioactive probe from chromosome twenty. In the meantime, I set up a second gel, with a different pairing of fragments and probes. A third gel, then a fourth. I got so caught up in the rhythm of the experiment that I was able to ignore everything else—Willie’s flip-flop intentions, my sister’s reluctance to visit me, my own exhaustion and excessive hunger, the period I had missed, and the fetus that I suspected was growing in my womb.
I worked for six days. Then I sat down at my desk, trying not to listen to Susan’s TV battling with Yosef’s boom box, and I scrutinized the blots I had developed that week. One line in particular caught my notice, near the bottom of the first blot, the one with the probe from chromosome twenty. Three of the lanes showed a certain pattern of bands. The other lanes didn’t. I deciphered the code on the tubes of DNA. The first pattern corresponded to DNA from the three members of the family who shared the disease, while the other lanes belonged to those members who had been given a clean bill of health. It was probably a coincidence. I had tested only twelve samples. Afraid to jinx the result, I said nothing to anyone. Slowly, I poured gels with DNA from two other families and biked home for the night. I tried not to get excited, like someone who has discovered a suitcase full of cash but expects the rightful owner will show up to claim it.
Later that week, I tried to analyze the data from all three families. The computer I was using was little more than a toy. The keys were sticky with Coke and doughnut grease. Vic wandered by the cubicle in which the computer was crammed with reference books, broken cameras, and an IBM Selectric that hadn’t worked in years. He paused above my shoulder. Unlike the other postdocs, I never played computer games. Don’t tell him, I warned myself. If the linkage turned out to be a mirage, Vic would think I was too desperate to judge my results objectively.
He moved on, and I relaxed. The printer squealed and spit out paper, the answer in ink so faint I could barely read it. According to the computer, the odds were fifty to one that the linkage I had discovered between the marker and the gene couldn’t be accidental. Good but not great. With such a low score, the “pattern” I had found was most likely a fluke. I needed to test other families. It was even more complex than I had led Willie to believe. To find out if a certain person carried the gene for Valentine’s, you needed to test not only that person, but his entire extended family. This was because the marker for Valentine’s chorea manifested itself in a slightly different pattern in each family with the gene. It was as if, long ago, God had handed out a set of colored handkerchiefs, two to each person. Some handkerchiefs were red, others were green, or yellow, or blue. In one family, everyone who had inherited a red handkerchief might carry the gene for Valentine’s, while those members of the family with other colors did not have the gene. In another family, the green handkerchief might be the lethal marker. In healthy families, a red or green handkerchief meant nothing at all, because no one had the gene.
I tested the DNA from a third family in New Jerusalem, but there seemed to be no correlation between the pattern on the blots and Sumner’s judgments as to who did or did not show symptoms of the chorea. I kicked the cabinets beneath my bench, then stomped to the bathroom, punched the stall, and swore. I splashed cold water on my face, kicked the stall, and swore some more. Composed now, resigned, I went back to the lab and cleared the samples from my bench. Glancing at the labels, I saw that I had misread the code on one tube. In Yosef’s spidery script, the N’s looked like M’s. I retested the data. The correlation had shot up to a hundred to one.
Still, that wasn’t good enough. You couldn’t publish a paper with a correlation of less than one thousand to one. If I tested a family that wasn’t related to the family from Maine, and if the test worked for them, I would be sure I had found a pattern. I waited until midnight, when everyone except Achiro’s replacement had gone home. I was hybridizing a blot of the Drurys’ DNA with the probe from chromosome twenty when someone came in. I turned my head to see who it was and spilled the probe.
“That sucks,” Susan said.
I looked down at the puddle.
“Sorry I’ve been giving you such a hard time. I shouldn’t have said I found the gene when I hadn’t. Those assholes get me so angry, I forget this is your life we’re talking about. It must be awful, having so little chance to find the marker.”
I restrained myself from saying: Oh yeah? You think I have no chance to find the marker?
“We girls should stick together.” Susan sashayed to the water bath and scrutinized the dials. “Maybe you want to come over to my apartment? There’s this drink I make with ginger beer and vodka. We could get plastered and talk.”
I felt sorry for her then. She was lonely and afraid. I wanted to wrap my arms around her. If only she had tried to make friends earlier. But the last thing I wanted now was to sit in Susan’s kitchen, get drunk, and gripe about Lew. “Some other time,” I said. “Thanks. I mean it. Really.”
“Right. Some other time.” She stood there, legs bowed, ballet slippers turned out, and I was seized by the desire to twirl her around the room in a mad pas de deux. Maybe next week, when Maureen and I went dancing, we would ask Susan to go with us.
She dropped her right ear to her shoulder, swung back her head, then pressed her other ear to the other shoulder. “If you want to reject my offer of friendship,” she said, working her head the other way, “I won’t take it personally. But if I were you, I’d join Workaholics Anonymous. There’s a group that meets at the Cambridge Y. If you don’t fight these obsessions, they can kill you.”
I nodded. “I’ll look into it.”
“You think I’m being weak for admitting I have a problem. Not all of us can tough it out like you and your bionic friend in the wheelchair. Some of us, the pressure starts to get to us. It squeezes our brains and makes our eyeballs pop. So excuse me for thinking you might need someone to drag you out of this dungeon for a while. It won’t happen again.” On her way out she kicked a box, which snowed Styrofoam pellets across my bay. They would be squeaking beneath my feet until Cesar swept them up. He would think I had made the mess, but I didn’t have time to care. As soon as Susan left, I prepared a new probe and set the Drurys’ blot to soak. The telephone rang.
“I’ve been missing you,” Willie said. “Anything special going on? Or is it just another late night?”
Don’t tell him, I thought. Not yet. “Nothing special,” I said. “Just another late night.”
“What’ve you been up to? How many of those little marker things you tried?”
“About nine,” I said, trying to keep my heart from beating so loud.
“Nine’s not so many. Have you tried chromosome thirteen?”
“No,” I said. “I will.”
“You do that,” he said, although he sounded as if he didn’t have much faith that I would. “How’s everything else?”
Well, I thought, I’m pregnant. At least, I think I might be pregnant. I haven’t had time to buy a test. I might be pregnant with a child who has a horrifying disease for which there is no cure and raising that child with a husband who might also get sick and die. “Fine,” I said. “The usual.”
“Jane, is something wrong?”
“Wrong? There’s nothing wrong.”
He tried another tactic. “I got a postcard from the folks. It showed this beautiful full moon over the Eiffel Tower. It’s her Honey moon. Get it?”
“Sure,” I said. “I get it.” If I didn’t tell anyone about the correlation, it might turn out to be real. If I didn’t take the pregnancy test, I might not turn out to be pregnant.
“I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself laughing too hard.”
I was startled by his anger. He had just caught me at a bad t
ime, I said. I would call him in a few days. I might have something to tell him then.
“What?” he said. “What is it? Why can’t you tell me now?”
“No,” I said. “Not now.” And I hung up before I could break my promise to myself and blurt out the news that I had found the probe.
At the end of that week, while my labmates were at the deli drinking beer, I developed the blot from the Drurys’ DNA. I moved in slow motion, aware of the pull and release of each muscle, the pressure of the linoleum against my feet. I tried not to think my result might be wrong. But I knew it was right. I just knew. Even before I typed the data into the computer, I was able to guess the answer. The printer hummed, the daisy wheel shrieked into place. The odds that the gene for Valentine’s chorea was linked to the marker on chromosome twenty were several thousand to one. I ran the data again, and when the answer came out the same as the first time, I pulled a stream of paper from the printer and danced around the cubicle. I thought of calling Maureen so we would go out and get drunk and celebrate.
But I never made that call. How could I explain—to myself, Maureen, or anyone who understood anything about genetics—that I had found the needle in the haystack on, what, my ninth try? Call it luck. Intuition. A miracle. Chance. I was plagued by the possibility this was all a big joke, like the rubber mouse in the Seal-a-Meal bag, or the coal Maureen had once smeared around the eyepiece of my microscope on April Fool’s, or the fake bottles of reagents she had arranged on my shelf—“Elixir of Youth,” “Cure for Cancer,” “Drink Me.” But Maureen didn’t have the power to make a marker seem linked to a gene if it wasn’t. And she would never be that cruel. Nature wasn’t like Willie, changing its mind about whether to bestow its favors or not. But I couldn’t help but worry that Someone had this power, some mischievous god who was watching me and laughing, waiting to jump out and reveal his best trick.
16
The reporters, I was sure, would get everything wrong. That’s why scientists submitted their results not to newspapers, but to journals. The editors sent the manuscript to a panel of experts for review. They accepted a paper only if its data and conclusions convinced the experts. I wished this same process could have been applied to other questions—for instance, whether you should marry a man whose love might bring you grief. But no one claims to be an expert on such matters, and I wouldn’t trust anyone who did. Passion tends to be more persuasive than fact. The way in which you might represent your data to a scientist might not be the way you would represent that same data to yourself.
Vic made everyone in the lab swear not to reveal our findings. We couldn’t be certain we were right until our paper was reviewed and accepted for publication, and the editors of Cell might retract their acceptance if the results were leaked to the press. Unfortunately, my father didn’t know this. When I called to tell him we had found a marker for the gene, he reacted so strongly I forgot most of the things I intended to say. I should have driven out to Mule’s Neck to see his face when he learned that all his work had paid off and the longest long shot had come in. But events cascaded too quickly. We needed to repeat my experiments and triple-check the results; it could ruin a career to announce a discovery your colleagues couldn’t reproduce. We needed to write the paper and rush it off to Cell before some other lab scooped us. I thought of summoning my father to Boston to tell him the good news in person, but he wouldn’t have agreed to come unless I told him why.
So I called him that night, the night I found the marker. I heard him chewing on his brisket. “What is it, doll? What’s the matter?”
I was about to give him the gift he had always wanted, and even though that gift might save my sister’s life, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him, to become the good one forever, to move so far ahead in whatever race Laurel and I were running she could never catch up.
But of course I did tell him. “We found it, Dad. The marker. We can use it to develop a test for the gene.”
The phone clattered and then went dead. Honey said she found him slumped against the counter, beating his forehead with the phone. She assumed one of their children must be sick. Or maybe it was Ted. She snatched away the phone. “Who is this!” she demanded. “Tell me who this is!”
I explained the good news. Then I listened to my father say, “I love you, Janie. I’m prouder than any father has any right to be. Maybe your mother’s death wasn’t for nothing.” And in the midst of all this turmoil, I neglected to warn him that he mustn’t release the news until my paper came out in Cell. He called the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and all three major TV stations. Luckily, the discovery was too important for Cell to allow it to slip by. The editors rushed our paper into print two weeks ahead of schedule. The press conference was set for December 16.
I had daydreamed for years about writing a paper that would earn the respect of the fifty or so biologists in my field. Those few families at risk for Valentine’s would likely care as well. But the prospect of revealing my results to a crowd of reporters was as unsettling as the notion of getting married in Yankee Stadium. Even more disconcerting, Vic informed me that I would need to lead the press conference. He would be up there on the stage, but he planned to use his few minutes in the limelight to make a plea for the NIH to formulate guidelines for genetic testing and to impose a moratorium until those guidelines were in place.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. But Vic hadn’t said a word about his reservations since his speech in New York. When I had shown him the blots, he assumed the expression of a man who is trying to believe he really has seen an angel. “Jane,” he said, and held the X-ray to the light, calling my name to make sure I had seen the visitor, too, and yes, it truly did have a halo and wings.
We sequestered ourselves in Vic’s office to write the paper. He rarely went home, although his wife was in the last week of her pregnancy. We lived on food from the vending machines—potato chips and crackers were the only food I could tolerate anyway—and sandwiches Yosef brought us from the deli. I would doze on Vic’s couch while he wrote a section of the paper, then he would grab a nap and I would write the next section. It didn’t matter who wrote what. Our minds thought the same thoughts, produced the same words, although Vic’s talent for understatement was nearly biblical. “It is likely that Valentine’s chorea is but the first of many hereditary diseases for which a marker will be found,” the first line read.
Finally, we were done. The Federal Express carrier scuffled in, slush on his boots, then scuffled out again with the envelope we gave him. I collapsed in Vic’s arms. That was when he said he wouldn’t be leading the press conference. “This isn’t something new,” he said. “I’ve always had opinions. But I kept them to myself. I thought I could be one person at home and another person in the lab. There’s never been a problem with that. Nothing I couldn’t reconcile.” Amid the clutter on his desk stood a portrait of his wife and four sons, their faces as unremarkable as fingerprints. “Telling a parent that a fetus has a such-and-such chance of inheriting a disease and giving him or her no other choice but to abort that fetus . . . If that’s where this has led us . . .”
I wasn’t sure what I would do if I found out I was pregnant. But how could anyone oppose a test that would tell me if the fetus was carrying the gene? Anything that gave me more information was a blessing, I thought.
“Jane,” Vic said, “I never would have gotten into this if it hadn’t been for you. I let my concern for your welfare get the better of my judgment. To be frank, I hadn’t thought this out. In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t imagine you would be this successful.” He patted my arm. “I hope you realize you’ve accomplished a wonderful thing. I didn’t mean to steal your thunder.”
“Sure,” I said. Whatever thunder he meant, I didn’t begrudge it. But whatever I had accomplished didn’t seem wonderful. I felt as if I had committed some terrible crime and the punishment would soon come due.
The day of the press conference I spent nearly an
hour staring stupidly into my closet, deciding if I should wear the suit I had bought for my medical school interviews twelve years earlier. I wasn’t a salesman. My data were right. I didn’t need to sell them. So what was I so scared of? Still, I put on the suit, and later, when the director of public relations at MIT led my father, Sumner, Vic, and me through the halls to the auditorium, I was glad I had worn it. If anything went wrong, I could go home and take off that suit and pretend that whatever had gone wrong had happened to someone else.
We took our places before the microphones. I felt as if I had been called upon to testify against some powerful wrongdoer, and anything I said would be turned against me. The reporters would try to stump me the way Mrs. Scipione had stumped me at the science fair. They would ask me a question that wasn’t relevant and rob me of the prize that by all rights should have been mine.
My father welcomed the reporters, but he didn’t understand the science well enough to answer their questions. Vic announced his intention to set up the NIH committee and said he would answer questions later, in the lobby. Then he sat down. This left Sumner to speak for all of us. I expected him to steal credit for the discovery. Instead, he was the most humble of spokesmen, bringing clarity and charm to the chaos, paying proper due to everyone; a collector, after all, doesn’t earn credit by pretending he has painted his artwork himself. I never could have kept my answers so brief or caused my voice to rise and fall in just the right spots. I had none of the grace Sumner had perfected in his years of telling patients what was killing them without subjecting them to lectures on base pairs and proteins or the neural gaps in their brains.
The reporters seemed grateful. They raised their hands and waited, as deferential as the undergraduates who usually occupied their seats. Sumner drew diagrams with colored markers on a board. The reporters took notes. Then one reporter stood and said that she had a question for Dr. Weiss. She wore a rumpled brown dress. The dark circles beneath her eyes made her look sad.
A Perfect Life Page 21
