Generosity: An Enhancement

by Richard Powers

  Schiff lobs all the familiar criticisms at him, but he stays Zen.

  Sure, well-being is a quantitative trait. Yes, these genes interact with dozens of others, and with scores of other regulatory factors. We are devoting a whole lot of microarrays and computer cycles to untangling those interactions . . . Of course environment plays a role in their expression. But all these genes affect the way we engage the environment in the first place. There’s even some evidence that an adverse environment can strengthen the expression . . .

  Off camera, Tonia asks:

  But the more of these alleles I have, the greater my joie de vivre?

  His face admits to complexities.

  We don’t even say that. We’ve simply noted a correlation . . .

  Shot-reverse to Schiff, who is enjoying this ride. She herself is far too sunny for her own good. It hasn’t yet dawned on her that this story might actually be nonfiction. She doesn’t get that until a few hours after they stop filming. For the moment, she asks:

  And you can look directly at my genes and tell me my alleles?

  Kurton beams and says:

  Give me your coffee cup. We can take a swab off that.

  They cut the sequence into the piece’s climax. The assembled show airs two weeks later.

  PART FOUR

  THE NEXT FIRST PAGE

  . . . retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

  —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  Russell and Candace watch the recorded show together, in her apartment, on her tiny flat-panel television, after Gabe goes to bed. Neither has the nerve to watch the segment alone. Nor do they have the nerve to see each other again, without pretext.

  They kiss each other experimentally on Stone’s arrival, to Gabe’s disgust. “What is this, France or something?” But Russell appeases the boy by spending a little while in Futopia with him, before lights-out for children and showtime for adults.

  Then Russell and Candace settle in, deployed eighteen inches apart on her living room sofa. They kiss again, riskier, as the recording starts. “Thanks,” Candace says. “Helps. Much better than a tranquilizer.”

  Stone almost jumps out of his skin. He has taken half a milligram of Ativan, from a little plastic bottle full of them borrowed from his brother, just before arriving.

  The woman smoothes her hair and stares at the screen. Under her breath she tells herself, “Maybe just as habit-forming, Candace.”

  “It’ll be fine,” he says. He can’t figure out what he’s talking about. He finds her mouth again. A moment later, he’s not sure if he really said anything at all.

  Both of them are helpless and pounding by the time “The Genie and the Genome” starts. Each tries to concentrate, but they’re throbbing in unison, audible to each other. They try to follow Kurton’s argument, the one about our vast increase in the ability to improve people. The man seems somehow different from the person they saw onstage, the one who lured Thassa to Boston. “He is charming,” Candace concedes, her hand tracing circles on Russell’s thigh. “There’s no arguing that.”

  Stone should say something. “There isn’t?”

  The show sweeps them headlong, rushed by CGI, rapid crosscuts, and a ruthless synth soundtrack. Everything about the show makes science as sexy as sports. Neither of them watches enough TV to be inoculated. The message floods them: strengthen, sharpen, enhance your chromosomes, be smarter, healthier, and truer. Thrive and be what you want, feeding every need. Live forever, suffused in joy.

  Kurton mentions Thassa by pseudonym, near the show’s end. He talks of her like some design template for the future. “We cured smallpox,” he says. “We eradicated polio. We can hunt down and wipe out misery. There’s no reason why every one of us can’t be equals to our ideal.” In the last lines of the profile, the scientist says, “I don’t believe in God, but I do believe that it’s humanity’s job to bring God about.”

  By then, the two viewers are long gone, the television muted, Candace up and astride Russell, bobbing herself to a pulse they find together, Russell her fuse beneath her. They end up shattered, crumpled into each other, a double collapse, both so grateful to be back here, after so long away.

  Then they’re in her bed. The second time is slow. They turn each other all ways, tasting, playing, giving over—all either of them ever wanted. Whatever the first reason, there’s no other point now than to fit together. It takes all his will not to tell her he loves her, over and over. And he would, if words weren’t as hindering as fur on fish. But this is what he thinks, curled up safely into her amazing back, plummeting into sleep: Thank you. Thank you for raising me from the dead.

  They wake in light, to a disoriented Gabe calling, “Mom? Don’t we need to get up? Mom? Why is the TV on?”

  Candace springs up and startles when she sees Russell. She covers her mouth with her hand, half in this morning’s start and half still in the ocean of last night. She kisses him, chastely now, her breath loamy and close, stale with slept-on bliss. Her neck and pits, too, smell fusty but familiar. Fitting. She grins and shies a finger to her lips. She shouts to the door, “Morning, sweetie. I’ll be right out!” She pantomimes to Russell, Wait here, then laughs again at the idiot gesture. She tumbles into long johns and a sweatshirt and disappears.

  So—a French farce: yet another story you know by heart. Only in this one, the other man is four feet tall.

  Russell stretches out diagonally in her sheets, territory he has already marked. The sheets still hold her gamey scent. He has read how people choose their mates on smell and some sixth sense, a pheromone whiff off histocompatibility complexes other than their own, but recognized. He was doomed to end up here, in her bed, from the moment they sniffed each other.

  For months he’s watched the film in his head, sure that this inevitable collision would end in fumbling disaster. Sure he’d come away from a night with Candace condemned forever to the life of an impotent poet, without even the consolation of writing poems. Now all the focused force of dread vanishes in a rush of surprise fitness, leaving him vast amounts of surplus energy with which . . . to enjoy the woman again, at the earliest possible opportunity. All the best writing is rewriting.

  He feels good. Contemptuously good. Every inscrutable thing that Thassa has ever said about how easy this state is to achieve now feels stunningly obvious. And yet this burst of happiness will be deducted from any remaining share owed to him in the afterlife.

  Beyond the door, a mother makes right again the world of her child that has come apart a little in the night. Russell breathes in; only the memory of last night’s television persists in rasping him. And even that burr is obscured by the side effects of the Ativan and the image of a woman lifting and lowering herself gratefully on him.

  She lets herself back into the room, flushed. She leans against the door, a makeshift barricade. “I’m so sorry about this! I’ll just get dressed and take him to school. Then I have to head in . . .”

  “Sounds good. I’ll just lie here like a satiated drone.”

  She grins, comes to the bed, and climbs all-fours on top of him. “You are wonderful. Simply wonderful.”

  She means someone else. Or some other word. But maybe he is, this morning. For this moment, anyway, full of something much like wonder.

  He watches her stand in her closet and do a demure reverse striptease until she is Candace Weld again, pleated, rose-colored college psychologist. The moment she’s dressed, they lose each other again. He pulls the covers over his thin chest. She looks everywhere but at him. “Stay as long as you like,” she says. “You know where the coffee is. I’ll check in with Thassa from work. See what she thought about the show.”

  “Good plan.”

  She crosses to him and kisses him on the forehead. He kisses her on the chin. In afterthought, she sits on the edge of the bed and rests her hand on his sternum. “I hope . . .”

  “Yes,” he says. “Me, too.”

  She goes to the door, touches her lips, sends hi
s germs back to him on the carrier air. The door opens and she stumbles out into the hall, into a bolting ten-year-old.

  When Candace called, Thassa had already recovered from the show. She laughed at the scientific pseudonym that Dr. Kurton gave her. “He must have stolen it. From a film I showed him.”

  The Algerian seemed as resilient as her alleles made her. “It’s not so bad as I feared. Kind of science fiction, right? Nothing to do with me, anyway. Now it’s Jen’s problem! Although, did you see that anime of my brain? My own brain, working. Very strange, that.”

  That night, at their usual time, Candace checked in with Russell.

  “How did she sound?” he asked.

  The psychologist sighed. “Happy. As usual.”

  “I know the feeling. Except for the ‘usual.’ ”

  And the two of them went on to speak of more pressing things.

  The scientific community’s reaction starts noisy and amps up fast. A madly democratic chorus weighs in on radio, television, and the Internet, and in newspapers and university lecture halls.

  The press leaps on the usual expert witnesses. In the States, they swarm around Jonathan Dornan. Three internationally bestselling books explaining evolutionary genetics to the intelligent layperson make him the automatic go-to for anything spelled with the letters G, A, C, and T. Dr. Dornan gives a guardedly appreciative quote to the AP: “Ten thousand genes get expressed in the human brain. We understand fewer than one percent of them. This research begins to give us a handle on what happens in forming baseline temperament.”

  Others doubt the paper’s details can be redeemed, let alone refined. In laboratories from Tübingen to Beijing, skeptical researchers object to the idea that anything so complex could derive from so small a number of genes.

  Nobel laureate Anthony Blaze writes a much-reproduced Guardian op-ed:

  We must once and for all outgrow our obsolete ideas about heredity. Genes don’t code for traits. They synthesize proteins. And single proteins can do incredibly different things, depending on where and when they’re produced . . . We have no gambling gene, no intelligence gene, no gene for language or walking upright or even a single gene for curly hair, for that matter. We certainly possess no set of genes whose function is to make us happy.

  This piece just feeds Truecyte’s original firestorm. Geneticists on four continents caution about overstating the case for nurture. There’s nothing magical about behavior or temperament. When the crucial genes are missing, no amount of outside stimuli can compensate. Maybe FOXP2 isn’t a gene “for language,” two German researchers point out in an Economist reply, but the lack of a good copy of it prevents the development of speech.

  Other speakers come to Blaze’s defense in dozens of international forums rushed together in the wake of the story. The Kurton-doubters concede that a single gene defect can knock out a complex behavior. But that doesn’t mean complex behaviors derive from a single gene. One bad allele can cause depression. But a few good ones don’t necessarily cause bliss.

  Researchers whose greatest social stress consists of writing grant proposals slink out of their labs and into broadcast studios. They summarize the complex article using short, digestible sentences of simple words. On cue, across the big three monotheistic target markets, creationists flood the call-in lines, leading the discussions into threads more tangled than any enzyme pathway.

  A hard-core genetic determinist from the University of Leiden, interviewed on BBC Four, points to the haunting twin studies: the more genes any two people share in common, the more likely they are to share dispositions, no matter how or where they’re raised. A nurturist colleague from Hamburg refutes that “hardwire hype,” suggesting that any individual’s emotional highs and lows probably differ as much as any two people’s baselines.

  In the scattered sniping, both sides commit crimes of passion. A symposium at the University of Florida generates a complex exchange of ideas that culminates in face-slapping. An outspoken engineer from MIT who champions Kurton’s paper as an important early step in the future structural improvement of humans receives death threats.

  The most damning critique comes from the epigenetics community. A revolution is afoot, one that looks almost like retooled Lamarckism, calling into question the centrality of the gene and all the old dogma of fixed inheritance. The genome seethes with extragenetic inherited mechanisms, environmentally altered chemical switches. The gene-centric view looks increasingly like the domain of fifty-seven-year-olds still in the grip of obsolete paradigms. Nurture can directly affect germ cells. Old-style gene-association studies like Kurton’s may be not even irrelevant. Temperament may be in the water, food, and air, as much as in the chromosomes . . .

  For a few strange days, neither right-wing nor left-wing talk radio knows whether they should be for this discovery or against it. Both wings flap over the notorious footnote, Jen. Is she real, or just some kind of research artifact? Is she the poster child for the coming, new human? Or is she just some chick who’s more chipper than she should be?

  The consensus, if any, is vague. Most talking heads agree that the sculpting of affect is lifelong and fluid. But most also concede that people’s bedrock emotional skills vary as greatly as their skills in math. For proof, witness the chaos of this public argument.

  But in all the din, no one comes forward with any substantive criticism of the original paper’s methodology. The statistics withstand scrutiny. Other studies will take years to confirm or contradict the outcome. The story could vanish in shame. It could be put to rest once and for all in a new definitive study. And still the genes of happiness will knock about in the collective marketplace for generations.

  Candace Weld did, at least, have the foresight to run one definitive experiment that spring. At the beginning of April, she entered into Google the quoted phrase “happiness gene.” The search engine returned 727 hits, one-fifth of them false positives. She tried again near the beginning of May, when even the TiVo-and-leave-o people had gotten their first hive-mind vibe of Thomas Kurton. By then the hits had reached 162,315. Come June, she didn’t have the nerve to try again. Nor did she have the need.

  In short, Truecyte’s announcement produces the usual scientific free-for-all. No one is shocked but the general public. Science has never hidden the fact that truth is red in tooth and claw. Blood has flowed over the question of inherited temperament since Paleolithic humans started breeding dogs.

  Usually the shouting takes place behind closed doors, out of earshot of the press. Few families bicker in public. The gap between any two scientists pales next to that between science and the science-hating public. But once betrayal is involved, all bets are off.

  The betrayal in question splits along generational lines. In one corner, the old-style university geneticist, hands full of reagent, head full of a slowly accreting body of knowledge. In the other, the molecular engineer, hands on the computer simulations and head full of informatics, working for a start-up drug company that reduces even the research professor to a licensed client. Patience versus patents, say the old-style professors. Law versus awe, say the upstarts.

  Like the worst of family fights, this one gets uglier as the stakes rise. But in the weeks following publication, Kurton sails above the fray. If he and Truecyte have indeed discovered deep foundations of human emotion, then they’ve just made themselves indispensable. And if they’ve moved a little too quickly or hopefully, the damage will be smaller than the potential gain. They’re a private company after all, accountable to no one but their investors. Write off the loss, manage the resulting publicity, and stake a new claim.

  The mastodon has evolved. It’s a whole new elephant.

  Thassa’s genome slips into the wild, joining the list of laboratory escapees from killer bees to SARS. A fifth of the popular articles about The Journal of Behavioral Genomics cite the footnote woman from the obscure ethnic population who has won the happiness triple crown. One million people hear Kurton marvel about “Jen.” Ten
million hear about her from that one million. And so the imaginary woman comes to life, growing from anonymous childhood to cult adolescence in about five days.

  Of course, the bloggers get to her first. There’s a funny piece on Queen Elizabeast (high authority ratings from all user indexes) called “No Cry, No Woman,” suggesting that

  anybody who is that far above the human baseline—anyone whose brain scan looks like a symphony—probably should already be considered her own honorary species. If Jen truly is without sadness, then she’s missing out on something profound, mysterious, and essentially human. That’s my feeling, and I’ll go on saying as much, at least until I get the Paxil tuned . . .

  The piece gets a few dozen trackbacks and spawns four times as many uncredited imitations across sites large and small. The online magazine Betatest runs a longer, philosophical rumination, “Jen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.” It’s a careful piece, distinguishing between destiny and predisposition. It paints a rich picture of positive psychology’s current understanding of emotional set points. It surveys the huge body of research about environmental contributions to happiness and argues that from any point of view, we ought to be much more interested in the part of our mood that’s under our control than in the part that’s not. It concludes: