Dancing With Myself
Page 37
“One. All the experiments looked good until two months ago.
“Two. We have not changed the form of the organism in that period.” He looked up. “Is that true, Alison? What about the DNA in the template?”
“Unchanged. We’ve used my DNA as the template in every experiment.”
“OK. Three. In all failed experiments, the actual energy used is consistent with all the molecular comparisons being made, but with no replacements along the DNA molecule.
“Four. When we use samples that have been in our tissue bank for a couple of months, the experiments still work.
“Five. When we use samples that have entered the bank more recently, the experiments usually fail.
“Six. The exception to that statement occurs when the recent tissue came from visitors to the lab. Then the experiment works. Jesus. Are you sure of that?”
“Positive. I’ll show you the output.”
He shook his head, put down my sheet of paper, and picked up his Pepsi. Amazingly, he had left his sandwich half-uneaten. For the next two minutes he sucked in silence on his straw. I knew enough not to interrupt. One look from Oscar was enough to break most pieces of experimental equipment, but he was a top-notch theorist.
At last he put down his cup, rubbed his hands absentmindedly on his napkin and then on his trousers, and said: “You know, I’ve been assuming that the experiments didn’t work because there was insufficient energy available to make the DNA conversion to the template form.”
“That’s right. We knew we had to begin with DNA close to the final structure. Maybe we just weren’t close enough.”
“But that’s not what’s happening here. Look at the energy used—it’s not that the process starts replacement, and then quits because there’s not enough energy available. It’s that comparisons are made with the given form and the template, and then no replacements are performed. Not one.”
“Because the initial and final forms are too dissimilar.”
He shook his head. The replacement process should at least begin. No, the only way to get the results we’re seeing is for the given form and the template to be identical, so our little engine can’t find a thing to replace. Our organism examines every nucleotide base, but if the match is already perfect it won’t do more than look.”
“But that makes no sense, either. I’m taking the samples right from our tissue bank. Every one comes from a different person.”
“I know, it sounds crazy. But there’s a simple way to test what I’m saying. You’ve been running the initial and final forms through the DNA fingerprint process. We can run a comparison between template DNA and tissue sample DNA—before you do the experiment.”
It was a ridiculous suggestion. But it was the only suggestion we had.
And so we did it.
The Jeffreys’ DNA fingerprint technique was developed over in England, at Leicester University. It produces thirty to forty dark bands on X-ray film, corresponding to repeating nucleotide sequences in the long DNA molecule. And while it is not totally infallible, it is close to it. The probability that two individuals will show the same banding on the developed film is less than one in ten billion (there are five billion people on the earth). When we compared the DNA in our tissue bank with my own DNA, I was convinced that we would see evident differences. And when we didn’t, I was just as convinced there had to be something wrong with the fingerprint matching machine. All the recently acquired DNA samples—including the one taken from Susan Carter, less than two hours earlier!—matched mine perfectly, band for band. And the banding of every sample that had been in the tissue bank for three months or more was instantly recognizable as different from my banding pattern.
Finally Oscar quietly took a sample from his own skin with a scalpel, and fed that into the matching machine. Ten minutes later we had the developed film. It correlated perfectly with my DNA. But an old sample of his from three months ago, kept in the tissue bank, had a totally different band pattern.
“Oscar, this is crazy.” I felt we should be laughing hysterically. “According to this, you’re me! Everybody is me!”
But he wasn’t laughing at all. He was staring at his own arm in disbelief, at the place where he had removed the skin sample. “The Mean Machine,” he muttered. “The one thing we didn’t test it for—didn’t think we needed to test it.”
“Test for what?”
“We knew it reproduced—we designed it that way, so there would be enough of it to work in every cell. But it does more than reproduce. It’s contagious. And by the look of it, strongly contagious.”
As contagious as the vision that Oscar was seeing. The organism was in me—naturally; but in my case it did nothing, since there was nothing for it to do. I already had my own DNA, and no one else’s. But if it could be communicated by casual contact, it would have jumped quickly to Oscar—to the rest of the faculty—to the students. There had been a widespread complaint a few weeks ago of students running a low-grade fever, not enough to keep anyone in bed but enough for them to notice it. If the whole campus was by now infected, only visitors would have different DNA to offer our tissue bank. And when they left….
Now I had a clear mental picture of thousands of students at the end of term, streaming away from the campus to every part of the country. The organism would already be in California, in Texas, in Maine, in Wisconsin. With modern travel, how long before it was in Europe, Australia, or China?
I brought my racing thoughts under better control. If Oscar had been “infected,” so that his DNA had been replaced with the template for my DNA….
“Oscar, it can’t be what you’re thinking. We have to be wrong about this. You’re still you—you don’t look like me, act like me, think like me.”
“Of course not. Alison, we know that the template matching only takes place during cell replication. Nerve cells don’t replicate—my brain is my own, and it always will be. Muscles, too, those cells don’t divide. But my skin, and my blood, and my liver and spleen, they will have changed to your DNA patterns. They are you. There’s nothing terrible about that. People do very well with blood from other people. So even if we can’t change everyone’s DNA back to their own form it won’t be the end of the world. Of course…”
It was his turn to fade off into silence, while I shivered. We had been struck by the same thought at the same time.
“Oscar,” I said. “We made the organism to affect replication—to work during mitosis. But it must work in meiosis, too. Every sperm and every ovum will carry only my sex chromosomes…X chromosomes. And all human offspring with two X chromosomes—”
“—are female.”
No males. Which, in just one generation, would be the end of the world.
To tell, or not to tell. Ought we to go public at once? Oscar and I spent the rest of the day sequestered in our lab, doors locked, telephone calls ignored.
I felt we had no choice; we had to call Washington at once and talk to the Surgeon General’s office.
Oscar disagreed, strongly. He made some good points. First, we had to do more tests to make sure we were right in our conclusions. Second, if we were right the whole campus was already infected, with no one feeling any the worse. Third, talk of a strongly contagious “plague” would cause widespread panic. And fourth, there was not a damned thing that anyone could do about the problem.
“Do you want people to hide away in their houses?” he said. “To stop shaking hands, refuse to meet strangers, lock us away and create new leper colonies? Look at me, Alison, do I seem sick?”
He did not. If anything he looked rather healthier than usual, a little thinner and a little less seedy. I agreed to wait, at least long enough for us to learn a bit more.
That was seven months ago. We are still waiting, but let me remove the suspense: in our first wild panic, Oscar and I had both committed a scientific blunder for which I would
have flunked a freshman. Human males have a chromosome—the Y chromosome—that is completely absent in females. In its place, normal females have an X chromosome (occasionally, as in Turner’s syndrome, a female will have nothing). The X and Y chromosomes are totally different, in structure and especially in size, so there was no way that my DNAs X-chromosome template could ever be close enough to a man’s Y-chromosome to convert it. All the DNA comparisons in our experiments, naturally enough, had been for autosomal DNA—DNA in chromosomes that are not sex chromosomes.
So boys will continue to be born as well as girls, we have not deprived the human species of its future, and our globe is much the same as it was before my DNA spread across its face.
Much the same, but not quite. The body cells of skin and liver and blood and spleen—and ductless glands—that suffer DNA replacement are not usually associated with the “higher” human functions of thought and emotion. Oscar and I had wondered if we would ever know how far and fast our new organism had spread. General human behavior should not change, but we could hardly go up to Canada or down to Mexico, and ask random strangers to contribute tissue samples to compare with mine.
But maybe we wrongly define the higher human functions. How we think and feel about everything except questions of pure logic is decided maybe five percent in our brains, ninety-five percent in our glands. And how many events in human history have been the result of logical thought? Just try to name one.
Anyway, neither I nor Oscar drew the immediate conclusion when cigarette manufacturers reported a catastrophic drop in U.S. sales, and raged against the new anti-smoking campaigns. And Oscar never reads the newspapers or watches television, so I was the one who picked up a different anomaly.
War makes it into the headlines much easier than peace. The people of Northern Ireland have been fighting over their border for too many generations to count. But four months ago, a snippet in the Overseas News section of our local paper pointed out that it was an unprecedented sixty days since the last violent incident. Maybe the Irish Protestants and Catholics disliked each other as much as ever, but for some reason they were not resorting to bloodshed.
I began to take a new interest in worldwide politics.
A month later, a strange quiet spread across the Middle East; no bombings in Beirut, no hostage-taking in Lebanon, a twenty-year trading agreement between Iraq and Iran. Farther east, the civil war in Sri Lanka ran out of steam, the Sino-Soviet border was peaceful, Indonesia held orderly elections, and the bloody Philippines riots ended. By that time, everyone could sense a new current in international relations. Five years ago, the Soviet Union and the United States had been busy in all-out arms escalation. But last week our leaders cut through the diplomatic red tape and agreed to a far-reaching treaty, reducing nuclear stockpiles and slowing conventional weapons development. The whole world began to breathe easier.
And so did I. Oscar (thirty pounds lighter and exercising every day, to his own astonishment and under the iron hand of Susan Carter) tells me that I ought to be ecstatic rather than simply relieved. “You make Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan look like amateurs,” he said. “Alison Benilaide is conquering the whole globe. She’s irresistible and she’s ubiquitous, billions of her, marching through Georgia, invading Delhi and Moscow and Beijing, leaping international borders at a single bound. They’re all you, Alison. You are the original Ur-Mother. You should be proud of your DNA, not ashamed.”
And finally, I think I am. I feel pride, and I would not argue if it were described as maternal. Our little engine that could may not be able to change most of the brain, but it seems to manage very well elsewhere, in the places that define our emotions and our innermost feelings. My DNA knows what it’s doing. And like the rest of me, it is apparently a pacifist.
So Oscar and I didn’t destroy the world. I rather think we saved it. For that, you don’t get medals. On the other hand, you don’t need them.
afterword: dancing with myself
This story, like “Tunicate, Tunicate, Wilt Thou Be Mine,” began as a title. It also began at a time I can precisely define. I was at a Saturday night “prom” dance at Disclave, a local science fiction convention, on May 28, 1988. I suspect that I’m the world’s worst dancer, but somehow I had managed to commit myself to dancing at least once. So I was moving around the floor in a bewildered sort of way, trying not to think too much about where my feet were going, and the disk jockey, who was later threatened with physical violence for playing advanced heavy metal when people wanted tunes they already knew, put on, presumably by accident, a great Billy Idol record, “Dancing with Myself.”
And I, in the bemused mood where you know that at most one half of your brain is working, said to myself, “I can write a story with that title. And I know exactly what it will be about: DNA copying and the human genome.”
I was halfway through writing another story, “Humanity Test,” at the time, so I didn’t get to Dancing with Myself” for another month. But the story was finished by the end of June 1988.
Now let’s talk about other timing. “Dancing with Myself” was purchased by Analog, and published in the August 1989 issue. Four months later that most visible symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, came down. Two years after that the whole Soviet Union fell apart. The threat of global nuclear war, for the first time in most people’s lives, diminished. It no longer seems high on anyone’s list of worries.
So things happened just about on the schedule suggested in “Dancing with Myself.” Do I take credit, then, for “predicting” the vast changes in the world that took place in the four short years since I wrote the story?
You bet I do; but I don’t expect anyone else on the planet to agree with me.
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article: something for nothing
A Biography of the Universe
1.THE TRUE PROFESSIONAL
Biographies, of everyone from Charles Darwin to Nancy Reagan to Saddam Hussein, are a popular form of literature. Sometimes they are written because the author has had a long-term fascination or close relationship with the subject. Charles Darwin himself, for example, wrote a short biography of his polymath grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.
Just as often, however, biographies are written on commission, at the request of a publisher. One definition of a “truly professional” writer is a person who is willing to write about anything, at any length and to any deadline, provided only that the job is well-paid. If you would like to be such a professional, now or in the future, imagine the following situation: A publisher comes to you and asks you to write a biography. It is of a man you have heard of but never met.
You ask a few reasonable questions. How old is this person?
“I’m not sure. Somewhere between thirty and sixty.”
“Do you have people that I can talk to who have known him all his life?”
“No.”
“Well, I mean known him for most of his life.”
“No.”
“How about some of his life.”
“I suppose so. I can give a fair amount of information about what he has been doing for the past half minute.”
If you would take the assignment, you are a truly professional writer. You might also, with a little training, make a good cosmologist.
A cosmologist seeks to understand the nature and history of the whole universe. The age of the universe is not known with great precision, but we believe it to be between ten and twenty billion years. Let’s say for the moment that it is fifteen billion.
We have been able to study the universe in detail for less than four hundred years, since the invention of the telescope in about 1608. That’s about one thirty-seven millionth of its fifteen billion year lifetime. One thirty-seven millionth of the life of a forty-five year old is thirty-eight seconds.
That constancy is of course an assumption, not a fact; but there are reasons to make it, and we will come to those in due course.
Let me make one more introductory point. New biographies of old celebrities often promise “amazing new revelations.” These are normally, for obvious reasons, set at the end of the book, with the first three-quarters devoted to rehashing the same old material. I will be following this tried and tested philosophy. You will find little in the opening sections that was not in textbooks twenty or more years ago, and most of what I write is standard scientific dogma. I will provide due warning when the doubtful material appears.
2.STARS…
I said that we’ve been studying the external universe for only four hundred years. That’s an understatement if we accept that stars and planets must have been the subject of speculation since mankind first looked up and wondered about those points of light in the sky. However, no one had any idea until four hundred years ago what planets and stars were, or of their sizes, distances, and composition.
The modern view, that all stars are giant globes of hot gas, developed after 1609, when Galileo turned his homemade telescope upwards. He found that the Sun was not the perfect, unmarked sphere that traditional teaching required, but a rotating object with lots of surface detail, like sunspots and solar flares.
Over the next couple of hundred years, the size and the temperature of the sun were pinned down fairly well. It is a great ball of gas, about a million miles across, with a surface at 6,000 degrees Celsius. What was not understood at all, even a hundred years ago, was the way that the sun stays hot.