Being hot didn’t bother Rocky much either, no joke intended. Not much bothered Rocky; she was blessed with an even temperament. It was easy to teach her the ropes; in a biochem lab that’s rope enough to hang a novice. But Rocky was also smart. She had a quick, curious mind and she was tireless. She learned fast—dideoxynucleotide sequencing of DNA, for example:—I showed her once and she had it. Considering that dideoxy sequencing isn’t exactly on the level of jotting down Troy’s car-phone number, it was an impressive acquisition of technique. The stuff involves both manual and intellectual dexterity. I reminded her that there were four components of DNA: A, T, C, and G, arranged like a string, one long sentence describing maybe everything there is to know about you or me. We’d commandeered the enzyme machinery used by bacterial cells and forced it to “read” and replicate DNA for us in a tube. Millions of these little robotlike enzymes would read this long long sentence, making a duplicate strand—an “echo” sentence—then stop randomly at any given letter, so we’d have sentences ending at each of the letters.
Rocky got the hang of moving this reaction quickly; handling pipettes, a stopwatch, and lots of slightly radioactive tubes in a body-temperature water bath—with flawless timing. She told me it was like a game show (Password?) and I was the host, challenging her, Rocky, a prize-winning contestant. I promised her that the next step (“What’s behind the curtain?”) would be more challenging. We’d have to analyze reactions on an acrylamide gel, which she’d create by slowly and steadily pouring a liquid between two big glass slabs set only 0.2mm apart; no bubbles allowed. It all had to be completed in (hands down!) five minutes, before it gelled.
She got the gel poured on her third try. We loaded the tubes of replicated DNA strings onto one end of this gel and zapped them with two thousand volts of electricity—coaxing these charged little strands through. The longer strands would have a harder time moving through the gel’s mesh; the shorter ones zipped along. The different-length molecules would line up, making a “ladder”—one size above the other, each a single letter longer than the last.
At the end, Rocky and I put the gel against film, where the radioactive tracer in each separated strand burned the ladder pattern into the film.
“So we can read them one letter at a time up the ladder!” She beamed. “I win whatever’s behind this life!”
Rocky, I swear, could see through things. She saw the little enzyme machines as they crawled along the original long template DNA strand, dutifully copying each letter in the long statement, like so many microscopic Byzantine monks. She saw the “Bible” of human words standing in illuminated-manuscript splendor. She noted how each of the DNA molecules was driven through the gel by the lash of two thousand volts—“like a line of slaves,” she murmured. She answered my questions before I could ask them. It turned out that when Rocky concentrated, when her attention was truly engaged, she was a surefire lab technician. And how naturally the metaphors fell from our lips as we discussed our procedures!
She was a natural, humming away, a flask in her hand, sweating a little, the fluorescent lighting altering her features so that she looked elongated, El Greco-ish. Suited up in the old stained lab coat I’d found for her, she moved about like a canny shadow, deftly lifting one end of the glass slab off the black bench top, coolly popping her gum. With a sure hand, she poured that steady stream of liquid acrylamide onto the lip of the glass, where it soaked up slowly between the two glass plates. A little stream of acrylamide spilled from the edge of the plate, puddled on the bench, and dripped to the floor, but Rocky kept her cool. The gum cracked; she poured steadily, so that there was perfectly aligned seepage between the slabs. Totally absorbed in her work, she made little satisfied noises in her throat. She’d brought her tape player to the lab: James Taylor wailed and the backup percussion throbbed, “I’m a steam roller, baby, I’m a napalm bomb.”
We were growing and processing some bacterial cells in a cloning procedure. “Did it ever occur to you,” she asked, staring at the dissolving dot-candy-like colonies which only moments earlier had been cheerfully growing on a white paper disk, topping a nice moist nutrient agar, “did it ever like, occur to you that this amazing thing, this genetic-engineering stuff, looks like some two-year-old’s spit-up bib?”
The colonies were now turning into gooey little brown blobs after the lye hit their cell walls.
She winked at me. “Or worse?” She grinned apologetically. “I mean it’s exciting, don’t get me wrong. It’s awesome, Prof. But most people would scrape this shit off their shoes if they found it there.”
Well, it’s true. You cook up a solution and then to analyze genes, you stare at blots, pieces of paper smeared with dyed genes. Blots, blots, and more blots. We even give them directional tags: Northern Blot, Southern Blot, Western Blot.
I pulled a cup of coffee from the machine and disappeared for a while. It happened that Rocky’s comments depressed me. I could feel myself losing the natural joy I used to feel in the lab. Even the simplest procedures used to charge me up. For example, we grew lots of animal cells in tissue culture, and those guys had to eat—I used to look forward to feeding time at the zoo. What the cells snacked on was a serum of calf’s blood, bicarbonate of soda, vitamins, and hormones. We poured it over them in a warm rain. Little Shop of Horrors. Ollie, in particular, was fascinated by this flesh gardening. Then we’d provide new housing for the colonies of multiplying cells. I even liked that. Dishes had to be split: The cells kept replicating to maximum density. I hustled to accommodate the overspill. Some were sucked off into oblivion, into flasks filled with antiseptic iodine to kill all living cells. Others had their contents immortalized for posterity in gels. We filled our notebooks with photographs and dried remnants of these gels, stained fluorescent pink for DNA and RNA, purple for proteins.
“What’s up, Prof?” Later Rocky leaned in under the fume hood, where I was fiddling with a beaker. Ollie wandered up behind her and they both stood, looking at me.
“You know,” said Rocky, “today’s the day I’m supposed to learn how to extract DNA—maybe you forgot?”
I hadn’t exactly forgotten. Still, amazing though it seems, it was a common enough procedure in the lab that it could be put on a back burner, literally. Amazing, because what we were talking about here was nothing less than the isolation of deoxyribonucleic acid from a solution—you could actually pull it out and handle it with a glass rod, whip it around like a string cheese.
I looked at Ollie. “Would you like to see an interesting experiment?”
Ollie shook her head. “Ollie do it.”
“You can help, sweetheart. You can watch.”
“Look.” Ollie offered me another drawing. This one showed very tiny people growing from petri dishes; the dishes were set on the floor of the forest and were surrounded by huge dark Christmas trees. A human-faced star looked down on the scene.
Rocky, looking over my shoulder, snorted.
“Kinda ruins the Smurfs for ya, no?”
I folded up the drawing and put it in my lab-coat pocket.
“Hey guys,” I said. “Let’s make some human taffy.”
Rocky and I went to the incubator, where a couple of days earlier she’d placed some human foreskin fibroblasts. (Now you know what happens to all those little circumcision leftovers, guys!) We also carry human breast-cell lines, from mammary biopsies. Tip or tit? Briss or breast? the irreverent among us ask on our way to the fibroblast freezer.
In special media, in large plastic petri dishes, the cells had grown up and now crowded the bottom of the plate, clinging to the specially treated polymer surface. I showed Rocky how to suck the media off with a house-vacuum tube connected to a big Erlenmeyer flask, attached to another tube with a Pasteur pipette stuck on. The poor cells were now exposed, gasping. We scraped them off with a “rubber policeman,” a kind of glass-handled rubber spatula, and rinsed them into a centrifuge tube. We spun the hapless cells into a heap at the bottom of the tube and sucked off the li
quid above them again—this time replacing it with a nasty mix of detergent and RNA—as well as protein-degrading enzymes. The cells blew open with the application of detergent, exposing their proteins and RNase, soon to be chewed up by the enzymes. Without the proteins holding the scaffolding together, the chromosomes unraveled their neatly spooled DNA string. The strings sparkled modestly from a little distance. Close up, it all looked like a light slime in the tube.
“Is that it?”
“That’s it. Look, Ollie.”
“Holy shit! DNA!”
Rocky tried to lift some of the white fluff-slime on a glass rod and discovered that it was sticky, viscous, slippery. We watched it glitter and swing on the end of the rod for a second, then drop back into the tube.
“I can’t believe this. This is fucking DNA.”
“DNA, Ollie, this is magic stuff. It makes people.”
“Candy people? Talking candy?”
“Not exactly, Ollie.”
“Is it a thought from my head that grew?”
“You wanna answer that one, Rocky?”
Rocky looked up from playing with the malleable strand.
“Man, I can’t believe this,” she said again. Her face was all lit up.
“I know, isn’t it something?” Going through the steps to fetch DNA with Rocky sent me back to my pre-postdoc days; I felt an involuntary shiver of wonder. “You know, this is what some people call the Word, Rocky. This is what they call God’s Code!”
Rocky grinned at me again. She looked ecstatic.
“Yeah, and who would ever have imagined this? This goddam DNA looks, fuckin’ deoxyribonucleic acid looks and feels just like snot!”
Ollie tugged at my sleeve again.
“Is it from my nose?”
“Jesus,” I said. “Let’s put this in the spinner. It’s almost six o’clock.”
“I just can’t believe it. Snot!”
Sometimes, when I could get a sitter, Rocky and I worked nights in the lab, wandering in and out of temperature-controlled rooms, talking to ourselves. More and more, I’d begun to feel like one of the cell cultures I routinely isolated: With the overhead lights in the domed ceiling shining down on my feeling of smallness, my murmuring multiple selves, with the unfresh air recycling, I felt like a worker phage, stuck tight to the agar, reproducing myself. I wanted my own TOE. A single theory that would unite all the others, so I worked on the computer now; I spent hours writing out equations.
But the lab: In the lab, it all continued in the same way. We went on working, we focused on certain reactions and focused again, repeating them. We immortalized cells, strains of cancer, other diseases. Sometimes we went chromosome-walking; I taught Rocky how. We moved out, gene by gene, looking for the faulty one, the screw-up: thousands of possibilities, in some cases, stretching from here to Morocco and back; but we stepped out, little by little, into the gene universe.
You could find us sometimes in the Warm Room, where it’s raunchy and overheated, like a public sauna, or the Cold Room, which is airlocked at four degrees centigrade, where RNA can survive. And sometimes we wrapped ourselves up in plastic to handle recombinant viruses capable of infecting humans.
But even though I went through the motions of all the routine tasks of the laboratory, my body performed them pretty much on its own. In my head, I was walking out into space, where my real lab was.
Chapter 10
IT WAS LATE afternoon. I was winding up an informal lab review with some of the newer grad students. Step by step we enlarged our knowledge of Alpha1 Antitrypsin (a1AT) Deficiency, a genetic plasma protein disorder—a condition created when a plasma protein stops or blocks the action of a protein-splitting enzyme, trypsin.
We have here at UGC, I explained to them, one of only a dozen or so laboratories across the country studying a1AT, because the present typing system is technically difficult, time-consuming, and (I smiled at them) a boring, back-breaking job. Our reference labs do Pi (protease inhibitor) typing here, the genotype characteristic related to a1AT, which is unusual. Many labs do not measure Pi types directly but guess them from chemical values, which are often misleading.
I talked on about the chemistry of the disease, about how a1AT was an inborn error of metabolism, an autosomal hereditary disorder manifesting low serum and lung levels of Alpha1. I described how it destroyed tissue, led to emphysema. I told them about the Swedish scientists who discovered it, by using electrophoresis, a process of subjecting blood plasma to the force of an electric field—their technique for characterizing plasma proteins. After doing that, they noticed that about half a dozen blood samples out of thousands lacked the alpha1 globulin, then found that three or four of these six patients had developed emphysema as young adults, and bingo! The wires touched. Now the clinical manifestations of the disease have been fully published; the troublemaker gene cloned; the molecular bases of the major deficiency states have been defined; techniques for workup have been used for prenatal diagnosis. Liver disease (childhood liver disease, that is to say, another gift of a1AT) is still an enigma, and that problem is one we work on in this lab. Among other things, I thought.
They looked carefully at the protein, the structure of alpha1 (a single chain of 394 amino acids) and its natural substrate, neutrophil elastase. I talked a little about advances in gene replacement, or the implantation into the lungs of victims of a healthy gene that can produce Alpha1. This has been done with animals, I said. We’ve planted a human gene in monkey lungs—and it worked. No one had tried it with humans.
The wall phone rang. One of the grad students, Shelly Sullivan, answered it and nodded to me. I snaked through the aisles and the impromptu gatherings of student research groups and plucked the receiver from her hand. She waved to someone across the room and hurried off.
“Professor Charbonneau.”
“It’s Jesse.”
I heard myself asking him where he was in a neutral voice, forgetting to greet him or ask how he was doing. It was as if I’d expected him, as if he’d been on his way toward me—for some time.
“I’m over at everybody’s rival institution, UCLA. I’m here for a conference, but things came up back in Boston and I have to get back tomorrow. I called your department and they rang me over to your lab. Are you busy? Can you come out for a quick drink?”
I glanced at the wall clock. It was nearly four. Jay was due home early and, of course, had plans to go out later for a stand-up audition—but I could call him, tell him I had to work late, and ask him to give Ollie dinner and a bath just this once, put her to bed. Then I stopped musing. If I go, I thought, something will happen.
“Esme?”
“Yeah. I’m just thinking. My husband’s home tonight, so he could maybe take care of my little girl—”
“I heard you had a kid! I’m going to see a lot of pictures, right?”
“If you want to see them.”
“As long as you don’t tell me labor and birth stories.”
“I see you’ve got the same great bedside manner.”
“You oughta remember.”
“Tell me where you want to meet, Jesse. I’ll be there.”
Jay put up a halfhearted argument, for form’s sake, when I made my suggestion. I told him that I had to work late. (It did not occur to me to wonder why I didn’t just tell him the truth: I was meeting an old friend, so what?) I was afraid that he’d fall asleep on the couch before he tucked Ollie in, but I couldn’t express that concern or he’d explode: Why was I criticizing him? So I said nothing. And I said nothing about when he should expect me. He forgot to ask.
I hung up and stood for a minute, staring into space. I was thinking about making love with Jesse, and I stood there smiling idiotically till one of my grad students came up and raised and lowered his hand in front of my eyes.
“She’s not blinking!” he yelled to the others. “We stunned her with our questions!”
“No, it’s just lack of stimulus,” I said. “Come on, let’s go make a sti
nk bomb.”
I saw him across the room in the fancy bar on Burton Way, and I understood, with the force of a blow, part of what had been missing in my life. Love of the body: but not L.A.’s human statue love, no. Love of the way someone crossed a room, stood up to greet you, put weight on one leg, cocked his head, put an arm around you, held you tight. Love of a face, a collection of expressions, a set of reactions, a familiar sidelong eye-flicker.
He stood up as I neared and we shook hands, then kissed each other lightly on the cheek.
“You look great,” he said. “Your hair is long.”
“So is yours—God, it’s almost shoulder-length!”
“I put it in a pony tail for surgery.”
He looked a little different, I thought: darker, more intense, more serious in his jacket and tie. The attraction I’d always felt for him leaped up full-blown and presented itself to me, and I tamped it down grimly. I hadn’t quite remembered how everything about him seemed connected to his ease, his being-at-home in his body, a relaxed sexuality. It shocked me, close up. There was the leisurely landscape of his manner: an amused, unshakable gaze combined with his habit of dropping an ironic take on everything around him, his quizzical deadpan look. I reminded myself of his faults: No doubt he was still an interrupter, hot-tempered, arrogant, inflexible (a failing of most medical docs); no doubt he thought I still had the hots for him.
I sat down and we smiled at each other.
“You look great,” he said for the second time. Was he nervous?
Then he added: “Maybe it’s being a mom, do you think?”
“You mean, hormones made me what I am?”
“No,” he answered seriously. “Really loving somebody. Your little ... it’s a girl, right?”
Saving St. Germ Page 11
