Silver told Jacques Cohen that the cloning of Dolly had shocked and thrilled him. “It’s changed my whole philosophical view.”
“Well,” Cohen replied urbanely, with European modesty, in a dry tone of self-effacement, “we must remember that genes are not everything.” He himself had a patient’s baby about to be born that very night, any minute now—with help from someone else’s egg cytoplasm.
Silver asked a question, Cohen gave a technical answer. I could not follow all of it, but I gathered that Cohen and his group had extracted some cytoplasm from the egg of a fertile woman and injected it into the egg of an infertile woman. Then they had added sperm from the patient’s husband. From there everything had gone as it usually does with in vitro fertilization (IVF), fertilization in glass. They had implanted the fertilized egg in the woman’s womb, and now she was about to have a baby.
The lecture was held in the largest hall of the Lewis Thomas Laboratory. Several hundred students were in the audience, including Princeton’s graduating class of molecular biologists.
Jacques Cohen’s lecture was a dry, smooth, professional slide show. In 1959, the first successful IVF rabbit. In 1978, the first IVF human being, Louise Brown, a baby conceived in a petri dish. Then in the early 1980s, the cloning of sheep, in secret, by an old friend and colleague of Cohen’s, Steen Willadsen. Cohen explained, with an edge to his voice, that Willadsen had developed many ingenious techniques that Ian Wilmut, the man who cloned Dolly, had built on and had now made public at last.
When Cohen was done, he sat down at a table next to the lectern, took a sip of water, and let Lee Silver take over.
If Cohen’s lecture was low-key, Silver’s was in the highest key I ever heard from a podium. He told the students what he had said at dinner, that cloning had changed his view of life. “From the moment I heard it was done,” he said, “my entire conception of science changed.” He held up a thick stack of paper: his manuscript, Remaking Eden. Then he took the first few pages, tore them up, and dropped the pieces on the floor.
“We thought it would always be necessary for sperm and egg to unite to make an embryo,” he said. “We thought that was a law. We were wrong.”
He ripped up a few more pages of his manuscript and let them flutter down.
“I wonder now if any biological law can’t be broken. I don’t think there are any biological laws. There’s nothing that can’t or won’t be done in the future.
“We thought it would be impossible. I really thought it would be impossible—though I never like to use that word.”
Rip! Rip! Rip!
“Do you realize what this means? You could take a skin cell, a cell we don’t respect very much. Scratch the skin and you kill cells—we don’t care much. Right?”
He scratched his bare forearm and followed with his eyes the invisible flurry of a thousand lost cells that fell to the floor toward the first pages of his manuscript.
“But now, every one of those cells I’m killing can form a human life. We respected the fertilized egg partly because we thought that only the fertilized egg has the potential to form a human life. That’s no longer true. Any one of those cells has the potential to form a human life.”
As an embryo’s cells divide and divide, their numbers explode and so does their diversity. They become muscle cells, liver cells, kidney cells, hair cells, skin cells, nerve cells. Until Dolly, biologists had believed that all those mature adult cells were committed to their identities: They could not go back. Each adult cell had built so much stiff molecular scaffolding around its DNA that it could never be young again. But Wilmut and his team in Scotland had plucked the DNA from one skin cell in the udder of a ewe, and that DNA had started over and grown into a lamb. It was a miracle of regeneration, and it would soon help to cast a glow of infinite possibility around the new field of regenerative medicine.
Until the turn of the twentieth century, Silver said, biologists had thought that the workings of inheritance would always be secret from human beings. “With Mendel’s laws, for the first time, they knew how it worked. Then they thought we would never understand what a gene was. They thought that was something we would never know. And then in 1953 the molecular structure of a gene was determined: the double helix. Pretty incredible!”
In the early 1970s, scientists shocked themselves again. They discovered how to cut and splice DNA in bacteria. They could become genetic engineers. They had thought they could never do that.
“And cloning—everyone said it was impossible. Me too. I was among them. Absolutely impossible. It was an absolute law of nature, an absolute barrier.
“All knocked down! We can now think of ways of cloning almost anything we can imagine! There isn’t anything impossible anymore!”
Silver destroyed a few more pages of his manuscript.
“I mean, this is really incredible! Human beings have been around a long time: five million years. We discovered fire three hundred thousand years ago. We tamed the wolf thirty thousand years ago. One hundred years ago we found the laws of the gene. Fifty years ago we found the molecular structure of genes. Twenty-five years ago we found out how to do genetic engineering. And now with cloning—”
Silver broke off in mid-declamation and dropped his voice into a meadow of calm. “This is sort of a free-form talk,” he said softly, and the students laughed. “It’s not what I was going to talk about two weeks ago. But the world changed two weeks ago.”
He threw the last pages of Remaking Eden over his head and let them flutter to the floor.
There was so much talk about the lamb that night that I forgot about the baby. That story was more important than Cohen had let on at dinner. It is now regarded in some circles as the moment when our best hopes and worst fears about genetic engineering began to come true. A few of Cohen’s colleagues and many of his critics argue that the baby born that night was genetically modified, a GM baby. If so, then the promise and threat we saw in the portent of the lamb had already arrived. Human beings had begun the genetic engineering of human babies. I did not know this yet. But that night all of us felt that genetic engineering was coming of age, and coming home to us.
When the students and scientists had finished mobbing them, Cohen and Silver walked up the long aisle to the projection booth to collect their slides. For some reason the doctor seemed to have found the professor’s performance amusing.
“Anything is possible now,” he said drily. “You convinced me.”
Silver wondered how Ian Wilmut in Scotland was handling his instant celebrity.
“I think Wilmut is surprised,” Cohen said. “To him, it was a small step. And to me, too. But I’ll stay away from cloning for a while. I need to make a living.”
“Add one zero!” I said.
“You can buy anybody.”
Four
The Key in the Door
Slowly that year Stephen’s house became more a work of art than a house. He and Ben worked longer and longer hours, ran farther and farther behind. They went back to the bank and borrowed more and more money. Stephen suffered night sweats from his credit card debts. Sometimes he loved the place and sometimes he hated it.
I’m not a long-term worker kind of guy.
In the summer of 1997, when Jamie beat him at arm wrestling in the Outer Banks, Stephen assumed that he was just tired.
Five months later, on a morning in Christmas week of 1997, Stephen arrived at the house and put his key in the front door. He was more than six months behind his latest revised deadline, and his to-do list nagged at him whenever he got to work. The yard was mud, and the local sod farms were sold out of sod. The roof was untiled: Thousands of dollars’ worth of six-inch ceramic tiles were stacked on it in piles, and the roofer refused to return his calls. The locks in the doors were brass, brand-new, and top-of-the-line, but every one of them was sticking.
That Christmas, his whole family was there to help him finish the house. John had taken a sabbatical leave from MIT and moved to Palo Alto. H
e was writing a book, The Two-Stroke Cycle Engine, and helping out with the carpentry. Peggy had closed her practice and retired in order to make the trip. She helped Stephen by designing the new kitchen and bathrooms and laying out the gardens.
Ben was there almost every day, too. He had not done much of the manual labor. He was on his way to business school at UCLA. He did not want to go back to engineering; he wanted to be a producer in Hollywood. At the house, Ben was management. He wrote in his application to UCLA that his job was dealing with the banks, budgets, expenses, subcontractors, and “focusing my brother’s efforts on critical-path tasks.” Whenever people praised the house, Ben told them that his brother did all the real work. Ben was afraid of ladders, scared of heights. I don’t have Stephen’s hands.
The only one in the family who had to fly out that Christmas was Jamie. Even though they lived on opposite coasts, Jamie and Stephen were still inseparable. They talked on the phone a few times a day; and as often as they could, Jamie and his wife Melinda flew out from their home in Yardley, Pennsylvania, to help with the house. Jamie was making good money at Advent Design Corporation, a small engineering company north of Philadelphia. When the house was almost done, and his brothers’ credit cards were all tapped out, Jamie would come around each weekend and leave a check for ten thousand dollars: “So those were expensive weekends.”
The neighbors on Forest Avenue and for a few blocks around in Crescent Park kept strolling by that Christmas to admire Stephen’s house. The dilapidated little cottage was now a gem. Stephen let Jamie show them around, and Jamie worked each room like a realtor. Stephen had saved and rehung all of the windows from the original house because he loved rippled old glass. The uprights on the sides of the windows were poplar, custom milled. The windows’ headpieces and sills were custom, too. Some of them he had turned into double-hung windows, some into casement windows with little brass knobs. Almost all of the hardware was new, including fancy brass hinges at fifty dollars a pair. Stephen had saved the old doors from the original house and had them rehung by a woodwork company near Palo Alto, with new doors specially milled to match. And handsome as it all was, the place met the building code for earthquakes. “You could have turned that house upside down and shaken it,” Jamie says. “I really think you could.”
Real estate values were rising all over Palo Alto, which is prime Silicon Valley, and Stephen was beginning to realize that after all the sweat and squalor, after all his beginner’s idiotic mistakes, after all his forebodings of disaster, he might actually make a profit. If he could just sell the place without losing money, he saw himself restoring more houses. They stood in a row ahead of him like the Painted Ladies. He knew what he wanted to be now—he knew what he was. He could imagine doing this kind of work for the rest of his life, or at least until he turned forty. Everyone in his family could see the change in him. His drifting days were ending. Stephen’s mother thought it was wonderfully appropriate that Christmas when Stephen’s Harley was stolen from the garage. To Peggy the theft seemed like a gift or at least a wink from heaven. “It was a miracle! It was a miracle!”
That morning Stephen stood on the front porch fiddling with the key in the front door. He had not yet gotten around to fine-tuning the lock, which a carpenter has to do with every door and jamb. The key refused to turn. But the door was beautiful: He had stained, varnished, and polished it to match the door of the garage. Stephen also liked the look of the doorknob and the plate around the keyhole. He had shined the brass as brightly if it carried the name of his first ship, or the Heywoods’ heraldic coat of arms. The front doorknob was new and its mate on the inside was a knob that Stephen had saved from the original door, an antique brass globe impressed with an ornate flower. All gleaming brass: the knobs, the lock, the decorative escutcheon around the keyhole.
Stephen unscrewed the front doorknob. He inspected the latch bolt and the strike plate to make sure the bolt lined up with the hole in the plate. It did. He screwed the knob back in place.
Then, experimentally, he tried the key with his left thumb and forefinger. This time the tumblers in the lock revolved smoothly and the cam threw the bolt. So there was nothing the matter with the key or the lock.
Stephen tried again with his right thumb and forefinger. But he could not turn the key.
Jamie told his family that Christmas that he had decided to quit his job at Advent Design Corporation. He was going into biology.
It was a leap into the dark for Jamie. He had never even taken a biology course—he had always been an engineer. Jamie likes to tell a story. In Newtonville, he says, his eighth-grade teacher, Mr. Malagodi, assigned everyone in class to design and build the strongest possible bridge out of simple classroom materials. Most of Jamie’s classmates built a bridge with a ruler, for a span of exactly one foot. Jamie’s bridge spanned five feet, with yard-high towers made of T squares. It was a suspension bridge: Strings ran down from the T squares to support a series of rulers under the roadway. Most of the one-foot bridges failed with one or two textbooks placed on them. A few made it to five textbooks. “My bridge was last and everyone wanted to see the test,” Jamie says. “In the end, we put eighteen textbooks in the center of the bridge before one of the T squares buckled and the whole thing came tumbling down.”
At MIT, John Heywood is well known and respected for his competence, intelligence, hard work, and good sense. Both John and Peggy are solid in-the-box people. But at home and at school, Jamie’s inventions were always baroque: dreams of brave new companies, new industries. He founded start-ups that broke down, he made wild Icarian flights out of the box. In an MIT manufacturing class called 2.86, the assignment was to design a yogurt cup. Everyone else made a round cup—as instructed. Jamie made his square.
“It was a nice cup,” his mother says. “Jamie tended to get As or Cs. He didn’t get Bs.”
Friends of his from MIT days say he solved problems not so much by mastery of equations and formulas but by an intuitive sense of what would work, what the right angles were for the trusses on the bridge. He winged his answers without calculating them. He could not always find his way by incremental steps, but sometimes he could sense it, and he was always out of the box.
Even his marriage took him out of the box. He met Melinda in Cambridge when he was at MIT and she was at Wellesley. Melinda grew up in the Pickle Family Circus, where her father was the band-leader. Her mother is a belly dancer in Athens. By the age of two, her parents were divorced, and Melinda danced with her mother for the first time. By the age of seven, she was dancing in smoky Greek tavernas until one or two in the morning. Her mother’s stage name is Rhea, and Melinda and her sister Piper worked their way through college and graduate school as belly dancers, the Daughters of Rhea. In Christmas week of 1997, Melinda had just finished her PhD in medieval French literature at the University of Pennsylvania, while Piper worked on a PhD in molecular biology at Johns Hopkins—a connection that Jamie would find useful later on. Melinda also worked as a circus dance artist and juggler. She performed in the Big Top of Circus Flora with a troupe that included Flora the Elephant, Nino the Clown, and the famous Flying Wallendas. In one of the company’s acts, Melinda, sequined and slender, caught in the crosslights, played the allegorical figure of Hope.
In his first job after graduation, Jamie helped design the hulls of boats for the winning team of the 1992 America’s Cup. Then he embarked on a series of entrepreneurial projects, managing teams of engineers, some of them more than twice his age. He fought in business the way he had fought at basketball, football, tennis, wrestling, arm wrestling, and hockey (he was a bruiser at hockey). “Recklessness and competition are just different ages,” he says. Actually, Jamie was still reckless at thirty. He was scary on highways—the fast lane was too slow for him. He also raced boats. (“All I do is race. I don’t sail. I get bored in a boat if I’m not racing.”) He loved the wild starting line, crouching on a 25,000-pound piece of fiberglass as it thrashed almost out of control. He still wan
ted to save the world. He also yearned for the best boats, the finest cars, the finest houses, and his sense of destiny visibly ate at him.
“Jamie was always a sort of bumptious young man,” Peggy says. “His ambitions never fit his skin. He always wanted to do more or be more than he was actually doing or being.”
By 1997, Jamie had been working at Advent Design Corporation for six years as an engineer and a project manager. He had helped make a surgical irrigator, a fiber-optic surgical loupe, and a machine for manufacturing suppositories. He and Melinda lived in a fine old three-story Victorian in Yardley—Stephen had done some beautiful work on it for them. Advent had been founded by two techies from MIT, and to Jamie it felt like a sort of idealized extension of school. He was playing with cool toys, designing and building useful gadgets and robots, and the people there were very bright. But the place was too small for him, and that year he decided it was time to move on. He wanted to own a shop of his own, or else try something completely different.
Flying in and out of Silicon Valley on his visits to Palo Alto made Jamie restless. In those years, the workshops in the valley loomed as tall as the towers of Wall Street, even though most of the buildings that housed the new start-ups and dot-coms were only two stories high, no taller than Stephen’s Heartbreak Hotel. From desktops and laptops across the country, Jamie and his techie friends e-mailed each other with stock tips, news about initial public offerings, ideas for start-ups and dot-coms, insanely ambitious business plans—and some of his friends were getting rich. Being young and untried was their biggest asset. The social commentator Michael Lewis was in Silicon Valley then, writing a book called The New New Thing. “Having a past actually counted against a company, for a past was a record and a record was a sign of a company’s limitations,” Lewis says. “You had to show that you were the company not of the present but of the future. The most appealing companies became those in a state of pure possibility.”
His Brother's Keeper Page 3
