‘What came of it?’
‘Obviously he didn’t get the prize and I’ve often wondered why.’
‘Let’s ask him.’ the pragmatic Armitage said, and next night at dinner the tertulia entertained their cohort Maxim Lewandowski as their guest.
It was easy for Senator Raborn to open what would have to be an intrusive interrogation: ‘Max, when I was in the Senate, if my memory does not play me false, my staff put together a memorandum in your behalf, which the full Senate forwarded to the Nobel people in Stockholm recommending you as recipient of the prize in some branch of science, I forget which. Do I remember correctly?’
Each of the men leaned forward to watch how the gawky man would respond to this surprising probe into an affair long dead. To their surprise the old man, now eighty-six, leaned back, clapped his hands gently and smiled: ‘Well, now!’
‘It’s true?’ St. Près asked, and the scientist replied: ‘I believe numerous leaders, from various fields, nominated me. The Senate committee, yes, and strongly.’
‘That’s right,’ Raborn said. ‘Eight or nine leading senators signed the recommendation with me. What happened?’
Lewandowski closed his eyes and recalled the most painful moments of his life. ‘Genetics made me, literally and figuratively, but it also destroyed me.’ To help the others understand the terrible trap into which he had fallen, he started with simple basics: ‘I’m sure we all know what role the many millions of genes each of us is endowed with play in human existence. They’re the incredibly small, magical units that determine how we shall look, what color hair we have, our bone and tooth structure, our resistance to disease and, some think, our intellectual capacity; even when our biological clock will begin to run down and when death will follow is probably destined at our conception in the womb.’
The men asked about such things as genetic inheritance of characteristics, diseases that result from errors in the genetic inheritance and other aspects of the mystery. He handled all the questions patiently and with a marked skill for simplification and generalization. But after many minutes he waved his hands across the table as if he were clearing it and asked in quite a different tone of voice: ‘We’ve talked a lot about genes, several million in a human body, but we haven’t said how they exist or how they do their work. Well, the genes are on the chromosomes. Each chromosome is a threadlike filament incredibly long and incredibly thin. It’s made of DNA, one of the life-directing substances. There are twenty-two chromosomes in every human being, and since each one consists of two strands, one from the mother, one from the father, we carry with us a total of forty-four. The pairs are numbered from one, rather large, to twenty-two, quite small, and through a process of isolating, staining and magnification we can actually photograph them.’
‘Where does the stuff come from that can be photographed?’ St. Près asked, and Lewandowski gave an astonishing answer: ‘Any body fluid. Blood, of course, but also perspiration or sputum or urine, or just about anything else.’
Lewandowski expanded further: ‘In addition to the twenty-two chromosome pairs, which might be called the traditional ones, there’s another pair, mysterious, outside the mainstream. It has no number but it’s all-important, because it controls human sexuality. If this special chromosome pair has one component X and a second X—and they too can be photographed—the baby turns out to be a female. But if it consists of X and Y, it’s a boy. And across the world, in all civilizations, for every one hundred girl babies born, there are around one hundred and four boy babies. Have to be, because boys are more fragile than girls. They die off easier. I forget the actual figure, but at about eight or nine, the balance is an even one hundred girls to one hundred boys, but thereafter it quickly falls into an imbalance and remains that way all our lives. There’re always more females than males.’
‘I’m guessing,’ said St. Près, ‘that somehow you messed up with this mysterious twenty-third chromosome pair.’
‘Close, but not quite. You see, in a constant minority of XY cases the poor fellow has a double Y. He’s XYY, and right there my trouble began.’
‘Why? What does XYY produce?’ Raborn asked, and the scientist lowered his head, bringing his hands to his lips as if what he now had to say was too painful to share. Then, straightening his shoulders he coughed, looked at the members of the tertulia and said in a burst of confidence: ‘I did most of the original work on XYY, me and a fine researcher in France. I was first in studying a large number of men in the general American population who were conspicuous for having the XYY syndrome.’
‘How would you go about testing me, to see if I had it?’ President Armitage asked.
‘Same routine. A photograph of even a tiny drop of any of your body fluids and the telltale extra Y will leap out at you.’ He pulled from his jacket pocket a folded, rumpled sheet of paper, photocopied from a medical textbook, and smiled ruefully: ‘I keep this with me to study at odd moments.’ When the men looked at the jumble of mixed chromosomes from a man with XY structure, they saw forty-six chromosomes, not arranged in the pair grouping under which they operated. At the bottom of the page, the twenty-two pairs had been drawn and arranged in descending order from No. 1, the largest pair, to No. 22 for the smallest, plus an unnumbered XY, indicating that this particular sample came from a normal boy.
The complexity of these data was so awesome, and their implications so profound, that editor Jiménez asked: ‘You have researchers who can untangle this mess at the top? Could you, for example, arrange this man’s chromosomes in their proper pairings?’
‘I can do it almost automatically,’ and with the point of a pencil he indicated in the midst of the jumble the big halves that were easy both to identify and to pair up with their partners: ‘Surely you can spot those big differences,’ and the men agreed.
‘But when you work with this material, you memorize the chromosomes as if they were your pets,’ and darting arbitrarily through the scattered diagrams he rattled off their numbers.
‘And the X and Y?’ Armitage asked, and without hesitating the scientist identified the big X, explaining: ‘It’s so big, makes you think maybe the female component is much more important than the male.’
‘And the tricky little Y?’
Pausing for a moment, as if reluctant to identify the chromosome that had destroyed his reputation as a serious scientist, he at last pointed to a nondescript minor figure bearing almost no identifying marks: ‘There the little bastard is,’ but none of the men could spot it in the top tangle.
‘So what happens when a male baby has two of the little terrors?’ President Armitage asked, and with the tip of his pencil, Lewandowski drew a second Y in the top diagram.
‘The Frenchman and I proved at about the same time that young males cursed with the XYY pattern were apt to have a handful of clearly defined characteristics. No question about it. Bigger, heavier musculature. Abnormally aggressive. Difficult to discipline. And, in their mature life, more apt to fall afoul of the law.’
‘These were discernible traits?’
‘Absolutely identifiable. Except that not every XYY adult showed intractable behavior. A man could be a hulking XYY and still be a good citizen.’
‘What are you saying, Maxim? Is he an ugly type or isn’t he?’
‘That’s where I stumbled onto trouble.’ the scientist said. ‘The truth seems to be that the XYY has a propensity toward bad behavior. You might say that he is eligible. But that doesn’t mean that he will be a bad apple.’
‘So what happened?’
‘The Frenchman and I arranged for a brilliant experiment—study might be the better word. He would work through a large number of French prisons. I would do the same in America. And we would blood-type every man in those jails. It was a huge task.’
‘What did you find?’
‘In each country the prison population contained an abnormally high proportion of XYY male inmates.’
‘They did?’ Armitage asked. ‘You mean that XYY
men showed a propensity for criminal behavior?’
Lewandowski winced: ‘That’s exactly what a newspaperman asked me. “Does XYY pinpoint the criminal type?” That’s where the horror started, with your simple question.’
‘How?’
‘Well, as you might expect, I pointed out to the reporter every caution an honest scientist would make: “Insufficient number of cases. Many possible collateral explanations. Possibly some overriding causative factor. Perhaps the fact that the XYY man was bigger and huskier made the police more watchful. Maybe the results were peculiar to French and American jails.” I offered a dozen hedges against the easy conclusion that the extra Y chromosome produced a criminal or a potential criminal. But he didn’t listen.’
‘What did he do?’ Armitage asked.
‘As he left me he asked one short question: “Dr. Lewandowski, what’s in a chromosome?” and I answered honestly: “It contains the genes that control human development.” And the next day newspapers throughout America and soon throughout the world screamed: “American scientist discovers the gene that makes a man a criminal.” ’ He stopped and laughed sardonically and said: ‘He didn’t even get it right. We hadn’t a clue which of the fifty thousand odd genes in that fatal extra Y was guilty. Only that it existed on Chromosome Y. When I challenged him about this he said airily: “Chromosomes are too difficult for the general public to understand. Genes are fashionable this year.” So gene it had to be.’
‘Then what?’
‘The roof fell in. A French newspaper pointed out that my colleague in that country had done half the work and received none of the credit. I had stolen his material. What was worse, my French friend said accurately that he certainly had not come to the conclusion that there was a specific gene or chromosome that determined criminal behavior, and he cited all the caveats that I had given the reporter.’
‘Were you able to explain what had happened?’
‘Not to this day. Newspapers, magazines, television, full-length books were so captivated by the possibility that an identifiable gene could cause criminal behavior that in the popular mind I had made a titanic discovery, and reputable biologists began to speculate on how we might be able to go into the womb of a mother about to give birth to an XYY boy and alter the gene structure so that the child would be born normal and without a propensity for being a criminal.’
‘And?’ Armitage persisted.
‘I became the laughingstock of the scientific community. The mad scientist from Vienna. Restructuring the human race. XYY baby boys in special incubators at birth. And any chance for the Nobel Prize went down the drain.’
This confession was greeted with a long silence, during which the waitress informed the table that the yogurt machine was still on the blink. When substitute orders were placed, Senator Raborn asked: ‘So what’s the state of the inquiry into XYY now?’ and Lewandowski explained: ‘Dozens, hundreds of careful investigations in prisons throughout the world have confirmed that the jail population contains a conspicuous plethora of XYY men.’
‘Doesn’t that prove your original point?’
‘Not at all. For as I foresaw when I gave that damned interview that condemned me, we still do not know what exactly it means. Probably ninety-five percent of XYYs lead quite satisfactory lives. Why the difference in the others?’
‘What are you doing now, Maxim?’
‘I’m a born scientist. Science is all I ever did. Once you’ve been bitten by the bug you never quit. I have a small laboratory upstairs.’
‘What are you working on?’ Armitage asked, wondering if his college might make some use of Maxim’s investigations.
‘The Human Genome Project.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Maybe the most ambitious project under way in the world today. Comparable, I think, to a trip of humans to Mars.’
‘But what is it?’
‘The scientists of the world have decided to draw up an atlas of the human chromosomes, all forty-six.’
‘A big task?’ Jiménez asked.
‘So big it stupefies. The forty-six contain millions of genes. A map has to be drawn of every chromosome, showing where and how its strings of genes operate.’
‘To what purpose?’
Solemnly Lewandowski said: ‘To restructure the human race. To rectify God’s mistakes.’
Recognizing the gravity of what the scientist had said, and the depth of his commitment to whatever role he was playing in this enormous undertaking, they peppered him with questions, at the conclusion of which he stated his creed: ‘When we have solved the secrets of the genome, if we ever do, we’ll be able to specify which genes in which chromosomes produce which anomalies in human life and perhaps correct them by adjusting the genes. Don’t laugh. We already know which genes in one chromosome are responsible for Tay-Sachs disease, which afflicts Jews with a fatal disorder. That already permits us to do genetic counseling of young couples with the gene who may want to marry: “Since you both carry a defective chromosome, better not have children.” And we are certain that a defect in Chromosome ten produces the sickle-cell anemia that plagues blacks. If we correct the gene deficiency in ten we protect the black man or woman from the disease, which is so destructive.’
On and on he went, identifying those errant chromosomes whose flawed genes had been proved to be progenitors or at least warning signals of this or that specific disease. For example, a defective gene in Chromosome 7 was suspected as an agent in cystic fibrosis and Chromosome 13 was related to eye cancer. The tertulia was astounded at how much information had already been collected. At the conclusion of his summary he dropped a bombshell: ‘And through the most painstaking work plus accidental good luck, we’ve learned that a gene in Chromosome twenty-one is definitely related to the cause of Alzheimer’s disease.’
His listeners leaned forward, for they had witnessed the ravages of this mysterious disease, and they were mesmerized by what Maxim said next: ‘Yes, we’ve found a large family in Sweden, many of whose members contract what is known as early-onset Alzheimer’s. Very unusual, death comes in the forties. When we reconstructed the life history of each member, some brilliant researcher, an Englishman, I believe, detected that the troublemaker was Number fourteen.’
The tertulia discussed this avidly as waitresses cleared the nearby tables, and Lewandowski said: ‘Faint clues, not nailed down yet, also incriminate Chromosome nineteen. I’m a member of the team, scientists in various nations, who’re working to map the genetic structure and history of Number nineteen. Maybe three hundred million genes in that system, but with a mix of luck and insight we may be able to spot the part of the chain that causes the trouble, maybe not.’
‘What do you actually do, Maxim? Study a hundred thousand slides? Here in our building?’
‘No,’ he chuckled. ‘Nothing so dramatic. I receive reports from many sources. One researcher explores one segment of the gene chain, another works on a different part. And if we’re lucky, a third, maybe in Bombay, works on a fragment that overlaps the end of the first segment and the beginning of the second. He or she builds a bridge that I can report on to all other workers on Number nineteen. Parallel with our team, others are working on Chromosome fourteen, and refining what’s already been accomplished on twenty-one.’
In the silence that followed, Lewandowski took a long drink of iced tea and said gravely: ‘In time we shall discover this dreadful secret, and maybe we’ll find some treatment that will enable us to help Mr. Duggan’s wife on the second floor and restore her to him.’
No one spoke, for each member of the tertulia, deeply moved, had a lump in his throat. Finally St. Près spoke for the group: ‘Keep at it, Maxim. Lots of stricken people await your findings.’
Most human beings, thanks to the benevolence of God, are spared the more excruciating agonies of death, which cause the sufferer to scream desperately for relief. Berta Umlauf, a widow of seventy-nine who once lived in the most attractive red-roofed house on Island
5 across the channel from the Palms, had known death in its most horrible forms.
She had lived originally in Marquette, a town in the northern segment of Michigan, the part that is separated from the more important southern portion by the Straits of Mackinac. As a pretty, petite girl in high school she fell in love with a six-foot-one football star named Ludwig Umlauf, whose father, Otto, owned a profitable lumber business and whose socially inclined mother, Ingrid, had great hopes for her son, maybe winning a football scholarship to go to Notre Dame or at least to Michigan. Mrs. Umlauf was distressed when Ludwig informed his parents that he was not going to college; he would marry his neighbor Berta Krause and start work immediately in his father’s lumber operations. To escape interference from his mother, Ludwig eloped with Berta and Mrs. Umlauf angrily felt that the marriage had damaged her son’s promising future.
Ludwig did not think so, for with Berta’s eager assistance and his father’s stern tutelage, he helped the Umlauf lumber concern to thrive. But as Berta watched her husband closely she had the suspicion that he did not go away to college because he had been afraid to do so. He wanted to stay at home, in his familiar house and employed in the business his grandfather had started and his father had extended. With old Otto and young Ludwig growing timber in their extensive woodlands and selling it in a variety of outlets, the Umlaufs became more than prosperous; they were rich. When each year the ever-increasing earnings were made known to Mrs. Umlauf, Ludwig hoped that she would relax her hostility toward Berta.
But the wealthier the Umlaufs became, the more convinced Mrs. Umlauf became that Berta had damaged her son’s prospects: ‘A boy as wonderful as him, who can make money so easy, he ought to be farther along than he is. You’re holding him back, Berta, and it’s a crying shame.’ Not even the birth of a grandson reconciled the contentious old lady to her daughter-in-law, and the older Mrs. Umlauf began to pressure her husband to leave the bitter winters of northern Michigan and find a pleasant home in Florida, a plea he obstinately rejected, sometimes with profanity: ‘This is where we earned our money, this is where we’ll spend it. Goddammit, this house will be our home as long as I live,’ and he would remind his wife that he found his only pleasure in life when hunting in the Umlauf game-rich woods or sailing his boat on the waters of Lake Superior. Like the stubborn Lutheran he was, he refused to consider flight to an easier life in Florida.
Recessional: A Novel Page 26
