by Ben Mezrich
“None of this is going to be real, unless people make it real.”
Church knew he wasn’t finding the right words. At ten years old, his vocabulary hadn’t yet caught up with his imagination and capacity to think. But he also knew that, compared with what he’d just seen, the present was so—boring. He didn’t want to be here, he didn’t belong here.
Later in life, he would return to this moment as the instant when he first started to think of himself as a sort of time traveler. Deep down, he started to believe that he was from the far future, and had somehow been left in the past. It was his task in life to try to get back, to try to shift the world to where he had once been.
From the look on his mother’s face, he could tell that she understood.
“So you’ll make it real,” she said.
She was going to help him any way she could. But, still, he knew, it would be up to him. If he wanted to reach the future, he would have to figure out a way to write it himself.
CHAPTER SEVEN
December 10, 1984. Twenty years later.
ALTA SKI RESORT, WASATCH MOUNTAINS, UTAH.
At ten thousand feet above sea level, the air was so thin that it was like breathing through a straw. The temperature was a brisk forty-two degrees, and the sky above a dangerous shade of gunmetal gray.
Midmorning, the snow had begun to fall again, the heavy flakes swirling down from the low cloud cover, diminishing visibility to a paltry few yards. If the weather reports were accurate, in a resort town that lived and died by the accuracy of its meteorologists, the area was facing its second blizzard in three days. Many of the roads that traversed the sixty-mile passage back to the Salt Lake City airport were already closed, and the long ride up the triple chairlift from base level had been like ascending through the highly charged outer atmosphere of one of Jupiter’s moons.
At the moment, Church couldn’t have cared less about the forecast or the visibility. With four feet of fresh powder, the runs at the summit were pristine and untouched. His own skis barely left tracks as he cut a tight line down the center of the mountain. Each twist of his hips sent showers of snow toward the tree line on either side of the narrow trail, and the mist from his breath crystallized in lavish patterns against the bluish glaze of his goggles.
A towering six foot five by his late twenties, with wide shoulders and long limbs, Church had grown into an avid athlete. Skiing was just one of his many physical hobbies. Growing up in Florida, he hadn’t expected to develop an affinity for a cold-weather sport. The only skis he’d ever been on had been in water, back when he was a toddler and still living on the air force base of father number one. But when his mother had saved him from the unexceptional school system in Clearwater by packing him off at age fourteen to Phillips Andover boarding school in Massachusetts, he’d opened his mind to an abundance of new experiences.
Compared to a childhood spent in depressed Florida public schools, Andover had been like the World’s Fair all over again. Everything was shiny and new, and students had access to nearly limitless resources. His classmates were either smart enough to keep up with him or understanding enough to get out of his way. Immersing himself in exploring a wide range of subjects, he’d rapidly expanded his interests: biology, chemistry, higher math. After finding an ignored computer in the basement of the science building, he’d taught himself to program and done a bit of hacking just to see if he could.
By the end of his second year, his teachers recognized that he was different, and, eventually, they gave him keys to the various labs, so he could conduct his independent projects on his own.
At Andover, he first discovered the world of genetics. He was fascinated by the fact that every living cell had within it a genomic code—a double helix of DNA made up of bases of chemical molecules attached together like rungs on a ladder. And that ladder comprised coding for everything, from eye color to the length of fingers and toes. At the time, the study of genetics was in its infancy, and it was the dirty stepchild of the biological field. People who wanted to change the world didn’t go into genetics; they found other avenues for making significant contributions.
Church bent low on his knees as he came into a tight turn, his ski poles bouncing at his sides. He could no longer hear the skis of the colleagues he had set off with from the base that morning; a quick glance over his shoulder gave him no new information. They could have been a dozen feet behind him or he could have lost them at the last fork. For all he knew, they had stopped at one of the upper mountain cafés and were enjoying cocoa in front of a fire.
Over the past decade, Church had lost the ability to take it slow. Trading Andover for Duke University, he had been in a rush to get through college. He’d skipped most freshman and sophomore classes and headed directly into the advanced sciences. At Duke, he had taken additional classes and done extra work for no credit, especially whenever there was a lab component. While earning his degree in chemistry and zoology, he’d continued to develop his knowledge of genetics on the side. During the summer between his first and second year, he’d applied to graduate schools, earning admission to several schools, including Harvard, but had chosen to remain at Duke.
Church’s focus became crystallography: The field seemed a natural fusion of all of his interests—math, computers, chemistry, and biology. He had especially taken to the professor in charge of his crystallography lab, Sung Hou Kim, who had just arrived from his own postdoctorate at MIT. When Church had gone into the young professor’s lab for his initial sophomore-year work interview, Kim had been working on a large brass molecule construction kit, attacking the faux atoms with a little steel wrench, smiling. Church had loved the physicality of the exercise, and had decided then and there that it was where he belonged.
Working in Kim’s lab became an obsession, and Church stopped attending his other classes. He taught himself to become an expert in the study of RNA, the messenger molecules that carry out tasks inside the cell, enabling the development of trait-generating proteins. Soon, Church was spending more than one hundred hours a week in Kim’s lab.
It wasn’t until he received a letter in the mail from the Duke administration that he realized he had failed out of the Ph.D. program. Although he’d published five notable papers in that first year, all that mattered to the university was the fact that he hadn’t attended any of his necessary course work and was now receiving failing grades in two of his classes (which he had already aced as an undergrad).
Years later, he still had that letter, as a reminder to himself of the first time he’d nearly derailed his entire career:
Dear Mr. Church
Examination of your record for the past semester reveals that you earned a grade of F in a course in your major field. Earning a grade of F in the major field occasions withdrawal from a degree program (see page 58, Bulletin of Duke University, The Graduate School). Consequently, you are no longer a candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the department of Biochemistry at Duke University.
We regret that this action is necessary and hope that whatever problems or circumstances may have contributed to your lack of success in pursuing your chosen field at Duke will not keep you from successful pursuit of a productive career. . . .
The dismissal had come as a major shock; Church had completed his undergraduate degree in only two years, and had gotten kicked out of graduate school in less than half that time. It was a quick and painful lesson in the culture of academia; fulfilling requirements was somehow valued over whatever original research or work one might be doing. Church considered giving up graduate school entirely and focusing on lab work, but Dr. Kim rescued him from his own shortsightedness. Kim asked him, did he want to be a technician, or did he want the autonomy that would better enable extreme innovation? If he continued on the road he was going down, he would never have any control. He would always be at the mercy of someone else. Church took his mentor’s advice.
On the next turn of the mountain slope, Church was moving so fast he f
elt his outer ski lose touch with the snow. For a brief second he thought he might skid out of control. Then he countered with his entire weight, came up centered, and continued rocketing down the slope.
Getting into a Harvard Ph.D. program hadn’t felt like a life-changing event at the time. Compared to Duke, Church’s Ph.D. work had been free of drama, and after graduating he’d spent six months at a biotech company in Boston, then a few months out West. After that, he’d gone back to the Northeast, where he’d fielded offers and almost ended up at Yale, before he’d learned how little they were willing to pay to set up his lab. Then he’d given a talk that, oddly, turned into an interview at Livermore, where they were building nuclear bombs. He’d had to enter the facility through a sequence of three barbed-wire fences and he’d quickly decided that wasn’t for him, either.
Luckily, a friend at Harvard, Gary Ruvkun, told him about an opening in the genetics department of Harvard Medical School. Although Church was a little out of cycle and the department had just finished its hiring process, he’d applied anyway. At his interview, he pitched his Ph.D. thesis, a dissertation about a new method of analyzing genetic enhancers that were involved in DNA-binding. It was just sexy enough to get him the post, but what he truly wanted to work on was sequencing—coming up with ways to read genetic material fast, better, and cheaper.
At the time, the art of reading genomes was just being developed, although James D. Watson and Francis Crick had discovered and defined the double helix structure of DNA as far back as 1953. It was now well known that genetic material is formed by billions of organic molecules called nucleotides (the basic units of nucleic acid that make up DNA and RNA). These are arranged in sequences that create the genome, which is carried by every living cell in every living organism, and in which all traits are coded.
But isolating and “reading” those sequences was still extremely difficult. Frederick Sanger had only sequenced the first full genome—that of a simple virus—as recently as 1977. Any high school biology teacher could explain that DNA was made up of four chemical building blocks—adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine (ACGT)—that were paired together and attached by hydrogen into a molecule that resembled the steps of a twisting ladder, and that this genetic material, duplicated in every cell, was essentially the instruction booklet behind life itself. But making sense of those instructions, and understanding which sequence of ACGT gave rise to what specific characteristic, was exceedingly difficult.
The process of isolating and reading genomic codes originally involved giant devices with big chunks of paper covered in genetic material that were dipped in vast tanks of kerosene as coolant. A scientist would sit in a room surrounded by fire extinguishers as he or she ran six thousand volts of electricity through the paper, hoping the whole thing didn’t explode. The process that came after that one was a bit more fine-tuned, and also less flammable, but researchers still had to lug clunky, meter-long pieces of glass around the lab. Then came an automated technique, called capillary electrophoresis, which involved rooms full of giant machines that cost millions of dollars.
As part of Church’s Ph.D., he’d developed a way to multiplex the process of reading genomes, essentially speeding up the technique and making it cheaper by sequencing multiple strands at once. He’d likened it to moving from a swamp to a village—his goal was to eventually get to a full-scale city. From the beginning, his multiplex technique garnered immense interest from all across academia. A process that had previously taken months, or longer, could now be done in days.
At his Harvard office, Church had received a phone call from the Department of Energy just weeks before traveling to Utah, asking him to be part of a unique project. He had assumed that the venture would be connected to his work on multiplexing, but to his surprise, the government had something else entirely on its mind. The DOE was bringing together the top scientists in genetics in order to try to figure out the mutation rates among populations who had been living downwind from Hiroshima when America dropped the first atomic bomb.
Church had been the youngest scientist on the invitation list, which had included seventeen other prestigious names. Even so, he had been less than enthusiastic about the DOE request. He hadn’t gone into genetics to deal with the aftereffects of weapons of war as a top consideration. But David Smith of the DOE and the rest of the brass there had made several convincing arguments that appealed to Church: The meeting would take place at one of the premier ski resorts in the country, Sunday, December 9, to Thursday, December 13, 1984, and it would be paid for by the Department of Energy and the International Commission for Protection Against Environmental Mutagens and Carcinogens. There was fresh powder in the forecast, and some amazing scientists whom Church really wanted to meet had already accepted the invitation. Being a nerd, he found the latter as compelling as the former.
Almost immediately after the scientists convened at Alta, they’d come to the conclusion that there was no reliable way of measuring the cellular effects on people living downwind from chemical or nuclear explosions. Trapped in place by multiple blizzards, they had instead decided to make the most of their time by hitting the slopes and then meeting in hot tubs and at the main restaurant for long bull sessions on anything that struck their fancy.
Church wasn’t sure by what magic their conversation shifted to significant ideas, but he assumed it was just the natural result of isolating so many brilliant people together for five days. Late that first night, the idea came up of reading the entire human genome.
By determining all the sequences of A,C,G,T, they would, in effect, figure out what made a person a person, down to the cellular level. It was as audacious a project as the original moonshot, which had led to men walking on the lunar surface. But instead of looking outward, toward space, theirs would be an adventure inward, toward the center of humankind.
The first question that had arisen was how much such a project might cost. At the time, their estimate was a dollar for every base pair of genes, three billion dollars in total. Church was the only one there with a computer, aTRS80 model 100—a 1.5 kg, pre-laptop-era laptop—and he started doing reality checks on the wild scenarios that he and others were considering.
Almost immediately, the Department of Energy began writing checks. One thing the government of the eighties was good at was writing checks in support of science. For Church that would mean that, as soon as he got back to Boston, he would scramble to put together grant proposals. A running joke in his lab in those early days was that he was the only person at Harvard who didn’t know how to properly ask for enough money. But the Human Genome Project (HGP), as the DNA-mapping effort would soon become known, would change that. Soon there would be considerable amounts of money going around, and even an inexperienced grant writer with some odd ideas could find a way to get some water from the spigot.
The Human Genome Project would hit the biological sciences like a lightning bolt. But in its first conception at the lodge in 1984, it was just a way to turn a blizzardy week with a peculiar goal into something productive.
Church hit a tuft of snow head-on, then shifted his weight to take a narrow curve in the trail. Maybe it was the shadowy gray light, barely peeking through the low clouds, maybe it was the snow that was now gusting horizontally through the air, but he never even saw the tree stump, jutting up from the edge of the slope. His first ski managed to clear the frozen wood, but his back ski collided with an ugly jolt. Church tumbled forward, his long frame jackknifing over the tips of his skis.
Luckily for him, the fresh powder was soft enough, even for a headfirst landing. He hit and kept on rolling, sending up a massive cloud of snow.
By the time he finally heaved to a stop and started to crawl his way out from under the snow, thick clumps hanging from his thick beard like Christmas tree ornaments, two of his colleagues had caught up, shushing to a stop just a few feet away. David Smith from the DOE was in front, yanking his goggles up to look George over. Then he smiled.
“F
or a minute there, I got a little bit worried about the future of DNA sequencing.”
Church laughed.
He always had a knack for making an impression.
CHAPTER EIGHT
December 14, 1979. Five years earlier.
WEEKS BRIDGE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS.
At ten minutes past midnight, Chao-ting Wu leaned out over the dark water of the Charles River, her elbows heavy against the stone railing of the seventy-year-old bridge, and wondered to herself how someone so incredibly smart could do something so incredibly disappointing.
Ting, as she had been called since childhood, could feel Church standing awkwardly next to her, pretending to look out over the water as she was—but he wasn’t fooling her at all. She knew exactly how his mind worked. He wasn’t contemplating the way the moon danced across the glassy surface of the river, the refracted light made even brighter still by the template of a precrystallizing liquid, H2O kept in a state just a few degrees above freezing. Nor was he counting the chunks of ice that had come loose from the snowy banks on either side, floating in aimless circles, buoyed by some incalculable logic of water current, wind, and temperature.
Ting doubted Church even saw the river, the ice, or the moon. She knew he was too busy going over the details of the evening—from the minute he had picked her up at her apartment to attend a fellow student’s party to the moment when he had finally taken her by the hand. No doubt, now he was contemplating what he was supposed to do next. Ting was glad that so far, those ruminations had led only to his standing in awkward silence, just a little too close, as they leaned together over the Charles, while the fingers of his free hand absentmindedly pulled at the end of his thick, ever-present beard.
