by Ben Mezrich
Ting could honestly say she had never expected this moment. She had met Church shortly after he had entered graduate school at Harvard. They had taken a course together on chromatin structure, and Church had sat across from her. He was tall and so, so quiet, but every time he opened his mouth, whatever came out was strange, smart, and creative. Even so, people had begun referring to him as “three-words-George,” because that was as much as anyone ever seemed to get out of him.
Ting had taken an instant liking to him. From the very first week, they had spent many hours talking science—always science. They would meet in one of the Harvard libraries to exchange ideas or they would take walks along the Charles River and around Harvard Yard. There was so much that was bold and archaic and looming about the place, from the stone architecture of Widener Library to the brick and antique glass of the old dorms like Thayer and Wigglesworth. In contrast, their conversations were so new and modern: crystallography, life sciences, the nascent field of recombinant DNA.
Unlike Church, Ting had fallen into biology quite by accident. She had come to Harvard to study math, but while working as a dishwasher in a biology lab to help support herself through college, she had suddenly felt at home. The simple beauty of the natural world held so much in common with the purity of numbers—she and Church could go on and on about the subject. Ting loved having a male friend with whom she could talk just that sort of deep science.
So it had come as a complete shock to her when, one day in the library, Church had turned to her and asked if perhaps she might think about having their interactions become more social. It was such a Church way to ask—and her response had been immediate disappointment. She had found this great friend, and suddenly he wanted more.
From then on, she had avoided him. If he came near her in the halls, she ran up the nearest set of stairs. Months passed, and her feeling of disappointment stayed with her. She would have talked science with him any time; indeed, their conversations were unlike any either of them could have with anyone else, but that was as far as she wanted it to go.
But just a few days earlier, a friend of hers had come back from a grad school party and had told her she’d seen Church turning down numerous women who wanted to dance with him. Ting had felt instantly responsible, and she decided she needed to tell Church it was time for him to move on.
His response had surprised her: He said he would wait five years for her. Ting knew that this was not an arbitrary declaration. Church’s willpower and determination were well-known. Just before graduate school, he had taken part in an MIT nutrition study and had volunteered to subsist on a bowl of cornstarch and a plastic test tube full of amino acids for forty-five straight days. Worse yet, he’d had to keep complete track of whatever went into his body and whatever came out. Which meant once a day, he’d had to return to the lab with bags full of the end result of a diet of cornstarch and amino acids. Nobody else in the study had lasted half the prescribed time period, but Church had never even considered giving up.
Five years pining for her would’ve been a walk in the park. So Ting had made him a deal: one date, and he would see how incompatible they were outside a library.
It wasn’t until just minutes ago—after the party, the walk to Weeks Bridge, the touch of his hand in hers—that she had begun to realize something surprising: She had been wrong, and he had been right.
December 14, 1990
CAMBRIDGE CITY HALL, 795 MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS.
Eleven years to the day from that first date, Ting was still holding George Church’s hand. They had traded the view from Weeks Bridge for a court-appointed justice of the peace, who had stepped out from behind his oversized mahogany desk long enough to read a few lines from the marriage license they had just finished signing.
Around them, the walls, staircases, and much of the ceiling were trimmed in ornate wood molding and the floors were mostly marble. From the outside, the building was impressive, three stories of Romanesque masonry, complete with arched windows and a lofty bell tower casting shadows down the bustle of Massachusetts Avenue. But inside, despite the wood and marble, there was no mistaking the feeling that this was a hundred-year-old government office.
All of which was perfectly agreeable to Ting and Church. They had reached their decision to get married with a similar lack of fanfare; they had simply decided it was time, since they were ready to start trying to have children. There had never been any question of having a traditional wedding, or even of telling most of the people they knew that they were getting hitched. In fact, they had biked to city hall. The only concession to the formality of the moment Ting had made was that, for once, she had actually worn a skirt. And this was balanced by the fact that the witness they’d chosen for the proceeding was the clerk from the liquor license window across the hall.
Over the past eleven years, the main beats of their relationship hadn’t changed; they were both true scientists, and when they were together, they talked science. In social settings, Ting had helped George come out of his shell. More often than not, he now spoke in full sentences, and had endeared himself to all of Ting’s friends. Everyone who knew Church adored him; he was physically big, overwhelmingly bearded, and mentally astounding, but he wasn’t at all intimidating.
At Harvard, Church’s career had taken off like a rocket. From his work in multiplex genetic sequencing to his helping to found the Human Genome Project, he had gathered an immense amount of momentum behind him. His lab was growing at an astonishing rate, as was his standing at the university. He had become a unique voice in science, and his lab was filled with unique minds. The letter grades of his student and lab staff meant less to him than their creativity and willingness to break barriers. Creating genetic technology was only going to get faster, smarter, and cheaper. His goal was to build a lab that always saw two steps ahead of others.
Ting’s journey had not begun quite so auspiciously. She had chosen to work on research involving the genetics of fruit flies through the mechanics of their chromosomes, starting with her early work on telomeres and now focusing on how chromosomes interact with each other. As in all living creatures, the fruit fly’s genome is made up of long chains of DNA—the building blocks of life that code for everything from the length of a fruit fly’s wings to the color of its body. These long chains created separate chromosomes. Whereas humans’ genetic material contains twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, for a total of forty-six individual chromosomes, a fruit fly has four pairs. Telomeres are specific, repeated DNA sequences that appear at the end of each chromosome in humans, fruit flies, and all living creatures. Telomeres protect those chromosomes from degradation during replication, when errors can occur that can give rise to disease. Essentially, telomeres act as chemical buffers, or bumpers, to help keep genetic material intact. Even so, over time, telomeres shorten and eventually degrade, a process many scientists believe is a cause of aging.
Ting’s scientific research was complex and intense, which she enjoyed. But the trouble for her started almost immediately, as she went to look for a faculty position in the Department of Genetics, where Church was already a faculty member. Although she and Church were not yet married at the time, and had told very few people that they were even in a serious relationship, the head of the department had made it clear that she was not to be accepted; he believed it would be a conflict of interest for her to be in the same department as Church.
To Ting, it was infuriating; her life with George was personal, and it made no sense that anyone would, in these modern times, still argue that her personal life could be used to dictate her professional capacity. Relationships, marriage—like skin color—were a personal feature, and should not be used as a measure of a person’s worth or ability.
In fact, she and Church rarely saw any need to share their private life with anyone. When Ting had become pregnant a short time after their marriage, many of her friends had even expressed concern about how difficult it would be to raise a kid on
her own. “But George and I are married, have been together for eleven years,” she had explained.
Since there was no official university policy against the spouses of scientists applying to the same department as their husbands, Ting stayed the course and, despite his warnings, applied to the genetics department, but covered her bases by also applying to every other department that fit her interests. She was accepted to the Department of Anatomy, shortly after which she went on maternity leave.
It wasn’t until she was about to return from leave that she discovered that the Department of Anatomy had been dissolved, with parts subsumed into various other departments. Since she was a geneticist, she was advised to request that her transfer be to the Genetics Department. This, however, would put the same director who had refused her entrance in charge of her life. She immediately set up a meeting with the man, but once they were face-to-face, he made it very clear that he did not want her to stay. He had a personal policy against the hiring of spouses of tenure track professors—under no circumstances would she ever earn her own tenure under him. He suggested she give up her faculty position to work as an assistant in another faculty member’s laboratory, as then he would be comfortable with her being a member of his department.
Ting was angered and insulted. She had experienced racism because of her background, she had lived through sexism because of her gender, and now she was learning that her marriage to one of the most promising men in all of biology was actually going to be an obstacle to her career.
Church was equally shocked and wanted to help, but the situation made outright action on his part difficult. Instead, he and Ting worked as a team, with her on the front lines and Church as a sounding board, providing whatever insights he could. But they had been trained as scientists, and this was unfamiliar territory. They were discreet. Few knew what was happening, and those who sensed something was amiss wondered whether the problem lay with Ting, some even speculating that she was a mediocre scientist who had gained access to the department only because she was Church’s wife, thus justifying the department chair’s opinion. The irony of the situation did not escape Church and Ting, as they knew the difficulties she faced. She was assigned a tiny lab that amounted to a fraction of the space normally offered to faculty of her position, and students were not allowed to work for her.
Every morning, Ting and Church walked to work together; he would turn right and head into a state-of-the-art, well-financed lab full of brilliant postdocs, and she would turn left and head into her closet of a lab, which had been diminished at one point to a single other researcher. Church found the situation unbearable.
When the time approached for her to put up her name for tenure, Ting and Church knew that the damage to her career was insurmountable. Against all odds, she had established herself as a pioneer in her field, with international renown, but there was no denying that she did not have anywhere near the number of published papers one would normally expect of someone of her caliber and position. She simply had not been afforded a proper lab or the students working with her that were necessary to build a publishing legacy. She knew what she needed to do—there wasn’t a choice. Before a panel of senior faculty, she requested that her tenure packet include a letter explaining the circumstances under which she had worked. Her chair did not agree, and the other faculty in the room did little better than watch the event unfold. Nevertheless, Ting had met her goal, spoken up for transparency and fairness.
Her tenure evaluation was one of the strangest that the Harvard Medical School had ever conducted. She heard, after the fact, that the senior faculty members had been so confused by her CV, some of them asked if there was some sort of lawsuit going on that they didn’t know about. The head of the department didn’t explain, he simply pushed them to refuse her request.
She was not surprised by the outcome. She turned her attention to securing the immediate functionality of her lab and approached a newly minted dean, who was appalled at the situation and on the spot got Ting interim funding. In the meantime, Ting and Church began looking for new jobs at other universities. If Harvard didn’t want Ting, Ting and Church didn’t need to stay at Harvard. However, word of the odd state of her CV reached as high as Larry Summers, the president of Harvard at the time.
Before long, the dean called again, stating that she would like to take the stunning, highly unusual step of rerunning Ting’s tenure process, without the knowledge of the department chair. At that point, Ting and Church were already trying to decide between offers at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington University in St. Louis, and Boston University, and were feeling excited by the prospect of leaving for more friendly surroundings. Assured that the restarted tenure process would not be completed before she and Church would have signed new contracts elsewhere and that, therefore, there would be no complications with their departure from Harvard, Ting agreed; she liked the new dean and understood her need to take corrective action. It was the right thing to do. Then Ting got the word—her tenure had been granted. It would be the last tenure Larry Summers approved as president of Harvard. Furthermore, the head of the department who had opposed her would soon be resigning.
The speed and strength of the confirmation of her scholarship after seventeen years of academic inequity were completely unexpected, and that it would come from outside her department spoke volumes to Ting. Tenure was, at this point, just an administrative label. What mattered much more was that, outside the walls of Harvard, she was recognized as a scientist in her own right.
Ting was now faced with a choice. They could move Church’s and her laboratories to a university that did not have issues with their marriage, although that would disrupt the lives of their trainees, numbering in the fifties for Church at that time. Or they could continue to work at Harvard Medical School, thereby sparing their trainees the life disruptions that can so easily derail aspiring scientists. Ting steeled herself to the reality that she would be staying on at Harvard Medical School.
All in all, it had been a traumatic lesson in the politics of science. Enormous ventures like the Human Genome Project (HGP) could change the direction of where the money would flow, but politics would influence how and where scientists lived and worked. Lines of authority would sometimes be arbitrary; and good and bad people would make decisions that influenced scientists’ daily lives.
With the barriers lifted from her lab, Ting did right her ship. In fact, she went on to get two coveted “high-risk, high-reward” National Institutes of Health Director’s Awards totaling almost $10 million to pioneer new technologies that have enabled some of the highest-resolution images of the genome to date, and to pursue transformative ideas for combating disease. She would wonder from time to time what more she might have accomplished had she not spent seventeen years fighting for equality. Mostly, though, she planned to recoup those lost years by living, and working, seventeen years longer.
Going forward, Church was determined to insulate his young charges from university politics as much as he could. The battles that Church and his lab were going to fight weren’t going to be with petty administrators and political tribunals. He was taking aim directly at the parameters of biology itself.
There was only one rule that he had set, as law: Nothing was impossible.
Hand in hand with Church, in front of a justice of the peace, they had only begun to get an inkling of how differently the world would treat them, as a couple, but they were confident that they would fight as a team to push science itself out of its comfort zone and into a future that sometimes only they could see.
PART TWO
A poet sees a flower and can go on and on about how beautiful the colors are. But what the poet doesn’t see is the xylem and the phloem and the pollen and the thousands of generations of breeding and the billions of years before that. All of that is only available to the scientists.
—GEORGE M. CHURCH
Every cell in our body, whether it’s a bacterial cell or a human cell, has a
genome. You can extract that genome—it’s kind of like a linear tape—and you can read it by a variety of methods. Similarly, like a string of letters that you can read, you can also change it. You can write, you can edit it, and then you can put it back in the cell.
—GEORGE M. CHURCH
CHAPTER NINE
Early Fall 2008
77 AVENUE LOUIS PASTEUR, BOSTON.
Sometimes, it’s the strange questions that keep you up at night.
Church leaned back in his chair, his long legs tucked beneath the desk in the middle of his stark, brightly lit office, nestled deep in a corner of his second-floor laboratory. His right hand was still resting on the phone in front of him, long after he’d hung up, his feet bouncing against the carpet beneath the desk in the self-taught routine he used to keep himself awake.
He wasn’t sure how long he had been sitting there, staring at the dormant phone, after having spoken to a journalist who had posed an astonishing question. He could tell by the dark sliver stretching across the bottom of the drawn window shades on the other side of the concise, ten-by-ten space that the afternoon had shifted to early evening. But in New England, in the fall, he couldn’t be much more accurate than that. Nor would it have helped to open the door behind him and peer out into his lab. The young scientists—best guess, now numbering in the seventies—who called the Church Lab home made their own schedules. And most of them had little use for watches, clocks, daylight—really, anything beyond the sterile, cinder-block walls of the Harvard Med School New Research building. At midnight on any Wednesday, there might be twenty-five postdocs huddled around the various Plexiglas sterile hoods lining the twists and turns that separated Church’s office from the pair of elevators leading down to the building’s lobby.
