Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (11 page)

I woke up and the tube was on the floor in front of me. I had no idea how long I had been out. The gas was still running, it was cold enough to be condensing water out of the air, and the tube was frozen. The next thing I noticed was that my mouth felt funny. My tongue and lips were numb. I’d been anesthetized for a long time, and the tube was frozen solid. I shakily made my way to the bathroom, where there was a mirror. My upper and lower lips on the right side had bright white stripes from the frozen tube, and the tip of my tongue was white, like snow. Frostbite. The frozen tissue was melting, and it was starting to hurt. But much worse, there was going to be some hideous swelling.

I called Cynthia, who drove me to the hospital. My friend Marc was on duty in the pediatrics emergency room. I was starting to look really scary: my mouth looked like something out of a bad cartoon. I could barely say the word “frozen,” and I wrote down the names of all the drugs I could think of that might reverse the swelling. Marc said he might have to do a tracheotomy. Was that all right with me? I told him I thought it would be swell—we laughed but we were scared. Marc started injecting epinephrine, norepinephrine, prostaglandins, antihistamines—everything we could think of that might cause blood vessels to contract and squeeze out the fluids converging on my throat. Norepinephrine worked. Within about an hour I was stabilized.

During the next month I made a miraculous recovery. The plastic surgeon I consulted had predicted at least a year of reconstructive surgery. Later she told me that she hadn’t seen anything heal that well except in an infant. Well, I felt like one. It had been a dumb thing to do.

Cynthia was a wonderful nurse. She kept me alive with fresh juices and gazpacho through a straw. She read Dorothy Sayers to me in her third-floor bedroom. She scrubbed my wounds relentlessly with Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap.

I figured that I needed at least one cell that knew how to form the border between the pink and the white part of the missing edge of my lip. I hoped that cell was still alive somewhere. I was afraid it might be struggling to reproduce, and a powerful antibiotic like gentamycin might kill it. The plastic surgeon had advised taking it, but I didn’t want to risk it. I imagined my mouth growing back. It was spring, and I was falling in love with my nurse. My lips and tongue grew back, and I needed no surgery. Within a month I could close my mouth completely and even whistle again.

There was a mystery to this story. Marc, the doctor who had treated me, was the first person to point it out. If I was unconscious long enough to have my tongue and lips frozen, how did the tube come out of my mouth? Animals anesthetized on nitrous oxide do not move. One of the advantages of nitrous in dentistry is that the patient doesn’t wiggle or jerk around at all. The tank was half full, and there was still enough nitrous in there to keep me asleep for hours more. I should have been completely immobile, and I could have died. But when I awoke, the tube was some distance from my face. It was all very strange. What had happened?

Enter Katherine O’Keefe.

Cynthia and I were living in California. We’d gotten married and had two boys. My nurse turned out to be an understanding wife. She knew that I had a wanderlust that would be less trouble to deal with than to suppress, and she made a deal with me. Two weeks out of the year, right before Christmas and Easter, she would leave me to my own folly, after which I would join her and the boys at her parents’ house back in Kansas. Whatever I did while she was gone would be over before she came back home. Keep in mind this was the 1970s.

It was Christmas of 1978 and Cynthia had been gone for six days. My week alone was almost over, and nothing of interest had happened. I had been hanging out at the Buttercup Bakery—not a likely place for me to come across a quickie romance because Cynthia and I used to work there together. But for some reason I was drawn to it. I was sitting at a table with two friends when Katherine O’Keefe came through the door. She walked directly to my table. I didn’t know her, but our eyes connected, and within five minutes we were walking out the door.

She followed me home. We talked briefly about nothing much in the kitchen and then made love before I knew anything more than her name. She looked deep into my eyes and did something to me with her mind that was ecstatic. It seemed to me as if a little tentacle had reached into my mid-brain and tickled my hypothalamus.

I asked her what the hell she had done to me.

She replied, “You’ve been playing with your mind, but you don’t know anything yet. No one has ever properly taught you.”

I was excited. “Will you show me how to do that? What you did?”

“You already know. You just need to practice.”

Then she asked me if I had ever figured out who pulled the tube out of my mouth that fateful day in Kansas. My jaw dropped. No one except Cynthia and Marc knew about that tube. I hadn’t talked about it. When you freeze your mouth by being totally stupid, you don’t feel compelled to tell people about it. When I could finally speak again, I asked her how she knew about it.

“I was there, and I pulled it out of your mouth. I waited until I was sure you were okay and then I left.”

I could hardly absorb this. How could she have been in my house in Kansas City?

It turned out that she could travel on the astral plane. Her mother had taught her how to do this when she was a child. It required that she imagine a machine surrounding her. The machine would respond to her intentions. She had been in transit when she had seen me dying. She knew I would later play a role in her life, so she stopped and pulled out the tube.

We talked through the night. I was absorbing what she said to me like a sponge. The next morning she woke me and reminded me that I had a plane to catch. I had forgotten all about my regular life and hadn’t even mentioned it to her, but, of course, she knew.

After Christmas I made arrangements to drop by Kathy’s house on the way home from work on Thursday afternoons. She had agreed to teach me what she knew. She told me that I had abilities that I hadn’t tapped into and that I had to learn to quiet myself inside. I had to learn not to think so much.

I was not unaware of meditation, but I had always found it difficult to do in the way it’s usually done. I spend a lot of time in my meditative states, but I didn’t know how to describe it to Kathy. So I struggled. Kathy didn’t realize that what she needed was not to teach me something new but to teach me to use what I already had.

I started being able to do little exercises with my mind. Nothing fantastic, but I was a willing and eager student. I wanted to know what it would be like if I was in the room with her at the same time as she was traveling by her imaginary machine to New York to be with her mother. She didn’t always answer my questions. Sometimes she looked at me as if I shouldn’t have asked them, but that didn’t stop me. I’ve never been of the opinion that any question is off-limits.

On the first Thursday in March I came by at the usual time; she met me at the door.

“You have to stop coming by. Something bad has happened and I need to concentrate. You’re too distracting for me. I need to find someone—like me—to work with.”

It was final. There was suddenly no space in her life for me. I went away and I didn’t hear from her again until the fall.

I was now working at Cetus. Katherine wanted to meet me for lunch. I saw her coming down the sidewalk and walked toward her. Something felt very ominous.

“Do you remember when I told you that I would need you someday?”

I had almost forgotten.

“Well, I need you now. I’m about to die, and I’m not ready. My children need me.”

Kathy had discovered back in March that she had a malignant
melanoma. She had “found somebody who was like her,” and the two together had tried to cure her, but the cancer was spreading. She was dying. She wanted to know if I could get her interferon at Cetus.

We had about ten micrograms of it there as a reference. Cetus was eventually going to produce it in amounts that would be therapeutic for some types of cancer, but it was years away from clinical trials. I had to tell her that I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t even delay her death.

“I guess I knew that before I called you, Kary. It was just a dream.”

I asked her whether there was anything I could do for her. She said no. Two weeks later some guy called me to say that Kathy was dead and she had wanted me to know.

I
N THE EARLY
years of PCR, no one could figure out why certain methods of doing it turned out to be better than others. As I first envisioned PCR, each cycle would cause the amount of target DNA to double. The first cycle would provide twice as much, the second cycle four times as much, the third cycle eight times. But often by the tenth cycle, it would not completely double. It would increase by a factor of 1.8, then 1.5, and 1.3. Something was running out or something was being made that interfered with the process. It meant that calculations based on a consistent doubling could be way off. Like compound interest with a variable rate.

In PCR there are about twenty different things you have to measure out, each of them dependent on all the others. In figuring out how to perform the reaction so that each cycle would result in a complete doubling of the target molecule, a major problem I encountered was that I had to deal with several completely different systems for measuring the amounts of things. Some of the molecular ingredients were measured in grams, some of them in esoteric units of activity, and some of them by how much ultraviolet light they would absorb. The
reasons for all this were historical and constituted a real pain in the science of chemistry that no one had taken the trouble to fix.

I decided to fix it.

The most rational of the systems of measurement was due to a concept put forward by a nineteenth-century count named Amedeo Avogadro. He taught higher physics at U.T. While at Turin, he suggested that equal volumes of gases contained the same number of gas particles. Sometime later that century, Stanislao Cannizzaro used Avogadro’s concept to devise a system of chemical measurement, which is still in use today.

Chemistry students hate it. Chemistry adepts love it because it separates them from the students. Before doing a chemical reaction, which is like a recipe, you have to determine the amount of each ingredient you’re going to use. If every molecule weighed the same, that wouldn’t be difficult. But because the molecules in each chemical have a different weight, this gets to be very complicated.

Every chemical has written on the front of the bottle its molecular weight, which is defined as the number of grams of the chemical that contain Avogadro’s number, 6.023 × 10
²³
of molecules. That number is called a mole. For example, one mole of carbon weighs 12.011 grams, whereas one mole of glucose weighs 180.16 grams, but the number of molecules in a mole of carbon is equal to the number of molecules in a mole of glucose.

If this seems complicated, well, it is because 6.023 × 10
²³
is an astronomical number. Chemists like the fact that nobody can really understand what they’re talking about. Besides the difficulty in computing, the problem that they have failed to
see is that in using this system of nomenclature they are making things so complex that they themselves miss out on obvious, glaring mistakes. That was a problem I had in trying to understand why my PCR reaction was so inconsistent.

Avogadro’s number has no inherent chemical significance. In many calculations, I noticed, biochemists were first multiplying by Avogadro’s number, then somewhere later in the same calculations were dividing by this number. It’s easy to make huge mistakes when calculating numbers with exponents like 10
²³
. Norman Arnheim, whom I worked with at Cetus, did a long calculation to show how many moles of DNA would be present in a single sperm cell. He screwed up the calculation and ended up with 0.9 molecules instead of 1 and published a paper including the hilariously erroneous conclusion.

I began to wonder how we managed to create such a confusing situation. In Europe the gram is a commercial unit. People buy bananas by the gram. But in America the gram is primarily a chemical measurement. The gram unit of weight is based on the fact that a cubic centimeter of water weighs 1 gram in its most dense state, which is at 4 degrees centigrade. The centimeter is 1/100 of a meter. A meter, according to the French, is 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the North Pole to the equator on a line that went right past Notre Dame, where that little guy sells roasted chestnuts in the winter. For chemistry the measurement is inappropriate because it’s a geophysical concept.

When chemists actually did mix 200 grams of one substance with 500 grams of something else in a big flask, Avogadro’s number was marginally useful. But chemists rarely
deal with anything that large anymore. Rather than 200 grams, people are mixing substances on a molecular level—200 molecules of this and 200 molecules of that. Instead of dealing in liters, we are using microliters. Chemists can now work with two molecules; they can detect them and do reactions with them. The old system just isn’t applicable anymore. What chemists need to be able to determine is how many molecules there are someplace and how close together they are. There’s a very simple way to determine that number: Count them. When you have ten units of an ingredient, express it as ten. It isn’t necessary to say ten divided by some unwieldy number.

I created an entirely new system for comparing substances, the details of which would be of considerable interest to only a small group of people. But it was by using this system that I was finally able to figure out why people doing PCR were getting inconsistent results. When I compared the number of molecules in each of my ingredients, it became obvious that in many cases there simply weren’t enough enzyme molecules to react with the DNA molecules that had to be processed. Nobody had realized that the limiting factor in doing PCR is simply the number of molecules of the enzyme, because they had no way of knowing how many molecules of enzyme they were using.