Saving St. Germ (14 page)

But I was going to do real work again. If I was falling apart, well, then, maybe I could use the information I gathered, falling. Maybe I could use the exhaustion, the stand-up, the late nights, the arguments with Jay, money problems, broken promises, the hopeless sitters, Jay’s bottles in the trash. I could use them like the elements of the periodic table dancing before me. Ollie, I got a little ethereal: I could put them in the mind’s centrifuge and fly them around into suspension. I could alter them, name their new names as they combined and recombined in the burning alchemical blaze: like poetry, I thought. I felt cleansed now, I could drink my coffee up, then walk into the lab, for the first time since I’d come to the University of Greater California, as if it were mine, as if I belonged there.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:

...

She died           a famous woman         denying

her wounds

denying

her wounds      came    from the same source as

her power

—Adrienne Rich

“Power”

I
RATHER LIKED
the lab I’d been given at UGC, in which I was to pursue my gene-splicing
and
(it was clear) do something flashy, fund-attracting—find a cure for a congenital disease, invent an artificial gene for genius, analyze a dead president’s DNA. But as time passed, I grew reflective; I sat in my laboratory lost in thought. I hunched over in my chair, twirling my hair—in those well-equipped rooms in the one-story prefab building (
OBERMAN HALL
) next to the Physics Lecture Hall Building. Maybe theory was in the air. What was I thinking about? Electromagnetic particles, the sidereal shifts of stars. One step, two steps: out into the universe. I lusted after a TOE, what scientists call a Theory of Everything. I herded my chiral molecules shyly, like chicks, into the huge incubating light of this desire.

I found some extra funds to hire Rocky as my assistant. She and I had a long talk about women and science. Then we talked about men. “I’ve broken up with Troy,” she said, and smiled her beautiful, untrustworthy smile. “I’m not promising nothing, Prof, except, you know, a real crack at change. This is
it,
man. I’m taking a very tough look here at my self-destructive behavior.” She shook her hair into her eyes, peering out at me through the dark seductive tangle: an absolutely irresistible and completely unconscious liar.

“Put a lab coat on,” I said, “and would you mind sparing me the bullshit?” I was looking at a crayon drawing Ollie had done on graph paper while sprawled on the lab floor. She was spending time with me at work now—Jay was around less than ever. Because of certain chemical-splash risks and low-grade radiation levels in the lab, she was restricted to the entry area, where there was more circulating air and less cookery. She’d been slowly drawing everything she observed. Her drawings were quite realistic except for sudden distractions urgently sketched in: a great winged blue monkey, arms crossed, slowly spinning atop a centrifuge—or a shower of watching eyes poured from a suspended pitcher into a rack of Eppendorf tubes. And who’s to say these visions weren’t scientific? Didn’t Einstein imagine elevators free-falling in deep space, people traveling in trains at the speed of light? He looked people straight in the eye and told them that if you moved a clock through space, it lost time. And it was true.
Why did Einstein throw a clock out the window?
Somebody saw angels spinning the planets with puffs of air from their beating wings; they saw the universe mounted on the back of a giant tortoise; they saw black holes, baby universes, bubble worlds, big bangs, superstrings, event horizons, and oh yes, microwave background radiation from the glowing of the hot early universe, red-shifted
... He wanted to see time fly.
Ollie pulled at my lab coat and gently took back her drawing of the centrifuge with the giant blue monkey on top. “Mom, I’m going to put in the ambulance birthday cake,” she said gravely. “At this minute, not the next minute.”

“Man, I hate these lab coats.” Rocky shook back her hair, bent down, and tweaked Ollie’s nose, then smiled up at me again. “Those slits they got instead of like,
real pockets
? They keep getting caught on doors and hooks and stuff. They’re
dangerous
!”

“We’re going to be working with some organic solvents and hot tracers later—
that’s
dangerous. Put on a lab coat.” Ollie looked up at me and Rocky frowned a little—I was feeling pressured and my tone was annoyed.

“Just
try
it,” I added in a gentler voice. Rocky saluted and went off to find a coat. Earlier, she’d been fitted with a “hot” badge and a ring. These were protective devices; they recorded radioactivity levels in the human body. When the bit of film got developed in the badge or the crystal structure altered in the ring, it was time for Time Out: You were getting a little too cooked. The lab levels weren’t high compared to, say, working in a nuclear reactor, but I was weirdly proud of the fact that I, like my lab peers, could stutter a Geiger counter to life with a wave of my hand.

Being hot didn’t bother Rocky much either, no joke intended. Not much bothered Rocky; she was blessed with an even temperament. It was easy to teach her the ropes; in a biochem lab that’s rope enough to hang a novice. But Rocky was also smart. She had a quick, curious mind and she was tireless. She learned fast—dideoxynucleotide sequencing of DNA, for example:—I showed her once and she had it. Considering that dideoxy sequencing isn’t exactly on the level of jotting down Troy’s car-phone number, it was an impressive acquisition of technique. The stuff involves both manual and intellectual dexterity. I reminded her that there were four components of DNA: A, T, C, and G, arranged like a string, one long sentence describing maybe everything there is to know about you or me. We’d commandeered the enzyme machinery used by bacterial cells and forced it to “read” and replicate DNA for us in a tube. Millions of these little robotlike enzymes would read this long long sentence, making a duplicate strand—an “echo” sentence—then stop randomly at any given letter, so we’d have sentences ending at each of the letters.

Rocky got the hang of moving this reaction quickly; handling pipettes, a stopwatch, and lots of slightly radioactive tubes in a body-temperature water bath—with flawless timing. She told me it was like a game show (
Password
?) and I was the host, challenging her, Rocky, a prize-winning contestant. I promised her that the next step (“What’s behind the curtain?”) would be more challenging. We’d have to analyze reactions on an acrylamide gel, which she’d create by slowly and steadily pouring a liquid between two big glass slabs set only 0.2mm apart; no bubbles allowed. It all had to be completed in (hands down!)
five minutes,
before it gelled.

She got the gel poured on her third try. We loaded the tubes of replicated DNA strings onto one end of this gel and zapped them with two thousand volts of electricity—coaxing these charged little strands through. The longer strands would have a harder time moving through the gel’s mesh; the shorter ones zipped along. The different-length molecules would line up, making a “ladder”—one size above the other, each a single letter longer than the last.

At the end, Rocky and I put the gel against film, where the radioactive tracer in each separated strand burned the ladder pattern into the film.

“So we can read them one letter at a time up the ladder!” She beamed. “I win whatever’s behind this life!”

Rocky, I swear, could see
through
things. She saw the little enzyme machines as they crawled along the original long template DNA strand, dutifully copying each letter in the long statement, like so many microscopic Byzantine monks. She saw the “Bible” of human words standing in illuminated-manuscript splendor. She noted how each of the DNA molecules was driven through the gel by the lash of two thousand volts—“like a line of slaves,” she murmured. She answered my questions before I could ask them. It turned out that when Rocky concentrated, when her attention was truly engaged, she was a surefire lab technician.
And
how naturally the metaphors fell from our lips as we discussed our procedures!

She was a natural, humming away, a flask in her hand, sweating a little, the fluorescent lighting altering her features so that she looked elongated, El Greco-ish. Suited up in the old stained lab coat I’d found for her, she moved about like a canny shadow, deftly lifting one end of the glass slab off the black bench top, coolly popping her gum. With a sure hand, she poured that steady stream of liquid acrylamide onto the lip of the glass, where it soaked up slowly between the two glass plates. A little stream of acrylamide spilled from the edge of the plate, puddled on the bench, and dripped to the floor, but Rocky kept her cool. The gum cracked; she poured steadily, so that there was perfectly aligned seepage between the slabs. Totally absorbed in her work, she made little satisfied noises in her throat. She’d brought her tape player to the lab: James Taylor wailed and the backup percussion throbbed, “I’m a steam roller, baby, I’m a napalm bomb.”

We were growing and processing some bacterial cells in a cloning procedure. “Did it ever occur to you,” she asked, staring at the dissolving dot-candy-like colonies which only moments earlier had been cheerfully growing on a white paper disk, topping a nice moist nutrient agar, “did it ever like,
occur
to you that this amazing thing, this genetic-engineering stuff, looks like some two-year-old’s
spit-up
bib?”

The colonies were now turning into gooey little brown blobs after the lye hit their cell walls.

She winked at me. “Or
worse
?” She grinned apologetically. “I mean it’s exciting, don’t get me wrong. It’s awesome, Prof. But most people would scrape this shit off their
shoes
if they found it there.”

Well, it’s true. You cook up a solution and then to analyze genes, you stare at blots, pieces of paper smeared with dyed genes. Blots, blots, and more blots. We even give them directional tags: Northern Blot, Southern Blot, Western Blot.

I pulled a cup of coffee from the machine and disappeared for a while. It happened that Rocky’s comments depressed me. I could feel myself losing the natural joy I used to feel in the lab. Even the simplest procedures used to charge me up. For example, we grew lots of animal cells in tissue culture, and those guys had to eat—I used to look forward to feeding time at the zoo. What the cells snacked on was a serum of calf’s blood, bicarbonate of soda, vitamins, and hormones. We poured it over them in a warm rain. Little Shop of Horrors. Ollie, in particular, was fascinated by this flesh gardening. Then we’d provide new housing for the colonies of multiplying cells. I even liked
that.
Dishes had to be split: The cells kept replicating to maximum density. I hustled to accommodate the overspill. Some were sucked off into oblivion, into flasks filled with antiseptic iodine to kill all living cells. Others had their contents immortalized for posterity in gels. We filled our notebooks with photographs and dried remnants of these gels, stained fluorescent pink for DNA and RNA, purple for proteins.

“What’s up, Prof?” Later Rocky leaned in under the fume hood, where I was fiddling with a beaker. Ollie wandered up behind her and they both stood, looking at me.

“You know,” said Rocky, “today’s the day I’m supposed to learn how to extract DNA—maybe you forgot?”

I hadn’t exactly forgotten. Still, amazing though it seems, it was a common enough procedure in the lab that it could be put on a back burner, literally. Amazing, because what we were talking about here was nothing less than the isolation of deoxyribonucleic acid from a solution—you could actually pull it out and handle it with a glass rod, whip it around like a string cheese.

I looked at Ollie. “Would you like to see an interesting experiment?”

Ollie shook her head. “Ollie do it.”

“You can help, sweetheart. You can watch.”

“Look.” Ollie offered me another drawing. This one showed very tiny people growing from petri dishes; the dishes were set on the floor of the forest and were surrounded by huge dark Christmas trees. A human-faced star looked down on the scene.

Rocky, looking over my shoulder, snorted.

“Kinda ruins the Smurfs for ya, no?”

I folded up the drawing and put it in my lab-coat pocket.

“Hey guys,” I said. “Let’s make some human taffy.”

Rocky and I went to the incubator, where a couple of days earlier she’d placed some human foreskin fibroblasts. (Now you know what happens to all those little circumcision leftovers, guys!) We also carry human breast-cell lines, from mammary biopsies.
Tip or tit? Briss or breast?
the irreverent among us ask on our way to the fibroblast freezer.

In special media, in large plastic petri dishes, the cells had grown up and now crowded the bottom of the plate, clinging to the specially treated polymer surface. I showed Rocky how to suck the media off with a house-vacuum tube connected to a big Erlenmeyer flask, attached to another tube with a Pasteur pipette stuck on. The poor cells were now exposed, gasping. We scraped them off with a “rubber policeman,” a kind of glass-handled rubber spatula, and rinsed them into a centrifuge tube. We spun the hapless cells into a heap at the bottom of the tube and sucked off the liquid above them again—this time replacing it with a nasty mix of detergent and RNA—as well as protein-degrading enzymes. The cells blew open with the application of detergent, exposing their proteins and RNase, soon to be chewed up by the enzymes. Without the proteins holding the scaffolding together, the chromosomes unraveled their neatly spooled DNA string. The strings sparkled modestly from a little distance. Close up, it all looked like a light slime in the tube.

“Is that it?”

“That’s
it.
Look, Ollie.”

“Holy shit! DNA!”

Rocky tried to lift some of the white fluff-slime on a glass rod and discovered that it was sticky, viscous, slippery. We watched it glitter and swing on the end of the rod for a second, then drop back into the tube.