Saving St. Germ (6 page)

Everything was better when I was at Harvard. Does that sound like the punch line to a bad WASP joke? But it is the embarrassing truth that the high point of my career hit when I wandered the Yard in a ponytail and stained white coat, a syringe in my back pocket, a bracelet of rubber bands around my wrist: a grunt, a slavey, a research mole in the funded vineyards of a high-profile prof, assisting his Nobel-level work in the lab.

OK, I was never really a mole
—
I was a protégée, a star pupil of Professor Kendall Quandahl, whom everyone called, affectionately, Q
—
or, (not so affectionately) Spock. He liked me; our personalities meshed. And nothing more. Just that simple: straight regard, like a shot of strong whiskey between us. Man to man, had we been equals. I certainly idealized him, and he, in return, saw in me an intelligent, loyal acolyte. I don’t think he ever saw me as a woman.

First of all, I learned early on, in my undergrad days, there are not that many women in chemistry, and none in Organic. Operating on a behavioral premise I’d acquired as a little girl (that if men could do it, I could improve on it), I threw myself recklessly into this masculine preserve. Then I took Q’s courses, Q became my mentor, guiding my research, which became, in biochemistry (then molecular biology) meticulous, inspired. I substantiated his theories, theories of molecular biology that focused on synthetic enzymes. We modified proteins, intent on discovering what enzymatic defects were responsible for certain genetic diseases. When he went on to gene cloning (single-gene-deficiency diseases) I followed.

Well, Ollie. The more I work on this, the more I see: no life ever organized itself expressly for a writer. But I have a scientist’s perilous illusion of control. And doesn’t life, after all,
appear
to organize itself for the scientist? Well, up to a point. And then, lab life doesn’t
disappear,
it simply alters form. And your bio-chem biography and mine can be spelled out quite simply: A-T-C-G. That’s
a
denine,
t
hymine,
c
ytosine, and
g
uanine: the nucleotide bases, in specific sequence in each strand of DNA, that encode the genetic information that
is
us. (So the Biotech Bible story tells us!) One human cell contains enough DNA to ignite the synthesis of thousands upon thousands of proteins. Opening its base-pair locked strands, DNA gives birth to its daughter-messenger RNA, and presto! The command is given for an aquiline nose, a tendency to gain weight, a tendency to be a moody sot ... or the command is given for you, Ollie, you. The problem now is we have some control over these commands. So what instructions will be given
—
what kind of kids will we build? And will we select death right out of the gene pool?

Yes, said distinguished Professor Q, part of the new Shook-Up Biology at Harvard (the department of biochemistry and molecular biology, which broke away from the old department, when the DNA-magus, Mr. James Watson, arrived on the scene, presenting himself like the sphere to Flatlanders). Q liked my sexy dissertation (“Genetic and Chemical Engineering of Enzymatic Active Sites in Monoclonal Antibodies”). Q, with his single social bias: a preference for obsessive assistants, female or male. He moved about the lab in his characteristic high wind
—
all gestures, snorting, wheezing, unfinished sentences, pushing his glasses up and down his nose, scratching his bald spot. Breathing heavily through his nose like a great engine of asthma,
his
genetic curse.

He had big ears, did I say that? I see them as bat-winged babies, but I am finding lately, as I sit up till the wee hours, sneaking a cigarette occasionally, that memory has exaggerated his physical presence in all ways. He wasn’t
that
tall, for example. And I think he was called Spock as much for his alien-seeming nature and his conflicted manner as for the ears. He curled into himself, with a chemist’s hunched posture. Not the carriage of defeat, but of curiosity
—
the result of years of bending over microscopes, sinks, boiling points: close-up inspection of life’s clues to itself.

I worked the usual postdoc schedule: sometimes up to ninety hours a week in the lab, finishing up my three-year sentence, which included a one-year lab at the Cambridge Medical School, the Harmon-Tannen Cancer Institute, Genetic Diseases. The cancer institute was a hospital but also a research facility, an academic preserve. Physically, it was an architectural anomaly,
a layer cake:
There were two floors of research labs, followed by three floors of patients in beds, followed by two floors of research and so on. Every lab had medical fellows working in it
—
they worked in research as part of clinic training. Brushing shoulders with physicians will quickly teach a scientist what a clinician’s opinion of an academic researcher is. Those docs took their research knowledge and applied it righteously to the ill. And the physical setup of the hospital ensured that we would never be too far away from ailing human beings
—
the final focus, the docs said, of all our work. We were, of course (by their definition), elitist
—
Ph.D.’s talking about “elegant” theories and they stuck together in a practical bullying sensibility. Some academics were intimidated by this
—
it was easy for them to “cross over,” into the land of medical biotechnology, especially when encouraged by the NIH.

I felt like many other academic scientists
—
caught between the two poles. I cared very much about the people in beds above and below us, but I also cared about the simple precision of a procedure
—
and how the results of that procedure might affirm or change our view of nature, the “models” for the natural world. And I didn’t care about money. We all know doctors have traditionally loved their bucks
—
and now, genetic research was an
industry,
everybody concerned could make a fortune. It seemed to me everyone was playing high-tech Monopoly.

One morning I came into the biochemistry lab after a trip down memory lane. I’d been to see my friends at the old organic lab. I had a glass distillation apparatus from the lab glass-blower in my pocket, and I rubbed my fingers over and over its cool smooth contours. I discovered Q slumped on the stained and burned couch in the corner, crumpled up, breathing violently through his nose, talking to himself. He was poring over photographs of clinical presentations borrowed
f
rom the medical-school lab: children with a variety of genetic diseases.

He flipped a sheaf of photos at me without speaking. (I admit that I have trouble with medical-textbook photographs. The subjects look manipulated, terrified. I find the clinical “framing” of the disease and its victim intrusive.) The first photo I looked at was of an albino child, who wore her unpigmented skin like a hair shirt. Under the photographer’s harsh overhead lights, she looked bald and wounded, invaded by the camera: a pure-white chubby girl in a Care Bears T-shirt, her colorless brows knitted together above her pale red-glinted eyes. She was trying to look fierce, since emotion can give color; she squinted angrily, she shot furious red darts at what I imagined to be the cameraman’s stupid ruddy glow, his gleaming black hair and mustache, the treacherous rainbow caught in his lens.

Q had worked, off and on, for a long time on the problems of albinism, trying to determine at a molecular level whether the genetic defect that led to pigment degeneration affected an entire chromosome or a single gene. The idea, of course, was that if one narrowed the field, one could develop an
in utero
screening test. Q knew this test was just around the corner.

I wondered what kind of reaction he wanted from me now, scientific or emotional. He looked at me foggily, breathing thunderously, his eyes twitching behind his wayward glasses. He was wearing a horrible tie, I remember there were pink parrots sewn into its sky-blue weave. I really hoped that he wasn’t going to get sappy on me. He did this type of thing occasionally, making me feel manipulated. His wife was dead, he had no children, but he slipped, every once in a while, into an avuncular sentimentality so gross and powerful it was like drink; he wept and slurred words, he swayed at my shoulder, urging tragedy on me like a late-hour cocktail.

“Look at this,” he gasped, then peered over his glasses at me. “When I look at these faces, I tell you, Esme, I get back on the track. I remind myself that we are not isolated here. We’re not a bunch of theoretical chemists, computer jocks!”

He coughed, a lengthy, stagy, wheezing bark. This cough had become famous among graduate students and fellows, who imitated it both in and out of the lab
—
it had a certain self-conscious bass quaver to it, as if he were about to break into a Ray Charles imitation. I’d gotten to know a medical student who could do a perfect reproduction of it
—
this guy reduced me to tears late one night in a campus bar by
coughing,
Q-style, several bars of “Georgia on My Mind.” Now, however, I put these thoughts out of my mind and waited demurely for him to finish.

“We’re
bench
chemists, wet chemists.” He blew air through his nostrils. “We’re in the
trenches,
returning
fire.
”

He spat a little on me. I was embarrassed enough to be cruel.

“Save it for the grants committee,” I said, without looking up at him.

I was finding it hard to tear my eyes away, flipping through the black-and-white documentation of nature’s out-of-the-park foul balls: Down’s syndrome, Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell anemia, beta-thalassemia, PKU, Gaucher’s disease, Alpha
₁
Antitrypsin Deficiency. This last disease, this horror, had been my own obsession. Colleagues of mine pursued immunological questions
—
AIDS being a primary focus
—
or tracked malfunctions in cellular growth, that is to say, cancer. I’ve always been intrigued by single-gene deficiencies, not just because they supposedly offer more promise of cloning and reintroduction of a doctored gene back into the body: I was just
after
this one. I stared at a photo of a young man, barely twenty (I could guess by his childlike facial expression) who’d developed the premature emphysema that characterized a
₁
AT. His chest was sunken, iron-ribbed from the terrible exertion of drawing breath after breath. His body looked fifty years old. I saw that he would be dead in a year or two, if he made it that far. The emphysema usually doesn’t hit till the twenties, but
might
show up before then. To parents who had a kid who looked and seemed healthy, every cold, every sore throat was a potential nightmare, the beginning of the end. My father died of emphysema, but that’s not why I identify with it so strongly. I reacted calmly to a
₁
AT; I felt outraged by it
—
but
focused.
I thought I knew how to pursue it. I knew its habits. But, at the same time, I knew we had no real cure rate.

I threw the photos back at Q.

“Horror movies,” I remember saying. I looked at my nails and yawned.

He laughed. “Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “that your feigned indifference is much more dramatic than pitched hysteria?
You
should speak to the grants committee.”

I recall smiling stiffly.

“Glad I entertain you.”

I tried to be cool. I got up and rotated my elbow, which had been bothering me in the lab, stiffening up on me, in a series of rapid, bone-popping circles.

He kept watching me. “What are you doing?” he asked finally. “Exercising the chip on your shoulder?”

I froze. “What chip?” I blushed. “What chip?”

He gave me that big limpid gaze over his glasses.

“You are naturally gifted in this field. I admire you, Esme. Nevertheless, nonacademic science might be too volatile for you. Did you ever think about that? You seem afraid to get emotionally involved, to
care
.”

It was hard for me to absorb that comment. I was his right arm. I’d come to believe that I knew everything he thought about our work together, I thought I knew everything he thought about me. Unlike other professors, he was there. He had made himself available to me; we’d become friends.

To my horror, I turned girlish, making a little face at him, murmuring something about how I hoped that he really didn’t believe that.

He punched me on the shoulder, slid the photographs in a file, and suggested we go to work. But I sat there for a while after he went to wash up. I took out the glass apparatus and held it up to the tube lamp. It exploded into prismatic light fractures, jumpy neon-white right angles, spangling the walls and ceiling.

It doesn’t worry me, Ollie. It doesn’t worry me that you go to your nursery school and sit by yourself and that you don’t talk to the other kids and that you sing a little song over and over to yourself. I know you are not unhappy. I know what you’re thinking. I was like that. I remember being like that. You talk only to me, sometimes to Jay or to your stuffed dragon. I understand. Language, the language we speak out here in the world, is treacherous, ambiguous. You have to figure the world out by observation, by experiment, before you can enter the code.

That spring I invited my mother, Millie Charbonneau, to a department party. It was ironic that she lived right in Cambridge, where I was, and yet we hardly saw each other: My lab schedule was that demanding and her job as a Filene’s buyer kept her on the run. But I wanted to see her suddenly. I wanted, I wasn’t sure why, to sit down and talk to her about what I’d been like as a kid. I couldn’t remember much before five or so—and she’d always been closemouthed about that stuff when I asked her questions. Was I a brat? Did I cry a lot? Was I toilet-trained early? When did Í speak? Walk? Was I a kid who laughed?

Mom was delighted to come to the party. She wore a dark pink suit, pearls. Her skin
—
it’s so lovely
—
absolutely glowed. You know, it’s so strange: Since my father died, she’d been growing more and more beautiful. At sixty, she looked youthful, her hair swinging in a kind of shiny salt-and-pepper bob. She laughed like a little kid
—
her whole body moved around.