At my desk I hooked up my laptop to the lab’s network and accessed the database. Justin had called it that, but in truth it was an unorganized and uncatalogued repository of gene fragments. There were close to a hundred files, and in each file were dozens of DNA sequences, most of them unnamed, like untold stories in a book.
I opened the first file in a long list and scrolled down to the nameless sequence I’d been browsing earlier in the day, which was spread across multiple lines. To find what I was looking for felt suddenly as close to impossible as identifying a rare bird in a forest from a fallen feather. But it was possible. Provided that the bird existed, if its feather was there, in the database, I would eventually find him.
I was copying the sequence on my screen into the window of a genomic database search engine when Aeden walked into my bay. “I’m glad you came back,” he said.
“Are you?” I didn’t look up, but I could see him from the corner of my eye, standing by the workbench with his thumbs hitched into his jeans pockets.
“When I mentioned that you could put your talent to better use I was referring to another project, not another lab. I never meant to suggest that you should leave this lab, Emily.”
I looked at him. “That’s good to know,” I said without irony.
“Okay. I just wanted to make that clear.”
“It’s clear,” I said, and shot him a reassuring smile. “Clear as daylight.”
“We’re ordering pizza for dinner,” Aeden said. “If you want to join us in the conference room you’re more than welcome.”
But I could hardly see myself sitting with him and Allegra and the two other postdocs still in the lab, making small talk and having to pretend that nothing had happened. Or worse: feeling pressed to invent some story about how I was looking for something else to research.
“I already had dinner,” I said, though I hadn’t.
Aeden gave me a careful nod, not quite believing me. “If you change your mind, let me know.”
“I will, thank you.”
Leaving the lab several hours later I saw them sitting in the conference room, all four of them bunched at one end of the oval table: Aeden and Allegra on one side and Wendy and Steven on the other, leftover pizza on a paper plate and opened cans of Diet Coke between them. I could hear snippets of their conversation, the usual gossip that had circulated in my old lab about one lab scooping another, getting their work published first. Steven blurted some oblique comment about irreproducible data that I failed to catch. Everyone laughed, including Aeden.
I was about to step away from the door when Aeden caught sight of me through the pane. He made a motion to stand up, but before he could I turned around and walked quickly down the hallway, away from the conference room and out of the lab. The easy familiarity of the four reminded me for some reason of an incident from long ago that I thought I’d forgotten, but hadn’t.
On my way back from the Hilander one evening I made the split-second decision to join the kids from my street, several of whom were my classmates in school, though we’d rarely spoken. There was a warm, pleasant breeze and the moon was full, and their voices were crisp and articulate in the calm night air. I got off my bicycle, parked it on the street, and went to sit down on the curb with them. At first they sort of froze, and there was an uncomfortable silence in the air. But very quickly they picked up where they’d left off. I sat at the edge of the circle, with my knees pressed to my chest, waiting for someone to talk to me, but no one did. I racked my brain for something to say, and found that I had nothing that I thought they might want to hear—nothing about the bands they listened to or the dwindling black market where they got their cigarettes, or about how they would have to put up with their parents for another three years before they saw freedom. And I felt, moreover, that even if I’d said something that was of interest to them, it wouldn’t make a difference. The void between us, between myself and other people, was unbridgeable. At a break in their conversation, before I could be embarrassed any further, I stood up and got back on the bicycle. But as I pedaled away, relieved, I felt a door closing behind me forever.
Chapter 4
A few days after my arrival in the lab, I walked into the main room early one morning to see Aeden and Allegra extracting vials from the PCR machine.
From my desk I watched Aeden pipette the contents of the vials into the wells of the gel on his bench. It was what he’d been doing when I’d first met him, and practically all week. But something about the tender care with which he was loading these particular samples, as if he feared to lose even a single drop, told me they were different, and possibly special: the culmination of something rather than the beginning.
Half an hour later Aeden was carrying the gel tray to the Eagle Eye across my bay, Allegra skidding in her heels behind him, her long dark hair held to the crown of her head by a dangling barrette. Aeden slid the gel into the machine and angled the screen toward them. The screen lit up, and I saw the columns of bands glowing against the black backdrop, and then I understood: the DNA on the screen belonged to their mutant mice.
Allegra was jumping up and down, like a child. “Knockouts. We have knockout mice.” Aeden lifted her off the floor and whirled her around in circles until they fell into each other’s arms, laughing nervously, like the sole survivors of some huge catastrophe.
I suppose I should have been happy for them, and relieved to know that within a couple of weeks, or however long it took them to analyze their knockouts, I would know if the genes they had identified and deleted were important, and possibly the same ones I was looking to find. But I was horror-struck by the speed at which things were unfolding, the way time seemed to be closing in on me.
Aeden and Allegra returned to their bay and stood at her desk examining snapshots of their DNA. Unable to work, I sat senselessly observing Allegra’s hair, now spread like a shawl across her back: how certain browns, glistening in the sun, gave off a reddish hue similar to the color of my own hair. I waited for someone else to show up, so that in the diversion created by his or her arrival I might walk out unnoticed, until it dawned on me that it was Saturday, and that no one would be showing up in the lab anytime soon.
Slowly, I stood up from my desk and got into my coat—a red windbreaker my father had gotten me for Christmas long ago. I was halfway out of the bay when I spotted something glinting in the aisle: Allegra’s hairclip. I raked it off the linoleum, slipped it into my coat pocket, and kept walking.
Outside I moved north, toward the wrought-iron gates of the campus, feeling like a thief with Allegra’s hairclip in my pocket and at the same time strangely avenged. On the street I crossed the avenue and headed west, past First and Second Avenues into Third, Lexington, and Park, venturing into areas of the city I’d never seen before. The day was cold and metallically luminous, the sky seamlessly blue. I walked fast, as though running away from something.
Until somewhere along Madison Avenue, feeling out of breath and so parched it hurt to swallow, I walked into a diner called Nectar. Averting my eyes from the two crowded rows of booths on either side of the entrance, I scurried to the no-less-crowded counter at the edge of the room and found a stool sandwiched between two strangers. A woman with graying red hair and freckles on her face was working the counter. I ordered poached eggs and a coffee, and when the coffee came I wrapped my hands around the mug, glad of the warmth.
“You okay, honey?” the woman behind the counter asked me in a Slavic accent. Her name tag read galina.
“I’m fine, thank you,” I said, not wanting to start a conversation.
“You sure?”
“Yes,” I said, as graciously as I could. For all I knew she could have been my mother. Any stranger with a slight resemblance to me could have been my mother.
The eggs, when they arrived, were too runny for my liking.
“What’s the matter?” Galina asked, seeing me put my spoon down.
“They’re undercooked.”
She whisked t
he little bowl away and returned it a few minutes later, the bracelets on her wrist clanking hollowly. “There you go.”
But the yolks were now overcooked.
“Still no good, honey?”
The look on her face made me wonder if she thought I was about to start crying. “They’re perfect,” I said.
After she was gone I dipped a hand into my coat pocket and laid Allegra’s hairclip on the countertop. And then I confronted what bothered me: their imminent results, which I had no way of foreseeing. But also how Aeden had swept Allegra off her feet and whirled her around, so spontaneously.
The last person I’d gone out with, a particle physics student from a neighboring lab in Champaign, had smiled politely when I’d tried to make a joke, and said I had an unusual hair color. “Like it’s on fire or something,” he’d observed across the table. I’d cut the date short, and we did not see each other again. My joke—about a mutant egg coming before the chicken—was lame, admittedly. But the bigger picture had gone through him like a quark, and what did the color of my hair have to do with anything?
I stood up from the bar stool, asked Galina for the check, and went to pay up front, leaving her the most generous tip I could afford and Allegra’s hairclip lying on the counter.
When I returned to the lab, Justin was sitting in Allegra’s desk chair. I hadn’t spoken to him in days, and was surprised to see him there on a Saturday.
“Three weeks?” he said. “Why don’t you analyze them now?”
“Mice aren’t analyzed at birth,” Aeden replied, sounding irritated. “Everyone in the field knows that, Justin.”
“So what?” Justin shot back. “Where is it written you have to go by the book?” He watched me walk into my bay. All three of them did. I had reached my desk when Justin said, “At any rate, this certainly deserves a celebration. You guys up for brunch?”
Through the vertical aperture between our desks I watched Aeden pull his fleece sweatshirt over his head. Compared to Justin’s woolen Ivy League sweater, the pullover looked worn and ratty, as though he might have slept in it. Allegra snatched her purse from her desk and lifted her fashionable coat off the backrest of her chair. I looked away as they left but only after I heard the doors flapping at the end of the hallway did I sink into my chair and access the database.
I can’t say how long I’d been sitting with my face to the screen, a minute or two or twenty, when I felt a whiff of cold street air and heard a slight sound, so delicate it was as though someone were turning a page in a book. I looked up, and there was Aeden, standing next to me. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said, raising a hand.
“You didn’t,” I said, though I was, both startled and pleasantly surprised.
“I’m guessing you already heard about our mice.”
“Yes. Congratulations.”
Aeden pulled out the stool under my workbench and sat down on it. The sequence on my laptop was in plain sight on the screen, but he wasn’t looking at it. “Aren’t you supposed to be celebrating?” I asked him.
“I thought you might want to join us.”
“Why?”
“It occurred to me that between the three of us we could help you brainstorm a new project.”
“Justin agreed to this?” I couldn’t imagine that.
“Is there a reason why he shouldn’t?”
I shook my head. “No reason.” I hesitated, and then said, “You don’t have to be nice to me. There’s really no need.”
“I’m not trying to be nice,” Aeden said. “I’m concerned about you.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said.
Aeden smiled at me across the sunlit air. “So are you coming or not?”
I wondered what, if anything, he saw when he looked at me: small nail-bitten hands and limp red hair, a lightly freckled nose on a face that was pretty enough? But that wasn’t all there was to see, or couldn’t he tell? Couldn’t he see that I wasn’t about to give up on the project? “I’m not,” I said. “I appreciate your concern for me, Aeden, but I think I’m capable of finding my own way.”
Aeden raised an eyebrow at me. “Fair enough,” he said, and stood up.
He was walking away when I heard myself say, “Thank you for thinking of me.”
“You’re welcome,” he said.
Chapter 5
A gene is a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. It is a long and finite sequence of DNA made up of ATGC nucleotides. The beginning of every gene is ATG, the universal ending TAG, or TAA, or TGA. But what lies in between the beginning and the end is different for each gene, and encoded in these differences are protein molecules with wide-ranging functions.
Unraveling on my laptop screen from morning to night were sequences whose nucleotides appeared to have fallen randomly in place:
ACTTTTGTACCTTTCTCGCCGGGACAGAGAAGTGGGCCGGGACCAGCCGGGCCAGACCAGACTGGACCCCAGGGGCGATGCGGCTGCTGCCCCTGCTGCGGACTGTGCTCTGGGCCGCGCTGCTCGGCT . . .
But nothing was random. There was music in the white noise, and it was my job to find it. Day after day I watched sequence fragments unfurling on my screen; day after day I sat at my desk assembling and reconstructing them to their full length, comparing them to gene sequences in public databases and assigning them names and functions, weeding out redundant genes and analyzing prime candidates: unknown sequences that encoded axon guidance proteins.
David Hobbs, as it turned out, had made the database. He had started out by building a library of bacteria carrying genes expressed in the mouse olfactory bulb. Hundreds of bacterial colonies from the library had been randomly selected, and their mouse DNA sequenced and uploaded into files. Most of the sequences, the ones I had examined, encoded housekeeping proteins. Only a handful encoded axon guidance proteins, and they were not novel; they were genes whose function in the bulb had been tested, and they did not explain how olfactory nerves, hundreds of thousands possessing different odorant receptor types, ultimately reached their targets, allowing us to smell.
I wanted to believe that the gene I was looking for was in the database, and that it would eventually make its appearance. When it happened, I told myself, when the sequence popped up on my screen, I would recognize it, in all its nuanced glory. But the truth was that of the many genes I had annotated, very few were novel, and of these none encoded an axon guidance protein. I was nowhere near done with the database, but the more sequences I sifted through, the more unlikely it felt that I would ever come across what I was looking to find, and the more plausible it seemed that Aeden and Allegra had already found it.
Hearing them discuss their data from my desk, I often wondered how they’d come upon their genes—the ones they’d knocked out of the mice they were waiting to analyze. I had read about techniques devised to hook genes from commercial libraries to specially designed probes, like one might hook fish to bait. Most of them weren’t subtle enough to pick up rare genes. But then I didn’t know what Aeden and Allegra had picked up, and as the weeks rolled by it became increasingly difficult for me to work, to keep my eyes on my screen instead of peering through the aperture of my desk into Aeden’s bay, where a fat green folder he’d recently pulled out of his filing cabinet lay open.
Most of the pages in the folder were hand-drawn sketches of gene constructs resembling from afar the architectural blueprints of modern and beautifully elaborate houses. But among these loose and incomprehensible drawings were the printed copies of the three genes Aeden and Allegra had knocked out of their mice. Despite knowing that I shouldn’t, I tried to make out the sequences from my desk, but the font was small, and accurately reading the ATGC letters was like trying to decipher a road sign from a mile away. Still, every day at noon, when Aeden usually returned to his desk with his lunch and sat at his chair to examine the printouts, I subtly slid to the edge of my swivel chair and strained my neck and eyes for a better view, at the risk of being seen by him.
One time I fell off my chair, tipping my mug of sharpened pencils along the way and causing such a r
acket that Aeden shot up from his desk. “Are you okay?” he asked, across a floating ledge of petri dishes.
“Fine,” came my broken reply as I pulled myself up from the floor. “I’m fine.”
But I wasn’t fine at all.
On a rainy day in October, Aeden didn’t return from the cafeteria as he usually did. Impatient and curious, I walked out into the hallway and saw him in the conference room, standing in front of the whiteboard with a blue marker, discussing his knockout experiment and what he hoped to find in his mice with several other postdocs from the lab. Outlined on the board was a Mickey Mouse head, dotted in red, and shooting up from its snout were long blue threads that failed to reach the red dots, instead wandering off on their own. It was a hypothetical result, but a dream one nonetheless. The kind of results that would mean that the genes they had identified were involved in directing the axons to their targets.
The following day I muscled my way into Justin’s office, not bothering to knock on his door for the second time in a row. He was standing in the anteroom with his wrists held out to Karen, who was helping him with his cuff links. The window slats were open, and the room was blindingly bright.
“Were there no doors in your old lab?” Justin asked.
I pulled the door shut, deflecting the noise of an industrial centrifuge. “I would like to see their genes,” I said.
Justin looked at me. “Why?”
“I think I deserve to know what genes they knocked out, whether I’m searching for something they already found.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” Justin said. He looked away again. “Aeden is very secretive about his work.”
“Don’t you have the printouts?”
“No, I don’t. Aeden never gave them to me, and I never requested them.”
The DNA of You and Me Page 3