The DNA of You and Me

by Andrea Rothman

  “Seriously?” Steven said, and with a hearty laugh, “The results are that bad, huh?”

  Then Aeden did stare up at him. “They’re not bad. They’re just difficult to interpret.”

  Coming into the lab three days later I saw a cart laden with empty mouse cages parked on the far side of the hallway, near the main room entrance closest to Aeden and Allegra’s bay. I was already used to the sight, and would have thought nothing of it had it not been for the fact that the door to Justin’s office, perpetually shut, was wide open, and the hallway itself, normally bustling with activity at that hour of the morning, was eerily quiet. When I walked into the room, Justin was standing over Aeden and Allegra, swinging his arms in the air like a crazed person conducting an orchestra. The entire lab was congregated at the foot of their bay, watching the scene as if it were something from a movie, a good portion of the postdocs with barely suppressed smiles spilling from their faces. Except for Steven, who stood at the periphery of the circle, his arms on his chest, staring somberly at the floor.

  “Your genes,” Justin kept saying. “I want to see your genes.”

  From the door I watched Aeden drag his filing cabinet drawer open and extract the printouts I’d examined. He sat with a hand held across his mouth while Justin flipped through a mound of stapled pages, his eyes darting uncomprehendingly from one sheet to another, no doubt seeing only randomness in the molecular language. He went through the same motions with the other printouts, and flung the stack on Aeden’s desk. It landed with a thump, like a bird without wings. “You mean to tell me these are the genes you knocked out?”

  Aeden looked at him. “Don’t pretend you’ve never seen them. You’ve seen them, Justin. You even said they were promising.”

  “No, I didn’t. I would never say such a thing. Not without a stitch of evidence. It would be unprofessional of me.”

  “Unprofessional,” Aeden said, with a conspiratorial look at Allegra. But her face was turned to the window.

  “Don’t patronize me, Aeden,” Justin shouted. “I just got off the phone with Carol Levine. She says the gene Craig isolated from his mutant flies has a small internal sequence in its coding region that is unique. She didn’t say what it was, of course. But I can tell you this, without knowing anything about it, I can tell you I highly doubt that the sequence is in any of your genes. In fact, I bet you it isn’t. I should never have allowed you to knock them out. Clearly they’re not what we’re looking for.”

  “This isn’t happening.” It was Allegra, speaking to the linoleum at her feet.

  “You don’t know that, Justin,” Aeden said. “You don’t even know that this Carol person is telling you the truth.”

  Justin glared at him. “Show me the results.”

  Aeden shut his eyes.

  “C’mon, I want to see those mouse heads of yours. Don’t think that because I wear a suit to work I’ve forgotten how long it takes to analyze a few brains. Not that long, Aeden. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that your results are negative. After three years and two national grant awards, we’re going to be scooped by another lab.” He glanced behind him, casting a searching eye at the faces gathered around him before looking back away. “Stupid me, trusting your knowledge and intuition as scientists instead of taking matters into my own hands.”

  “You forget this is our first strain of mice,” Aeden said in their defense. “We have two other knockout strains, one for each gene, remember?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Justin snapped. “If I remember correctly, the three genes you knocked out are very similar to one another.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’re doing the same thing. One of them could still have a role in axon guidance.”

  Justin gave him an exasperated look. “Don’t you get it?” he said. “You knocked out the wrong genes.” He looked behind him again, this time past the congregation, and spotted me by the door, where I’d remained standing. He grabbed the printouts from Aeden’s desk and began to make his way toward me.

  Aeden flashed out of his chair, following Justin through the parting mob of postdocs and students. “Where are you going with our sequences, Justin?”

  “Where does it look like I’m going?”

  “You have no right.”

  “I have all the right in the world. I’m the head of this lab.”

  Before I could fully digest what was happening, Justin was standing in front of me. “Take a look at them, Emily. Let me know what you think.” He plopped the pages into my arms. Mechanically I curled my fingers around them, astonished at their meager weight, at the springy pliability of paper that seemed to mirror the state of my mind, adrift in shame and confusion. “How long will it take you to examine them?” Justin demanded.

  I didn’t dare look at Aeden. “A couple of hours.”

  “How long to find a suitable gene candidate?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “I can’t predict that.”

  “But you will find it,” Justin said. “In our database.”

  “I will try.”

  “Welcome to the project, Emily.” A false smile was budding from the corners of Justin’s mouth. He held his hand out to me, but thankfully I had no hands to take it.

  Everyone in the lab was gathered around us, including Aeden, standing next to Justin. When I finally summoned the courage to look at him, I was bewildered. I had expected to see anger in his face, but there was no anger. He was visibly upset about the situation, but beyond that, there was a shade of disillusionment in his eyes, as if I were a rare butterfly his hopes had been set on, whose damaged wing he’d failed to see; and for a reason I could not begin to put my finger on, it troubled me more than I could say.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said to Justin, and fled to my corner of the lab, to be alone.

  Part Two

  A Bridge

  Chapter 8

  Twelve years ago, the period in the lab I’m recalling, the belief that there existed a yet-to-be-discovered group of guidance proteins exclusive to the sense of smell was at best an educated guess. There was no evidence to indicate that the molecules that shaped the map of smell during development were any different from the well-known fraternity of axon guidance proteins that accounted for much of the wiring in the brain. In fact, several of these proteins were known to help olfactory axons navigate the bulb. Yet given the thousands of targets olfactory nerve endings need to reach in the bulb to form the map of smell, it was possible, theoretically, that a completely new group of genes existed.

  Among the things I had told Justin at the conference in Chicago, something I could distinctly remember saying was that these genes, if they existed, were likely to have sequences unobserved in other genes. They were likely to be related to other axon guidance molecules, I told him, but only insofar as a star is an incandescent mass of gas, or a person is a member of the human race. “They will be the oddballs of their community,” I said. Standing with Justin at the refreshments table that day, I’d felt confident enough to speak my mind, sensing as I did that if anyone would hear me out on my crazy theory it was him: a man who seemed to me to be about as guarded around other people as I was.

  “And what are these proteins doing, in your opinion?” Justin asked me, clearing his throat from the coffee that tasted like fish piss.

  “Directing traffic,” I said.

  “How?”

  A crude example, but the best one I could think of, was a moving walkway in an airport. “Imagine thousands of people in an airport terminal,” I said, “all of them needing to reach different gates. Now imagine a series of walkways designated to channel them to their respective gates. The people are the axons, the gates are their targets in the bulb, and the walkways are the proteins. It doesn’t need to be a huge group of proteins. It can be a small group, so long as its members can recognize and interact with different types of axons.”

  Suddenly I’d lost him. He was eyeing a man staring at a conference leaflet near our end of the table—a
lab head, according to his name tag.

  “Anyway,” I said, speaking to Justin’s profile. “I hope I’ve gotten my theory across.”

  “An unlikely theory,” Justin said, loudly enough for the man to hear.

  I knew then that unlikely meant feasible. The bell call sounded and Justin walked off, and that was the last time I’d spoken to anyone about my theory.

  After fleeing to my corner of the lab that morning I wanted to approach Aeden, wanted to explain why Justin had gotten so worked up about the internal sequence in Craig’s gene and why it was important. That was the reason I gave myself at the time for wanting to speak to him—the one I was aware of, at least, or willing to admit to myself.

  But to approach Aeden after what happened that day, to even get him to talk to me, was harder than I’d anticipated.

  In the crowded elevator one morning, on our way up to the lab, Aeden made a point of fixing his eyes on the button panel. When the elevator stopped on our floor he bolted out ahead of me.

  “Aeden,” I called.

  He kept walking. “What do you want?”

  The weather was colder, and he was wearing a long black woolen coat I’d never seen on him, reaching almost down to his knees. From behind, it gave him the mysterious air of a magician. “Do you have a moment?” I followed him through the double doors of the lab, into the hallway. “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “I have mice to dissect,” he said, not turning his head to look at me.

  He was walking fast, and the gap between us widening. “What about later today?”

  “Probably not.”

  At lunch I went to the cafeteria to look for him, but he wasn’t there. I knew he snuck out of the lab during the day to smoke. I’d smelled the cigarettes on him and knew that wherever it was that he went to, it couldn’t be far. I searched the campus grounds for about an hour in the hopes of finding the secluded spot where he might be, but it was in vain. When I returned to the lab he was settled in the conference room with his container of food, chatting with Allegra.

  In the evening I left the lab shortly after he did and followed him down the street, to the dorm building where most of the postdocs in the lab lived. I wanted to catch up with him but he was talking on his phone, and the intimate tone of his voice told me it wasn’t a good idea to interrupt him.

  The following morning, and for many days, I scanned the crowded lobby of the building, hoping to see Aeden on his way to the lab. But I never ran into him in the lobby, or in the street.

  A few weeks later, late on a Friday afternoon, I saw him descending the stairs of the lecture hall, scanning the packed rows and crowded aisles for a place to sit. Catching his eye, I pointed to the empty seat next to mine, then watched him move right past me, only to settle a few rows farther down, between two perfect strangers.

  For the next fifty minutes I sat alone in my seat, unable to make sense of the images being projected on the screen, unable to concentrate on what the renowned stem-cell biologist from Kobe, Japan, whose papers I’d read with fascination, was saying about rewriting a human cell’s destiny.

  When the lecture ended I left my seat and went to stand outside, in the cool autumn air. I knew that I should give up and leave, but something kept me there, waiting for the Q&A session to end. At last a flourish of clapping came drifting through the open doors, followed by the hubbub of people rising from their chairs. I was standing to one side of the doors, eyeing the multitude of faces flocking up the stairs, when Aeden came charging past me in his black coat, a pack of Parliaments in his hand.

  “Aeden?” I said.

  “We meet again,” he said, and veered north, in the opposite direction from the lab.

  “I hate to bother you.”

  “Then don’t.”

  I trailed behind him anyway, across a lawn of leaves, wanting to catch up with him and not daring to. It was six o’clock in the evening. The light of day was starting to fade, and the air was cold and still and silent but for the distant sounds of York Avenue traffic and the crunching of the leaves under our feet. “We need to talk,” I said.

  Aeden didn’t answer.

  Beyond the lawn, behind the Human Resources building, there was a courtyard I’d never seen. Wooden benches with peeling paint stood against three tall walls, facing a sapling growing in a circle of bricks. Aeden went to stand by the tree. He took an orange lighter from his coat pocket and lit a cigarette. I realized this was his hiding place, the place he came to smoke, and to be alone. I felt I shouldn’t be there, impinging on his privacy, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “What is it you want to talk about?” he asked in a resigned voice.

  I walked through the gate and went to stand next to him, under the tree. “Why are you evading me?”

  He shook his head at me. “Do I need to answer that question, Emily? It’s obvious you’ve been waiting for your chance to jump in, and Justin has been encouraging you all along. ‘Welcome to the project.’ Did he really expect me to fall for that nonsense? Did you?”

  “I never agreed to switch projects, Aeden.”

  He let out a stream of smoke through his nostrils, nodding at the bleached sky above our heads. “That’s true. I just assumed you would.”

  “I should have been honest with you,” I said. “As honest and straightforward as you’ve been with me.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “What?” I asked, momentarily thrown off by the question. “No. I want to talk about the sequence, the one the San Diego lab found in their gene. I don’t have a clear idea of what it is, but I know for a fact it’s not in any of your genes.”

  “I think that topic was already amply covered. Don’t you?” Aeden took another drag from his cigarette. “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but the last thing I want is to discuss my genes with you. If anything I’d like to chill a bit before imaging my next round of enlightening bulbs.”

  “You’re asking me to leave?” I said, though it was clear enough.

  “Requesting kindly,” Aeden said, releasing an ashen blanket of smoke through his mouth.

  I wanted to ask him if he knew how many smokers were diagnosed with lung cancer each year, and of those how many died; the odds weren’t in his favor. Instead I found myself saying, “I’m not here because of your genes, Aeden. I’m here because I didn’t want you to see me in a bad light after what happened, but it looks like you’ll go on seeing me that way no matter what I do or say.”

  I turned around and began to walk away. I hadn’t yet reached the small crooked gate at the end of the courtyard when Aeden called behind me, “Emily, wait.”

  His next words made me stop. “What brought you to the project?”

  Chapter 9

  On our way to the Tramway—a neighborhood diner with pink neon lights tucked like an oyster in a shell under the Queensboro Bridge—Aeden told me about Craig Wallace, the star senior postdoc in Justin’s lab two years earlier.

  Justin had demoted him for falling behind schedule with his mice and losing to a competing lab. The next day Craig had gone into one of the mouse colony rooms of the lab in the Animal Facility and swapped the labels on the cages, making hundreds of nearly identical brown mice bearing different mutations indistinguishable from one another.

  “It took David close to a year to regenotype the mice and straighten out the mess,” Aeden said, dodging a pizza delivery boy on a bicycle.

  “And Craig definitely did it?” I asked.

  Aeden looked straight into my eyes. “There’s no proof that he did. By the time the mess was discovered Craig was gone. But who else could have done it?”

  “I’m surprised Justin didn’t press charges.”

  Aeden held a hand to his ear, as if he’d failed to hear me. “Press charges? Justin wouldn’t press charges against a serial killer. An investigation would spoil his precious reputation, not to mention the lab’s.”

  I wanted to laugh about the serial killer part but was fighting off a jabbing head
ache similar to the one I’d experienced after breaking into Aeden’s filing cabinet.

  In the diner a Coldplay song I knew Aeden liked was streaming through a loudspeaker on the wall. Snippets of the melody had escaped the earbuds he wore in the lab at night, and I’d grown to like the song myself. It was a sad sort of song, and the place, with its yellow lighting and large empty booths, had the lonely feel of an Edward Hopper painting. But I couldn’t have felt less alone.

  “What are you having?” Aeden asked, flipping the plastic pages of his menu.

  “I’m actually not that hungry.” The headache had begun to fade, but I was still feeling too anxious for food.

  An elderly woman was sitting all alone across from our booth. There was a stain on her bread, she kept telling the waiter, a red stain she was certain was beet juice. The waiter agreed that the bread was stained—though it wasn’t—and when he walked off with the basket of bread I was able to see the woman clearly. She was wearing white elbow-length gloves with a white dress and hat; her shoes were also white, and on her plate was an egg-white omelet and a scoop of cottage cheese. Aeden was observing her too, and when our eyes met we smiled at each other, mutually intrigued.

  “So why smell research?” he asked me.

  The answer I gave him came out so effortlessly I might have been preparing it in my head all along. “I was allergic to grass growing up, especially cut grass.” I gazed out the window, noticing the street outside, glowing with the lights of the bridge towering over us. What I told him next was unexpected. “I spent most of my childhood indoors, alone, never playing with anyone. My father was always worried about me. It bothered him that I had no friends. Even in my teens, after I outgrew my allergy, I kept looking for excuses to stay at home, or in his lab. He ran a small chemistry lab at the medical school in Rockford. Anyway, summer weekends he had to practically drag me out of the house to the local mall, Lino’s for pizza, sometimes even the Navy Pier in Chicago, the beach in Evanston, wherever he thought I might run into people my own age, which I did, of course, but it was pointless. I’m not a very sociable person.”