by Simon Mawer
That passing mention is momentous. It is confirmation, if confirmation were ever needed, that Mendel repeated the Pisum work on other, unrelated species and got the very same results. It also drags Darwin into the equation. Mendel is shouting his findings to Nägeli, and still the idiot takes no notice. The correspondence dribbles on for a few years, but the work is beyond all recovery now. Mendel has lost his way. He is fiddling around with unsuitable material and ill-defined characteristics and corresponding sporadically with a botanist who hasn’t understood his findings at all. He is at sea again, but wandering vaguely without map or compass and with no hope of finding land.
The last extant letter to Nägeli comes after a gap of a full three years:
Highly esteemed Sir and Friend,
Despite my best intentions I was unable to keep my promise given last spring. The Hieracia have bloomed and faded here once again without my having been able to pay them more than a few fleeting visits. It is a real grief to me that I have to neglect my plants and my bees so completely. Since I have a little spare time at present, and since I do not know whether I shall have any next spring, I am sending you today some material from my last experiments in 1870 and 1871 …
It is rare that a man is genuinely ahead of his time. Even the greatest discoveries in science are made in their appropriate time. Crick and Watson proposed a structure for DNA when Franklin and Wilkins were just focusing in on the thing themselves (Crick and Watson more or less filched the vital information from the other two), and just when the whole world of biology was waiting for it. Darwin was mulling over natural selection, going round and round in circles in fact, just at the time that Wallace was thinking the same thoughts, just at the time men like Huxley were ready to take up the flag and turn the defense of natural selection into some kind of crusade. Few are ahead of their time … but Gregor Mendel was. He was so far ahead (and this is the litmus test) that even when he spelled it out and people read the argument (for example Nägeli, for example Focke) they still couldn’t grasp the importance. They could see what he had done, they could understand exactly what he had found (they would have to have been defective not to, so clear and concise is Mendel’s writing), and yet they could not perceive the significance. When finally his time did come, three men (de Vries, Correns, von Tschermak) stumbled over the great paper all in the same year, all quite independently of one another, all having repeated, more or less, the experimental work. The world of scientific thought had finally caught up with the fat friar.
“My time will come,” he was reputed to have said. It came sure enough, but by the time it came Father Gregor, Great-great-great-uncle Gregor, was dead.
Life after Jean? It was a fragile thing. I constructed new habits out of the fragments of a past that I had almost forgotten. I’m not looking for sympathy, just stating facts. That has been my training. I found solace in my work, of course.
At the Royal Institute for Genetics the defective FGFR3 gene has already been cloned in E. coli bacteria; we have already persuaded the bacterium to express the protein in culture. There is now the theoretical possibility of finding a way to inactivate the mutant gene. In vitro experiments are proceeding using cultured skin fibroblast cells from … the author.1
I nurtured my cultures and I counted the months and I thought of her. I peered down the microscope and watched my own cells floating like galaxies in the black void, gleaming bright in their amniotic world (choose your metaphor), absorbing amino acids from the medium and constructing from them the rogue protein that had betrayed me; and I thought of her. I found a different kind of solace in the arms of one of Eve’s many sisters—Dawn, shall we say?—a creature equally as pneumatic as her crepuscular sibling, but blessed with two X chromosomes and a consequent flock of pubic hair. But I thought of Jean. Of course.
When it came, her phone call was unforeseen and unexpected. I had forgotten the peculiar softness of her voice, the weakness of her vowel sounds, the apparent passivity. They were qualities that had annoyed me once. “Ben? Is that you?”
“What do you want? I’m rather busy at the moment.”
“Ben, can you come see us? Would you, Ben? Hugo would like that.”
“And you wouldn’t?”
“Ben, please. It might be a bit suspicious if you don’t.”
“It’s part of an alibi, is it?”
“Don’t be like that.”
“What should I be like? What in God’s name should I be like?” For a few moments I felt the obverse of love but I obeyed her summons, accepted her invitation, however you like to put it. I went. Of course I went. Revisiting the scene of the crime, if you like.
Hugo Miller’s tone was of feigned surprise when he opened the door of number 34 Galton Avenue. His pale eyes stared in amazement. “Good Lord, it’s Ben!” he cried, as though my arrival were entirely unexpected. “Good to see you. Come on in, come on in. You know the way, don’t you?” Oh yes, I knew the way, but still he showed me. He exuded bonhomie, he exuded paternal pride, he exuded domestic smugness. “Good of you to come. Must be miles out of your usual way. Saw you on the telly the other day. Quite a thing, eh? Good of you to drop round.”
Like a proud parent entering a nursery, he showed me through into the living room. And there was Jean, standing by the coal-effect electric fire—Jean in a pink denim maternity dress, Jean blushing like a child and smiling at me and holding her swollen abdomen as though otherwise it might hit the floor.
“Hello, Ben,” she said. “It’s been a long time.”
I stood in awe before her. I stood silently before the metamorphosis that blind, molecular instinct had wrought. I marveled at the transformation. Two strings of DNA—hers and mine, united in mysterious conspiracy—had done this to her. Distorted and out of proportion, yet she was beautiful. That was the absurd thing. Beautiful. I wanted to tell her of her beauty. I wanted to make her understand. I wanted to go down on my knees in front of her. Does that sound mad? I wanted to cling to her knees and tell her of her beauty and beg her to return to me. I wanted to shout out to the red-haired, freckled fool who fussed around her that the child was mine, that I had slavered over her body, that I had belabored her with that one part of my own body that is not stunted, that it was I who had impregnated her with my own, potent seed. But instead I just stood there and smiled at her with my carefully designed smile; the smile I use on the whole world.
Did I want to feel the nipper move, Hugo wondered.
She eased herself down into a chair. “I’m sure Ben doesn’t want …”
“How do you know what he wants? Go on, let him feel.”
She shrugged and placed her hand on the mound in her lap. “Just there.”
“Go on, have a feel,” insisted her husband.
Reluctantly I advanced on her. She took my squat hand in her slender one and pressed it to her swollen abdomen, just above the knot of the umbilicus. I could smell the familiar scent of her. I glanced up, and our eyes met over the mound of her belly. Was there a momentary glimpse of complicity there, or were those mismatched eyes mere globes of jelly and gristle? If you focus on the outside of a body, on the outer integument, on the skin and hair, on the strange, glassy eyes in their sleek orbits and the curiously molluscan ears, if you concentrate on all that and realize that it is mere machinery, nothing more than a confection of sinew and cartilage and bone, driven by muscle and wired and controlled by an overambitious neural network, then you can begin to dismiss the person underneath. But that’s the difficult bit, because the mask is so convincing.
“Have you got it?” Hugo demanded.
There was a lump. “There’s a lump,” I said.
“That’s a knee, I expect. The little beggar’s upside down, isn’t it?”
And then the lump moved, a deep, glutinous stirring beneath the surface, like something swimming in treacle. Abruptly I straightened up and backed away.
Jean smiled. “He always moves around at this time of day—”
“He, dear?”
Jean reddened, fumbling for an escape. Sweat glistened on her forehead. “I fancy it’s a he. It’s my dream. I want to call him Adam. If he’s a he.”
Hugo was watching her solicitously, as though searching for symptoms of something or other. “Are you all right, dear? Hot flush, is it?”
“I’m quite all right, dear.”
“Of course they can tell us the sex,” he explained, “but we didn’t want to know, did we? Of course we didn’t. Well, you’ve got to let nature take its course, haven’t you? Those people at the clinic were marvelous, but medicine’s done enough to help us, and now it’s over to Mother Nature, isn’t it, darling?”
“I suppose so.” She changed the subject, and the moment of anxiety was over. “How’s the work going? I’ve been really starved of news. Is Miss Conway still at the Institute? And what about the dangerous Olga?”
But I really couldn’t take much of Jean’s brittle chatter or her husband explaining to me the latest advances in in vitro fertilization and intracytoplasmic sperm injection. I had a cup of tea and left them to their marital contentment as soon as I decently could. “You know what Jean and I would like?” Miller said as he showed me to the door. “We owe you quite a bit, really, putting us onto the fertility people, that Doctor Lupron and everything. You know what we’d like, Ben?”
Jean was hovering anxiously in the background. She must have known what was coming, must have been powerless to prevent it. “What would you like?”
“We’d like you to be the nipper’s godfather,” Miller said.
We’ve got a slot free on the third day, and I was thinking, Gravenstein mailed me. How about giving a lecture on eugenics? Now that’d be something.
I’m not a historian, I wrote back.
Eugenics now, she replied. The new eugenics. In vitro fertilization, population screening, embryo selection, gene therapy, that kind of thing. You guys are right into that, aren’t you? I’ve got someone here at Cornell who could do it all right, but you’d be something else, Ben.
So, in addition to the keynote speech, THE NEW EUGENICS, a lecture by DOCTOR BENEDICT LAMBERT, appeared on the on-line program for the Mendel Symposium, accessible through the web site of Cornell2 and the Masaryk University, Brno.3 I spent time in the library, with Galton and Davenport and Pearson. I learned about the Society for Racial Hygiene, and eugenic sterilization programs in Germany and the United States. I read the words of Francis Crick and Hermann Muller, Nobel laureates the pair of them, and Eysenck and Herrnstein and Jensen, professors the three of them. That’s great, Ben, Gravenstein assured me when I sent her my lecture outlines. Now, when you get to Brno I’ll be there to meet you at the airport and take you to the hotel. Morgan McClintock, our chairperson, will be there too. He’s looking forward to meeting you …
So to Moravia. So to the forgotten city of Brno. While my child grew in Jean’s womb.
And life after the garden pea? Life after the disappearance of his paper into the oblivion of one hundred twenty academic libraries? Life after the disappearance into the void of the forty copies? Life after Nägeli?
They elected him abbot in 1868.
This shall not prevent me, he wrote to Nägeli, from continuing the hybridization experiments of which I have become so fond; I even hope to be able to devote more time and attention to them once I have become familiar with my new position.
It was, of course, an illusion. Although he gave up his teaching, as abbot, he found less and less time to devote to the experimental garden.
Despite my best intentions I was unable to keep my promise given last spring. The Hieracia have withered again without my having been able to give them more than a few hurried visits …4
That was it, really. The excitement and optimism of youth gave way to the dullness of middle age. His scientific interests degenerated into mere stamp collecting—beekeeping and meteorology—while his innate stubbornness found an outlet in a bitter and pointless dispute with the fiscal authorities over tax demands on the convent. A stream of letters to the taxman issued from his pen. He argued, he debated, he looked for loopholes, he looked for escape clauses; he never gave ground.
He retreated within his carapace. My time will come, he said. He took his temperature readings and his rainfall readings, he grafted fruit trees and cultivated flowers, he smoked, he coughed and wheezed, he heard the pounding of his heart in his ears, he felt the gross oedemic swellings of his legs, and he never let anyone but his two nephews past the barricades of isolation. They were medical students, the sons of Theresia, being supported at the medical school in Vienna by their uncle. Thus was Theresia’s generosity as a little girl paid back.
“They want to put me away,” he told them.
You may imagine their condescending smiles at Uncle Gregor’s suspicions. “Who, Uncle? Who wants to put you away?”
“The brothers. They want to get me declared insane and sent to a lunatic asylum. They want to pay their damned tax and get on with living their tiny little lives. You know that the bishop has set them to spy on me? You know that? They all want me to surrender. But I won’t. Oh no. Look, let me show you this …” And another of the letters would be produced, the page closely inscribed in his careful copperplate hand, full of the twists and turns, the repetitions and reiterations of a mind obsessed.
But a spark still glowed among the ashes of genius. There is the Notizblatt, a fragment discovered in the library of the monastery long after Mendel’s death. It is a page of jottings written in his careful copperplate hand on the back of the draft of a letter dealing with monastery business of 1875:
It goes on down the page. He is still playing around with numbers and ratios, trying to fit experimental results with expected values, trying to nose out further applications of the laws he had discovered. There is the odd correction, the occasional scribble, but as you read it you can feel him thinking, as palpably as if he were sitting there before you at his wide desk in the prelate’s quarters, with his glasses propped up on his high forehead and his face set with concentration. It is like watching the dying of a brain, the last firings of the last neurons, the last breath of life.
1. See “Progress in the study of Achondroplasia,” Trends in Genetics 11, May 1995.
2. http://www.cornell.edu
3. http://www.fi.muni.cz/masaryk
4. Final letter to Nägeli, 18 November 1873.
The simultaneity of events. A bright afternoon in Mitteleuropa, with the sun slanting on the fields and forests of Moravia and glittering on the concrete and glass of Brno’s suburbs as a coach brings travelers back from the north; a dull day of drizzle in the offshore western island, with rain glistening on the tarmac and running in shimmering rivulets down the windows of the Hewison Fertility Clinic. The two worlds coincide, come together contingently if not spatially, as the phone rings in the reception of the hotel in Brno at the exact moment that passengers troop in from the car park outside.
A distant, almost apologetic voice: “Ben? It’s me.”
What does one say? What does one say that has not been said already so many times that the words have lost their savor? Thus it is merely, and bathetically, hello.
“The pains have begun. The doctor warned me that it’ll still be quite a long time … Anyway, I just thought I’d let you know.”
Then the receiver is returned to its cradle and the worlds separate again like fragments flung apart by a silent and irremediable explosion: the coach passengers are queuing for the lift to take them up to their rooms (only one lift is working, and that can manage only three people at a time); and Jean is replacing the receiver, closing her eyes, breathing deeply and steadily as she has been taught.
Her husband was with her for some of the evening. “Get some sleep,” she told him. “Nothing’s going to happen for hours.” He went home with a display of reluctance. She had a disturbed night, drifting in and out of sleep, jerked to wakefulness by spasms of pain, allowed to doze back to unconsciousness until the next assault.
Occasionally a nurse looked in to see how things were going, smiling in that crisp and distracted manner nurses have.
“All ready for the battle, Ben?” Gravenstein asked as we sat down to breakfast next morning. She surveyed the food with dismay. “Christ, how do these Czechs keep any control over their weight?”
It was another day of sun in central Europe. The dining room was dissected by shafts of light. They cut across the groups at breakfast, spotlighted their shifting alliances and friendships, highlighted their promiscuity of mind and body. “You see that guy from Stanford, and the woman from Manchester?” Gravenstein said confidentially. “Well, they came down in the elevator at exactly the same time. How about that? That is the third day running that it’s happened. And I know for a fact that she has a husband and two children back home.” The woman was blushing at something the Stanford man had said, blushing and looking round as though to spot eavesdroppers. Gravenstein caught her eye and smiled conspiratorially across the room at her.
After breakfast I made a call to London. An anonymous voice told me that she was sure all was going well, but no, I couldn’t speak with Mrs. Miller. Mrs. Miller was in labor.
It was drizzling and gray when Hugo arrived at the clinic that morning. An anemic half-light flooded the city with vague and unsubstantiated promises of better things to come. Jean lay there in the labor room looking old and drawn, her face slick with sweat. She lay in a plain white gown, with a fetal cardiac monitor attached to her swollen belly. A nurse turned a knob on the machine so that Hugo could hear the strange rippling sound of the baby’s heart, like horses galloping toward the scene of some unknown battle far in the electronic distance.