him only once or twice, when he was working alone. My messenger bag suddenly felt heavy with secrets and possible disaster.
“There will be time for your reunion with Clairmont later, Shotgun,” Chris said, hooking the laptop to a projector. There was a wave of appreciative laughter. “Lights please, Beaker.”
The laughter quieted as the lights dimmed. Chris’s research team leaned forward to see what he had projected on the whiteboard. Black-and-white bars marched across the top of the page, and the overflow was arranged underneath. Each bar—or ideogram, as Matthew had explained to me last night— represented a chromosome.
“This semester we have an all-new research project.” Chris leaned against the whiteboard, his dark skin and white lab coat making him look like another ideogram on the display. “Here’s our subject. Who wants to tell me what it is?”
“Is it alive or dead?” a cool female voice asked.
“Good question, Scully.” Chris grinned.
“Why do you ask?” Matthew looked at the student sharply. Scully squirmed.
“Because,” she explained, “if he’s deceased—oh, the subject is male, by the way—the cause of death might have a genetic component.”
The graduate students, eager to prove their worth, started tossing out rare and deadly genetic disorders faster than they could record them on their laptops.
“All right, all right.” Chris held up his hand. “Our zoo has no more room for zebras. Back to basics, please.”
Matthew’s eyes danced with amusement. When I looked at him in confusion, he explained. “Students tend to go for exotic explanations rather than the more obvious ones—like thinking a patient has SARS rather than a common cold. We call them ‘zebras,’ because they’re hearing hoofbeats and concluding zebras rather than horses.”
“Thanks.” Between the nicknames and the wildlife, I was understandably disoriented.
“Stop trying to impress one another and look at the screen. What do you see?” Chris said, calling a halt to the escalating competition.
“It’s male,” said a weedy-looking young man in a bow tie, who was using a traditional laboratory notebook rather than a computer. Shotgun and Beaker rolled their eyes at each other and shook their heads.
“Scully already deduced that.” Chris looked at them impatiently. He snapped his fingers. “Do not
embarrass me in front of Oxford University, or you will all lift weights with me for the entire month of September.”
Everybody groaned. Chris’s level of physical fitness was legendary, as was his habit of wearing his old Harvard football jersey whenever Yale had a game. He was the only professor who was publicly, and routinely, booed in class.
“Whatever he is, he’s not human,” Jonathan said. “He has twenty-four chromosome pairs.”
Chris looked down at his watch. “Four and a half minutes. Two minutes longer than I thought it would take, but much quicker than Professor Clairmont expected.”
“Touché, Professor Roberts,” Matthew said mildly. Chris’s team slid glances in Matthew’s direction, still trying to figure out what an Oxford professor was doing in a Yale research lab.
“Wait a minute. Rice has twenty-four chromosomes. We’re studying rice?” asked a young woman I’d seen dining at Branford College.
“Of course we’re not studying rice,” Chris said with exasperation. “Since when did rice have a sex, Hazmat?” She must be the owner of the specially labeled sink.
“Chimps?” The young man who offered up this suggestion was handsome, in a studious sort of way, with his blue oxford shirt and wavy brown hair.
Chris circled one of the ideograms at the top of the display with a red Magic Marker. “Does that look like chromosome 2A for a chimp?”
“No,” the young man replied, crestfallen. “The upper arm is too long. That looks like human chromosome 2.”
“It is human chromosome 2.” Chris erased his red mark and started to number the ideograms.
When he got to the twenty-fourth, he circled it. “This is what we’ll be focusing on this semester.
Chromosome 24, known henceforward as CC so that the research team studying genetically modified rice over in Osborn doesn’t get the heebie-jeebies. We have a lot of work to do. The DNA has been sequenced, but very few gene functions have been identified.”
“How many base pairs?” Shotgun asked.
“Somewhere in the neighborhood of forty million,” replied Chris.
“Thank God,” Shotgun murmured, looking straight at Matthew. It sounded like an awful lot to me, but I was glad he was pleased.
“What does CC stand for?” asked a petite Asian woman.
“Before I answer that, I want to remind you that every person here has given Tina a signed nondisclosure agreement,” Chris said.
“Are we working with something that will result in a patent?” A graduate student rubbed his hands together. “Excellent.”