The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,93

grandmother. The tension between my father and Jagu has been building, thickening, for a while: Jagu’s behavior at home has been particularly disruptive in the last few weeks—and this episode seems to have pushed my father beyond some edge. His face is hot with embarrassment. The fragile varnish of class and normalcy that he has struggled so hard to seal is being cracked open, and the secret life of his family is pouring out through the fissures. Now the neighbors know of Jagu’s madness, of his confabulations. My father has been shamed in their eyes: he is cheap, mean, hard-hearted, foolish, unable to control his brother. Or worse: defiled by a mental illness that runs in his family.

He walks into Jagu’s room and yanks him bodily off the bed. Jagu wails desolately, like a child who is being punished for a transgression that he does not understand. My father is livid, glowing with anger, dangerous. He shoves Jagu across the room. It is an inconceivable act of violence for him; he has never lifted a finger at home. My sister runs upstairs to hide. My mother is in the kitchen, crying. I watch the scene rise to its ugly crescendo from behind the living room curtains, as if watching a film in slow motion.

And then my grandmother emerges from her room, glowering like a she-wolf. She is screaming at my father, doubling-down on his violence. Her eyes are alight like coals, her tongue forked with fire. Don’t you dare touch him.

“Get out,” she urges Jagu, who retreats quickly behind her.

I have never seen her more formidable. Her Bengali furls backward, like a fuse, toward its village origins. I can make out some words, thick with accent and idiom, sent out like airborne missiles: womb, wash, taint. When I piece the sentence together, its poison is remarkable: If you hit him, I will wash my womb with water to clean your taint. I will wash my womb, she says.

My father is also frothing with tears now. His head hangs heavily. He seems infinitely tired. Wash it, he says under his breath, pleadingly. Wash it, clean it, wash it.

* * *

I. This begs the question of how the first asymmetric organisms appeared in the natural world. We do not know, and perhaps we never will. Somewhere in evolutionary history, an organism evolved to separate the functions of one part of its body from another. Perhaps one end faced a rock, while the other faced the ocean. A lucky mutant was born with the miraculous ability to localize a protein to the mouth end, and not the foot end.Discriminating mouth from foot gave that mutant a selective advantage: each asymmetric part could be further specialized for its particular task, resulting in an organism more suited to its environment. Our heads and tails are the fortunate descendants of that evolutionary innovation.

II. The death-defying function of BCL2 was also discovered by David Vaux and Suzanne Cory in Australia.

PART THREE

* * *

“THE DREAMS OF GENETICISTS”

Sequencing and Cloning of Genes

(1970–2001)

Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.

—Sydney Brenner

If we are right . . . it is possible to induce predictable and hereditary changes in cells. This is something that has long been the dream of geneticists.

—Oswald T. Avery

“Crossing Over”

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 2, scene 2

In the winter of 1968, Paul Berg returned to Stanford after an eleven-month sabbatical at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. Berg was forty-one years old. Built powerfully, like an athlete, he had a manner of walking with his shoulders rolling in front of him. He had a remnant trace of his Brooklyn childhood in his habits—the way, for instance, he might raise his hand and begin his sentence with the word look when provoked by a scientific argument. He admired artists, especially painters, and especially the abstract expressionists: Pollock and Diebenkorn, Newman and Frankenthaler. He was entranced by their transmutation of old vocabularies into new ones, their ability to repurpose essential elements from the tool kit of abstraction—light, lines, forms—to create giant canvases pulsing with extraordinary life.

A biochemist by training, Berg had studied with Arthur Kornberg at Washington University in St. Louis and moved with Kornberg to set up the new department of biochemistry at Stanford. Berg had