On the strength of that late-afternoon decision, I rode the D over to the main reading room. There I drew up a preliminary reading list. This evening, back home, I sit armed with a stack of texts on two-week loan. I toy with this pointless bookwork as if training for a genuine career change, a way of making a living after my bank account runs out. It wouldn't be too late for such an overhaul. The field is rife with refugees, immigrants from sister disciplines and distant relations. I come across a man who began in physics and earned an undergraduate degree at the ripe age of twenty-two. Global war sidetracked his studies, stripping him of seven years in military science. After the war, he again postponed an already alarmingly delayed career to spend two years retraining in another discipline. Only at the ancient age of thirty-three did he finally enroll in a Ph.D. program in his new field. Four years later, luxuriously older than I am now, he at last filed his dissertation. But a few months before, Francis Crick had also cowritten the Nobel Prize-winning paper revealing the structure of DNA.
I set off, late, to make myself expert, with no pretense of adding to the dizzy swell, simply wanting to swim it myself. I need to know exactly what happened to Stuart Ressler between 1957 and 1983. And only a sense of the tonal variations hidden in self-replicating molecules will lead me there. Having spent my life distributing fact, it was odd to sit this evening in front of reference books, see them take on a different complexion. In my years at the branch, these works were the final destination.
Now their pages seem more like customs clearance prior to departure, the last port before incognita. With Bacon still open in the quote book, I go to the well again: if a woman will be content to begin in uncertainty, she might end by drawing provocative maps indeed.
The scope of the stuff I have set myself is utterly draining. But I feel a certain excitement at the volume and novelty of material I must get through before any of it starts to cohere. A thrill at wondering whether coherence will come in the ten months left to my cash stockpile. I set my scale at the only gauge I have ever had firsthand experience of. For my attack on the life molecule, I fall back on that fine old obsolete mode of sightsinging: historiography. Tonight — the overviews, the outlines. Tomorrow, next week, a month from now — the big leap, that evolutionary giant step dear to saltationists. The jump from information to knowledge.
The Law of Segregation
Dr. Ressler and Cyfer were no spontaneous generation. The more I read of the first twentieth-century science, the clearer the chain of ideas about heredity stretches continuously back through speculation to the start of thought. The scenic overview leaves me nursing a metaphor: the idea of chemical heredity is itself an evolving organism, subject to the laws it. is after. Or better: the field grows as a living population, a varying pool of proposals constantly weeded, altered by selection. Theories duplicate or die by feasibility. Every article floating in the journal-sea on the day Dr. Ressler began life's work was an inheritable idea-gene vying for survival.
I sift the birth records of consecutive generations. Pleasant, to disassemble this random assortment and rebuild it into a body of thought. The principal names return from college biology, supplemented by professional searches from my last ten years. I see for the first time what an undertaking the thing is, how stunning the setbacks and solutions. I begin to view it from the air. Dr. Ressler assisted in the final push to join three islands. Mendel on one, observing that characteristics in intricate organisms were preserved in patterns. Mendeleyev, with his atomic construction set on another. On the third remote tip, Darwin, whose species-mad pageant was a continuous thread, a diversifying alluvial fan. Heredity, chemistry, and evolution, about to be spanned by a simple, magnificent triple-suspension more remarkable than anyone imagined.
For all its necessity after the fact, genetics advanced on the mark as shakily as nature toward fur. Every step of the way is littered with missed discoveries, untransmitted truth. Research, a poor parallel parker, needs several passes. Ressler's distant ancestor is case in point. Mendel toiled obscurely in the peapatch vineyard a hundred years before Cyfer. Devout Augustinian, hungry observer, agriculturalist, meteorologist, philosopher: variants on surgery and singing, Ressler's careers of choice. The father of inheritance, a celibate priest. Celibacy mysteriously preserves itself, passed on by paradoxical means. It should have died out long ago. But I've seen, face to beautiful face, another Augustinian pass celibacy on.
Mendel, a failure as a priest, was put to work as a schoolteacher. Capable but untrained, he twice failed the staff qualifying exam. He began research on the garden pea at thirty-four, devoting ten years to his hobby before promotion to abbot curtailed it. By then, drudgework and rare synthetic ability had led him to one of science's great insights. He delivered his results to an indifferent regional society in 1865 and published them in its proceedings. Distributed to a hundred scientific communities, his conclusions promptly sank like an oil-slicked bird, lost until 1900, when independent researchers reannounced them.
In the span of ten years, Darwin published Origin of Species, Mendel produced his inheritance paper, and Miescher discovered DNA. But it took a century to braid these three. Mendel's undeniable demonstration lay forgotten for thirty-five years, delayed by something dark and surreptitious. The monk's first giant step toward proving Darwin at the mechanical level was another human takedown, this time reducing us from monkey to molecule. Darwin was instant controversy; why total oblivion for the monk? Because of the revulsion produced by mentioning the fecundity of biology in the same breath as inert mathematics.
In Mendel, every characteristic derives from discreet, inheritable factors — his law of segregation, the philosophical implication lost on me until this minute. Seven years' labor in the garden overthrew Aristotle's notion of blended inheritance. Offspring of blond and brunette are not simply sandy. Rather, pairs of independent commands from each parent remain separate in the offspring, passing unchanged to grandchildren. Wildly counterintuitive: all immeasurable diversity deriving from rigid, paired packets. This Augustinian's God was more grossly architectural than the Deists'. For each indivisible characteristic we inherit two paired factors, with an equal chance of getting either half of each parent's paired set. The tune accompanying inheritance's barn dance is aleatoric, more Cage than Brahms. Individuality lies in the die's toss. The language of life is luck.
Mendel rescues living variety by noting that each gene comes in more than one tune. Some alleles for any trait dominate others. The visible result of a gene pair shows only part of the underwriting package. A person's genotype, the internal packet, is not fully revealed by phenotype, the outward form. Blond may lie hidden for generations, erupting again in unknown great-granddaughters.
I picture Dr. Ressler in his first weeks in the lab, wondering about the delicately turned nose of the woman who will nonchalantly waste him. The allele giving her bridge that innocent flip floated detached in either or both her parents. Her Myrna Loy allele might hide a matched half that codes for Irish pug: a half-breed, heterozygous. Or she might need identical alleles from each parent to achieve that cycloid dip — homozygous for profile. The same holds for the hazel eyes. The woman's daughter — I picture him wondering if she has one — might revert to any number of recessive traits: square nose, eyes drab brown. Yet even so prosaic a child could go through life a secret carrier of mother's mystery.
Mendel's Law of Segregation, not to be confused with the Little Rock affair, is itself a shade un-American. You can't tell by looking at a thing what ticks underneath. Two pea plants, both tall in phenotype, might have different genotypes — one homozygous tall and the other heterozygous. Violation of truth in advertising. The language of life is not only laced with luck. It also refuses to say just what it means. The generation of geneticists who rediscovered Mendel devised a way to determine a plant's hidden makeup. If tall allele is dominant over short, then a tall plant might be either Tall/Tall or Tall/Short. Crossbreeding against a known homozygous recessive produces four possible first filials: