He leans back in his chair and drains his glass. And I notice, for the first time, how thin his arms are, thin and nearly cylindrical, right up to the shoulders. Like iron bars. Phran brought him a plate of satay and sliced pineapple and he hasn’t touched it. When we had our lunch together the other day he must have ordered six dishes and taken three bites of each. A man who runs on some other energy source.
Tell him about the science, Julie-nah says. Lying back, a forearm over her eyes, as if it’s midday. I love it when you talk about the science.
no one remember old Marcus Garvey no no one remember
I’ll give you the short version, he says. Skin darkens because of melanin production, right? Melanogenesis, that’s what it’s called. A hormone, melanocyte-stimulating hormone, binds with the receptors in the melanocytes in the epidermis. This sends a signal to the genetic material in the melanocytes — a signaling cascade. The cascade sets off the production of eumelanin — that’s the good stuff. The black and brown stuff. So the crux of the matter is, how do you create melanogenesis on its own? At first I thought it was simply a matter of going back and reproducing the MSH. But that didn’t work. The half-life is too short; inject it and it just disappears into the bloodstream. I needed a new peptide. A stable analogue, all the way from scratch, that would bind with the melanocyte and run through the whole process in just the same way. Every enzyme had to be right. Not just the melanocortin 1 receptor; all the melanogenesis genes — tyrosinase, TYRP1, and DCT. It was enough to make any biochemist tear his hair out.
Well, what else did I have to do, in the middle of the winter, in Rochester? I synthesized peptides, one after the other. After my labwork, after all my other responsibilities, I just commandeered the centrifuge and sat there till two or three in the morning. It took six months, and then I got it. [Nle4, D-Phe7]-α-MSH. My baby. Melanoxetine. The perfect biomimic. Hundreds of times more potent than natural MSH, and utterly stable as a pharmacologic compound. The first, the only, artificial agent to induce melanogenesis. You can look it up; the patent’s been pending for nearly a decade.
carried us away in captivity required of us a song how can we sing King Alpha’s
One day he’s going to win the Nobel Prize for it, Martin intones.
I showed it to my lab supervisor, Silpa says, and this is what he said: either you’ve just invented the world’s best tanning drug, or a brand-new form of skin cancer. Or both. Refused to have anything to do with it. So I bought my own mice. Set up my own lab, in the kitchen of my apartment. It took another year, a full set of trials, to prove noncarcinogeneity. No anchorage-independent clonogenic cell growth. No metastatic tendencies at all. Then, I imagined, it would be easy. I submitted a paper to JAMA. No luck there. Submitted to The New England Journal of Medicine. The reviewer wrote back, This drug has no clinical application outside of questionable and theoretical cosmetic procedures. No one would willingly consent to have his skin darkened permanently.
So where was I, then? With no published results, no biomed corporation would touch it. I could file patents all I wanted. I was such a true believer! It would make you cry. All around me, it seemed, people were getting rich. It was the Eighties! Nobody was content with a mere clinical practice anymore. All you had to do was put your hand on the magic compound and you would sprout golden wings and fly off to Cambridge. Or Palo Alto. Call it a tanning supplement, my friends told me. I could have just hired some Indian jerks to synthesize it on the fly and sold it over the Internet. But that wasn’t the way! I kept thinking, someday people are going to want the real thing. In this way I’m still a Marxist. Formally speaking. I don’t believe in incremental change. In working within the system. It’s cost me tremendously. But now the result is almost here. It is here. You people are the result. We have only the one corner left to turn.
follow the shadows for rescue but as the day grows old I know the sun
What do we know about plastic surgery? he asks, rhetorically, looking around at us. What’s the consensus of the field? It’s all about taking away. Subtract, subtract, subtract. Does a sculptor start with a block of marble and glue little bits on? What is this neoclassical beauty all the doctors talk about? The least possible extrusion. Slenderness. A level plane. A level playing field. Of course, it all begins with the Jewish nose. In the Western world, at least. The nose that looks like a sail. A hatchet. Shylock’s nose. An aggressive nose, a nose that intrudes, a nose that takes. So what do you do? Cut it down to size. Reduce the curvature. Thin out the alar base. Do you know how many careers, how many lifetimes, have been spent figuring out how to shave a few millimeters off the human nose? Then take some doctor from the Third World, with an unpronounceable name, with his article on “Expansion of the Nostrils and Widening of the Cura to Reproduce African-Identified Features.” Using the first synthetic cartilage, for God’s sake! Why do you think it took so long for anyone to admit it was possible to do female-to-male sex changes? No one wanted to make a penis. No one wants to make anything. Why is that?
Babylon throne gone down gone down oh Babylon throne gone down
Because, Julie-nah says, sitting up now, if you make it, it’s not natural. It’s not augmented. It’s brand spanking new.
Correct. Enlarge a breast, and you have a woman with larger breasts. Give a young girl a rhinoplasty, and she’s just the same Sarah or Hee-jin she always imagined herself to be. Arguably, you can extend the same logic even to the original sex change. A man minus a penis is a woman. But clearly there’s a double standard at work. An enormous blind spot. In theory, all my techniques could have been developed thirty years ago. But we’re not yet at the point of accepting what the science can actually do. Why? Because our trajectories of beauty still only point one way.
The Roman nose, Julie-nah says, wide-eyed.
I and I do not expect to be justified by the laws of men
The classical ideal. The Aphrodite of Melos. It’s in the literature; it’s the foundation of plastic surgery. Look in the textbooks. Better yet, look in the museums. That translucent marble surface, the smoothness, the tight curves. That’s what whiteness means. Horaios, do you know that word? The Hellenistic Greek term for beautiful. The same etymology as hour. Meaning of the moment, or ripe. But the ripeness we’re talking about is something else.
Stillness, Julie-nah says eagerly, sitting up in her chair. Something frozen in time. Not actual ripeness, not the ripeness of a plum, or an actual teenager, say, but ripeness as a disappearing point on the horizon. Not actual beauty, more like the tomb of beauty. What do you think Botox is all about? All those whiteness creams, all those pale waif-models? It’s the death glow. The corpse pose. It’s been in the literature for thirty years. It’s not news.
Which is why RRS is going to be so difficult to accept, Martin says. It’s a fundamental reordering of the field. What if anything you wanted were possible? What if there were no trajectories, only personal choice? We’re going to have to hit this point hard when we go out as ambassadors.