Mendel's Dwarf (31 page)

The result is me.

I would like to make a comment on that word
domain
, in the manner of a Bible scholar offering a gloss.
Domain
is, of course, cognate with
demesne
, the land immediately adjacent to a manor house and retained by the owner for his or her own use. It is also a district, a region; the territory or sphere
of
. A further glance through the
New SOED
(1993 edition) gives other, specialist uses: a physics one (
in ferromagnetic material, a region in which all the atoms or ions are orientated in the same direction
), two mathematical ones (
a set with two binary operations defined by postulates stronger than those for a ring but weaker than those for a field
and
the set of values that the independent variable of a function can take
), and a logical one (
the class of all terms bearing a given relation to a given term
); nowhere does it give this particular biochemical one. I almost wrote a definition myself and posted it off to the editor-in-chief at the Clarendon Press—
a more or less functionally distinct region within the tertiary structure of a protein
—and then I thought better of it. I will stick with the felicitous nature of the original definition in the
OED:
“… a heritable property,
LME.”

I might have entitled my story
The Lost Domain
. It has the same sense of remoteness, of abstracted innocence, as Alain-Fournier’s strange masterpiece. But now the domain that was lost is found. Ahab has spotted the whale. Now what?

The audience stirs with admiration, and with the thrill of malice, of—Uncle Gregor would have known the word—
Schadenfreude
. Each and every member thinks: There, but for the grace of God, go I.

I look up at the hanging gardens of academics and aspiring academics, and each looks back at me: close on a thousand eyes. “Of course, treatment of this condition is out of the question.” I change the transparency on the overhead projector and the message is writ large across the screen of the lecture theater. “But there is this:”

5′ … GGC ATC CTC AGC TAC A*GG GTG GGC TTC TTC CTG … 3′

“This is the mutant section of the gene. I have marked the mutated base with an asterisk. The double underline indicates a restriction site for the endonuclease enzyme
SfcI
. This restriction site is not present in the unmutated sequence. This leads us to a very simple method for identifying the mutation.”

I pause while they argue it through in their minds, the ones who are in the trade getting there and whispering to their neighbors to show they have worked it out; the others, those who are just here for the sensation, the bizarre theater, waiting patiently for me to produce the solution like a conjurer returning the torn five-pound note whole and undamaged after showing it to everyone in shreds.

“We have designed PCR primers that will amplify this section. The section includes the entire transmembrane domain and
includes the mutation site. It is one hundred sixty-four base pairs long. As I said, in the normal form it does not present a restriction site for
SfcI
. The mutant form, because of the restriction site created by the transition
²
from G to A, will be digested by
SfcI
into two fragments, respectively fifty-five and one hundred nine base pairs long. Such fragments may easily be resolved by electrophoresis in polyacrimide gels, and may be readily distinguished from the full hundred-and-sixty-four base section. We have shown that all three segments are present in heterozygotes, only the full-length one is present in unaffected controls, and in the three homozygous patients tested so far, only the two fragments are present. Thus we have a straightforward prenatal test.”

The applause rings around the theater. The act is over. Ahab has harpooned the whale.

Or merely spotted it?

Ah, there’s the rub. We’ve found the mistake, we’ve identified the error, but how does that become me? How does the single spelling mistake end up as a total distortion of the whole meaning of the book? Developmental genetics is, in some way, a question of pattern-making. It is also a matter of complexity and of sensitivity to initial conditions, the sure signature of that modish department of mathematics, chaos theory. For, after all, the most noticeable aspect of genetics to the man or woman in the street is not what proteins you can or cannot make, nor even whether you have dark or light skin, or brown or fair hair—the most noticeable aspect of genetics is family resemblance. “Doesn’t he look like his mother?” they say. “Hasn’t she got her father’s nose?” “Isn’t he the spitting image of his grandfather?” You hear it up and down the High Street. They lean over the prams and they wiggle their fingers around and they make
their little genetic judgments. Mother used to assure everyone with an air of desperation that I possessed Great-uncle Harry’s BIG TOE.

All this is fine, but unfortunately there is no gene for the shape of your nose, or the cast of your brow or the shape of your toe. Genes only work through proteins. It is one gene: one protein; not one gene: one big toe, or one gene: one Grandfather Reginald’s face. Each gene carries the message for a particular sequence of amino acids, which in turn makes a protein, and a particular protein may do a number of things, but one thing it does not do, ever, is make a particular shape. Proteins are enzymes (can you metabolize galactose? can you make the pigment melanin?) or they are signalers (grow faster, become a woman, become a man, become a homicidal maniac) or they are workers (contractors, transporters). They are not Father’s nose or Mother’s chin; or Great-uncle Harry’s big toe.

Yet in some sense father’s nose exists; and mother’s chin; and, possibly, Uncle Harry’s big toe. In some way the proteins do conspire together to make patterns, and the patterns are the things that you recognize, and if you change some of the crucial proteins (but not others) the pattern changes. I’ve said it before, haven’t I?—I don’t resemble my mother or my father or my sister. I had that sense of dispossession from the very start. With the dubious exception of my big toe (
pace
, dear Mother), I don’t look like anyone from my family: but I do look like every other achondroplastic in the world. All because of a single-letter spelling mistake in thirty-three billion.

If you want a real research project, if your ambition is to pick up a Nobel Prize or two, if you want to become Lord Histone, O.M., C.H. (forget the bloody knighthood), if you want to be remembered by posterity as Uncle Gregor Mendel is remembered, then

FIND OUT
HOW
.

After the lecture I received the plaudits. A whole congeries of the interested and the fascinated gathered round, almost suffocating me in their enthusiasm to touch. And on the edge, Miss Jean Piercey. I finally encountered her in the corridor outside.

“Hello, Benedict.” She was too shy to bend and plant a kiss on my cheek, but bold enough at least to stay and talk, to make a suggestion, to issue an invitation to lunch. I detached myself from the grasp of others and we went off together, not to the usual pub but to a wine bar somewhere in the King’s Road, all wooden wine racks and chalked notices announcing the latest bargains; somewhere with no associations.

“Well done, Benedict,” she said as we watched each other over (a manner of speaking: of necessity we watched each other
through
) glasses of Poilly Fuissé.

“What did you think of it?”

“I didn’t really understand a thing,” she admitted. “Except that you’ve found your gene.”

Did the irony strike her, the none-too-subtle pun on her name? A month or two earlier and I’d have said not; but now I wasn’t so sure. “Found one, lost one,” I said, and she gave a wry smile. She’d had her hair cut short and she wore more pronounced makeup than before, just a dash of lipstick, but a darker, redder hue. The changes gave her a strange new slant. Phenocopy. In humans, artificial modifications of the phenotype appear to bring with them changes in the person—nature following in the steps of nurture. You are what you want to be. The changes made her look younger and yet wiser. Wisdom has never been the prerogative of the old. No longer a mouse; a vixen, perhaps. In her sharp little jacket (cut tight, cut deep) Miss Jean Piercey shone amid the vinous shadows of the wine bar, and the waiter who brought our plate of tapas glanced surreptitiously
down her front to see what mammary delights might lie there couched in black lace. I felt myself stiffen, not in protective outrage but in plain, animal tumescence.

“I’m becoming quite the flavor of the month,” I told her when the man had taken his lascivious eyes to another table. “Some Mendel organization wants me to go to a conference in Brno, can you imagine? The Mendel Symposium, or something. They’ve got wind of the Harry Wise connection.”

“And you’ll go?”

“Oh, sure, I’ll go. When fame and a free bed calls, I’ll go anywhere. I’ll tell them that Granddad Gottlieb used
his
Mendel connection to run a freak show, and I’m doing just the same. That’ll stir them up.”

She smiled wryly (new expression) and fiddled with the stem of her glass. “You shouldn’t say that kind of thing.”

“Just try and stop me.”

There was a pause. “You know I’m back with Hugo?” She tried to introduce it as a casual aside, as she might have commented on the wine. “On a trial basis, of course. No commitments, no recriminations …”

“No beatings?”

She colored a little. “No beatings. He’s stopped drinking. Drinking had quite a lot to do with it …”

“So you’re happy?”

She shrugged. “I don’t want you to think …” But words still failed her. The real words usually did. Platitudes were still her forte. “I don’t want you to think that you weren’t”—a hasty correction—“
aren’t
very important to me, Ben. But …”

But
. The word has featured large in my life. My own butt is disproportionately big. Maybe that’s it. What was the lie my mother always gave me? “It’s not what you’re like on the outside, it’s what you’re like inside that counts.” I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now. The phenotype wins through, you see. In medieval times the good were always beautiful, the bad ugly.
It’s little different now. Nowadays the ugly are unforgivable, that’s all. “But it wouldn’t have worked, is that what you want to say?”

She shrugged. “It couldn’t have, could it? We’d have been under such pressure all the time.”

I agreed with her. It was perhaps that agreement that broke down her little array of defenses. Her eyes, those disturbing, mismatched jewels, glistened. “My bloody mascara will run,” she said, applying the edge of a tiny lace handkerchief to her lower lids. “I was determined to be tough about this, and look what you’ve made me do.”

“Me?”

She smiled bravely through tears. “Not you. Luck, circumstance, heaven knows what. You always said it was just the toss of a dice.”

“Die,” I corrected her. “Dice is plural.”

“Pedant.”

“You know your foul husband doesn’t suspect who it was? He knows you were having an affair, but he has no idea it was me.”

That, as they say, threw her. “How do you know that?”

“He came around to ask my advice, that’s how. Good old Ben. A shoulder to cry on, if you can get down that far. And no danger, no
danger
at all. He came and asked whether I knew
who
it was and whether I could help him get you back and all manner of stuff. ‘You’re a good friend, Ben. You’ll help us, won’t you?’ That kind of thing.”

Her face almost crumpled. It looked like a paper mask about to collapse in the rain. “Please don’t, Benedict,” she pleaded.

“I won’t. I’ll be well behaved and decent. I’ll listen while you tell me
your
problems, and my problems can just go hang.” Not surprisingly, that brought a certain tension, a little measure of silence. We chewed our tapas. Miss Piercey’s mouth worked delicately on the fragile, moist things, as once it had worked … no. No, I must not pursue that line of fantasy, not yet, at any rate.

“So you know we’ve been going to a counselor, me and
Hugo?” she said when the emotional climate had cooled a little. “Did he tell you that?”

I pleaded ignorance. “Town counselor?”

“Ha, ha. Marriage counselor. They don’t call them that anymore. Partnership counselor or something. It’s been quite an experience.” She looked up brightly, her tears dried. “You know one of the things she said?”

“Get a dog?”

“Have a child. She said I need a child. Can you need something like that? It sounds awfully selfish. Anyway, she said that Hugo being unable to was part of the reason for everything. If you see what I mean.”

“Adoption?”

“She suggested that I get pregnant.” A silence in our
own
segment of the wine bar. Raucous laughter from a group of men in dark suits, escapers from some plate-glass aquarium. Jean fiddling with her tapas as though it just hadn’t been said. “She said that to me, on my own. She said that the”—Jean hesitated with the word, searching for euphemisms—“termination—”