The DNA of You and Me Read online

  Dedication

  To Larry, Alex, and Natasha

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One: The Wrong Genes Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two: A Bridge Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Three: Recombination Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Four: Chimera Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part Five: The Issue of Memory Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  The Wrong Genes

  Chapter 1

  Smell is an illusion, my father used to tell me: invisible molecules in the air converted by my brain into cinnamon, cut grass, burning wood. Heat was a measure of receptors in my skin, and brown was not brown but a combination of light waves captured by cones in my eyes. The world as I knew it, as I felt it to be, was the result of my own personal experience, and so it was up to me to make the best of my understanding of it.

  If it is true that things are what you make of them, it can be argued that it was I who got in the way of Aeden’s research, his life, and not the other way around. After all, he had been in the lab for three years when I first set foot there. Three years is a grain of sand in a scientist’s life, but when you’ve been working in someone else’s lab for that long you begin to hunger, irrationally, for a breakthrough in your work: your modest but unquestionable contribution to human knowledge.

  Tomorrow I will be receiving an award—an important one. This award marks in many ways the true beginning of my career, and a point of no return in my life, the one I sometimes fear will have me forever looking back. At least that is how it feels now, and how it felt then, when I first got the news last month.

  Giovanna, a senior postdoc in my laboratory, was in my office. It was our last meeting before her analysis of the strain of olfactory-impaired mice she engineered. The phone on my desk was ringing. It had been ringing for a while. Giovanna raised her head from the X-ray film on her lap and looked at me with a questioning smile. The room, though fully lit, felt as dim as the inside of a cave. I stood up from the desk and walked around her, over to the window, and raised the blinds. The light pouring through the glass stung my eyes momentarily, until I was able to see it: the Hudson flowing like melted steel in the distance.

  “You know what they’re saying out there about you?” Giovanna said.

  “No.” I turned from the window, not wanting to comment.

  Her eyes followed me across the room, back to my chair. On my desk the phone was blinking. “They’re saying that it could be you this year. That’s what people are saying, Emily.”

  I stretched my arm across the desk. Reluctantly Giovanna deposited her film in my hand. “Hazy,” I said, holding it between us like a veil. “The bands of DNA are hardly distinguishable from background noise. You’ll need to design a better probe, Giovanna.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t hear what I just said.”

  “And if it is me,” I said. “What about it?” The results were unambiguously clear, despite the background noise. All the genes in the cocktail had been integrated into the genome of her mice. As usual, I was being overly cautious.

  “Don’t pretend that you don’t care, Emily. I know you care. You know you care.”

  “How old are they?” I asked.

  “Seriously?” Giovanna said. Her hand was casually resting on the sphere of her belly. “Should I remind you that if you win this award you could go on to receive the Nobel Prize?”

  “I really couldn’t care less about the award nomination,” I said. “Now tell me, are your mice old enough to analyze?”

  Giovanna gave me one of her sidelong looks of resignation and drew out a spreadsheet from her marble notebook. That must have been when the phone began to ring again. Not the landline on my desk, but the one inside the raincoat draped over my chair. It was actually barking, a feature I much prefer to any other kind of ringtone. I let it bark. Giovanna raised her head from her spreadsheet and stared at me. I looked away from her, back at the film, and would have probably let the phone go on barking had it not been for her pregnant frame suddenly looming over me.

  “If you don’t answer that, I will,” she said.

  I patted the raincoat pockets and found the phone and raised it to an ear. I knew it was the call I’d been looking forward to and dreading in equal measure for the last ten years. Even saying hello into the receiver I found it hard to suppress the tremor in my voice.

  “Dr. Apell?” It was a woman’s voice, her tone exceedingly polite.

  “Yes. Speaking.”

  “Good morning, Dr. Apell. You have been selected to receive the Lasker Award in basic medical research for your contribution to neuroscience. The ceremony will be held in September . . .”

  After the call ended I just sat there, staring at the film on my desk. The bands of DNA were swaying like ships in a storm. I made a fist with my left hand. The other hand was still holding on to the phone.

  “What’s wrong?” Giovanna asked me.

  “That was the Lasker Foundation.”

  “Oh my God.” She cupped her nose. “Oh. My. God.”

  I raised a hand to stop her from yelling but she already was, yelling and rushing out of the office with the wobbling gait I sometimes envy her for, suspecting as I do that I will never have children.

  A moment later there was a piercing whistle outside my door, and after a while the sound of people flooding the hallway. That was when I stood up from my desk and left the room. On my way to the exit doors at the end of the hallway there was a sea of feet I was somehow able to weave my way through without tripping into anyone. When I raised my eyes from the floor I could see faces from distant labs moving toward mine. I flung the doors open, turned into the nearest elevator, and dove inside it, catching in the mirror, before the doors closed behind me, the department secretary’s perplexed smile, and an unopened bottle of champagne in her hand.

  Out on the street a muted rain was beating the pavement. I pushed through the revolving doors of the building, past the institute’s blue awning, and walked for several blocks without any particular aim. It took me a while to realize I had left my raincoat behind in the office and was soaked through, a while longer to recognize that I’d been walking east all along, toward the old campus.

  At the university entrance a man in a khaki uniform eyed me suspiciously from the guard booth. I was prepared to invent some story about having an appointment with Justin McKinnon, but he made no move to stop me from going through the gates.

  Climbing the stairs up to the floor of the lab, I heard the sound of drilling, and smelled burnt rubber. The hallway, when I reached the top of the stairs, was hazed in dust, and looked to be considerably narrower than I remembered it. In the main room, from which all the noise seemed to be coming, the workbenches had been gutted. In their place small cubicles were being erected, approximately six cubicles per bay, the combined areas of which seemed someh
ow to fall short of the original space—as if it had shrunk with time. Even the aisle that cut across the room was significantly shorter in real life than the infinitely long and protracted one of my memory. I inched farther down the hallway, toward Justin’s office.

  The mckinnon laboratory plaque was still there, fixed to the door with nails, but the frosted pane that had set Justin’s door apart was coated in grime. I stood outside, thinking. Or rather, trying to make up my mind. I hadn’t been back to the lab in nearly a decade; had avoided the campus, and running into Justin, like the plague. But now that I was there I would at least say hello to him and mention the news, which he would find out about sooner or later. I knocked on the pane and waited. No one answered. I rubbed an opening across the grime with the heel of my hand and was pressing my face to the glass, trying in vain to see through it, when a man opened the door from inside.

  He was young, about thirty or so, with tousled red hair, and casually dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. The anteroom behind him was crammed with lab equipment, and sitting at the desk where Justin’s secretary had sat was a young woman, her dark hair pinned to the crown of her head, her face leaning into a microscope. The little girl beside her was building a tower out of biological slides. She looked at me and I realized she was the daughter of the man standing in front of me, and that they were a family.

  “Is Justin here?” I asked.

  “Justin?” the young man said.

  “Isn’t this the McKinnon Lab?”

  “Not anymore.” He tightened his grip on the door handle. “I’m the new lab head.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, though I probably did, at that point, understand.

  “Justin McKinnon closed up shop last month.”

  “Justin retired?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  I folded my arms across my waterlogged dress, allowing the information to sink in. Justin retired at age fifty. Justin, whose life had revolved around the lab. What would he do with himself for the next twenty or thirty years, or however long he had to live? A chill was starting to seep into my bones.

  “May I ask who you are?” the young man asked me.

  The little girl’s glass tower had collapsed. “Emily,” I offered. “Emily Apell.”

  “Apell?” he said, looking closely at me. I held his gaze unblinkingly, and saw a spark of awareness register behind his clouded smile. “The same Apell who discovered that family of genes?” He snapped his fingers in the air. “What are they called?”

  “Pathfinders,” I said.

  “Yes.” He held out his hand to mine and I shook it. “Pathfinders,” he repeated, looking both impressed and disoriented.

  The woman behind him had risen from her chair. “Come inside and have some tea with us. You look like you’re freezing to death.”

  The young man was holding the door wide open for me to step inside. The two of them were smiling at me from ear to ear. I wondered if they knew about the award, but of course they didn’t. It would take several weeks for the Lasker winners to be announced, my name broadcast nationwide, on radio and television and the web. Their smiles, I was grateful to realize, had nothing to do with the award, and all to do with the discovery itself.

  The rest of that morning I sat in the campus cafeteria with a cup of coffee, watching the thinning rain descend upon the East River, and it’s where I’ve been coming to since, for nearly a month now. Especially with the developments of recent days, and the impending awards ceremony, I often find myself wanting to be alone, in a place where no one will know or remember me. After two o’clock in the afternoon there’s hardly anyone here. I sit at a table by a window and stare out across the glass for hours, allowing my thoughts to come and go. But today I begin trying to put those thoughts together and in order, as if the past were some very long and misrouted nerve ending whose folds and kinks I’m untangling, straightening out so that it might find its proper path, the one it strayed from long ago.

  I do it for Aeden. Mainly, though, I do it for me.

  Chapter 2

  That crisp September morning when I first arrived in the lab, fresh from graduate school, was twelve years ago now.

  Justin led me past the trafficked hallway into a cavernous room with an unbroken view of the Queensboro Bridge and bays running the length of a sun-doused aisle like rows in an airplane. In every bay white-coated men and women around my age were absorbed in some task or other—or not absorbed at all. Some of them looked up to watch me move past them along the aisle in my outmoded jeans and tangerine sweater and a pair of knee-high boots whose flat soles, I realized with a knot in my stomach, only accentuated my meager height.

  I steadied my dangling laptop on a hip bone and tried to make eye contact with everyone, and to smile, stopping wherever Justin stopped and opening my hand to whomever he saw fit to introduce me to: David Hobbs, Steven Kane, Eduardo Campos, Haru Oshiro, Mary Goodman, Wendy Nguyen . . . I matched their names to those in the bylines of the research papers from the lab that I’d read, and when memory failed me I attempted to figure out their status in the lab according to their appearance, guessing the fresh-faced people to be graduate students and the others, those with the complicated smiles and lines indented on their foreheads, to be the postdocs whose surnames had headed the grander papers.

  By the time we’d reached the final stretch of the room I was perspiring from the effort of having to smile at people I didn’t know, and uncomfortably aware of the buttery odor exuding from my scalp. I was relieved to make out the empty bay at the end of the room where I would be sitting: meant for only one person, instead of the usual two. We were about to reach it when Justin stopped in his tracks in front of the neighboring bay. A tall man stood there, his shoulders slouched, pouring DNA into the wells of a gel. We were standing only inches away from him, but it wasn’t until Justin cleared his throat that he acknowledged us, and even then he was slow to react, slow to rise to his full height and turn his eyes to us.

  “This is Emily Apell,” Justin told him. “Your new neighbor.”

  Aeden brushed a hand against his faded jeans and, looking at me, allowing just enough time for his eyes to lock with mine in a kind of forced welcoming, shook my hand. “Aeden Doherty. Nice meeting you, Emily.” Without another word he retook his multichannel pipette and went back to filling the wells of his gel.

  Behind him, framed against the sunlit windowpane of their shared bay, a pretty brunette was sitting at a desk with a hardcover notebook opened across her lap. Her face was steadied on mine but when I made a point of meeting her eyes she stared down, at the notebook.

  “Allegra Meltzer,” Justin said, and to Allegra: “Allegra, this is Emily.”

  Allegra raised her large green eyes to mine, nodded, and looked back down.

  It wasn’t exactly a welcome party, and though neither Doherty nor Meltzer rang a bell, I imagined they were senior postdocs, with projects that were going somewhere, not interested in a newcomer like me. Yet I kept hoping, after Justin had seen me to my bay and rushed off saying he needed to be somewhere, that they would approach me to inquire what I was doing in the lab, and maybe even ask me to join them for lunch. Why not?

  As a graduate student in Champaign, Illinois, I had identified three new members of a well-known family of genes involved in anticancer drug resistance, a study that had led to a respectable publication in a specialized journal for cancer research. It wasn’t the sort of journal one might find in an airport terminal, on the shelves of Hudson News: not Scientific American, or the high-profile Science or Nature, where people in Justin’s lab usually published their work. But then, I wasn’t the kind of hands-on scientist they were, the kind of scientist one encountered in most labs back then. I was a bioinformatician. I used computers to analyze and interpret the biology encoded in DNA, and liked to think of myself as a sort of Watson-and-Crick of the new millennium.

  Though what I wanted, what I was really looking for, I suppose, was to feel that I was one of them, on
e of the confident scientists in Justin’s flashy lab, instead of the person in the small and obscure research lab I’d been a week ago.

  And so when Aeden appeared at the foot of my bay sometime around noon and asked me if I’d had anything to eat, I immediately stood up from my desk, as if I’d been expecting him.

  Five minutes later we were headed along a path of ivory slabs bordered by tall research buildings and young maples, toward the cafeteria. The leaves of the trees were still green, despite it being late September and technically fall. The sky above was cloudless and deep blue, the air brisk and smooth. Aeden was staring fixedly ahead.

  There was a complicated intensity about his face, a general detachment in his manner with me that made me feel strangely at a loss. I noticed the timer clipped to his pullover and wondered if he’d left an experiment running in the lab.

  We were nearing the wide quadrangle of buildings at the end of the path when I recalled seeing Doherty and Meltzer in two very technical and low-profile papers from the lab, which I had followed with difficulty, not having any hands-on experience manipulating genes. “I read your two papers,” I said. “I think they’re awesome.”

  Aeden shot me a bloodless look. “Oh, please,” he said, matter-of-factly. I could smell nicotine on his breath. “It’s just a load of technical crap.”

  “The kind everyone in the field should be familiar with,” I said sincerely.

  “How do you like it here?” he asked me, changing the subject.

  “The campus?”

  “New York.”

  “I just got here. This morning, actually.”

  He looked at me closely, holding me in his light gray eyes for a long moment, as though he were seeing me for the first time. “You came straight to the lab?”

  I searched his face for the unfavorable opinion his even tone had not conveyed, and did not find it, or any other opinion. Unlike most people I’d met, he wasn’t judging me. “I was anxious to get to work,” I said, then, wanting to explain myself further, “The DNA database is the reason I came here, to this lab.”