Mendel's Dwarf (11 page)

Mendel muttered and fussed outside, kicking mud off against a stone. “You don’t, you know,” he said.

“Don’t what?”

“In man. You don’t have gradations of height. Not in this sense.”

“What are you talking about? I’m taller than you by …” Bratranek drew himself up as though to measure the matter. “A few inches at any rate. And Pavel …”

“Dwarfs, you fool, not you and me. Circus dwarfs.” Mendel pushed past him through the door. “Come. I’ll show you.”

“You’re keeping circus dwarfs in your room?”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

They went up the back stairs, Mendel in his socks, Bratranek clumping up behind in muddy shoes. “You’ve got a hole in your heel,” Bratranek said, but Mendel ignored him. He was standing in front of the door to his room, searching for his key among the folds of his soutane. When he discovered it, he gave a small grunt of satisfaction, as though finding it were not always the case. As the door opened, a smell assaulted Bratranek, the warm and fusty smell of acetamide. “Those mice. No wonder the abbot complained.”

“They don’t smell as bad as he does.”

The room was spacious but full, full of desk and papers, a trunk, two upright chairs, a table with a brass microscope on it and a box of microscope slides, a wardrobe, a row of old and battered boots against the skirting board, some seedlings in a tray, and, beneath the window, a
row
of five wooden cages. Sawdust was strewn on the floor in front of them. The mice scrabbled at the wire grilles with tiny, exact claws. Behind the noise of their scrabbling, there was another sound, a small crying like the sound of nestling birds. Mendel crouched down in front of the cages.

“It’s exactly the same,” he said, poking his finger at one of the small noses. “I’ve just completed the first generation from the hybrids. It’s exactly the same. I crossed an albino mouse with a dark brown one, and all the offspring were dark brown. Three males and four females. From them I made three pairs of brother with sister.” He looked around. “That was six weeks ago. These three cages.” He pointed. Mice scrabbled. Bratranek bent down to look. In the backs of the cages the mothers could been seen on their nests. Beneath two of them, small, pinkish blots writhed and squealed. “A total of nineteen pups,” Mendel explained. “Their hair is just appearing, so you can tell already. The hybrid parents were all brown, but some of the young are albino. Just as
with the peas. The albino disappears in the hybrids, but comes out in the next generation, just as with the peas. There are five albinos and fourteen brown. Of course it isn’t a large enough sample yet. Not like the peas. But the ratio is two and four-fifths to one. Just the same as the peas, the same three-to-one ratio. It really is the most basic mathematics.”

“But what does all this mean?”

“It means just what you asked. It means mice are no different. It means animals are no different. It means man is no different.”

My doctorate took me the statutory three years and created something of a sensation. Not much, but something. “The Effect of Induced Point Mutations in the Homeobox Gene
HOX7
in the Mouse,
Mus Musculus
.” I published a number of subsidiary papers in the course of the work, and I had one semester at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore as a graduate student. I heard Nirenberg lecture on the genetic code, and visited the Salk Institute, where Holley had first isolated transfer RNA (1 milligram from 90 kilograms of yeast, can you imagine that?), and argued with Watson at Cold Spring Harbor over the moral implications of recombinant DNA techniques. “Hey, this little guy’s something else,” I heard someone say of me. With my doctorate came the offer of a post at the Royal Institute for Genetics in London. A job. A salary. Lecturer in Molecular Genetics.

1
. Abbott et al.,
Johns Hopkins Medical Journal
134, 1974.

2
. E.g., T. A. Knight and J. Goss in England.

3
. In Mendel’s own terminology this would be the
first
hybrid generation, although standard practice in Mendelian genetics is to call it the
second
filial or hybrid generation.

T
he Royal Institute for Genetics was opened as the Galton Institute for Plant and Animal Breeding. It is housed in one of those redbrick piles in Kensington that serve indifferently as museums, hospitals, Anglo-Catholic churches, or university colleges—buildings reeking with that nineteenth-century neogothic conviction that almost everything has been done and proved, and anything missing is just around the corner and will be pretty straightforward when
you
come to it.

The Institute is strung out uneasily between the old and the new, between tradition and innovation, between the imperial past and an empirical present. On the one hand there is the old building with its ogive windows and gothic vaulting and statues of long-dead scientists in niches like sex maniacs skulking in the shadows; on the other hand, very much on the other hand, accessible through the kind of elevated plastic walkway that you find in airports, gleaming and humming like a machine, are the Gordon Hewison Laboratories, a cathedral of the new age where priests and scribes decipher and transcribe the texts, and find damnation written there just as clearly as they ever did in medieval times

I followed the director, James Histone, into this other world.
The lighting was even and pitiless. The air had the smooth texture of dust-filtering and sterility. “Relax, relax,” he kept saying to people. He wore a shiny gray suit and a spotted bow tie, and he beamed on everything with the eternal optimism of a television talk-show host. “Just an informal visit. Take no notice.” But of course people did take notice. They looked up from their benches as we passed by, and they stared for that fraction of a second that I can time so exactly. Some smiled nervously. One or two nodded as though in recognition. You notice everything, that’s the trouble: every wince, every grimace, every dilation of every pupil. You see them looking when your back is turned; you hear them talking when you are out of earshot; you know what they are thinking. In the street it is the fascination of the freak show, of the monster, of the walking gargoyle; in the laboratories, within the temple of molecular biology, it is the thrill of seeing a manifestation of the texts that they read with such minute attention, as though a beast from the Apocalypse were to walk through the scriptorium of a medieval monastery and by his existence confirm the truth of everything that the monks had just transcribed.

In the common room, future colleagues stooped to shake hands. The women looked motherly and uneasy; the men exuded a dreadful, forced bonhomie. “Good to see you, Ben. Good to have you with us.” Patricia Primer (red hair, freckles) explained her work on supercoiling and overwinding, demonstrating the processes with twists of her supple fingers that evoked a frisson of delight in poor old Benedict the diminutive goat; Ochre Codon (loose, voluptuous) gazed earnestly down at me and talked about overlapping genes in adenovirus; Vincent Vector (extinct acne craters and oily hair) explained a system for winning the football pools using the linkage analysis computer program. “I’m sure you’ll all get on fine, just fine,” the director said. His conversation was loaded with random repeats. “You’ll have a fine team,” he assured me when we were back in his office. “A fine, dedicated team. I predict great things, great things …”

His desk bore a shiny silver model of one turn of DNA, a shining spiral staircase that led upward like Jacob’s ladder toward an equivocal paradise. A silver plaque at the foot announced that he had received the Biological Institute of Georgia Annual Recognition for Scientific Endeavor or some such. On the walls there were framed photographs of the man himself with Crick, with Nirenberg, with Sanger. His main topic of conversation was money. He talked about supply and demand, production utilities and patents. “We’re in the marketplace now,” he kept saying. “There are no free meals.”

I interrupted him: “There is just one thing. I’m rather keen on my
own
research project. I’m confident I can get the funding for it …”

“Your
own
project?”

“The identification of the gene for achondroplasia.”

There was a silence. The director watched me through the intricate latticework of the DNA molecule. “Achondroplasia,” he repeated. “Of course. It’s a dominant, isn’t it?”

“Certainly.”

“One hundred percent penetrance.”

“Regrettably.”

His smile, at first larded with sympathy, metamorphosed. It became a careful, complex thing—a look of disappointment, a subtle blend of understanding and regret, a mute acknowledgment that the world is a bitter place and there is no alternative but to plow one’s furrow as best one can. “There’s no money in dominants,” he said sorrowfully. “Not unless they’re late-onset. No money, no future.”

“But I can get funding. That’s the one advantage being … like I am. There are lots of organizations interested. The Little People of America, groups like that. When they see me coming they reach for their covenant forms …”

He looked skeptical. “Recessives, that’s the name of the game. Recessives play on people’s anxieties. They can spend a
whole lifetime worrying whether they’re carriers, and then we come along and offer them a test. Recessives and X-linked. Look what they’re doing with fragile-X nowadays. And cystic fibrosis. Just imagine the commercial possibilities if you can design and patent a probe for something like Gaucher’s disease …”

Gaucher’s disease has a high incidence among Ashkenazi Jews—Ashkenazi Jews control the world’s banking and commercial system (vide
Mein Kampf
)—ergo a test for Gaucher’s disease will earn lots of money.

“You still can’t
treat
any of them,” I pointed out.

He opened his hands as though to display the obvious. “You give the parents the right to decide whether to terminate.” And then his gesture metamorphosed into one of helplessness. “But with achondroplasia … ninety percent of cases are sporadic, aren’t they? New mutations. I mean, your own parents …?”

“Both normal.”

“There you are.” He spread plausible hands once more. “What’s the point? Who’ll buy a thing like that?”

“People want to
know
. We”—I hated the collective pronoun—“
we
want to know our enemy.”

He nodded. “I understand your interest, Ben. Don’t think I don’t. But the world has moved on from those days when you could find something out for its own sake. Nowadays it has to have a commercial function.” Then he brightened up. “Is it true what I’ve heard? You’re some kind of descendant of Mendel? Is that true?”

“A family story.”

He pursed his lips and looked at me with his head cocked sideways, like a tailor considering me for a suit. “We could make something of it, you know. A bit of publicity never does anyone any harm. How about if I get in touch with the head of programming at the BBC? Good friend of mine. There’s mileage in that, all right. Might even get them to do a documentary. Would you be prepared? We must discuss it …”

I smiled back at him. “Only if I can have support for my project. I’ll only play the circus clown if you’ll come along with me.”

“Bartering, eh?”

“The marketplace,” I reminded him.