Mendel's Dwarf (20 page)

The next day he got their names and their ancestry, the whole tribe of them:

Johann, the grandfather, known as Big Johann. His wife, Magda. Their children, Johann (known as Little Johann), Willi, Heike, and Birgit (the dead one). All dwarfs. And Johann and Magda told him something of their own ancestry too. All dwarfs, except Magda’s maternal grandfather. “That’s what I was told,” Magda said. “That’s what they always told me.” And there was something else: “When you get one of us having children with one of you, then it’s all right,” the man explained. “But when two of us have children, sometimes it goes wrong.”

“Goes wrong?”

“Not an ordinary baby. One like us, but more so. Smaller.” He
held out his own hands, small, stubby things, to demonstrate. “Little runts, they are. Never last more than a few months. My wife gave birth to one such twenty years ago.”

Of course none of this is certain
, he wrote in his notes,
being merely a small sample. One needs many examples to confirm the mathematical proofs, the records of whole families; but it is at least indicative. Big Johann tells me that it is a well-known fact in their world that a dwarf mother never gives birth to one of these severe dwarfs by a normal man
.

He handed the diagram to Bratranek. “There. I have added my own supposition of their inherited characters, but otherwise that
is just as I was told it. It fits my ideas perfectly. Unlike garden peas, in mankind it would seem that the character of reduced growth dominates over the normal. I would consider delivering a talk on the matter to the Society, but I fear it would anger the Abbot. What do you think?”

Bratranek peered at the diagram. His expression was stern. He pursed his lips and pulled at his chin and frowned in the same way that he frowned at idle and foolish students. Mendel watched anxiously. “What do you think? Magda’s mother is unknown, as you may see—Magda was abandoned as a child outside the caravan of circus folk, so they told me. Anyway, assuming both Magda and Big Johann to be hybrids, and assuming my theories to be correct, they would expect to give rise to normal children in a ratio of three dwarfs to each normal, and the fact that Magda did not produce a normally heighted child is no more than the workings of pure chance. Further, it would seem that any dwarf of the non-hybrid kind is of the nature A, that is, pure—although unable to breed and thereby demonstrate such purity of type because of early death. What do you think?”

“What do I think?” Bratranek gestured helplessly. “They are mere monsters, deformities, things against the perfection of nature. And where does it come from, this character? I mean, normal people do not make dwarfs.”

“Ah, that’s a question!” Mendel leaned over the thin man’s shoulder and pointed to the figures. “Look at Birgit’s husband. As far as I could ascertain, he came from parents who were both normal. So in a sense these people
are
normal. They differ only in this one thing, and that difference could happen to anyone. Exactly how it arises I do not know, but there is no doubt that it does happen. I guess it to be something occasional and spontaneous, a change in the inherited characters owing to some error—a sport. A normal character transmogrifies into an abnormal one, and despite not having inherited diverse characters from his parents, the new carrier becomes a kind of hybrid.
Contrary to Darwin’s assertion—the poor man is far off the track with his ideas of hybridization—this kind of transmogrification I would assume to be exceedingly rare.”

“What has Darwin to do with it? These are aberrations—”

“My dear Bratranek, this is
every
bit as important as Darwin’s theory, I can assure you. And in contrast to his, this idea is precise, almost mathematical. It calls other matters into question. Are we just children of chance? Are we merely products of mathematical probabilities, little different from the tossing of dice?”

Bratranek snorted. “That is mere foolery. If that were so, how could such a perfect thing as a human body ever be produced? If it were mere chance, then all of us would be monsters!”

“And there’s this: Should I have warned the family that within their makeup lies this character for normality, which for them is anything but welcome? Magda herself was lucky. Her daughter Heike, as yet unrealized as a woman and a mother, carries the factor hidden within her body. It may be that a tortured childbearing lies ahead of this poor creature who appears so alien to us, but who differs in nothing more than a single inherited character.”

In the lab the refrigerators hum, the ultra-centrifuges whine, the suction evaporator whirs. Patricia Primer, now revealed as plain Pat Storey, her gestures still awakening Benedict the goat, crouches over a rack of tubes and injects liquid from a micropipette. She flips the used pipette tip into a bin, snaps on a replacement, sniffs up another sample. Mere microliters. She glances round and smiles, the precise movements of her hand barely pausing. Her smile has the same effect on me as her gestures. What would she think, I wonder and have often wondered, if she knew about Eve? What would she think if she knew how I
lust after her? Would she be surprised? Shocked? Flattered? Disgusted? Perhaps all those things.

“There’s a box arrived by courier. I put it over there.”

“Box?”

“From the States. Maybe it’s those cultures we’re waiting for.”

“Why didn’t you open it?”

“Not in the habit of opening other people’s mail. It might be love letters. Or dirty magazines.”

“Packed in dry ice?”

“Hot stuff.” Back to the work.

Ochre Codon (Olga Conlon, you will be pleased to learn, but known to many as Olga Condom) emerges from the sterile room with a medical flat in which a pale yellow culture liquid slops. She is large and loose, having been through at least two of the other postdocs and one of the project leaders in the last year. I have wondered, of course. Benedict the goat has watched her plump knees and wondered about her plumper thighs. She sweeps past toward the incubators, drawing after her a particular scent, as sweet and corrupt as a blown rose. Vincent Vector, Eric Venables in real life (tried with Olga and apparently failed; she is free but not easy), crosses her path, moving from PCR thermal cycler to electrophoresis gel, carefully stepping each time. over an expanded polystyrene box that lies almost in the center of the lab floor. Green lights on his PCR machine plot the rise of temperature—76, 77, 78, 79—and record the number of cycles, while the tubes inside, clutched by a heating block, proliferate DNA fragments on the rocket trajectory of an exponential curve—2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 … After thirty-two cycles you have 1,073,741,824 identical copies of the original molecule. It seems like getting something for nothing.

“I’m doing that family from Edinburgh,” he says.

“The one with the homozygote?”

“That’s right.”

Benedict the goat, Benedict the propositus, humps the box up onto a bench and clambers onto a stool to open it. “Just like Christmas,” he says.

“Hanukkah,” says Olga over her shoulder.

The sender-label on my Hanukkah present says THE REDUCED HUMAN STATURE FOUNDATION, CHICAGO. As I remove the lid, the ghostly breath of dry ice rises to greet me. Couched within the mist, packed among steaming slabs of dry ice, are thirty plastic tubes, each red-capped, each labeled, each with a small plug of white matter in the tip. The plugs are made of frozen white blood cells cultured from five families with achondroplasia. The pedigrees, carefully cross-referenced to the tubes, have already been downloaded over the Internet.

“When can we …?”

“Oh, crumbs,” says Pat helplessly. “I can’t possibly deal with them for a week at least. We’ll have to store them.”

“Get one of the graduate students to do them.”

“Probably bugger them up.”

It is a mundane world, a world of inconsequential chat while you follow a protocol that has been followed a hundred times before and can be followed now without thinking. Like cooking, very like cooking. A protocol, with its echoes of diplomacy, of law, of etiquette, is actually a recipe. You are constructing a sauce béarnaise. As with cooking, the uninitiated get it wrong and the sauce béarnaise curdles. Mere repetition is necessary to get it right, like Mendel with his cross-pollinations, hundreds and hundreds of cross-pollinations with a ninety-nine-percent success rate (“a very few [errors] … among more than ten thousand”
³
). You or I would get it right about once in every ten attempts, until we had repeated it dozens of times, until it had become routine …

“How’s the library lady?” Olga asks. As she passes by, she ruffles my hair. Whether this is something I love or hate, I have never decided.

“She’s fine.”

“You seem … quite close.”

“She’s an old friend. From home.”

The conversation dies away as she pulls on latex gloves (two pairs) and positions a Perspex screen between her and her rack of tubes and begins to make up a radioactive probe. Someone—is it Pat?—begins to hum a tune. In the silence everyone works.

It is a game of patience, this search. A game of watch and wait, of dealing the cards and reading the messages traced out in the cryptic bands of radioactive DNA probes. You deal and deal again. The patients queue up in the clinic, a whole circus assembly of the dwarfed and stunted, to fill in forms and surrender blood samples. White blood cells are spun like a merry-go-round, and lysed
⁴
and digested and amplified,
⁵
and the little samples of DNA, translucent like semen, glistening like seed, are sorted and tagged and identified. The secret of life in a speck of jelly. Once upon a time the mystery was enshrined in the tabernacle on the altar, in a sliver of wafer. Now it lies, stripped open for mankind to read, in a polyacrimide denaturing gel.

Great-great-great-uncle Gregor would have understood.

Finding the Gene

You extract the DNA from cells. Then you use specific enzymes (called
restriction enzymes
) to chop the whole lot up into manageable pieces. These enzymes cut at specific, known places in the DNA message. I have a catalog at hand that lists ninety-three such enzymes; we have fifty different ones stored in the fridge. I am not talking about the frontiers of science here.
Nowadays these things are commercially available. Using the enzyme of your choice, you carry out a digest, and then, from the whole mess, from the tens of thousands of different genes present in the gelatinous blob of DNA, you try to pick out the one that interests you.

Analogies, metaphors, similes. Searching for a needle in a haystack, that’s the obvious one. There are 3.3 × 10
⁹
base pairs in the human genome. Thirty-three billion letters. Do you need a yardstick? Does your brain seize up when people start talking about the number of centimeters from here to the moon and the total length of all the blood vessels in the human body, that kind of thing? Well, I have a copy of the Bible on my bookshelf—it must be a copy that Jean left behind, because, let me assure you, I’d never have bought it—and I have done a rapid estimation of the number of letters in that edition. Fifty letters a line, fifty-five lines a page, 1,668 pages. Number of letters? Four and a half million, more or less. It includes the Apocrypha. So the human genome, the sum total of all the human genetic material, is some thousand times as big as the entire Bible. Only a fraction of those letters actually code for genes, but still, finding a single gene is difficult enough. Like searching the Bible for a single sentence.