The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code (50 page)

his boss’s lunatic projects
:
Friedman’s boss, “Colonel” George Fabyan, had quite a life. Fabyan’s father started a cotton company called Bliss Fabyan and groomed Fabyan to take over. But succumbing to wanderlust, the boy ran away to work as a Minnesota lumberjack instead, and his outraged and betrayed father disinherited him. After two years, Fabyan tired of playing Paul Bunyan and decided to get back into the family business—by applying, under an assumed name, to a Bliss Fabyan office in St. Louis. He quickly set all sort of sales records, and his father at corporate HQ in Boston soon summoned this young go-getter to his office to talk about a promotion. In walked his son.

After this Shakespearean reunion, Fabyan thrived in the cotton business and used his wealth to open the think tank. He funded all sorts of research over the years but fixated on Shakespeare codes. He tried to publish a book after he supposedly broke the code, but a filmmaker working on some adaptations of Shakespeare sued to stop publication, arguing that its contents would “shatter” Shakespeare’s reputation. For whatever reason, the local judge took the case—centuries of literary criticism apparently fell under his jurisdiction—and, incredibly, sided with Fabyan. His decision concluded, “Francis Bacon is the author of the works so erroneously attributed to William Shakespeare,” and he ordered the film producer to pay Fabyan $5,000 in damages.

Most scholars look on arguments against Shakespeare’s authorship about as kindly as biologists do on theories of maternal impressions. But several U.S. Supreme Court justices, most recently in 2009, have also voiced opinions that Shakespeare could not have written his plays. The real lesson here is that lawyers apparently have different standards of truth and evidence than scientists and historians.

to rip off casinos at roulette
:
The casino gambit never paid off. The idea started with the engineer Edward Thorp, who in 1960 recruited Shannon to help him. At the roulette table, the two men worked as a team, though they pretended not to know each other. One watched the roulette ball as it spun around the wheel and noted the exact moment it passed certain points. He then used a toe-operated switch in his shoe to send signals to the small computer in his pocket, which in turn transmitted radio signals. The other man, wearing an earpiece, heard these signals as musical notes, and based on the tune, he would know where to toss his money. They painted any extruding wires (like the earpiece’s) the color of flesh and pasted the wires to their skin with spirit gum.

Thorp and Shannon calculated an expected yield of 44 percent from their scheme, but Shannon turned chicken on their first test run in a casino and would only place dime bets. They won more often than not, but, perhaps after eyeing some of the heavies manning the casino door, Shannon lost his appetite for the enterprise. (Considering that the two men had ordered a $1,500 roulette wheel from Reno to practice, they probably
lost
money on the venture.) Abandoned by his partner, Thorp published his work, but it apparently took a number of years before casinos banned portable electronics outright.

an inside-out (and triple-stranded)
:
For an account of the embarrassment and scorn Watson and Crick endured for this odd DNA model, please see my previous book,
The Disappearing Spoon.

complex and beautiful life
:
For a more detailed account of Miriam’s life, I highly recommend
The Soul of DNA
, by Jun Tsuji.

the oldest matrilineal ancestor
:
Using this logic, scientists also know that Mitochondrial Eve had a partner. All males inherit Y chromosomes from their fathers alone, since females lack the Y. So all men can trace strictly paternal lines back to find this Y-chromosomal Adam. The kicker is that, while simple laws of mathematics prove that this Adam and Eve must have existed, the same laws reveal that Eve lived tens of thousands of years earlier than Adam. So the Edenic couple could never have met, even if you take into account the extraordinary life expectancies in the Bible.

By the by, if we relax the strictly patrilineal or strictly matrilineal bit and look for the last ancestor who—through men
or
women—passed at least some DNA to every person alive today, that person lived only about five thousand years ago, long after humans had spread over the entire earth. Humans are strongly tribal, but genes always find a way to spread.

got downgraded
:
Some historians argue that McClintock struggled to communicate her ideas partly because she couldn’t draw, or at
least didn’t. By the 1950s molecular biologists and geneticists had developed highly stylized cartoon flowcharts to describe genetic processes. McClintock, from an older generation, never learned their drawing conventions, a deficit that—combined with the complexity of maize in the first place—might have made her ideas seem too convoluted. Indeed, some students of McClintock recall that they never remember her drawing any diagrams, ever, to explain anything. She was simply a verbal person, rutted in
logos
.

Compare this to Albert Einstein, who always maintained that he thought in pictures, even about the fundamentals of space and time. Charles Darwin was of McClintock’s ilk. He included just one picture, of a tree of life, in the hundreds of pages of
On the Origin of Species,
and one historian who studied Darwin’s original notebook sketches of plants and animals acknowledged he was a “terrible drawer.”

she withdrew from science
:
If you’re interested in learning more about the reception of McClintock’s work, the scholar most responsible for challenging the canonical version of her life’s story is Nathaniel Comfort.

producing the very Cyclops
:
Most children born with cyclopia (the medical term) don’t live much past delivery. But a girl born with cyclopia in India in 2006 astounded doctors by surviving for at least two weeks, long enough for her parents to take her home. (No further information about her survival was available after the initial news reports.) Given the girl’s classic symptoms—an undivided brain, no nose, and a single eye—it was almost certain that
sonic hedgehog
had malfunctioned. And sure enough, news outlets reported that the mother had taken an experimental cancer drug that blocks
sonic.

Maurice of Nassau
:
Prince Mo belonged to the dynastic House of Orange in the Netherlands, a family with an unusual (and possibly apocryphal) legend attached to its name. Centuries ago, wild carrots were predominantly purple. But right around 1600, Dutch carrot farmers, indulging in old-fashioned genetic engineering, began to breed and cultivate some mutants that happened to have high concentrations of the vitamin A variant beta carotene—and in doing so developed the first orange carrots. Whether farmers did this on their own or (as some historians claim) to honor Maurice’s family remains unknown, but they forever changed the texture, flavor, and color of this vegetable.

German biologist August Weismann
:
Although an undisputed brainiac and hall-of-fame biologist, Weismann once claimed—uproariously, given the book’s mammoth size—to have read
On the Origin of Species
in one sitting.

a fifth official letter to the DNAlphabet
:
A few scientists have even expanded the alphabet to six, seven, or eight letters, based
on chemical variations of methylated cytosine. Those letters are called (if you’re into the whole brevity thing) hmC, fC, and caC. It’s not clear, though, whether these “letters” function independently or are just intermediate steps in the convoluted process by which cells strip the m from mC.

and Arctic huskies
:
The tale of the husky liver is dramatic, involving a doomed expedition to reach the South Pole. I won’t expand on the story here, but I have written something up and posted it online at
http://samkean.com/thumb-notes
. My website also contains links to tons of pictures (
http://samkean.com/thumb-pictures
), as well as other notes a little too digressive to include even here. So if you’re interested in reading about Darwin’s role in musicals, perusing an infamous scientific fraud’s suicide note, or seeing painter Henri Toulouse-Lautrec nude on a public beach, take a look-see.

carried the men home to the Netherlands
:
Europeans did not set eyes on the Huys again until 1871, when a party of explorers tracked it down. The white beams were green with lichen, and they found the hut sealed hermetically in ice. The explorers recovered, among other detritus, swords, books, a clock, a coin, utensils, “muskets, a flute, the small shoes of the ship’s boy who had died there, and the letter Barents put up the chimney for safekeeping” to justify what some might see as a cowardly decision to abandon his ship on the ice.

the “RNA world” theory
:
Though RNA probably preceded DNA, other nucleic acids—like GNA, PNA, or TNA—might have preceded both of them. DNA builds its backbone from ringed deoxyribose sugars, which are more complicated than the building blocks likely available on the primordial earth. Glycol nucleic acid and peptide nucleic acid look like better candidates because neither uses ringed sugars for its vertebrae. (PNA doesn’t use phosphates either.) Threose nucleic acid does use ringed sugars, but again, sugars simpler than DNA’s. Scientists suspect those simpler backbones proved more robust as well, giving these ’NAs an advantage over DNA on the sun-scorched, semimolten, and oft-bombarded early earth.

viruses that infect only other parasites
:
This idea of parasites feasting on parasites always puts me in mind of a wonderful bit of doggerel by Jonathan Swift:

So nat’ralists observe, a flea

Hath smaller fleas that on him prey,

And these have smaller fleas that bite ’em,

And so proceed ad infinitum.

For my taste, a mathematician named Augustus De Morgan outdid even Swift on this theme:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,

And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,

While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.

gave each cat an individual name
:
A sample: Stinky, Blindy, Sam, Pain-in-the-Ass, Fat Fuck, Pinky, Tom, Muffin, Tortoise, Stray, Pumpkin, Yankee, Yappy, Boots the First, Boots the Second, Boots the Third, Tigger, and Whisky.

despite their mounting distress
:
In addition to the $111,000 yearly, there were occasional unexpected costs, like when an animal lib person cut a hole in the fence to spring as many cats as possible. Jack said there were still so many cats around that they didn’t notice the dozens that escaped until a nun knocked on their door and asked if the cats climbing onto roofs throughout the neighborhood were theirs. Um, yes.

a plausible biological basis for hoarding cats
:
To be scrupulous: scientists have not yet run controlled studies on the correlation between Toxo levels in the brain and hoarding. So it’s possible that the link between Toxo, dopamine, cats, and hoarding could come to naught. Nor can Toxo explain everything about hoarding behavior, since people occasionally hoard dogs, too.

But most animal hoarders do hoard felines, and scientists involved in the Toxo studies find the link plausible and have said so publicly. They’ve simply seen too much evidence of how Toxo can change the hardwired behavior of rodents and other creatures. And regardless of how strong its influence turns out to be, Toxo still seeps dopamine into your brain.

to help Jack cope
:
Over the years, Jack and Donna have given many interviews about their lives and struggles. A few sources include:
Cats I Have Known and Loved,
by Pierre Berton; “No Room to Swing a Cat!,” by Philip Smith,
The People,
June 30, 1996; “Couple’s Cat Colony Makes Record Books—and Lots of Work!,” by Peter Cheney,
Toronto Star,
January 17, 1992;
Current Science,
August 31, 2001; “Kitty Fund,”
Kitchener-Waterloo Record,
January 10, 1994; “$10,000 Averts Ruin for Owners of 633 Cats,” by Kellie Hudson,
Toronto Star,
January 16, 1992; and
Scorned and Beloved: Dead of Winter Meetings with Canadian Eccentrics,
by Bill Richardson.

customize proteins for different environments in the body
:
In one extreme example, fruit flies carve up the RNA of the
dscam
gene into 38,016 distinct products—roughly triple the number of genes a fruit fly has. So much for the one gene/one protein theory!

practically a defining trait of mammals
:
Nature loves playing gotcha, and for almost everything you call a “unique” mammalian trait, there’s an exception: reptiles with a rudimentary placenta, for instance, or insects that give birth to live young. But in general, these are mammalian traits.

more extensive MHCs than other creatures
:
In humans, the MHC is often called the HLA, but since we’re focused on mammals here, I’ll use the general term.

the same extra nipples that barnyard sows have
:
Though best known for the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell had a keen interest in genetics and dreamed of breeding fitter humans. To learn more about biology, he bred sheep with extra nipples and studied the inheritance patterns.