Frameshift

“See? Directly opposite the left-hand CG pair is the right-hand GC pair.” He paused, waiting for Shari to nod acknowledgment of this. “Now the maintenance methylase comes along and sees that there isn’t parity between the two sides of the strand, so it adds a methyl group to the right-hand side.” He went over the GC pair, making it darker, too:

Left side: T-C-A-C-G-T

Right side: A-G-T-G-C-A

“At the same time, the other half of the original strand is being filled in with free-floating nucleotides. But maintenance methylase would do exactly the same thing to it, duplicating cytosine methylation on both sides, if originally present on one side.”

Pierre clapped his hands together to shake off chalk dust. “Voila! By postulating that one enzyme, you end up with a mechanism for preserving cytosine-methylation state from cell generation to cell generation.”

“And?”

“And think about our work on codon synonyms.” He waved vaguely at the wall chart labeled “The Genetic Code.”

“Yes?”

“That’s one possible additional level of coding hidden in DNA, if the choice of which synonym used is significant. Now we’ve got a second possible type of additional coding in DNA: the code made by whether cytosine is methylated or not. I’m willing to bet that one or both of those additional codes is the key to what the so-called junk DNA is really for.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Shari.

“Well, as Einstein is supposed to have said, ‘God is subtle, but malicious he is not.’” He smiled at Shari. “No matter how complex the codes are, we should be able to crack them.”

Pierre went home. His apartment seemed vast. He sat on the living-room couch, pulling idly at an orange thread coming unraveled from one of the cushions.

They were making progress, he and Shari. They were getting close to a breakthrough. Of that he felt sure.

But he wasn’t elated. He wasn’t excited.

God, what an idiot I am.

He watched Letterman, watched Conan O’Brien.

He didn’t laugh.

He started getting ready for bed, dumping his socks and underwear on the living-room floor — there wasn’t any reason not to anymore.

He’d been reading Camus again. His fat copy of the Collected Works was facedown on one of the couch’s orange-and-green cushions. Camus, who had taken the literature Nobel in ‘57; Camus, who commented on the absurdity of the human condition. “I don’t want to be a genius,” he had said. “I have enough problems just trying to be a man.”

Pierre sat down on the couch and exhaled into the darkness. The absurdity of the human condition. The absurdity of it all. The absurdity of being a man.

Bertrand Russell ran through his mind, too — a Nobel laureate in 1950.

“To fear love,” he’d said, “is to fear life — and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”

Three parts dead — just about right for a Huntington’s sufferer at thirty-two.

Pierre crawled into bed, lying in a fetal position.

He slept hardly at all — but when he did, he dreamt not of Stockholm, but of Molly.

Chapter 15

“I can’t let you redo the exam,” said Molly to the male student sitting opposite her, “but if you undertake another research project, I can give you up to ten marks in extra credit for that. If you get eight or above, you’ll pass — just barely. It’s your choice.”

The student was looking at his hands, which were resting in his lap. “I’ll do the project. Thank you, Professor Bond.”

“That’s all right, Alex. Everyone deserves a second chance.”

The student got to his feet and left the cramped office. Pierre, who had been standing just outside the door waiting for Molly to be alone, stepped into the doorway, holding a dozen red roses in front of him.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

Molly looked up, eyes wide.

“I feel like a complete heel.” He actually said “eel,” but Molly assumed he meant the former, although she thought the latter was just as applicable. Still, she said nothing.

“May I come in?” he said.

She nodded, but did not speak.

Pierre stepped inside and closed the door behind him. “You are the very best thing that ever happened to me,” he said, “and I am an idiot.”

There was silence for a time. “Nice flowers,” said Molly at last.

Pierre looked at her, as if trying to read her thoughts in her eyes. “If you will still have me as your husband, I would be honored.”

Molly was quiet for a time. “I want to have a child.”

Pierre had given this much thought. “I understand that. If you wanted to adopt a child, I’d be glad to help raise it for as long as I’m able.”

“Adopt? I — no, I want to have a child of my own. I want to undergo in vitro fertilization.”

“Oh,” said Pierre.

“Don’t worry about passing on bad genes,” said Molly. “I was reading an article about this in Cosmo. They could culture the embryos outside my body, then test them for whether they’d inherited Huntington’s. Then they could implant only healthy ones.”