Olivia sat on the crowded Friday afternoon train trying to check her proofs. After reading the quotation she had chosen from Svante Pääbo – ‘The dirty little secret of genomics is that we know next to nothing about how a genome translates into the particularities of a living breathing individual’ – she put down the proofs and surrendered to the daydream that had pursued her from Oxford to London and had now caught up with her again on the journey to Horsham.
Thrilled and apprehensive about being on her way to spend the weekend with her new lover, she stared out of the train window at the stammering suburbs, the football fields, the back gardens, the industrial estates, the little patches of wood aspiring to rural life, some bulbous silver graffiti on a brick wall, the double speed and double clatter and sudden intimacy of a train passing in the opposite direction – it looked as if London would ramble on until it finally had to be drowned in the sea. She had to recognise that she was crazy about Francis, mad about him: it was hard to find a phrase that made it sound like a good idea. Crossing over into another person’s subjectivity, if such a thing were possible, was always fraught with excitement and danger. For a start, there had to be a person on the other side, not just an assembly of fragments, occlusions and self-deceptions; and then it was essential not to leave too much of oneself behind in the hectic rush towards the shining lake that all too often turned out to be a mudflat shimmering with excited flies. Even without the hazards of confusion and anticlimax, it remained a logically impossible transition. How could one ever truly enter into another subjectivity? And yet the impossibility seemed pedantic in the face of the imagination’s capacity to sense another way of being. She often felt ephemeral connections spring in and out of existence between her mind and other minds, but it was not often a temptation to turn those rainbows into more durable bridges. Her desire to do so now, on so little evidence, was like a kind of seasickness, pitching her between groundless bliss and groundless despair, between a fantasy of happiness and a fantasy of losing the happiness she didn’t yet have.
She picked up her proofs again. Her book on epigenetics suddenly seemed like a refuge rather than a chore. Since the millennial utopianism that had greeted the completion of the Human Genome Project twenty years ago, the search for the genes that corresponded to every desire and disease, every inclination and physical feature, had been, with a few exceptions, a failure. When Svante Pääbo had been in charge of the chimpanzee genome project, he had expected to find ‘the profoundly interesting genetic prerequisites that make us different from other animals’, but ended up, after the chimpanzee sequence was published, admitting that ‘we cannot see in this why we are so different from chimpanzees’. Not only did we turn out to share almost all of our genes with our fellow primates, but with far more distant relatives as well. The homeobox genes, which determine the position of limbs and other body segments, were almost identical in flies, reptiles, mice and humans. Where most variation was expected, there was least change. Nor was the quantity of human intelligence and self-regard reflected in the quantity of its genes. When the human genome had been sequenced, it turned out to contain twenty-three thousand genes, about the same as a sea urchin’s, but drastically fewer than the forty thousand in rice.
Ah, yes, here it was, the key paper in Nature on missing heritability (Manolio, et al.), that ended with the sublime sentence, ‘Given how little has actually been explained of the demonstrable genetic influences on most common diseases, despite identification of hundreds of associated genetic variants, the search for the missing heritability provides a potentially valuable path towards further discoveries.’ In what other field of science would something be demonstrable ‘given how little has actually been explained’? In what other scientific field would lack of evidence be described as ‘a potentially valuable path’, except in the sense that all paths that had no actual value could only be ‘potentially’ valuable? It was amazing that a journal which stood for the highest standards of scientific rigour would publish such an incompetently devious sentence. A more honest version would have been, ‘After decades of research, we’ve found almost nothing, but we’ve devoted our careers to this fruitless field, so please give us more money.’ Of course, some evidence might turn up in the future but one of the most valuable contributions made by genetic studies was to show that so far there was no purely genetic influence on the formation of all but rare monogenic diseases, like Tay-Sachs, haemophilia and Huntington’s, known to be caused by a mutation in a single gene; and there was the extra copy of chromosome twenty-one that produced Down’s syndrome, but after these simple certainties, ‘polygenic scores’ and ‘multifactorial’ explanations had to be brought in to prop up the plausibility of the genetically determined story.
However familiar it had become, she was still irritated by the phrase ‘missing heritability’, implying that genetic connections might turn up one day, like a favourite family cat, if only enough posters were put in shop windows or stuck on neighbourhood trees. For something to be ‘missing’ it had to have been there in the first place, but as far as the experiments showed, the correspondences were mostly non-existent, and only got upgraded to ‘missing’ by a doctrinaire refusal to revise the original hypothesis. It was a phrase from the same semantic playbook as ‘side effect’, which tried to pretend that among the range of pharmaceutical effects caused by a medicine the undesirable ones were somehow incidental. A patient suffering from blindness or liver failure after taking a medicine might well find the experience just as central as the intended effect. Would a depressive who had spent years feeling cursed by having the less active version of the SLC6A4 gene feel that she was on a ‘potentially valuable’ path when its connection with depression turned out to be ‘missing’ and that she had been waiting for a cure that could not exist, while losing out on those that did? As the daughter of two psychoanalysts, and the sister of a clinical psychologist, Olivia was especially pissed off that so much money had been spent and so many papers had been written pretending that this ‘candidate gene’ was the cause of depression; money that could have been spent on helping depressed people – for instance – or mending potholes.
Ironically, it was Professor Moorhead, the most ardent champion of the old neo-Darwinian model, who had catapulted her into the exciting new field of epigenetics. After graduating, she had initially been thrilled to be given a place in his lab, only to discover that he was a serial seducer of his female students and that working under him was a proposition that he took, like so many others, all too literally. Since Moorhead assumed that human nature was entirely mechanical, as he explained with an irresistible combination of smugness and impatience in his masterwork, The Insatiable Machine, she had assumed that his advances could be mechanically rebuffed, but this particular machine seemed to have a mind of its own, or at least someone else’s mind programmed into it, since it wasn’t strictly speaking entitled to one of its own. With whatever mysterious quantity of free will he brought to the task, Moorhead turned out to be a pest, writing Olivia a thirteen-page letter endorsing his amorous claims with a list of notorious symptoms, including insomnia, starvation and a renewed interest in poetry. Luckily, his unwelcome flattery coincided with her growing interest in epigenetics, a subject that Moorhead regarded as a passing fad, or at least a waste of his graduates’ time, which should have been spent dragging blocks of data across the desert floor of his genetic fundamentalism to erect a mausoleum fit to entomb his reputation. Olivia could still remember when any mention of Moorhead had lowered her mood, fleetingly but irresistibly, like the eclipse she had seen on a field trip in Indonesia, when she stood on a hilltop watching the edge of the moon’s shadow race across the forest, silencing the wildlife with its perplexing darkness. At the time of his repulsive advances she had sidestepped a confrontation by changing the subject of her DPhil. Since then, she had been waiting in vain for what should have been his inevitable downfall, but instead had been forced to watch him leap, like a supercilious chamois, from one improbable perch to the next. He had gone on to acquire a knighthood which had led, by all accounts, to a further decline in his chivalry. Despite her contempt for him, Olivia’s objective had never been to lodge a complaint, but to defeat him in his own field, and to overthrow the oppressive and strangely popular influence of his scientific ideology. In the meantime, she had become a Research Fellow, without teaching or lecturing to distract her.
Olivia saw her phone light up on the corner of the table. She had only left it there as a salute to the sense of potential emergency fabricated by the technology itself. What if Francis had a flat tyre? What if her mother had dropped dead? She leant forward and saw that it was in fact her brother Charlie who was calling. For a moment her deep scholarly habits pushed back against the distraction, partly because she welcomed it so much, but then, just as she changed her mind, the call ended. She felt annoyed with herself for putting up a struggle, but moments later he called again – it was so like him to assume, to know, in fact, that she really wanted to talk to him.
‘Hi, C,’ she said.
‘Hi there,’ said Charlie. ‘Is that the clatter of a train I can hear?’
‘Yes, I’m on the way to Sussex.’
‘Because you met a tall magnetic stranger at a party, and he invited you to spend the weekend.’
‘Well, actually, it was a conference. The rest is terrifyingly accurate.’
‘I’m psychic,’ said Charlie. ‘At least when it comes to you.’
‘It’s only with your patients that you don’t have a clue what’s going on in their minds.’
‘It’s for them to make that discovery,’ said Charlie, ‘to find the gold mines that were hidden in their psyches.’
‘Or the potato fields,’ said Olivia. ‘I feel that’s more like the sort of discovery you would inspire … Hello? Hello?’
Charlie called back.
‘I was thanking you: potatoes are much more nutritious.’
‘Hmm,’ said Olivia, ‘of course that’s what I meant. Hello? Oh god. Hello?’
‘Hi, I’m here,’ said Charlie, ‘this connection is hopeless.’
‘Let’s talk when I’m back in Oxford; I must do some work. I have to finish my final edit.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Charlie, ‘nobody is going to read your book anyway!’
They both had time to laugh before the signal died again. Charlie had been one of the most ardent advocates of Olivia turning her thesis into a book and she knew that he was really ringing to cheer her on. They had spoken a few days earlier about a challenging new paper she was determined to include, even at this late stage. Trying to find the right place for it was keeping her editing fresh. The experiment consisted of administering electric shocks to mice each time they were exposed to the sweet orange smell of acetophenone. It was hardly surprising that the mice, electrocuted five times a day for three days, started to become ‘reliably fearful’ from exposure to the smell alone. What was challenging to the standard view of inheritance was that the offspring of those mice still exhibited fear in the presence of acetophenone, without being given any electric shocks themselves. Indeed, the effect lasted into a third generation. The mothers of the new generations were of course unexposed, in case they passed on their fear in utero, and a further control was introduced through artificial insemination, eliminating the risk of rumours spreading from mouse to mouse through other forms of communication. Nobody understood how the fear of acetophenone had produced chemical changes that altered the expression of genes in a way that entered the sperm of the electrocuted mice. The orthodoxy of random mutation claimed that an organism’s complement of DNA was fixed from the moment of its conception. In this view it was impossible for a learnt aversive response to write itself into the DNA and be stably inherited by the offspring. It was just this kind of challenge to the conventional view of inheritance that made epigenetics such an exhilarating field.
Olivia looked up at the display of the stations that lay ahead. There were still three stops to Horsham. She knew she didn’t have the concentration to read any more but promised herself that during her stay with Francis, or at the very latest on the return journey on Sunday, she would find a place in her pages for the subversive, paradigm-challenging, reliably fearful mice. What she really needed to do was to get any texts and emails out of the way before she became absorbed in her torrid weekend. She ran through the new messages with the efficiency that could only come from deciding to postpone all the complicated ones, delete the intrusive ones and deal exclusively with Lucy’s confirmation of their dinner on Tuesday with a simple, ‘Can’t wait. Xx’.
Lucy was flying in from New York this evening. It would be lovely to have her back after her six years in the States. They had been so close as undergraduates and had both stayed on at Oxford but Lucy, unlike Olivia, had grown sick of academic life and had gone on to work as a corporate consultant in London and later New York. It was all very well for Olivia to say that she wanted to pursue pure knowledge, but she also knew that Lucy had no back-up, no inheritance in the pipeline, whereas Olivia’s parents had slowly acquired their large house in Belsize Park over decades of hard work. It was now preposterously valuable and would one day be coming down to her and to Charlie. It was naïve to underestimate the psychological impact of that difference. They had kept closely in touch, inter-continentally, but it was exciting that Lucy was now going to be fully back in her life.
Olivia finally switched off her phone, packed the proofs in her rucksack and took her overcoat down from the ledge overhead. There was no way for her to be more prepared without loitering by the carriage door and getting in everybody’s way during the next two stops. She sank back in her seat, turning slightly sideways so she could raise her knee and tuck it against the edge of the table. She gazed across a field, enjoying the complicity between the colours of the autumn woods and of the fiery evening sky stretching behind them, but soon her attention folded back on to the volatile thrill of imagining herself so close to someone she hardly knew.