The Molecule That Went Behind The World (J. Mark Smith)

The Double Helix Nebula, near thecentre of our galaxy, has the formof a massive strand of DNA.

10smith.ac:blankG5 copy 1/5/09 12:11 PM Page 586

J. MARK SMITH

The Molecule That WentBehind the WorldAnd the rose,what a mob of lights and barksit ties into the living sugar of its tree-trunk!As for the sugar,what tiny daggers it dreams of while awake!

F.G. LORCA, “Death”

I’M thinking this November night, 2007, abouttwo men, two scientists, two biochemists whoselives came to a focus in the study of the DNA

molecule. Fame took one its way, and obscurityleft the other where it left him; and for that reason you might call theirlives absolutely different. I’m thinking as well about the theories thathave been confirmed and magnified and rendered triumphant bymen (mostly) messing around in laboratories with nucleic acids thelast sixty years or so: theories not just of biological inheritance, whichwere hardly new even to the nineteenth century, but of determinate-ness. The first man is to me an iconic stranger: James D. Watson –whose name must be more widely recognized than any other livingscientist, since it was he who as a graduate student at Cambridge inhis early twenties, along with Francis Crick (now deceased), firstimagined the duplex helix shape that the DNA molecule most oftentakes. When I learned a few weeks ago that the 79-year-old Watsonhad been summarily “retired” from his position as chancellor of ColdSpring Harbor Laboratory while on a book tour for remarks made aboutAfricans’ genetically harboured predisposition to lower intelligence,

Queen’s Quarterly 115/4 (Winter 2008) | 587

J. MARK SMITH teaches English at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton.“Molecule” is part of a larger non-fiction project: an early instalment, “ThreeMen,” appeared in Santa Monica Review in 2006. His first book of poems, Notesfor a Rescue Narrative (Oolichan), was published in 2007.


I could only shake my head in wonder at these times, at the way wewrite and rewrite ourselves, and are yet more confirmed in our mutualstrangenesses.

Watson’s The Double Helix (1968) is an account, fifteen years after,of the discovery that inaugurated modern biochemistry. I read thebook, its inside cover stamped with my dead father’s name, for thefirst time last summer. As I went through it, what had begun as intensedislike for Watson modulated into something more mixed. I noticedthat his story showed great awareness of the contingency, sometimesabsurd contingency, of scientific discovery. Watson, looking back, wasas surprised as anyone that two gawky and foolish young men, one ofwhom was himself, had pulled out of the confusion of the moment,the confusion of seizable information, their molecule.

588 | Queen’s Quarterly

James Watson in the early 1960s, a giant in the world of science.


The thirty-something author of The Double Helix – or his editors –had a sense for narrative. Still, I admire the book most for its uncon-sciousness: all of Watson’s talk of girls, pretty girls, foreign girls, girlsattracted to other boys, the girl that he’ll end up marrying, the boy hissister will marry, etc. It’s the sort of memoir we call candid, and in itscandour is absolutely devious about the drives and deflections thatsend us through our lives, about our age-old hideboundnesses, andthe peculiarities too of each individual body and mind, which canonly be irrelevant to the final productions of science. Watson cannotquite believe that those circumstances and preoccupations felltogether, or calmed down enough, to allow his and Crick’s beautiful,economical model to come into view. He cannot get any distance onthe oddity and the contingency, it being his life after all; and the rest ofthe world cannot get away from that molecule. It’s the theory that dugitself right into and back around behind our history.

T HE unknown scientist in this story is RichardMorgan, a friend to my family, a man whoworked at the University of Alberta for most ofhis career. He was a colonial African of Welsh

descent, raised in the highlands of Kenya, and later he was a scholar-ship boy at elite English public schools. He became protégé to a suc-cession of star chemists and biochemists (Todd, Lemieux, Khorana),as one would have noticed at his memorial service in 1999. Studying atCambridge only a few years after Watson and Crick’s great decipher-ing, the energy of that time had impelled Dick towards his own life-long calling, a vocation never not heeded by him, even in his mostgregarious moments.

By his own characterization, he was absent-minded. I suppose thatthe quicksilver twistings and unskeinings of DNA molecules obtrudedeven on his waking dreams. But he was a lover of silly practical jokes.He had a preposterous, braying laugh; and he was adored by children,who appreciated his silliness. (He had no children of his own.) Hecycled through moderate manias, severe depressions. As a defence Isuppose against his own sensitivity, Dick enjoyed the company of big,loud, unsubtle men; and he was certainly not above a good gossipwith female friends. He was homosexual, almost certainly, but like thecontained, shame-eaten gay men of earlier eras, his actions in thissphere of life remained inscrutable even to his friends. With his moneyhe was generous to the point of stupidity. His executor, the financially

The Molecule That Went Behind the World | 589


prudent brother, would have to call in several large interest-free loansto colleagues and in-laws that Dick had never been able to bring him-self to collect. He was 59. He took cyanide from his own lab.

Dick was flying high when, in his late twenties, he took up a profes-sorial position in Edmonton. His mind was rapid-fire quick, with agift for spatial imaginings. My father, who was a transfer-RNA guy,sometimes went to him for help with the stereochemistry of thosesmaller cloverleaf-shaped molecules. Through the late 1960s, Dickwas in pursuit of the enzyme-powered process by which a cell repli-cates its own DNA. In replication, the duplex DNA splits apart, witheach old strand becoming one half of a new double structure. But howthis all worked at the point of the “replication fork” – where for a timethere are four DNA strands in play – no one yet knew. Dick theorizedthat new strand and old strand form, on each tine of the replicationfork, a very strong, temporary bond. “Cross-linking,” he called it.

Though he defended it vigorously for a number of years, Dick’scross-linking theory turned out to be false – an “artifact,” a plausibleinterpretation of irrelevant information. His data was better explainedby the competing hypothesis of a married pair of Japanese bio-chemists named Reiji and Tsuneko Okazaki. The “Okazaki fragment”is a basic term now, learned by undergraduates in every introductorycell biology course. By the mid-1970s, then, Dick’s cross-linking the-ory was in ruins. In a story about youthful hubris and error, this wouldhave been the moment of reversal.

During this decade, Dick was married for less than a year to thedaughter of an evangelical family hailing from Brooks, Alberta (shewas a nurse – the marriage was eventually annulled); my father diedwith two other mountaineers during a winter ascent of Mount EdithCavell; and then Dick for a couple of years was uncle and companionto my two younger brothers and me. He proposed marriage to mymother, which she accepted; but after some months one or both ofthem called off the engagement.

That wasn’t the end of it though. Dick’s friendship with my familyonly deepened over the years. My brother Trefor keeps a black-and-white photo in his apartment of himself at four or five tearing down agrassy hill holding Dick’s hand. My youngest brother Paul remembersDick as the one who helped him most, by transatlantic phone call,when he was doubting the bolder decisions of his early twenties.

In the late 1980s, Dick visited my mother and the man she finallymarried and my two brothers in southern Africa, where she had beentraining biology and chemistry teachers. I have a picture in my mind’s



eye of Dick standing in the dusty main road of a northern Botswanavillage, Toyota Land Cruiser nearby, savanna stretching all aroundbeyond the cinderblock houses, and a knot of small boys and girlspushing and shoving one another to reach for the candies that he ishanding out in overbrimming fistfuls. I see him next, startled and cha-grined, taking sharp criticism from his photo-safari companions forthis regression to colonial ways. He takes the criticism very seriously,his face flushed, and eventually he replies: but why shouldn’t thechildren have candies?

Dick’s own father – a spatial imaginer himself, an organizer of har-bours, ships, cargoes to be disburdened – had been hard on his boys.On the coffee plantation Dick and his brother had played in the grovesand among the African workers, but before they were teens stories ofthe “Mau-Mau” insurgency shocked them into awareness. Imperialdisintegration did not in any way soften the sadistic, homosocialclimate of the schools in England to which the brothers were sent.So there he was, half a life later, this man who had come to the mostrigorous understanding of human variability, and who had sufferedwith hardly a complaint his own self-wounding oddity. Dick stoodagain on the African continent chagrined by compassion and memory,by imagination and naïveté. Things were going to be hard enough forthose children. Were they not?



DICK didn’t have a career like Watson’s, ofcourse, but it wasn’t buried with theOkazakis’ triumph either. He kept workingon anomalous forms of DNA molecules –

triplex and quadruplex structures. This theoretical work, which hepersisted at from the late ’70s through the early ’90s, turned out to beprescient.

Jeremy Lee, a Yorkshireman and post-doctoral student in Dick’s labfrom 1977–81, told me that if he’d learned one thing from his super-visor, it was this: “Dick used to say that if you can imagine something,it’s likely to be true.” Lee believes that Dick was the first to proposethe existence of triple-stranded DNA, back in the late 1970s to early1980s. He imagined it as a temporary structure formed during thecell’s regulation of gene expression by part of the duplex moleculetwisting back on itself. Nobody took him seriously at the time. Dickalso had ideas about the role of quadruplex DNA in relation to telom-eres “about 15 years before” anyone else published on this subject.(Telomeres are expendable sequences of nucleotides that tie up the


Richard Morgan at a children's birthday party in Edmonton c. 1974. The author stands in the right mid-ground of the photo.


ends of chromosomes and prevent the cell from losing genetic infor-mation when it divides. Since it is possible that telomeres governaging, researchers have swarmed recently all over this subcellularstructure.) Did he make his ideas public? No, Lee said, though Dicktalked freely and openly with anyone who would listen. He had notbeen able to win the grant money necessary to test his hypotheses.

Dick’s story illuminates, among other things, how scientists com-municate with one another: well in small, elite groups; rather poorlyoutside of those; and very badly indeed across time. The refereed arti-cle is now almost exclusively an instrument of academic certification,not of dissemination. A sea of information – tens of thousands of arti-cles – overwhelms young students of science, and students defendthemselves by ignoring history altogether. The scientific findings of25–30 years ago might as well not exist. Who can blame young scien-tists? The only filter that might help is experience, the experience ofthe older scientists who remember what they do of the work alreadydone, including the dead ends or paths started down but never finallypursued. The technical advancements have been huge, but so has thewaste. That is one dimension of what Dick called “the lack of human-ity” in the sciences.

Lee, who is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, has alsobeen working outside of what he calls the central dogma of theWatson and Crick model. Lee’s recent work has involved the synthesisof a molecule he calls M-DNA. His lab claims to have found a way “toplace conducting metal ions such as cobalt, zinc, or nickel into thecenter of a DNA helix.” If such modified DNA molecules can be given astable structure, computer chips could conceivably be made fromthem. Lee too has come up against a lot of scepticism, but the tide ofhistory seems to be with him. Biochemistry has been utterly trans-formed since the 1960s. Lee told me that biochemistry and nanotech-nology are “almost the same field these days … DNA is nanotech.”

I can only feel ambivalence about “the field” as a way of life.Institutions have their own dynamics, of course, that are, apparently,pragmatic. But it seems fair to ask whether the disciplines of modernscience – abstracted from their institutional and interpersonal settings– are not, in some basic way, broken. In what sense are they disci-plines anymore? Lee answers my question rhetorically. “That’s likeasking, does the university as an institution work?” He means, I think,that it limps on into the future. It works to many ends other than theones it claims for itself, as do scientists themselves, “driven” by needsand inclinations whose singularities elude theorizing.



Biochemists, like other scientists, are very much concerned withnot being forgotten. Most scientific articles are, however, quicklyforgotten. The academic tool for measuring one’s continuing cur-rency – and for judging whether one’s work is being forgotten – isthe citation index. An article considered groundbreaking will becited in those that follow. But over the decades, citations dwin-dle. The exceptions are certain “seminal” papers whose spores goeverywhere, evergreen.

In The Double Helix, Watson observes that the DNA molecule itself,self-renewing and “very very stable,” possesses a sort of immortality:“the idea of the genes being immortal smelled right …” The names ofWatson and Crick, too, would seem, despite tarnishings, to haveattained to something like immortality (provided that the biotechnicaland ever more complex information society of the present survivesmore than a few decades). Then again, as Watson implies with a winkthroughout The Double Helix, the only time-proven way to avoid suchobsessions or anxieties is to reproduce sexually. More than forty yearslater Watson, one of the first human beings to have his entire genomesequenced, was dismayed to learn from the results that the greaterpart of his Y-chromosome had disintegrated, a normal phenomenonin men of advanced age.

The corollary to “the genes being immortal” is that aspects of our-selves that are genetically inherited will follow their own fatednessthrough our distracted lives. That character is fate, that inheritance isinescapable: these are not exactly recent discoveries. The family face,Thomas Hardy called it, “projecting trait and trace /through time.”The family slouch, the family pattern of youthful balding, the unself-conscious cock of a family hip. The family tendency to bad judgment,to arrogance in social situations. The family inclination, despite itsstubborn regeneration, to self-destruction. One of Watson’s sons, nowin his late thirties, developed a mental illness with effects close tothose of schizophrenia. Dick Morgan’s mother preceded him in sui-cide, and a nephew followed.

What activates the possibilities held by a life? Some ways of beingare simply passed down, like a garment of prejudice, for the child towear and alter in turn. Others get lost in the ocean of bio-moleculesconstituting a human organism. When I have spoken to the fathers ofgrown men, I have often been struck by the unmistakable sound ofpride in one’s man talk of his son, or shocked by the disappointment,sour as vinegar, in another’s.



From my own place in time – child of parents out of lower-middle-class, post-war England – I admire how Watson once bowled rightthrough class snobberies and stupidities, with the help of the loud,talkative, very middle-class and northern Crick. A certain amount ofcluelessness helped them, and amusement too, at their elders, atold ways. I recognize in Watson’s prose the boy-scientist sense ofhumour, so free of irony or world-weariness. I can still hear the rau-cous, naïve, male laughter of young scientists from my father’s bio-chemistry department, Dick among them of course. I love these youngmen, their boyish over-confidence, their excitement at the greatadventure of it all, their being unknown to everyone else yet certainthat they will emerge at the new centre of things. I love those youngscientists; but I feel dread and dismay at the waste of life and poten-tial, at the energy and brilliance taken over by an inhumane system.

Taking the light rail train home from downtown Edmonton, I noticea rather inept billboard message featuring youngish people of north-ern European stock in white lab coats with stylish spectacles andgelled hair: the ad says that “knowledge energy” will power Alberta’s


Magnified photo (c. 1965) of the nucleus of a white blood cell belonging to theauthor's father (Christopher J. Smith). Caught at a moment after DNA replication, but before cell division, it shows the normal number and structure of chromosomes.


future prosperity. The university across the river, like all secondaryinstitutions, publicly applauds itself and its intervolvement with indus-try, its hopes for capitalism and science, all of it to be driven, one is tosuppose, by young scientists’ mix of bravura and cluelessness.

What would I put against it? Sombreness and silence? Four-dimen-sional thought? A tragic sense of history? All I say is that we should tryto think in more nuanced ways – not just about what science can do,or what profits it will bring us, but about what science means, andwhat it cannot mean; about how a life in science carries through time,how careers and lives are never perfectly congruent, how the drive orenergy that we celebrate and reward in the current arrangement ofthe world is rudely and reiteratively connected to what we also callthe drives.

In the mid-1970s, at his farm near Wabamun Lake, about 50 mileswest of Edmonton, Dick hosted a series of parties that he called “GuyFawkes” bonfires. He had a house built out there, not for himselfexactly, but to entertain his friends, and the friends of his friends, andthe children of the friends of his friends. It had a spiral staircase and abig stone fireplace, with high plate-glass windows looking over theaspen woodland of a shallow valley. He’d even had a tennis court putin, on relatively level ground, just upslope from the house.

The English, on November 5, traditionally light fires to burn aneffigy of the lead Catholic conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605,but this sectarian back-story was arcana to most of the departmentalfolk – colleagues, staff and technicians, post-docs, grad students, fam-ilies and friends – who drove out of the city for Dick’s parties. He heldthem in September or early October, since November was hardly anideal time in Alberta. I remember the gathering of fuel, which wenton all afternoon. People dragged whole dead trees, scrap lumberfound somewhere on the property, even on one occasion a dozen oldtires, and balanced it all in a pyramidal form awaiting the first match.Dick loved a big bonfire. I’ve never anywhere else seen such large firesset in innocence.

By the third or fourth year, word got around beyond the biochem-istry department, and there were many people at his farm on thesenights Dick didn’t even know. A not so subtle current of rowdiness,even disrespect, appeared. I had my first taste of beer (hoppy,unsweet) in among the swirl of grown-ups on one of these GuyFawkes nights, probably given me by a drunken grad student. Dickcould set off a wild mood in the people around him. And then he’d becarried along by the excitement he sparked in others. But at some



imperceptible threshold in the night, as I recall, the momentum of theevent would pass him by. At the final Guy Fawkes party, the revellersburnt down a hay barn. Dick’s new house almost went up in flamesalongside it.

WHEN, last summer, I came across thephoto of Jeremy Lee’s round and whiskeryface, posted up on his lab’s website, thoughhe was older, I recognized him. I’m sure

that he too was at the Guy Fawkes parties, one of those young men.After our initial phone conversation I asked him about it by e-mail,but he ignored the question, preferring – I cannot fault his judgment –to straighten out my grasp of scientific fact.

QQ


Date post:	12-Feb-2022
Category:	Documents
Upload:	others
View:	3 times
Download:	0 times

The Molecule That Went Behind The World (J. Mark Smith)

Documents