Mendel's Dwarf Read online

  “But what does all this mean?”

  “It means just what you asked. It means mice are no different. It means animals are no different. It means man is no different.”

  My doctorate took me the statutory three years and created something of a sensation. Not much, but something. “The Effect of Induced Point Mutations in the Homeobox Gene HOX7 in the Mouse, Mus Musculus.” I published a number of subsidiary papers in the course of the work, and I had one semester at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore as a graduate student. I heard Nirenberg lecture on the genetic code, and visited the Salk Institute, where Holley had first isolated transfer RNA (1 milligram from 90 kilograms of yeast, can you imagine that?), and argued with Watson at Cold Spring Harbor over the moral implications of recombinant DNA techniques. “Hey, this little guy’s something else,” I heard someone say of me. With my doctorate came the offer of a post at the Royal Institute for Genetics in London. A job. A salary. Lecturer in Molecular Genetics.

  1. Abbott et al., Johns Hopkins Medical Journal 134, 1974.

  2. E.g., T. A. Knight and J. Goss in England.

  3. In Mendel’s own terminology this would be the first hybrid generation, although standard practice in Mendelian genetics is to call it the second filial or hybrid generation.

  The Royal Institute for Genetics was opened as the Galton Institute for Plant and Animal Breeding. It is housed in one of those redbrick piles in Kensington that serve indifferently as museums, hospitals, Anglo-Catholic churches, or university colleges—buildings reeking with that nineteenth-century neogothic conviction that almost everything has been done and proved, and anything missing is just around the corner and will be pretty straightforward when you come to it.

  The Institute is strung out uneasily between the old and the new, between tradition and innovation, between the imperial past and an empirical present. On the one hand there is the old building with its ogive windows and gothic vaulting and statues of long-dead scientists in niches like sex maniacs skulking in the shadows; on the other hand, very much on the other hand, accessible through the kind of elevated plastic walkway that you find in airports, gleaming and humming like a machine, are the Gordon Hewison Laboratories, a cathedral of the new age where priests and scribes decipher and transcribe the texts, and find damnation written there just as clearly as they ever did in medieval times

  I followed the director, James Histone, into this other world. The lighting was even and pitiless. The air had the smooth texture of dust-filtering and sterility. “Relax, relax,” he kept saying to people. He wore a shiny gray suit and a spotted bow tie, and he beamed on everything with the eternal optimism of a television talk-show host. “Just an informal visit. Take no notice.” But of course people did take notice. They looked up from their benches as we passed by, and they stared for that fraction of a second that I can time so exactly. Some smiled nervously. One or two nodded as though in recognition. You notice everything, that’s the trouble: every wince, every grimace, every dilation of every pupil. You see them looking when your back is turned; you hear them talking when you are out of earshot; you know what they are thinking. In the street it is the fascination of the freak show, of the monster, of the walking gargoyle; in the laboratories, within the temple of molecular biology, it is the thrill of seeing a manifestation of the texts that they read with such minute attention, as though a beast from the Apocalypse were to walk through the scriptorium of a medieval monastery and by his existence confirm the truth of everything that the monks had just transcribed.

  In the common room, future colleagues stooped to shake hands. The women looked motherly and uneasy; the men exuded a dreadful, forced bonhomie. “Good to see you, Ben. Good to have you with us.” Patricia Primer (red hair, freckles) explained her work on supercoiling and overwinding, demonstrating the processes with twists of her supple fingers that evoked a frisson of delight in poor old Benedict the diminutive goat; Ochre Codon (loose, voluptuous) gazed earnestly down at me and talked about overlapping genes in adenovirus; Vincent Vector (extinct acne craters and oily hair) explained a system for winning the football pools using the linkage analysis computer program. “I’m sure you’ll all get on fine, just fine,” the director said. His conversation was loaded with random repeats. “You’ll have a fine team,” he assured me when we were back in his office. “A fine, dedicated team. I predict great things, great things …”

  His desk bore a shiny silver model of one turn of DNA, a shining spiral staircase that led upward like Jacob’s ladder toward an equivocal paradise. A silver plaque at the foot announced that he had received the Biological Institute of Georgia Annual Recognition for Scientific Endeavor or some such. On the walls there were framed photographs of the man himself with Crick, with Nirenberg, with Sanger. His main topic of conversation was money. He talked about supply and demand, production utilities and patents. “We’re in the marketplace now,” he kept saying. “There are no free meals.”

  I interrupted him: “There is just one thing. I’m rather keen on my own research project. I’m confident I can get the funding for it …”

  “Your own project?”

  “The identification of the gene for achondroplasia.”

  There was a silence. The director watched me through the intricate latticework of the DNA molecule. “Achondroplasia,” he repeated. “Of course. It’s a dominant, isn’t it?”

  “Certainly.”

  “One hundred percent penetrance.”

  “Regrettably.”

  His smile, at first larded with sympathy, metamorphosed. It became a careful, complex thing—a look of disappointment, a subtle blend of understanding and regret, a mute acknowledgment that the world is a bitter place and there is no alternative but to plow one’s furrow as best one can. “There’s no money in dominants,” he said sorrowfully. “Not unless they’re late-onset. No money, no future.”

  “But I can get funding. That’s the one advantage being … like I am. There are lots of organizations interested. The Little People of America, groups like that. When they see me coming they reach for their covenant forms …”

  He looked skeptical. “Recessives, that’s the name of the game. Recessives play on people’s anxieties. They can spend a whole lifetime worrying whether they’re carriers, and then we come along and offer them a test. Recessives and X-linked. Look what they’re doing with fragile-X nowadays. And cystic fibrosis. Just imagine the commercial possibilities if you can design and patent a probe for something like Gaucher’s disease …”

  Gaucher’s disease has a high incidence among Ashkenazi Jews—Ashkenazi Jews control the world’s banking and commercial system (vide Mein Kampf)—ergo a test for Gaucher’s disease will earn lots of money.

  “You still can’t treat any of them,” I pointed out.

  He opened his hands as though to display the obvious. “You give the parents the right to decide whether to terminate.” And then his gesture metamorphosed into one of helplessness. “But with achondroplasia … ninety percent of cases are sporadic, aren’t they? New mutations. I mean, your own parents …?”

  “Both normal.”

  “There you are.” He spread plausible hands once more. “What’s the point? Who’ll buy a thing like that?”

  “People want to know. We”—I hated the collective pronoun—“we want to know our enemy.”

  He nodded. “I understand your interest, Ben. Don’t think I don’t. But the world has moved on from those days when you could find something out for its own sake. Nowadays it has to have a commercial function.” Then he brightened up. “Is it true what I’ve heard? You’re some kind of descendant of Mendel? Is that true?”

  “A family story.”

  He pursed his lips and looked at me with his head cocked sideways, like a tailor considering me for a suit. “We could make something of it, you know. A bit of publicity never does anyone any harm. How about if I get in touch with the head of programming at the BBC? Good friend of mine. There’s mileage in that, all right. Mi
ght even get them to do a documentary. Would you be prepared? We must discuss it …”

  I smiled back at him. “Only if I can have support for my project. I’ll only play the circus clown if you’ll come along with me.”

  “Bartering, eh?”

  “The marketplace,” I reminded him.

  After our interview, I wandered the temple precincts on my own. More by chance than design I found myself outside the library—the Bateson Library, named after the first director of the Institute. A bronze bust of the man stood at the entrance like the image of a titular saint at the door of a chapel. Bateson was one of those who had come second, one of the great losers, a blunt Yorkshireman who worked on inheritance in the last years of the nineteenth century, and found himself trumped by the discovery of Mendel’s paper. All that was left to Bateson was to travel to Brünn in the hope of finding out something about the man who had anticipated his own discoveries by twenty-five years. Bateson it was who coined a name for the new science: genetics. His etymological originality doesn’t even merit a mention in the OED.

  I waddled disconsolately through the doors of the library, in search of the Journal of Molecular Biology or something. Picture me there, standing just inside the doorway, looking down the carpeted length of the main reading room. Traffic in the Cromwell Road is dulled to insensibility by double glazing. The place is warm and hushed, scented with the dry dust of books and a hint of reverence. There are chandeliers hanging from a florid ceiling. A notice warns that anyone wanting to use photocopying facilities will have to pay in advance.

  Then, as I watch, someone coughs, and at the sound the woman behind the librarian’s desk looks around with a frown of impatience. Her expression barely registers surprise as she notices me standing there. “It is you,” she exclaims.

  How do you describe one of those moments in your life when the past leans forward to tap you on the shoulder? Turning point? Crisis? Epiphany? No such thing in fact. At the time, in time, it was a moment of complete inconsequence: two graduate students were sitting together in one of the bays, holding hands and consulting the same book; another reader was seated at one of the computer terminals, staring morosely at a screenful of luminous green text; the librarian was watching me. With those eyes.

  “I thought it’d be you,” she went on. “That’ll be that fellow I used to know, I said to myself. That’ll be that Benedict. Doctor Lambert now. I knew he’d go places.”

  “Shh,” said the man at the computer. The graduate students looked up. Surprise, amusement, curiosity, plain revulsion, you could have read all those emotions on their several faces. It was all rather embarrassing.

  “Maybe we’d better go outside,” the librarian suggested. So we went out and hovered around the bust of Bateson and didn’t know quite what to say. At least, I didn’t know what to say. She never seemed to have that kind of problem. “You could have knocked me over with a feather, I was that excited when I heard.” That was the kind of vocabulary Miss Piercey employed, a farrago of oohs and aahs and fancy-thats.

  “Heard what?”

  “That the new Doctor Lambert was”—she hesitated and looked embarrassed—“of diminutive stature. Not that I expected him to remember me, of course.”

  Those eyes, like an ill-matched pair of costume jewels. They brought to mind a teddy bear I had owned as a child. One eye had come unsewn and my mother came to the rescue with a transplant. But she wasn’t able to match the startling blue of the original, and so the replacement had been a lucid ochre, like a barley sugar. One cornflower blue, one amber, a strange mutation. “Naturally I remember you, Miss Piercey.”

  “Mrs., now.”

  “Mrs. Piercey?”

  “Don’t be silly. Miller. Mrs. Miller.” She made a face. “Not that it’s a grand success, but you do what you can, don’t you?”

  I agreed that you did, and wondered how I was going to get out of this one. There was something faintly embarrassing about being confronted with my adolescent lusts in this unexpected manner.

  “Anyway, you’ll have your own work to do, won’t you?” she said. “Won’t want to be bothered with me and my life. If there’s anything you want, just you ask.” She smiled down on me for a moment and then turned and clipped her way back into the library. I watched the gray sheen of her legs as she went, the slender curve of ankle and calf—a kind of perfection.

  Miss Piercey. Miss J. Piercey. Mrs. J. Miller. I laughed when I discovered what the J stood for. I had imagined June. June, moon, tune, it would have fitted well enough. Do names fit their owners, or do the owners grow to fit their names? It is true, isn’t it? The name seems as much a part of the person’s phenotype as his nose or ears or eyes. Even I feel Benedict.

  Miss J. Piercey.

  Jean.

  Don’t laugh.

  Mendel was a celibate like me, although our reasons were perhaps; different. What did he do for sex, I wonder? Was he a hand-reared man? Did he lust after choirboys, or after respectable widows? We expect something, don’t we? True absolute celibacy is impossible, surely. There must be something, even if it is only a discreet retreat to the bathroom and a thrilling auto-caress—and while that is going on, something must pass through the mind, some image of thigh or buttock or muscled torso, some cerebral picture of silken hair or buttoned boot or tight corset. What was it that stirred Great-great-great-uncle Gregor, I wonder?

  There were opportunities, of course—during those three years in Vienna, for example. Who is to say that he didn’t succumb to temptation then? Imperial Vienna, the Vienna of the Habsburgs, the Vienna of the operetta and the waltz, the Vienna of encounter and assignation in the Volksgarten. Opportunity knocks on the mind and the imagination. Heart palpitating, did he go for solitary walks around the central markets near his lodgings, where you could buy flesh or fowl for a few kreuzer? Did he look and merely wonder, or did he summon up the blood and once or twice take a girl back to the cramped lodging house just beyond the junction with Invalidenstrasse, where people came and went at all hours of the day, and blind eyes were always turned in this city that knew so much and saw so much? A young priest on his own, struggling with his books, distant from all that he knew. Lonely. Easy enough to doff the dog-collar. Easy enough to stir the sympathy of some young Slovak girl up from the country to earn an easy kreuzer in the city.

  Holding strictly to his vows, he shunned all relationships with women. Thus Hugo Iltis in the biography. The late-twentieth-century mind nudges and winks, and doesn’t really believe nonsense like that, does it? There is, for example, the conundrum of Frau Rotwang. How curious that even in the modest 1920s, Iltis should follow his disclaimer with this gentle and malicious insinuation: Niessl, indeed, used to speak of a certain Frau Rotwang whom Mendel called upon frequently in the early years.

  Rotwang. Red-cheek. Cheeks flushed faintly with embarrassment or enthusiasm. Frau Rotwang, wife of the proprietor of one of the cotton mills that had sprung up recently along the banks of the river Zwittawa. Herr Rotwang owns a large town house near the Capuchin church and a modest but productive estate out in the country. He is frequently away on business, in Prague, in Vienna, occasionally in Munich; and Frau Rotwang—pretty, younger than her husband, modest, devout—is often on her own. She is an amateur gardener. It is a respectable pastime, and Frau Rotwang is a most respectable young lady, the kind who might be expected to receive calls from a friar of the Augustinian monastery, a man who can offer her advice both spiritual and botanical. Walking back to the monastery from the Brünn Modern School on Johannesgasse, it is barely a detour to pass by the Rotwang house on Josefsgasse. The maid would have been familiar with the small, smiling figure of Father Mendel.

  “Frau Rotwang is in the morning room, Father. Can I take the plant for you!”

  “No. No, I will carry it myself, thank you.”

  The heavy furnishings of a bourgeois house of the nineteenth century, all velvet and plush. Drapes on the tables, heavy brocade curtains, elaborate gas lamps (new marvel)
on the walls, and woodwork everywhere—dark, ornate woodwork, giving off a smell of resin and polish and, despite the labors of a small army of maids, dust. Mendel climbs the stairs through puddles of colored light cast down onto the floor from the stained-glass panes above the landing—the Rotwang arms, fanciful and absurd, emblazoned by the morning sun.

  “What a pleasure to see you, Pater Gregor.” That was how she always greeted him, as though his punctual arrival were always a surprise. “Do come and sit. You must be exhausted after a day teaching all those boys.” A smile, slightly simpering; a blush. Rotwang, red-cheek. She is wearing a dress of some stiff and shiny stuff, undoubtedly the latest thing, undoubtedly the latest color—purple like a priest’s vestments for a funeral, one of the new aniline dyes. Against this heavy dress, her neck and face are fragile and pale, like porcelain. Frau Rotwang asks the maid to bring coffee and poppyseed cake (Father Gregor’s favorite), and only then does she notice his hand hidden behind his back. A sudden coy glance. “What is it that you are hiding, Pater Gregor? You are hiding something from me …”