Saving St. Germ (20 page)

I think I know. But here’s what happened in history. On February 5, 1953, Watson and Crick had nothing in mind to help them build a definitive model of DNA. But between February 6 and February 28 they learned enough to build the famous “Tinkertoy” model every schoolkid has seen, the one I built in my basement: the double spiral staircase. And you see, that’s it, that’s why Rosalind took longer.
They
were biologists—they loved to build atomic models: fast instructive visual aids. And this was a prefab Arthurian tale, with crusading knights, and a Holy Grail built like a twin helix. Rosalind Franklin was a crystallographer, a theoretician; she was interested in taking some time to demonstrate the structure of DNA on X rays, in crystal molecular formation. She was working on the integrity of each section of the canvas, like Cézanne painting: a scientist deep in her subject. And as far as a “race” goes, she had no notion at all that anyone outside Randall had access to her information.

In 1962, the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology was shared by Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins—in recognition of their work on DNA. Rosalind Franklin’s name was missing. But then, Rosalind was missing in general. On April 16, 1958, Rosalind Franklin died of cancer. She was thirty-seven years old.

I let my hand drop, glancing up at the top shelves, where I know stands a biography of Barbara McClintock, whose research into “jumping genes,” retrotransposons (using corn, plain old kernels of corn, as her model!) changed genetic inquiry. Her research led to high-resolution bonding techniques, but she was laughed at and ignored for years. Finally, in the sixties, her work was looked at objectively and, in 1983, she was awarded the Nobel Prize.

But I’m sick of this now. This glut of ... what? Sexist Highlights of Science History? The SH of SH? At least my theory is
my theory.

I look up at the wall clock. Ten-thirty. Jay,
says a little tin voice. I shake myself.
Jay.
I think of the way his eyes close, in a trusting manner, just before he stutters. I hear his voice, its musical timbre. His laugh. Then I shake my head.

My
theory,
I think. I look at the clock again, then pick up my bag. I’ve made my decision. I’m going over to USC to talk to (another name for my litany!) Professor Lorraine Revent Atwater.

I
FOUND PROFESSOR
Atwater’s office with some difficulty. She was on mini-sabbatical from the USC chemistry department; she was at work on a new project and had squirreled herself and her computers away somewhere in the warren of small offices in an offshoot of the chem building.

I knocked hesitantly at the door, which was half open, and blinked into the shadowy interior, where two (no, three!) leaping computer screens sat stacked up like animated building blocks. She was at work, bent over a yellow legal pad lit by the spotlight of a gooseneck lamp—she didn’t hear or see me.

I’d met L.R. (as she asked me to call her; “I’ve been ‘L.R.’ since grad school,” she said) at a seminar-conference at UCLA when I’d first come to L.A., and we’d stayed in touch. We were interested in the same things. Months into my chirality theorizing, we’d run into each other at Radio Shack—and, as if there were a kind of theory-ESP in the universe, she began telling me what she was working on. It was amazing, remarkable: We were both at work on chirality and we were both on our way to the conclusion that testing the tetrahedral molecules’ chirality in deep space was the place to begin.

There was no competition here. I liked L.R. and I was interested in what she’d come up with. I didn’t want to be scooped, and I would never let myself be scooped in the way Rosalind Franklin was—but this was different: L.R. and I both believed that chirality was such an evolving model that we didn’t worry too much about reproducing each other’s results. Besides, I was the neophyte; I was newer than the newest kid on the block. She had superior age, knowledge, and experience. It was not a Q-type feeling that I had here, but a simple hard look at what was up. Plus she was a woman—never maternal, not even sisterly, but she offered me the reinforcement one gives a respected if younger colleague of the same gender.

When I first met her I felt renewed in my conviction that theory’s elegance and abstraction needed just this kind of champion. Way back in the sixties, when I was just a glimmer of a kid-scientist, she’d actually found practical ways to solve Schrödinger’s equation on molecules—a formula that had been around since 1923, that made perfect sense, but that could never be solved for the descriptions of things as complex as chiral molecules.

The equation went like this:

Simple as pie! (Or psi.) It described molecular phenomena perfectly, but no one could get it to work practically. Lorraine Revent Atwater did. In 1965, at a time when computers were like electronic dinosaurs compared to our present versions, she calculated approximate properties of molecules using Schrödinger. She got it to work. She’d stay up all night calculating, she told me, then she’d fill in the results on the blackboard behind her, like a baseball scoreboard. Each morning she’d post a new set of “scores.”

Back in 1965, listening to the Jefferson Airplane, I read an article in
Science
about L.R. and the Schrödinger breakthrough. So when I finally met her, I chalked one up myself: I’d met a brain woman who was thought of as cold. This told me she was no-nonsense, the real thing—a theorist who didn’t apologize for the detached, classical beauties of theory, the way my friend Q had. When I felt desolate, I thought of her. For though she’d never been intimate pals with me, or offered me wild enthusiasm for my ideas, she stood steadily by me. And she gave me hope. After all, she
existed.

She looked up suddenly—a large, hook-nosed woman with short thinning grey-brown hair and an air of physical perfunctoriness. Great radiant eyes behind her wire-rim glasses. She didn’t miss a beat, but jumped right in: no small talk.

“Think about it, Esme—the problem is theological, isn’t it? A question of seeing it wrong because you’ve shifted your origin.”

“Yeah. But I think it’s God who keeps jumping around, not us.”

She offered me, with enormous delicacy, a partially eaten ham sandwich. I wolfed it down.

“You need to be a perissodactyl. You know”—she winked and waggled her fingers at me—“have fingers or toes in odd places, to spin
this
Frisbee.”

“The tetrahedrals
could
use a kind of special torque, couldn’t they?” I swallowed the last of the sandwich and she handed me a dented Coke can and I swigged from it. “Or, you’re right—maybe a perissodactyl, something providing the spin that’s morphically unfamiliar, a new kind of God? I see why you say the problem’s theological!”

“Right,” she said, nodding, smiling. She paused. “I don’t know if I’d call it
torque
exactly.”

“No?” I crumpled up the Coke can in my fist, took careful but show-off aim and watched my empty hit the edge too hard and bounce off. I shook my head and shrugged.

“We’re just about at the same place with this stuff, aren’t we?” I said. “Though we didn’t think this would happen.”

“I think so. You got third-order dispersion forces, mixed electromagnetic forces all producing the same results.”

“And at shorter distances, calculations lead to large discriminations, of the order of the thermal energy. Easily interpreted in terms of specific atom-atom reactions.”

We lapsed into silence, running over the spinning architectures in our heads.

Then she crumpled up a piece of paper, took aim, and hit the wastebasket, with just a little more spin than I’d applied. The paper wad danced around the circumference of the basket, wobbled, fell in.

She smiled again. “Torque,” she said.

“I think we’re close.”

“We’re close to the three-center attachment theory of Ogston. Whether our model has implications for chiral selectivity or for homochiral preferences in natural selection remains open to question.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Nevertheless.”

We sat and talked some more; I thanked her for “lunch.” As I went out the door, she called me back.

“Does it bother you that we’re neck-and-neck here, Esme?”

“No,” I said, honestly. “Does it bother
you
?”

She sighed, looked away for a second, picking at her teeth with a paper clip. She had big teeth. She looked like Eleanor Roosevelt, I thought suddenly. Then she faced me.

“I’ve lived longer than you,” she said very slowly. She sounded exhausted. “I’ve worked for years on this problem. Years. One feels things one wishes one didn’t. Possessiveness. Defensiveness. But one tries to put things in perspective.”

“It
does
bother you, then.”

She smiled her odd radiant smile. Her glasses glittered.

“Yes,” she said.

Halfway home, I remembered the lab I’d been scheduled to teach that afternoon. I’d forgotten completely about it. If I’d thought of it sooner, I might have called Rocky. She’d have found a grad student to supervise. I pressed down on the accelerator. Oddly, I didn’t feel bad at all. I felt absolutely nothing but the desire to pick Ollie up at school, give her a kiss, take her home, and get dinner, build a brave little fire in the fireplace, make hot chocolate, put her to bed in her flannel nightgown with the blue dancing stars, take out my yellow legal pads, my leaky pens, sit down in front of the fire, and go to work. Writing my own versions of bedtime stories—fantastic worlds, reached by leaps of faith, then returned from: hand over hand, across the reversed bridge of proof.

“Jesus, what’s up with you anyway, Prof?”

I’d come slogging in to school, late for my ten
A.M.
Organic class as it turned out. I’d given a disconnected, blurry lecture—and now, opening the lab door, I saw Rocky standing before me like a Judgment Day angel.

I dropped my briefcase and an armful of papers on a counter and walked over and took her hand and shook it.

“Congratulate me. I’m
that
close to chiral recognition.”

She dropped my hand. “Too bad you weren’t that close for
class
recognition at your lab yesterday. People were
not
happy, man. Especially that asshole, Donald Brandeman. I stood up and made up some lies for you—but you promised those test scores yesterday.”

“Shit. That’s
right.
I haven’t even
looked
at those tests.”

Rocky stared at me. “What’s goin’ on?”

I hoisted myself wearily up and balanced on a counter, a faucet fixture jutting into my back. “Jay took off. He’s gone.”

Her face swerved out of its expression, unsure. It occurred to me again how young she was. I watched her trying to figure out what to say.

“For
good
?”

“I don’t know, but it’s been five days and he hasn’t sent flowers.”

She didn’t laugh. The enormous distance I felt from everything focused itself now, here, on the distance between us. I felt as if I was waking up from an odd and very exhausting dream. Here was this
girl,
this kid—what had I been doing, trying to teach her science, lab procedure? Why was I wasting precious research time here in my own funded space, explaining things, correcting her errors, taking her painstakingly through procedures?
She’s no good to me
I thought, then I stopped myself. I looked just beyond her and noticed what she’d been doing. She’d set up the lab for sequencing, she had the spinners going, she had a couple of radiographs ready to pop out. The room hummed. Totally in control, I thought. How had this happened? How had this distracted, Walkman-wired, sweet-faced delinquent turned into a practicing scientist in less than two months?

She laughed, right on cue, as if she had a wiretap on my synapses.

“You taught me all this, Prof,” she said. “Remember?”

At night, Ollie and I sit in front of the fire. The heat and light attract us—we eat our meals and do paperwork before it. Ollie, sprawled on her stomach, with a sheet of white construction paper in front of her, draws wings on our house.

“It can go up,” she tells me.

“Where does it go, Ollie, when it goes up?”

She stares for a long time at the crayoned shapes, biting her lips.

“Where the blue starts, then up to Lucy.”

“Can you draw Lucy?”

She looks at me, astonished at my ignorance.

“Lucy can-not fit into our eyes.”

“But who is Lucy?”

“She is here because she is a diamond.”

“What kind of diamond is she?”

She wrinkles her nose at me and laughs.

“
You know.
Diamond that keeps our world inside it.”

She brushes wisps of hair from her eyes and inhales loudly through her nose, then out again. She still has a cold.

I sketch diamonds for a while in the margins of my calculations on a yellow legal pad. I make them three-dimensional cones whose adjoining bases form a circle. I begin to spin the diamonds, glittering, one by one down the right-hand margin. A log shifts suddenly in the grate, and sparks pop and sizzle upward, airborne; one lands on Ollie’s flying house and I reach over and smother it with my legal pad. She squeals, a combination of fear and delight: