David Duncan - Masterminds - Genius, DNA, and the Quest to Rewrite Life

To my mother and father.

I’ve had to face up to the

fact that most of our society

thinks of scientists as people

who are likely to do something

bad. Either bad to make

money for themselves, or

to cause trouble in the

Frankensteinian sense.

And the fact is, scientists

that I know are trying to do

good for people.

—Douglas Melton

Harvard embryologist

It is not possible to be a

scientist unless you believe

that the knowledge of

the world, and the power

that this gives, is a thing

which is of intrinsic value

to humanity, and that you

are using it to help in the

spread of knowledge, and

are willing to take the

consequences.

—Robert Oppenheimer

November 1945

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prelude: The Geneticist Who Played Hoops with My DNA

The Language of Biotech: A Genetic Primer

1. Prometheus• Douglas Melton

2. Eve• Cynthia Kenyon

3. Paul• Francis Collins

4. Faustus• Craig Venter

5. Zeus• James Watson

6. Puck• Sydney Brenner

7. Moses• Paul Berg

EPILOGUE: What If Frankenstein’s Monster Had Einstein’s Brain?

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P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …

About the Author

Q and A with David Ewing Duncan

Top Ten Favourite Authors

Life at a Glance

A Writing Life

About the Book

The Greatest Story in Human History

Read On

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The Web Detective

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Notes

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

There’s a high probability that for Homo

sapiens, the process of evolution as we

currently think about it, as natural selection ,

is for all intents and purposes over. It is

going to be replaced by our desire and

capability to tinker .

—Stuart Schreiber, Harvard geneticist

I’m playing hoops with Erik the Red on a half-court at the ends of the Earth, and he is toying with me. Also Iceland’s most famous geneticist, he’s dribbling a basketball in a Reykjavik gym on a typically damp, cold day in August near the Arctic Circle. Notorious for being rude, as well as brilliant and filled with an infectious passion, Kari Stefansson, a descendent of Erik—an early Viking explorer and marauder—insisted that I go one on one.

Every day at 2:00 P.M., when he’s not wandering the globe rustling up cash or giving talks, Stefansson drives from his office downtown across this speck of a capital city, home to nearly all of Iceland’s 290,000 people, to a gym that requires a retinal scan to enter (Icelanders love gadgets). Just beyond the gym’s parking lot the city ends and a hardened lava field begins, though this is hardly a landmark in Iceland. Here the black rock everywhere remains raw, hardened in waves and eddies, once lava-hot, covered only by a thin veneer of lime-green moss. Overhead, the sky boils with immense gray-white clouds that turn nearly black above a ridge of distant mountains where active volcanoes still blow off steam. The land looks ripped from a primeval moment in history, when cones spewed ash and fire and Titans roamed the Earth.

It’s a fitting place for Stefansson to be exploring the raw ingredients of life, the nucleotides and other molecules that he first began to study as a medical student at the university here before moving on to the University of Chicago and then to Harvard. There, as a medium-important neurologist, he delved into the mechanics of multiple sclerosis and other maladies of the brain. At first, before new technologies made deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) easier to work with, he cut open the brains of persons who had died of neurological disorders. Later, he parsed out their DNA, looking for links. But the academic approach was too slow, so in 1996 he returned home to Iceland to start a company.

On the court Stefansson destroys my pathetic game, despite being fifty-six years old to my forty-four, a difference he notes everytime he overpowers me to plant a basket. At six feet, five inches, with close-cropped white hair, a pointed beard, and biceps that bulge out of the tight black designer T-shirts he tends to wear, Stefansson looks as formidable as his wild-eyed Norse forebears in the Icelandic sagas he likes to read, those hairy warriors who sailed in flat-keeled longboats one thousand years ago, snatching women from the British Isles and taking them to this bleak edge of the earth.

I haven’t played basketball in years. When I finally grab the ball he flashes me a glare that Erik might have used before hacking to death an enemy in the tenth century.

Prior to playing, we had been talking about a test that Stefansson’s company, deCode Genetics, had just run on my DNA, a journalist-as-guinea-pig experiment to check my nucleotides for genes associated with disease. Back in the States, I had a lab extract three vials of my blood to ship on dry ice to Reykjavik. deCode’s technicians then plucked out my DNA from the white blood cells and tested it against the company’s database of genetic maladies. Do I have a genetic proclivity for heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, osteoporosis, anxiety? “We will tell you if you are crazy, or if you might die of a stroke. You will become our first American lab rat,” he had told me a few months earlier, when we met during a biotech conference in New York.

Stefansson had promised to reveal my results when we returned that afternoon to his office, making me one of the first persons ever to reveal publicly so much personal information about a raft of disease markers hidden in everyone’s genes. In a few years, he says, these tests will be routine: a screening like a cholesterol test that will tell us whether we might one day contract a dread disease or die sooner, rather than later. They also might be used to tease out genes that affect behavior, telling us whether we have a predilection for anger, risk taking, happiness, or homicide. Yet I know this sort of predictive genomics is still very much nascent, the information incomplete, the connections between genes and disease or behavior murky, the forecasting power faulty and poorly understood. But I’m willing to listen, and to imagine the possibilities as described by this Armani Viking.

Of more immediate concern to me is how to react if Stefansson tells me that my nucleotides may be harboring an aberration I never suspected, a dread disease ticking inside me like a secret time bomb ready to strike when I’m fifty years old, or seventy. A fatalist, I don’t think much about how I might get sick or die, but I can’t help but feel a small apprehension.

On the court I’ve got the ball and I’m dribbling toward the basket, making a few clunky moves I remember from years back. I whip around Stefansson; he pushes in close and I feel his hot Viking breath on my face. I zig left; he cuts me off. I zag right, and we crash shoulders as I push to turn a corner around him. He’s behind me, pushing, and I start my leap, holding the ball up, eying the basket when he blurts out, “I have your DNA results.”