Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Before the problem could even be posed, scientists had first to determine a structure for DNA that fit the evidence. The structure fell the year Ressler attained legal adulthood, one of the most celebrated solutions in science. X-ray diffractions of crystalline nucleic acid suggested a helix. The beautiful Chargaff Ratios demanded the amount of adenine equal that of thymine, guanine equal cytosine, and G + A equal C + T. DNA presented too many structural possibilities to be cracked by standard organic analysis. By starting with the constraints in Franklin's and Wilkins's data, Watson and Crick tinkered with cutouts until the shoe dropped. They hit upon the double helix, where complementary base pairs — G pairing always with C, A always with T — form the spiral rungs.

Temperament, coded in long strings of base pairs, plays a big part in any interpretation of data. The full ramifications of the model were not quickly grasped. It followed neatly that chromosomes were just supercoiled filaments of DNA. Mendel's genes were simply sections of chromosome, a length of spiral staircase— say ten thousand base-pair rungs spelling out auburn hair. But using four letters to convey the content of all living things seemed like transmitting every Who's Who of this century in staticky dots and dashes across a copper filament.

How was the message read? How to determine the language of the cipher? Understand that question and I've understood him. Dr. Ressler, receiving intact the work of the structurists, trained his temperament on the smallest end of the genetic spectrum, the connecting link. The task given him was to determine how twin-helical sequences of four bases

strung amino acids into enfolded protein:

… threonine-valine-tryptophan…

Dr. Ressler's question was not primarily cytological or chemical or even genetic, although it was all these. Heredity's big hookup lay in information, pure form. It floated agonizingly close in the air, an all-expenses-paid trip to Stockholm taped to the bottom of some chair in the lecture hall. Yet prestige played no more than ironically in Ressler's mind. His was a drive deeper than recognition, a need to cross that hierarchical border, that edge, that isomorph, that metaphor, to get to the thing itself, to arrive at the enigma machine, reach it on pattern alone, reach down and take into his hands the first word, name it, that string of base-pairs coding for all inheritance, desire, ambition, the naming need itself — first love, forgiveness, frailty.

Canon at the Second

I know that need. It keeps me up late, reading. It ruins the best hours of the day, as I run downstairs every fifteen minutes to check the mail. But no further word from Franklin. Only that northern scene, the lovely, faraway village with the fire forever frozen in gesso, proves to me the man ever existed. The painter known only to him, me, and a dozen experts in esoterica: Herri met de Bles, Frank Todd's coding problem. How to find, in the work of a forgotten artist, evidence of that same message Dr. Ressler looked for, the same link, only from the other end, writ large in the outside world.

Frank's problem from the start was convincing himself that skill of hand and eye was its own best excuse for using it. He was temperamentally incapable of believing his own ingenious proofs. He was already in danger of disappearing before I met him. The pointless proliferation of voices, dispersed over the map, shouting, conjugating, declining, declaring nothing except look at me, look at all this, lost and leading nowhere except to their own noise, led him to a place where I can't trace him.

Already too long out of training, I remember I own a book that might be good for something besides proving that people I once worked with actually liked me. I go to my private reserves and pull out the Times Atlas, goodbye gift from my old life. I flip through the maps and locate the pages corresponding to his landscape: Dinant, the Meuse, Namur province, Wallonia, Belgium. I slip my finger up an inch, over the language line into Flanders:

Leuven, Mechelen, Antwerp, a world away. What does it tell, the geometrical isomorph, the representations drawn impeccably to scale? Does it help to know that Franklin, on 7/6/85, by the postmark, was near the tip of my fingernail?

I need more. I return to the shelves, pull out a bit of esoterica of my own. I fish about in my two-volume historical atlas for that contradiction in terms, the same place at a different time. I find the cartoons — Low Countries, Burgundy, Hapsburg Sphere. I follow the ebb and flow of colored lines, picture Herri moving through this Gobelin tapestry of economic confusion and geopolitics. But I can't recover the place, realize it in imagination. I sidetrack myself on imagining Franker in his self-described liberation of new words. I studied French for four years in school, during which time I never met a native speaker. All my classes were taught in English, and all I can remember is the cheat of making a sound intermediate between "le" and "la" and the insistence of the texts that one uses the formal form with everyone except intimates, small children, and animals.

Yet I must have retained some spark of the secret life of words, Franker's excuse for more study. Because I also remember being able to translate, fluently and without prompting, the one French sentence Dr. Ressler claimed to know. He rolled it out wistfully as early as the second visit I made to their mechanical hideaway, and he repeated it at odd moments in the course of the year I was his friend. Je ne fais aucun mal en restant ici. I do no harm by remaining here.

He claimed only one other standing bit of foreign-language repertoire, Bach's favorite saying: Es muss alles möglich zu machen seyn. All things must be possible. Tenuous assertion at best. Both Dr. Ressler and Todd sacrificed themselves to a corollary translation: All things that are possible are real.

Breakthroughs in Science

The daily papers have never been kind to his field. They cover the developments well enough, in an Ike's coronary kind of way. They lay out in lay terms the birth pangs of the science, but wind up promising a bevy of mail-order life forms by the end of the decade. The subject matter itself isn't beyond reporters. The logic of inheritance is straightforward. Beadle and Tatum are more coherent than the Mideast. However complex science becomes, it remains at least internally consistent.

The trouble with science journalism lies in time scale. The average news story wraps up in a week to ten days. News confuses significant with novel. I was shocked to discover, at twenty, that news carefully culled not the day's most important events but the most alarming and unusual. Lingering separatist movements are not news, except to today's corpse. Species extinction is too mundane to report. Every "event" in molecular genetics is made out to be a fast-breaking story, conspiring toward an end. A sneak preview of a biological revolution on Monday implies that the derivative consumer good will hit the shelves by week's end.

His science has done its share to aggravate expectations. Genetics has evolved more in the three decades since Ressler worked it than in the previous three millennia. It's easy to think that discoveries will continue to pour out in saturation patterns. But journalism errs in equating development with advance. A new postulate is no more news than a new poem. What news reports as fundamental progress in knowing the world may be only a subtle rearrangement of best analogies.

A new relation is not conquistador's plunder. Science is not about control. That is technology, another urge altogether. The pursuit of living pattern that possessed Ressler has nothing to do with this year's apotheosis of bioengineering. He once remarked that mistaking science for technology deprived the nonscientist of one of the greatest sources of awe, replacing it with diet as filling as Tantalus's fruit. I had only to hear the man talk for fifteen minutes to realize that science had no purpose. The purpose of science, if one must, was the purpose of being alive: not efficiency or mastery, but the revival of appropriate surprise.