Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

I try to connect those fifteen per capita files with the libraries of magnetic disks in the room down the hall entrusted to his care. One and the same, they still don't jibe. I can no more connect government electronic omniscience with the antiseptic Mylar bits he twiddled for a living than Frank could assimilate global geopolitics into a life that consisted largely of schemes to delay, another year, his masterpiece on a minor Flemish landscapist. What was Haiphong to Herri or Herri to Haifa? Less than nothing. Yet Frank, for a few weeks, turned pages and copied, insisting, against all evidence, that he and what happened all around him shared, somehow, the same substance.

EPA scandal; Capitol Hill sets up killer watchdog, whacks it when it barks, and again for good measure when it fails to bite. "Almost 10 years after the public was alerted to the dangers of ethylene dibromide as a potent carcinogen, a Congressional subcommittee will inquire Monday into the reasons for Federal inaction on banning or restricting the substance, a widely used pesticide and gasoline additive…." Chemical "is invading food and underground drinking supplies… but the agency has yet to act." B11, for Jesus's sake. Big news was last night's Emmys.

I imagine him tending to his cut-and-paste, affecting a theatrical sigh. Every attempt to work himself into moral outrage failed to extinguish the sense of responsibility wadded up inside him. His notes filled with toxic poison, his night with the care and feeding of CPUs. But his thoughts were consumed by panel and patina, the incomprehensible landscape, the local confusion of nights when a stranger dropped by to keep him company, the chance to sketch the trivial sorrows of the nearest feminine face. Those weeks, that face was mine.

The Perpetual Calendar (I)

The breakthroughs in Dr. Ressler's science open as I explore them, like an unknown inlet that turns out to be a channel. As his post-doc went into its first autumn, partial overlap still seemed viable. If each triplet codon shared one base with its two neighbors, the string ACGAAGC would be parsed into discrete particles ACG GAA AGC. I make my own feasibility check the way he once must have. Given a codon ACG, the next partially overlapped codon must be Gxx. How many triplets possess that form? Four possible bases in the second position times four in the third gives a possible sixteen. But nothing in protein sequences places any such positional restriction. All twenty amino acids can occur freely, anywhere in a chain.

Uncanny: my first scientific deduction before seeing the argument in print. Of course, I wasn't first. Nor was I unassisted. But this surge of strange confidence: I have turned up a solution, attached my scent to the landmark. A cause for extraordinary muscle-flexing.

Dr. Ressler came as close as anyone I've ever met to demonstrating that saving grace of Homo sapiens: the ability to step out of the food chain and, however momentarily, refuse to compete. That was the quality that drew Todd and me to him, forced our love, although we barely knew him. "Nature cares nothing about the calculus of individuals." I saw him get angry once or twice. In the end, he even went after his goal with force. It wrecked him to admit that the gene is a self-promotion, a blueprint for building an armed mob to protect and distribute its plan throughout the inhabitable world.

But selflessness too has survival value. To paraphrase Haldane again, one might lay down his life for two brothers or eight first cousins. Ressler knew the calculus and how far he was condemned to obey it. But at the crucial moment, he elected for pointless altruism. Self-denial: the weirdest by-product of a billion years of self-interest. But in nature's hands, even altruism furthers selfish ends.

So I come down from my overlap conquest, return to research. I taste, after making the kill, just between the salt and sour buds on my tongue, the incomparable protein soup driving me forward: not blood. Enzyme wine.

I solve little by eliminating partial overlap. The insight, as advances do, only opens fresh cans of helical worms. I have backed into the framing problem. If a string of bases stores instructions without overlap, that long sequence still has to be framed into correct instructional bits. The gene segment ATCGGT-ACGGCCATG has three different reading frames:

The string itself might carry some punctuation device, a chemical comma indicating how the codons should be read. The reading frame would then be unambiguous: ATC,GGT,ACG,GCC,ATG. But no chemical evidence for a such structure exists.

I ask all the wrong questions, raise naive, misinformed objections that would cause even that most humane educator to smile. Might certain codons chemically fit their amino acid assignments? How literally should I take the tape analogy? Which half of the double helix is transcribed for reading? Can the tape play in both directions? I am a rookie, a greenhorn, a tenderfoot in this new country. But so is science.

I begin to see one thing, at any rate. The chemical tumbling act is a mechanism beyond belief, a language more awesome than I suspected, perhaps more than I can suspect. To transpose the line of information-packed triplets into a meaningful burst of aminos is to begin to hear the structure of genes unfold over time — a virtuosic celebration of ideas trying themselves out, competing, announcing, developing, exploring contrapuntal possibilities.

As my understanding increases and my naivete shrinks, the mechanism strikes me as unnecessarily cumbersome, inefficient. How might I build it better, simpler? I read, with distress, that ours is not the only possible genetic code, nor even perhaps the best way to keep self-duplicating molecules in production. I remember the innumerate grief of Annie Martens — an in-law, like it or not— when she heard Dr. Ressler describe how base 12 would have been a superior counting system to base 10. The woman was profoundly saddened by this irreversible impediment.

Another sadness, stronger than the code's inefficiency: it hurts to discover how much my understanding relies on analogy, pale figurative speech. My tape recorders, playback heads, builders, blueprints, and messengers. Scientific method itself — from diagrams to symbolic formulae to phenomenal descriptions — relies on seeing things in reflected terms. The gene as self-replicating organism, the organism as pan-gene, the cell as factory, the protein as robot running a program so complex that, in Monod's words, "to explain the presence of all that information in the protein you absolutely needed the code."

Will I ever get it? "Code" is itself a metaphor. "Cipher," the etymological dictionary says, comes from that profound mystery, the zero. A term to house my bafflement at how living things can be made up of so many nonliving parts. And if I get to the code, in the months before my savings run out, will it translate, repair the tear in my chest opened the day Dr. Ressler's instructions dispersed? One of the only sources of real company I've ever enjoyed — his gray brows, the taut, yellow smoothness of his face, the brutal, brave humor, the effortless flow of sentences — zeroed. "Dead" is too weak a metaphor. I push the barrow, sift the stone for a hint at how Chartres might come of rubble.

The first time I had a private conversation with Dr. Ressler, when my repeated visits to MOL gradually put him at something resembling ease, we sat in the darkened control room watching through the two-way mirror as Todd fired up the end-of-week processing. Ressler volunteered nothing, but pleasantly answered everything I asked. Just to hear him talk, I asked about a bank of devices, red diode lights flickering rapidly but irregularly.