Richard Powers - Generosity

The Truecyte announcement runs through the meme pool like a wave through a football stadium. Websites everywhere poll user responses; the story gets four stars for newsworthiness, four stars for importance, and five stars for entertainment value. By rough count, two-thirds of the commenting public believe that nature contributes more to happiness than nurture, up from 50 percent a year ago. Two in five believe that science will soon be able to manipulate the genetic component of happiness to our advantage. Most people believe that if Truecyte has done original work to make a useful discovery, they should be able to profit exclusively from it. Eleven percent of the general public thought the happiness gene had already been found.

The discovery hits at the perfect time. The war has spilled over into a third neighboring country, and fatalities are at a forty-five-month high. A new study from the Union of Concerned Scientists shows that global greenhouse-gas emissions may have been greatly underestimated. Scattered outbreaks of a new fatal flu strain come in from central Asia. Recent tests show heavy-metal contaminants increasing dramatically throughout the food chain. Two decades of Ponzi schemes have unraveled the global financial markets and erased trillions of dollars of imaginary wealth. A terrorist cell in Southern California is rounded up, halfway to constructing a dirty bomb.

And scientists discover the genetic cause of joy.

In the final cut of “The Genie and the Genome,” finished just after the first article comes out in The Journal of Behavioral Genomics , Kurton refers to her simply as “Jen.” He describes how the group predicted her genomic signature, based solely on her psychological tests. He shows a color-enhanced animation of her fMRI:

Coordinated activity in these areas associates with sustained positive emotions. Look at her baseline: it’s a symphony.

His excitement ratchets up when talking about the process:

You feed the amplified DNA fragments into this high-throughput optical reader We can do a temperament analysis for under $1,000.

“Do you take Visa?” the off-camera host asks. His smile says: Choose your payment method.

He’s guarded about the interconnected patents his data rely on, but more voluble about the countless interconnected enzyme factories that contribute to the brain’s reward circuitry. He concedes the many genes that emotional well-being involves. Genes that control the pathways and synthesis of crucial neurotransmitters. Genes that assemble the machinery of neurotransmitter release and reuptake. Genes that wire together the centers of perception, memory, and emotion

But after another splice, he’s addressing an auditorium full of electrified people. Sixty percent of the room wants to sic the government regulators on him and the other forty are ready to send him to Stockholm. He’s in front of a huge projected slide, twenty feet wide. As he paces in front of the image, waving and conducting, a graph dances across his body.

The cloud of scatterplots is a thin cigar tipped along a rising diagonal. The vertical axis aggregates selected indicators of subjective wellbeing. The horizontal axis aligns the alleles for genes whose precise identities Thomas Kurton and company now make public for the first time.

He doesn’t have to draw the implied rising line. The line is there , running through the densest section of the cigar-shaped cloud. Data points fall all over the plane, but not randomly. The points rise as the number of repeated segments in certain gene polymorphisms changes. He focuses on a point high up to the far right, and calls it Jen .

Jump back to the smart house in Maine. Kurton’s eyes shine for the show’s host, or maybe its million viewers, live and on the Web.

Think about falling in love. How vibrant and wise you feel. Everything full of meaningful secrets. Amazing things, just about to happen Well, Jen and others up at the high end are like natural athletes of emotion. They fall in love with the entire world. And the world can’t help reciprocating. Genes plus environment, in a positive-feedback loop

Schiff lobs all the familiar criticisms at him, but he stays Zen.

Sure, well-being is a quantitative trait. Yes, these genes interact with dozens of others, and with scores of other regulatory factors. We are devoting a whole lot of microarrays and computer cycles to untangling those interactions Of course environment plays a role in their expression. But all these genes affect the way we engage the environment in the first place. There’s even some evidence that an adverse environment can strengthen the expression

Off camera, Tonia asks:

But the more of these alleles I have, the greater my joie de vivre?

His face admits to complexities.

We don’t even say that. We’ve simply noted a correlation

Shot-reverse to Schiff, who is enjoying this ride. She herself is far too sunny for her own good. It hasn’t yet dawned on her that this story might actually be nonfiction. She doesn’t get that until a few hours after they stop filming. For the moment, she asks:

And you can look directly at my genes and tell me my alleles?

Kurton beams and says:

Give me your coffee cup. We can take a swab off that.

They cut the sequence into the piece’s climax. The assembled show airs two weeks later.

. retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Russell and Candace watch the recorded show together, in her apartment, on her tiny flat-panel television, after Gabe goes to bed. Neither has the nerve to watch the segment alone. Nor do they have the nerve to see each other again, without pretext.

They kiss each other experimentally on Stone’s arrival, to Gabe’s disgust. “What is this, France or something?” But Russell appeases the boy by spending a little while in Futopia with him, before lights-out for children and showtime for adults.

Then Russell and Candace settle in, deployed eighteen inches apart on her living room sofa. They kiss again, riskier, as the recording starts. “Thanks,” Candace says. “Helps. Much better than a tranquilizer.”

Stone almost jumps out of his skin. He has taken half a milligram of Ativan, from a little plastic bottle full of them borrowed from his brother, just before arriving.

The woman smoothes her hair and stares at the screen. Under her breath she tells herself, “Maybe just as habit-forming, Candace.”

“It’ll be fine,” he says. He can’t figure out what he’s talking about. He finds her mouth again. A moment later, he’s not sure if he really said anything at all.

Both of them are helpless and pounding by the time “The Genie and the Genome” starts. Each tries to concentrate, but they’re throbbing in unison, audible to each other. They try to follow Kurton’s argument, the one about our vast increase in the ability to improve people. The man seems somehow different from the person they saw onstage, the one who lured Thassa to Boston. “He is charming,” Candace concedes, her hand tracing circles on Russell’s thigh. “There’s no arguing that.”

Stone should say something. “There isn’t?”

The show sweeps them headlong, rushed by CGI, rapid crosscuts, and a ruthless synth soundtrack. Everything about the show makes science as sexy as sports. Neither of them watches enough TV to be inoculated. The message floods them: strengthen, sharpen, enhance your chromosomes, be smarter, healthier, and truer. Thrive and be what you want, feeding every need. Live forever, suffused in joy.