Andrea Barrett - Archangel

He used fly cultures he’d kept for Axel, techniques he’d learned in his lab, a procedure he’d seen Duncan do in a different context. With a needle he ground to a very sharp point and then heated, he touched — just touched — the center of the red eye of a lightly etherized female fly; then he touched the other eye and laid the fly on a dry piece of paper, which he put into a little vial. A couple of hours later, he transferred the treated flies to a food bottle. In the few that survived the procedure he watched how the Malpighian tubules turned deep red and stayed that way. So: injury to one organ, the eye, caused what appeared to be a permanent change in another organ: an acquired characteristic.

Later, he mated the treated females to normal males and proceeded as usual. Amid the next generation he found a few mutants — yellow body, narrow eyes, twisted penis — as expected. And also, unexpectedly, seventeen flies, both male and female, with red Malpighian tubules. This was peculiar, and completely compelling: what did it mean? Immediately, he started breeding these to each other. None of their offspring showed the red tubules, but that might mean nothing; the trait was likely recessive, and he had only a small sample.

Duncan and most of the other students had a sense of what he was doing; they wandered in and out of the open labs and they all talked not only while they worked but also during their outings. Still, no one knew the details until the director asked him to give a presentation at one of the season’s last Friday night gatherings. He was nervous when he spoke — undergraduates were rarely asked to speak in front of the whole community — and he referred to earlier work that he hoped might support his own. In particular, a recent symposium that many in his audience had attended and that had examined this crucial question: could an injury to one generation cause an effect that was inherited by the next?

Swiftly, he moved through those other researchers’ results. One had demonstrated the transmission of acquired eye defects in rabbits, which seemed to have the characteristics of a Mendelian recessive. Others had shown what seemed to be inheritable effects of injury from alcohol, lead, radium, and X-rays. Perhaps, though, this was parallel induction: had a physical agent acted simultaneously on both the germ cells and the somatic cells, producing changes independently in each, or had the change induced in the body actually affected the germ cell? Which was the mechanism at work with Sam’s flies, and would either case argue for evolution directly guided by the environment? Sam saw Duncan in the audience, listening intently and taking notes, although he didn’t ask any questions afterward. Other hands did wave, though, and Sam was pleased with the way he guided the passionate, occasionally contentious, but civil discussion that followed.

In September, when he returned to college and reported all this to Axel, Axel shook his head and said he wished Sam had consulted him before throwing himself at such a controversial issue. He should never, Axel said, have presented this to so many eminent scientists before testing his hypotheses more thoroughly. Then he said that while he didn’t yet trust Sam’s results, they were intriguing and Sam should push the work forward. He’d supply the flies and the other materials; when the time came, he’d help Sam write up the results. “Although it would have been better,” he added, “if you’d done even more while you were still at Woods Hole.”

“I should have,” Sam admitted.

And would have, he knew, if he hadn’t gotten involved with Ellen. Four years Sam’s senior, presently working as a biology instructor at Smith, she’d spent the previous year in England, where she’d cut off her hair, befriended several brilliant women, and taken up feminism and eugenics. One opinion she held strongly was that exceptionally intelligent people—“Like you,” she said to Sam, during a collecting trip at Quisset, “and me”—should have children together, which would improve the world. Later, she and Sam decanted their specimens side by side, and a few nights after that, when a crowd of students got drunk on the beer two chemists had brewed, they ended up entwined in the dusty wooden attic over the supply room.

The next day, when Sam apologized for what had happened, Ellen calmly claimed it as her own idea and said Sam had only done what she wanted. At the beach, she wore a daring wool-jersey bathing suit that clung to her wiry shape and ended mid-thigh, the white trim disturbingly like underwear, and when she swam she looked to Sam, with her close-cropped hair, like one of the elegant spiraling clam worms he collected at night. He had no idea how he felt about her; he was nineteen, and she let him make love to her. Sam couldn’t imagine why.

“Because I want to have several children, starting soon,” she told him. “And you’re such a good specimen. You’re tall”—here she tapped one of Sam’s fingers—“big-boned, and bright”— tap, tap —“hardworking, sturdy, even-tempered.”

By then she was working on Sam’s second hand, having thrust the first inside her blouse. His hands on her small, pointed breasts, his mouth in the hollow of her throat, her bony feet on his back. He was completely inexperienced when they met; he was astounded. For the last two weeks of his stay at Woods Hole he was with Ellen every night. “If I’m pregnant,” she said the day they parted, “we’ll get married. If not …”

Not, as it turned out, although they met as often as they could during Sam’s last year of college, several times near Sam and twice in Massachusetts, the second time just after Duncan proved him wrong.

What kind of a person would, in utter secrecy, interrupt his own project to replicate a fellow worker’s experiments and double-check his results? Duncan published a paper noting that the preliminary results of a young student investigator — here he named Sam — presented orally and informally, had sufficiently interested him to push those experiments further. When he did, he found that in flies whose eyes had been burned, the Malpighian tubules indeed turned red, and that a small number of the offspring of those flies also had red tubules.

But he also saw something Sam had failed to see, perhaps because he’d been so absorbed with Ellen. In his early work in Morgan’s lab, Duncan had occasionally noticed — or so he wrote; Sam wondered if it wasn’t Morgan himself who saw this — fly larvae feeding on the eyes of dead adults that had fallen on the food at the bottom of the culture bottle; this had colored the intestines of the larvae red. After seeing the initial data (and this did sound like him; he could test a chain of reasoning like a crow pulling at the weak spots in a carcass), Duncan had suddenly wondered if the pigment might be carried from the larvae through the pupa stage, possibly appearing in the adults.

He crushed the eyes of some flies, mixed them with yeast and agar from a culture bottle, and added larvae; their intestines soon became filled with the red food, and a bit later the Malpighian tubules, visible through the larval walls, became deep red. The larvae pupated; adults emerged; their tubules too were red. Variations with different foods showed clearly that some component of the red pigment in the crushed eyes passed from the digestive tract of the larvae into the Malpighian tubules and remained there into the adult stage. Sam’s larvae had eaten the damaged eyes of dead flies and that — not a response to the injury itself — had colored their tubules. Sam had found not an acquired characteristic, but simply a transient response to diet. Acquired characteristics were not — could not be, Duncan said — inherited.

Sam was wrong, he’d been proven wrong, but at first that didn’t seem so serious — why would people hold his curiosity against him? He was young, he was enthusiastic; he’d seen a big question in Kammerer’s work and explored it open-mindedly, trying to follow the data rather than his own preconceptions; he’d shared his findings honestly. Leaving Woods Hole for his last year of college, he’d sensed that others saw him as a wonderfully promising student, welcome anywhere. Six months later, the recent work he’d done in Axel’s lab rendered pointless by Duncan’s paper, those same people seemed to regard him as a dubious young man who’d overreached himself. Even Axel, after reading the copy Duncan sent specially to him, a little handwritten note— I’m sorry —scrawled at the top, groaned and went for a long walk before sitting down with Sam.