He feels good. Contemptuously good. Every inscrutable thing that Thassa has ever said about how easy this state is to achieve now feels stunningly obvious. And yet this burst of happiness will be deducted from any remaining share owed to him in the afterlife.
Beyond the door, a mother makes right again the world of her child that has come apart a little in the night. Russell breathes in; only the memory of last night’s television persists in rasping him. And even that burr is obscured by the side effects of the Ativan and the image of a woman lifting and lowering herself gratefully on him.
She lets herself back into the room, flushed. She leans against the door, a makeshift barricade. “I’m so sorry about this! I’ll just get dressed and take him to school. Then I have to head in ”
“Sounds good. I’ll just lie here like a satiated drone.”
She grins, comes to the bed, and climbs all-fours on top of him. “You are wonderful. Simply wonderful.”
She means someone else. Or some other word. But maybe he is, this morning. For this moment, anyway, full of something much like wonder.
He watches her stand in her closet and do a demure reverse striptease until she is Candace Weld again, pleated, rose-colored college psychologist. The moment she’s dressed, they lose each other again. He pulls the covers over his thin chest. She looks everywhere but at him. “Stay as long as you like,” she says. “You know where the coffee is. I’ll check in with Thassa from work. See what she thought about the show.”
“Good plan.”
She crosses to him and kisses him on the forehead. He kisses her on the chin. In afterthought, she sits on the edge of the bed and rests her hand on his sternum. “I hope ”
“Yes,” he says. “Me, too.”
She goes to the door, touches her lips, sends his germs back to him on the carrier air. The door opens and she stumbles out into the hall, into a bolting ten-year-old.
When Candace called, Thassa had already recovered from the show. She laughed at the scientific pseudonym that Dr. Kurton gave her. “He must have stolen it. From a film I showed him.”
The Algerian seemed as resilient as her alleles made her. “It’s not so bad as I feared. Kind of science fiction, right? Nothing to do with me, anyway. Now it’s Jen’s problem! Although, did you see that anime of my brain? My own brain, working. Very strange, that.”
That night, at their usual time, Candace checked in with Russell.
“How did she sound?” he asked.
The psychologist sighed. “Happy. As usual.”
“I know the feeling. Except for the ‘usual.’ ”
And the two of them went on to speak of more pressing things.
The scientific community’s reaction starts noisy and amps up fast. A madly democratic chorus weighs in on radio, television, and the Internet, and in newspapers and university lecture halls.
The press leaps on the usual expert witnesses. In the States, they swarm around Jonathan Dornan. Three internationally bestselling books explaining evolutionary genetics to the intelligent layperson make him the automatic go-to for anything spelled with the letters G, A, C, and T. Dr. Dornan gives a guardedly appreciative quote to the AP: “Ten thousand genes get expressed in the human brain. We understand fewer than one percent of them. This research begins to give us a handle on what happens in forming baseline temperament.”
Others doubt the paper’s details can be redeemed, let alone refined. In laboratories from Tübingen to Beijing, skeptical researchers object to the idea that anything so complex could derive from so small a number of genes.
Nobel laureate Anthony Blaze writes a much-reproduced Guardian op-ed:
We must once and for all outgrow our obsolete ideas about heredity. Genes don’t code for traits. They synthesize proteins. And single proteins can do incredibly different things, depending on where and when they’re produced We have no gambling gene, no intelligence gene, no gene for language or walking upright or even a single gene for curly hair, for that matter. We certainly possess no set of genes whose function is to make us happy.
This piece just feeds Truecyte’s original firestorm. Geneticists on four continents caution about overstating the case for nurture. There’s nothing magical about behavior or temperament. When the crucial genes are missing, no amount of outside stimuli can compensate. Maybe FOXP2 isn’t a gene “for language,” two German researchers point out in an Economist reply, but the lack of a good copy of it prevents the development of speech.
Other speakers come to Blaze’s defense in dozens of international forums rushed together in the wake of the story. The Kurton-doubters concede that a single gene defect can knock out a complex behavior. But that doesn’t mean complex behaviors derive from a single gene. One bad allele can cause depression. But a few good ones don’t necessarily cause bliss.
Researchers whose greatest social stress consists of writing grant proposals slink out of their labs and into broadcast studios. They summarize the complex article using short, digestible sentences of simple words. On cue, across the big three monotheistic target markets, creationists flood the call-in lines, leading the discussions into threads more tangled than any enzyme pathway.
A hard-core genetic determinist from the University of Leiden, interviewed on BBC Four, points to the haunting twin studies: the more genes any two people share in common, the more likely they are to share dispositions, no matter how or where they’re raised. A nurturist colleague from Hamburg refutes that “hardwire hype,” suggesting that any individual’s emotional highs and lows probably differ as much as any two people’s baselines.
In the scattered sniping, both sides commit crimes of passion. A symposium at the University of Florida generates a complex exchange of ideas that culminates in face-slapping. An outspoken engineer from MIT who champions Kurton’s paper as an important early step in the future structural improvement of humans receives death threats.
The most damning critique comes from the epigenetics community. A revolution is afoot, one that looks almost like retooled Lamarckism, calling into question the centrality of the gene and all the old dogma of fixed inheritance. The genome seethes with extragenetic inherited mechanisms, environmentally altered chemical switches. The gene-centric view looks increasingly like the domain of fifty-seven-year-olds still in the grip of obsolete paradigms. Nurture can directly affect germ cells. Old-style gene-association studies like Kurton’s may be not even irrelevant. Temperament may be in the water, food, and air, as much as in the chromosomes
For a few strange days, neither right-wing nor left-wing talk radio knows whether they should be for this discovery or against it. Both wings flap over the notorious footnote, Jen. Is she real, or just some kind of research artifact? Is she the poster child for the coming, new human? Or is she just some chick who’s more chipper than she should be?
The consensus, if any, is vague. Most talking heads agree that the sculpting of affect is lifelong and fluid. But most also concede that people’s bedrock emotional skills vary as greatly as their skills in math. For proof, witness the chaos of this public argument.
But in all the din, no one comes forward with any substantive criticism of the original paper’s methodology. The statistics withstand scrutiny. Other studies will take years to confirm or contradict the outcome. The story could vanish in shame. It could be put to rest once and for all in a new definitive study. And still the genes of happiness will knock about in the collective marketplace for generations.