Candace Weld did, at least, have the foresight to run one definitive experiment that spring. At the beginning of April, she entered into Google the quoted phrase “happiness gene.” The search engine returned 727 hits, one-fifth of them false positives. She tried again near the beginning of May, when even the TiVo-and-leave-o people had gotten their first hive-mind vibe of Thomas Kurton. By then the hits had reached 162,315. Come June, she didn’t have the nerve to try again. Nor did she have the need.
In short, Truecyte’s announcement produces the usual scientific free-for-all. No one is shocked but the general public. Science has never hidden the fact that truth is red in tooth and claw. Blood has flowed over the question of inherited temperament since Paleolithic humans started breeding dogs.
Usually the shouting takes place behind closed doors, out of earshot of the press. Few families bicker in public. The gap between any two scientists pales next to that between science and the science-hating public. But once betrayal is involved, all bets are off.
The betrayal in question splits along generational lines. In one corner, the old-style university geneticist, hands full of reagent, head full of a slowly accreting body of knowledge. In the other, the molecular engineer, hands on the computer simulations and head full of informatics, working for a start-up drug company that reduces even the research professor to a licensed client. Patience versus patents, say the old-style professors. Law versus awe, say the upstarts.
Like the worst of family fights, this one gets uglier as the stakes rise. But in the weeks following publication, Kurton sails above the fray. If he and Truecyte have indeed discovered deep foundations of human emotion, then they’ve just made themselves indispensable. And if they’ve moved a little too quickly or hopefully, the damage will be smaller than the potential gain. They’re a private company after all, accountable to no one but their investors. Write off the loss, manage the resulting publicity, and stake a new claim.
The mastodon has evolved. It’s a whole new elephant.
Thassa’s genome slips into the wild, joining the list of laboratory escapees from killer bees to SARS. A fifth of the popular articles about The Journal of Behavioral Genomics cite the footnote woman from the obscure ethnic population who has won the happiness triple crown. One million people hear Kurton marvel about “Jen.” Ten million hear about her from that one million. And so the imaginary woman comes to life, growing from anonymous childhood to cult adolescence in about five days.
Of course, the bloggers get to her first. There’s a funny piece on Queen Elizabeast (high authority ratings from all user indexes) called “No Cry, No Woman,” suggesting that
anybody who is that far above the human baseline-anyone whose brain scan looks like a symphony-probably should already be considered her own honorary species. If Jen truly is without sadness, then she’s missing out on something profound, mysterious, and essentially human. That’s my feeling, and I’ll go on saying as much, at least until I get the Paxil tuned
The piece gets a few dozen trackbacks and spawns four times as many uncredited imitations across sites large and small. The online magazine Betatest runs a longer, philosophical rumination, “Jen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.” It’s a careful piece, distinguishing between destiny and predisposition. It paints a rich picture of positive psychology’s current understanding of emotional set points. It surveys the huge body of research about environmental contributions to happiness and argues that from any point of view, we ought to be much more interested in the part of our mood that’s under our control than in the part that’s not. It concludes:
Any contentment that Truecyte’s mutant of happiness feels, the rest of us can also experience, much more meaningfully, because more intermittently, through daily effort.
The article gets e-mailed tens of thousands of times around the Net, and with every copy of the article comes a full-length color portrait of a woman in a pose suggesting euphoria. Her features have been Photoshopped out and replaced by the ubiquitous sunny smiley face.
Countless Internet top feeders follow the happiness-gene kerfuffle in detail. They browse to the Behavioral Genomics site and give up in frustration halfway through the abstract. They surf to the Truecyte home page and take the Flash guided tour. They add a few new key terms to their newsreaders, plunge into numerous user groups, or lurk invisibly around the corners of the crazier brawls. They post questions on various Answers Forums, asking whether Jen is for real or some kind of medical composite.
A Facebook user named OtherAngie confesses to being Jen. Her pokes explode, and within three days, her friend count skyrockets from 500 to 8,000+. Half the people leaving comments on her page dare her to prove the claim. She’s holding her own, spinning out elaborate accounts of her irrepressible psychohistory and her recent discovery by science, when three other Facebook users announce that she’s full of shit, because each of them happens to be Jen. Then a dozen people on MySpace jump the claim, and the game wipes out as fast as it started.
The tag phrase “u r so jen” disseminates through the mobile texting community. By the end of the month, the word graduates from adjective all the way to verb. I jen you not.
Sometime near the invention of writing, a single mutation began making its way through the human gene pool. The variant may have arisen once, somewhere in the Middle East. Or it may have appeared independently in the Arabian Peninsula and somewhere in Sweden. Whatever else the gene variation does, it prevents the lactase enzyme from being shut off after weaning. Those with the variation enjoy a prolonged digestive infancy and can drink milk their whole life long.
When tribes began to keep domesticated cattle, the variant humans had a novel advantage: a food source the others couldn’t digest. Some three hundred generations later, most adults of Northern European ancestry can consume milk with impunity, with the skill still spreading around the globe like a pandemic.
I want to know how long three hundred generations is, on an evolutionary scale. I want to know how fast lactose tolerance will move through the rest of the dairy-fed globe. I need to know how fast a tolerance for the lactose of human kindness might spread-how long it might take for the generosity haplotype to run through the race and fit us out with a new, stunning skill.
Thassa gets wind of her anonymous renown. You’d have to be an off-the-grid Tuareg not to come across the happiness gene somewhere in some medium. And people who react to stories about the happiness gene also react to stories about the woman who has it in spades.
She follows the mounting Jen speculation on blogs across the Web. She even leaves comments here and there, saying that no such creature exists. In fact, Jen is more imaginary to her than Gabe Weld’s little digital angel. If people want mystery and imagination and inexplicable temperament, they should just read Assia Djebar. The whole “genetically perfect happy woman” story will disappear as fast as last month’s runaway curiosity-a young man from Maryland who can tell with 98 percent accuracy when any other human being is lying. And Jen will leave no more lasting a trace.
The doings of Thassa’s alter ego are the least of her worries. The spring semester is nearing its climax, and she’s struggling. The demands of the film curriculum and her own appetite leave her overstretched. She’s taking Advanced Production; Culture, Race, and Media; History of Documentary; Location Sound Recording; and Ecology, the last of her general-education requirements. She’s singing in the Balkan choir and trying to form a Maghrebi one. She’s showing Kabyle films to the weekly CineClub, where she’s already given elaborate presentations on Bouguermouh’s La Colline oubliée, Meddour’s La Montagne de Baya, and Hadjadj’s Machaho. She’s fallen in with bad mah-jongg influences. And she’s started what can only be called a liaison.