Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers Page B

could combine two perfectly clear liquids and turn them a shocking pink. There was no contest. Her magic blew his out of the water, and consumed him with jealousy.
    He took to theft: no other choice. He tinkered in the darkness of her closet while Patty was out of the house. he worked with tiny bits of chemical, so she would never know that anything was missing. Somehow, she always knew, and she’d explode with all the violence that the chemical safety manual warned about.
    The fourth time his sister caught him sneaking experiments behind her back, she gave him the set. Truth was, she couldn’t stand the smells. Patty had been born with the wrong alleles. Even ammonium chloride turned her stomach, and after her first few excursions, she couldn’t bring herself to open the vials.
    Three months into his sole proprietorship of the chemicals, young Tom completed all 150 experiments in the printed booklet and began inventing his own. His alarmed parents bought him a grandiose expansion for Christmas, although such gear was beyond the budget of a Detroit assembly lineman with five children. Armed with “forty-nine solvents, catalysts, and reagents . . . one thousand hours of pure chemistry!” the boy never really broke stride in his life again.
    Even without that proximal cause, he might have landed someplace nearby. From early childhood, he showed all the signs: the model rocketry, the ham radios, the long afternoons gazing into tidal pools, the complete Herbert S. Zim Golden Guides, and later, the expanding universe of cheap science-fiction paperbacks, those lyric hymns to alien life-forms with the surreal cover art where you couldn’t tell buildings from geographical features from living things.
    Eighth-grade frog dissection revealed how nearby species were already more alien than any fiction. His first microscope opened his eyes to life’s true measurements. Diatoms everywhere, whose biomass dwarfed those mutant giants too large to see the real scale of living. In high school, he discovered the Haldane quote about God’s inordinate fondness for beetles. The year Kurton came through puberty, God disappeared altogether, replaced by deeper wonder.
    In senior year, he read
Microbe Hunters
. He turned his bedroom into a shrine to de Kruif’s heroic microbiologists. He painted the names Pasteur, Koch, Reed, and Ehrlich on his ceiling, the last thinghe saw at night and the first thing he opened his eyes on in the morning. His mother couldn’t object; he was heading to Cornell on full scholarship in the fall.
    In short: Kurton’s genes might have led him to genomics, no matter what environment threw at him. But environment pulled all the right triggers, at just the right times. All the right teachers, the right toys, the right texts in the right order. In the first month of college, he came across the most beautiful concluding sentence in world lit, words that gave him far more epiphany than any novel. The book itself was a long, hard slog, but oh, that arrival!
     
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
     
    By sophomore year, he was spending long hours in the lab, in his private chapel with its very own fume hood.
Do not put your nose over the unknown; waft the air of the unknown to your nose.
In his third year, he earned a key to the storeroom, where all the supplies were lined up in orderly glorious ranges on the shelves. Sometimes he would simply stand among them, as if on the podium in front of an orchestra, listening.
    In graduate school at Stanford he made his first real discovery—a gene-promoter mechanism that no one on earth knew about. The find infused him with terrible urgency, a hurry to discover something else,