your reason. Or close enough.”
8
Paul’s father had died of a heart attack in the summer after his freshman year of college. It happened suddenly, leaving a thousand things unsaid.
The funeral procession followed the hearse from the church to the graveyard where four generations of his father’s family lay buried. A green hill where Paul suspected that he, too, would someday find his final repose. His mother cried.
“I could take a semester off,” he told her. “I could stay.”
“No,” she said. “Go back to school.”
“You shouldn’t be alone.”
“I’m not alone; I have the church.”
And it was true. For the last several years, as his father’s behavior had grown more erratic, his mother had retreated into her Bible study. She spent five days a week up at the church. Sometimes she didn’t come home.
* * *
“Your father’s things are yours now,” she told him.
“What things?”
“The things fathers give their sons.”
On the last night he was in town, he went up to his father’s room. His mother was downstairs. She’d fallen asleep on the couch.
Paul opened his father’s closet. Shirts and ties. Books. In the back, near the wall, a loaded gun, silver black. He’d seen it before, years earlier.
He found a coin collection. Susan B. Anthonys, and a dozen Liberty Bells. There was a stack of scientific periodicals. Inside each one, a scrap of paper bookmarked a page. Paul realized these were his father’s publications. All his published papers. Studies on antagonistic pleiotropy, heterosis, and the mitochondrial haplotype distribution of the Przewalski’s horse.
Behind the stack of journals, against the wall, something caught his eye. He reached in and grabbed the green spiral notebook. He opened it, recognizing his own childish hand. His father had kept it, all these years.
He flipped the pages until he found it. Not a date, but a mouse. January-17.
He closed the notebook and threw it back into the closet.
The next day he headed back to school.
At Stanford, Paul double-majored in genetics and anthropology, taking eighteen credit hours a semester. He sat in classrooms while men in tweed jackets spun theories about Kibra and T variants, about microcephalin 1 and haplogroup D. He plowed into 300-level biology, where from the lectern his professor singled him out from the other students, responding to his question by saying, “You have the gift of insight, my boy.” And then, to Paul’s startled expression, he added, “You know which questions to ask.”
There were classes in comparative interpretation and biblical philosophy. He experimented with fruit flies and amphioxi and, while still an undergraduate, won a prestigious summer internship working under renowned geneticist Mathew Poole.
He also scrutinized the fringe theories. He contemplated balancing equilibriums and Hardy-Weinberg. But alone at night, walking the dark halls of his own head, it was the trade-offs that fascinated him most. Paul was a young man who understood trade-offs.
In the medical library, he came across research on the recently discovered Alzheimer’s gene APOE4—a gene common throughout much of the world—and he wondered how deleterious genes grew to such high frequencies. Paul discovered that although APOE4 often produced Alzheimer’s, it also protected against the cognitive consequences of early childhood malnutrition. The gene that destroys the mind at seventy saves it at seven months. He read that people with sickle-cell trait are resistant to malaria; and heterozygotes for cystic fibrosis are less susceptible to cholera; and people with type A blood survived the plague at higher frequencies than other blood types, altering forever, in a single generation, the frequency of blood types in Europe. A process, some said, now being slow-motion mimicked by Delta 32 and HIV.
In his anthropology courses, Paul was taught that all humans alive today can trace their ancestry back to Africa, to
8
Paul’s father had died of a heart attack in the summer after his freshman year of college. It happened suddenly, leaving a thousand things unsaid.
The funeral procession followed the hearse from the church to the graveyard where four generations of his father’s family lay buried. A green hill where Paul suspected that he, too, would someday find his final repose. His mother cried.
“I could take a semester off,” he told her. “I could stay.”
“No,” she said. “Go back to school.”
“You shouldn’t be alone.”
“I’m not alone; I have the church.”
And it was true. For the last several years, as his father’s behavior had grown more erratic, his mother had retreated into her Bible study. She spent five days a week up at the church. Sometimes she didn’t come home.
* * *
“Your father’s things are yours now,” she told him.
“What things?”
“The things fathers give their sons.”
On the last night he was in town, he went up to his father’s room. His mother was downstairs. She’d fallen asleep on the couch.
Paul opened his father’s closet. Shirts and ties. Books. In the back, near the wall, a loaded gun, silver black. He’d seen it before, years earlier.
He found a coin collection. Susan B. Anthonys, and a dozen Liberty Bells. There was a stack of scientific periodicals. Inside each one, a scrap of paper bookmarked a page. Paul realized these were his father’s publications. All his published papers. Studies on antagonistic pleiotropy, heterosis, and the mitochondrial haplotype distribution of the Przewalski’s horse.
Behind the stack of journals, against the wall, something caught his eye. He reached in and grabbed the green spiral notebook. He opened it, recognizing his own childish hand. His father had kept it, all these years.
He flipped the pages until he found it. Not a date, but a mouse. January-17.
He closed the notebook and threw it back into the closet.
The next day he headed back to school.
At Stanford, Paul double-majored in genetics and anthropology, taking eighteen credit hours a semester. He sat in classrooms while men in tweed jackets spun theories about Kibra and T variants, about microcephalin 1 and haplogroup D. He plowed into 300-level biology, where from the lectern his professor singled him out from the other students, responding to his question by saying, “You have the gift of insight, my boy.” And then, to Paul’s startled expression, he added, “You know which questions to ask.”
There were classes in comparative interpretation and biblical philosophy. He experimented with fruit flies and amphioxi and, while still an undergraduate, won a prestigious summer internship working under renowned geneticist Mathew Poole.
He also scrutinized the fringe theories. He contemplated balancing equilibriums and Hardy-Weinberg. But alone at night, walking the dark halls of his own head, it was the trade-offs that fascinated him most. Paul was a young man who understood trade-offs.
In the medical library, he came across research on the recently discovered Alzheimer’s gene APOE4—a gene common throughout much of the world—and he wondered how deleterious genes grew to such high frequencies. Paul discovered that although APOE4 often produced Alzheimer’s, it also protected against the cognitive consequences of early childhood malnutrition. The gene that destroys the mind at seventy saves it at seven months. He read that people with sickle-cell trait are resistant to malaria; and heterozygotes for cystic fibrosis are less susceptible to cholera; and people with type A blood survived the plague at higher frequencies than other blood types, altering forever, in a single generation, the frequency of blood types in Europe. A process, some said, now being slow-motion mimicked by Delta 32 and HIV.
In his anthropology courses, Paul was taught that all humans alive today can trace their ancestry back to Africa, to
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