In the spring of 1978 I was in love with this hot scientist who was doing research on shifted reading frames in single-stranded DNA viruses. She was a 28-year-old Ph.D. candidate whose own genotype specified high cheekbones, hazel eyes, brown hair, long Barbie-doll legs, and hubba hubba hubba.

Shifted reading frames, the area of her research, refers to the way more than one meaning can be carried in a text sequence depending on how you break it into words. For example, in English, the sequence NOTIME can be read "No time" or "not I, me." The DNA alphabet is composed of codons, sequences of three nucleotides. A DNA sequence -- for example, TTACGGATTACCC -- can be broken into codons in exactly three ways, depending on where you start reading. Early on, scientists discovered codons whose function was to signal where reading was to start and stop. The belief was that the DNA between any start-stop codon pair was read linearly, much like sentences in a book. In fact, DNA sometimes interprets the sequence between start and stop pairs differently, so that, in effect, DNA equivalents of NOTIME sometime mean one thing and sometimes mean something else.

Before this austere trick was sussed out, the thinking was that DNA was essentially obvious, in the sense that one gene mapped to one protein. It was believed that the number of genes in a sequence of DNA could be counted by tabulating the number of "start reading, stop reading" codon pairs, and that the number of genes in an organism's genotype equaled the number of proteins in that organism. Figuring out what a gene did, on this model, would be like looking up a part number on Amazon.com. Just as each item that Amazon sells has a unique "ASIN" number, so it was thought that there was a one-to-one correspondence between genes and proteins.

But then what was one to make of the fact that the bacteriophage phi X174 had nine genes and 11 proteins? 9 = 11? Or as we would say nowadays, WTF?

Then in the early 1970s a scientist named Frederick Sanger had an epiphany -- for which he would be awarded the Nobel Prize (his second) in 1980. "Holy cow!" Sanger said (I'm paraphrasing), "Mother Nature has been yanking our chain!" Turns out that DNA was doing some pretty damn fancy self-modifying recursive hacks, by which it was packing all kinds of meta-information into the plaintext. By now, 2003, everybody knows that DNA is devious, flirtatious and duplicitous. But in 1978 this was still shocking news. The discovery of shifted reading frames was like finding out that your mother had been having an affair for the last 15 years. Or that's how it seemed to me, in any event.

But I may be anthropomorphizing: harboring jealousy, a quarter century later, against a molecular archetype. For if you want to know the truth, DNA was the only thing that my gorgeous so-called girlfriend ever thought about. Ever. Even in our most intimate moments she was thinking about the tricks, subtleties, sleights of hand, misdirections, camouflages and bad faith of DNA. It was as if she were Sherlock Holmes and DNA were Dr. Moriarty. Their relationship was all-consuming, adversarial and to the death. My role was incidental, and biological, like food or a blanket.

Yet so smitten was I, so in awe of her nonchalance in the domain of the nucleotides, that I resolved to learn the code myself. I read textbooks, I sneaked into lectures, I lurked about laboratories. And I read scientific papers that she gave me, and that I barely understood, as I popped Jiffy Pop popcorn over a Bunsen burner at 3 in the morning while she was in the cold room packing a column -- or at the next bench running two-dimensional isoelectric-focusing slab electrophoresis gels in preparation for a talk she was to give at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory that summer.

Oh my God, to be in that laboratory! I pity anyone who has not watched a hot chick, with her hair in a bun, wearing a white lab coat, perform science in the middle of the night. Even her mistakes were sublime: One night while doing some assay she accidentally poked her wrist with a hypodermic full of some nasty mutagen. "When I die of cancer in the name of science 30 years from now," she said without slowing down or looking up, "you can say you saw it happen."

I knew then that I was on hallowed ground, in the very presence of Science with a capital "S," privileged to watch something as selfless, sacred and filled with mortal peril as the first wave landing on Omaha beach. I felt awe, as if Marie Curie were speaking directly to me from some ethereal realm. I felt as if I were popping popcorn for Galileo.

She gave that talk at Cold Spring Harbor; it went well, and then she left for London or Zurich, some lover or husband, it was all so long ago, I cannot remember. She later told me that James Watson and Francis Crick were in the audience when she presented her paper and that Watson complimented her afterward. Whatever the merits of her research, I have no doubt that Watson was more impressed by her ass than her assays. But in any event one does not present papers to the popes of DNA unless one knows whereof one speaks: That chick was the real deal.

Twenty years later I wrote a novel about molecular biology, largely inspired by memories of time spent in that beautiful geneticist's lab. We'll come back to her.

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