The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [141]
“Cleaved DNA molecules introduced into yeast promote efficient homologous recombination at the cleaved ends,” Kilimnik said. “Going by that, we should be able to put our constructs near CDC36 in the chromosome.”
Leonard had stopped eating by this point, and just sipped his water. His brain felt as if it was turning to mush, seeping out of his ears like the green lobster guts on his plate. When Kilimnik went on to say, “In a nutshell, what we’re going to do is put an inverted HO gene into daughter cells to see if this affects their ability to switch sex and mate,” the only words Leonard understood were sex and mate. He didn’t know what an HO gene was. He was having trouble remembering the difference between Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Schizosaccharomyces pombe. Fortunately, Kilimnik didn’t ask any questions. He told them that anything they didn’t know they would learn in the Yeast Class, which he himself would be teaching.
After that dinner Leonard did his best to get up to speed. He read the relevant articles, the Oshima, the Hicks. The material wasn’t that difficult, at least not in outline. But Leonard could barely finish a sentence without drifting off. The same thing happened in the Yeast Class. Despite the stimulating effects of a plug of chaw in his cheek, Leonard felt his mind glaze over for ten minutes at a time while Kilimnik lectured at the blackboard. His armpits grew fiery from the fear that he might be called on at any minute and make a fool of himself.
When the Yeast Class ended, Leonard’s anxiety quickly turned to boredom. His job was to prepare DNA, cut it with restriction enzymes, and ligate the pieces together. This was time-consuming, but not all that hard. He might have enjoyed the work more if Kilimnik had said an encouraging word or asked his input on anything. But the team leader barely came into the lab. He spent most of the day in his office, analyzing the samples, barely looking up when Leonard came into the room. Leonard felt like a secretary dropping off correspondence to be signed. When he passed Kilimnik on the lab grounds or in the dining hall, Kilimnik often failed to acknowledge him.
Beller and Jaitly got somewhat better treatment, but not much. They began muttering about transferring to another team. The guys next door were working with genetically altered fruit flies, trying to find the cause of Lou Gehrig’s disease. As for Leonard, he used Kilimnik’s absence to take frequent breaks, going out behind the lab for a smoke in the cool sea breeze.
His main goal in the lab was to conceal his disease. Once he’d prepared the DNA, Leonard had to put it through electrophoresis, which meant dealing with the gel casting trays. He always had to wait until Jaitly and Beller had their backs turned before he tried to pull the well combs out of the agarose, because he never knew, from moment to moment, how bad his tremor might be. After he managed to load the gels and to run them for an hour or so, he then had to stain the samples with ethidium bromide and visualize the DNA under ultraviolet. And when he was done with all that, he had to start over with the next sample.
That was the hardest task of all: keeping the samples straight. Preparing strand after strand of DNA,