Double Blind Read online

  Lucy had sat next to Hunter at a dinner party three weeks earlier, and so impressed him with her background in science and business that by the time they were sipping their fresh mint tea, he had invited her to double her salary and head up the London office of Digitas, the digital, technological and scientific venture capital firm he had founded after selling his legendary hedge fund, Midas, only a few months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers. She had been persuaded to make the move from Strategy, the consulting firm she had been working for, partly because of the excitement of a new opportunity, but also because of the collapse of various aspects of her personal life. Hunter was so eager for her to get to London that he had thrown in a fortnight in his apartment in St James’s Place while she looked for somewhere reasonable to live. It was a generosity that would inevitably lead to an anticlimax. The floorplan of the penthouse duplex, sent by Jade in an email with enough bullet points to start a civil war, made it clear that Lucy would be falling off a cloud when she eventually moved into a flat she could afford. Still, it was a kind gesture, as was this luxurious seat, and the limo to the airport, and all the rest of it. She tried to feel spoilt, but she was too bewildered to be entirely convinced.

  Lucy was accustomed to attracting favours and special treatment and she always reciprocated with her own forms of generosity. Her need to magnetise a certain level of protection was rooted in the drastic uncertainties of her childhood: when Lucy was five, her mother had been sectioned after a manic episode and had been taking drowsy Lithium ever since; and by the time she was sixteen, her handsome father had drowned in a whirlpool of alcohol. There was no doubt in Lucy’s mind that her parents were loving and well-intentioned, but they had been incapacitated by their afflictions. Seeing them was like watching someone you love climb aboard the wrong train and then having to run down the platform trying to warn them of their mistake as the train draws out of the station. For much of her childhood Lucy had been forced to look after the people who should have been looking after her. She had developed a penetrating sensitivity to the moods of anyone she was close to and a longing for a level of security that would put her beyond the corrosive financial anxiety of her childhood. In a sense her whole life had been a rather fraught dialogue between her resolute drive for independence – her ‘shield maiden’ persona, as she thought of it, in honour of her mother’s Swedish ancestry – and her effortless ability to find a granite harbour – as it had become in this extended Viking metaphor – by attracting the protection of powerful men.

  Lucy told the flight attendant that she wouldn’t need any breakfast but would love a Bloody Mary. She was impatient to get airborne so that she could try to get some sleep. As she buckled her seat belt she felt a weird spasm clutching at the muscles of her right leg, like the cramps that sometimes attack the arch of a foot but spread over a much larger area and more spasmodic. She sat up slightly in her seat and gripped the armrests until the sensation subsided. This had happened twice before in the last few weeks and she had taken the view that it was a panic attack. It was certainly frightening but hardly surprising that some kind of symptom had emerged from what was probably the most stressful and sleep-deprived month of her adult life. After her visa renewal had been unexpectedly rejected, Strategy had offered to transfer her to London, but she had decided to accept Hunter’s offer instead, leaving her not only homeless and switching continents but also starting a new job. And then there was Nathan.

  During the last four years in New York she had been living with Nathan, her rich and handsome American boyfriend, whose close-knit family had grown to treat her as one of their own. Nathan’s parents, with their waterfront compound on Long Island and their large brownstone in the West Village, and their three grown children all living in charming apartments in the same neighbourhood, had given Lucy, through their warmth and inclusiveness, free from the stresses of poverty and mental illness, a radically different experience of family life from the one she had been brought up with. When she discovered that she had to leave the States, Nathan had said that the obvious solution was for them to get married. She would acquire American citizenship and become further integrated into his splendid family. Their relationship had gone on for so long, and Lucy was so well liked, that there was a collective assumption in Nathan’s family that the two of them would end up together anyway, so why not now, when it was useful as well as romantic. For Lucy, Nathan’s proposal had made her realise that she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with him, or indeed any more time at all. The sudden pressure had forced her to recognise that their relationship had long depended on the trance of habit and the fear of loss. At first, he argued against her rejection by invoking his passion and the depth of their history, but when she persisted in refusing him, it became clear that he found it impossible to imagine a woman from such a fragile background turning down such an advantageous offer.

  ‘But don’t you want this life?’ he asked, waving his hand towards the vast lawn and the private beach in one direction and then back towards the monumental house, designed by Philip Johnson and featured in so many books about masterpieces of American architecture, and the guest house beyond it, in perfect harmony, and the studio, like a high-windowed church, ready to accommodate any artistic impulse, however slight, in a space large enough to work on fifteen Jackson Pollocks simultaneously; not that there was room in the house for any more Jackson Pollocks. Beyond the cluster of buildings was a swimming pool and a tennis court and a driveway that led to two gatehouses occupied by some of the adorable staff of whom it could truly be said that they were part of the family.

  ‘It’s not the house that’s proposing to me,’ said Lucy, uncontrollably irritated by Nathan’s question. It was traumatic enough to be rejecting someone to whom she had been so close, without being bribed to change her mind. She knew that she wanted to achieve something of her own and not have her ambition crushed by a boa constrictor of complacency. Of course, she was susceptible to the offer of so much security, but she was also deeply suspicious of her susceptibility. Her true enemy was not her lack of security, but her longing for it. There were greater things to strive for than the appeasement of her childhood fears.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, accepting the Bloody Mary from the flight attendant.

  Her leg ached after the cramp and felt strangely useless. She massaged her thigh while she drank her premature cocktail. There had been a time when she used to have an uncontrollably fluttering eyelid, after spending ten or twelve hours a day in the library, week after week. She didn’t need Martin Carr, Olivia’s dad, to psychoanalyse why the flutter had moved from her eyelid to her leg: she was making too many journeys at once. The shield maiden was leaving the granite harbour of Nathan’s family and setting off on another adventure, but she was out of practice and needed to get back into shape.

  At least this turbulent and confusing part of her life meant that she would be seeing Olivia again. They would be meeting in London in a few days and later in Oxford, where Lucy had to introduce Hunter to lots of heads of departments during his lightning tour of Europe. It would be useful to have Olivia around since the pages of her own Oxford address book were a bit foxed after six years. It was difficult to know who Hunter might not want to see, given the breadth of the Digitas portfolio. She was particularly intrigued by the biotech division but had already made a study of its other holdings, including an AI and robotics division, Brainwaves, run by a guy called Saul Prokosh. Hunter had told her that Brainwaves had a project, nicknamed Happy Helmets, that was ‘going to be huge’. They were still looking for a marketing name that didn’t make it sound like a children’s toy. There was also some military stuff that Lucy was going to keep well away from, although Hunter had told her that his ‘ethical position’ was to provide protection and not to develop weapons. Her science background had been recognised at Strategy, but only so that she could work out more efficient ways to deliver antibiotics to cattle that should not have been taking them in the first place, or to ca
lculate the patient population of a disease, so as to tell a drug company whether one of its products was an ‘orphan medication’, or whether some of its side effects could be repurposed for a new market. Moving from consulting to entrepreneurial science would stretch her talents for the first time in a while.

  She couldn’t wait to tell Olivia that Digitas had acquired a controlling interest in the start-up founded by Olivia’s old nemesis, Professor Sir William Moorhead. YouGenetics was a medical company based on data harvested by several generations of graduates working under his guidance. The correlations, however small, between thousands and thousands of genetic variations, deletions, duplications and mutations and the propensity for and the outcomes of hundreds of the world’s most popular diseases were locked in the data banks of YouGenetics, and might well remain locked there since they had given rise to so few useful treatments. The science might be limited, but Lucy knew that the company could make money. Moorhead had been too lofty to feed the endless public fascination with genetic ancestry. Lucy was not so prudish. It was not at all clear how a person’s ability to pay her mortgage or love her children would be enhanced by the discovery that one per cent of her genes were Haplogroup R-DF27, or that she was descended from Genghis Khan (a startlingly common fate, showing that if the true purpose of human existence was to disseminate genetic material, raping and pillaging was the way to go), but there was a market for it. She intended to offer an especially expensive version of this pointless surrender of data, making a huge fuss about the genealogy of the company itself, founded by the paterfamilias of antique genetics. With this new income, she could reform the company and make it cutting edge.

  It was great that Olivia was having her book published soon, but she would be lucky to sell six hundred copies and get a review in Current Biology. Lucy wanted to help change things on a larger scale. Only last night a colleague had been telling her about the seeds from cotton plants that had been attacked by beetles, giving rise to a new generation of plants more resistant to beetle attack. Basing the development of seeds on epigenetically acquired characteristics would be a revolution in agriculture, using nature’s own defences rather than the violent crossbreeding of standard genetic modification. GM had produced few successes and met with enormous resistance. Monsanto, too enterprising to rest on its laurels after Agent Orange, had gone on to formulate ‘terminator’ seeds, but their popularity had never extended beyond the company’s own boardroom and had ended up being banned.

  As they started to taxi away from the gate, Lucy looked out of the window at the parked planes, the busy push-back tugs and the brake lights bleeding across the wet tarmac. She felt a sudden tightening in her body, as if a forgotten companion she was roped to had lost her foothold and was dragging her backwards just as she was about to reach the summit. Nostalgia, she didn’t do nostalgia, but right now it was pulling her into a free fall of inexplicably poignant detail: the green and white tiles in Nathan’s shower, the energetic tedium of his mother’s conversation, the diner on the corner where she had drunk enough insipid coffee to fill that refuelling truck; the jetty where Nathan’s little sister told her she had lost her virginity the night before; the great gilded adequacy of her old life; the family that had adopted her and would now never speak to her again.

  As the plane took off, she could hear her friend screaming like a jet engine and then it was as if Lucy took a knife out of her belt and cut the cord and the screaming faded as her friend fell. She couldn’t go there. She just couldn’t go there. She needed another Bloody Mary to help her sleep and to soothe the weakened muscles in her leg.

  3

  Olivia sat on the crowded Friday afternoon train trying to check her proofs. After reading the quotation she had chosen from Svante Pääbo – ‘The dirty little secret of genomics is that we know next to nothing about how a genome translates into the particularities of a living breathing individual’ – she put down the proofs and surrendered to the daydream that had pursued her from Oxford to London and had now caught up with her again on the journey to Horsham.

  Thrilled and apprehensive about being on her way to spend the weekend with her new lover, she stared out of the train window at the stammering suburbs, the football fields, the back gardens, the industrial estates, the little patches of wood aspiring to rural life, some bulbous silver graffiti on a brick wall, the double speed and double clatter and sudden intimacy of a train passing in the opposite direction – it looked as if London would ramble on until it finally had to be drowned in the sea. She had to recognise that she was crazy about Francis, mad about him: it was hard to find a phrase that made it sound like a good idea. Crossing over into another person’s subjectivity, if such a thing were possible, was always fraught with excitement and danger. For a start, there had to be a person on the other side, not just an assembly of fragments, occlusions and self-deceptions; and then it was essential not to leave too much of oneself behind in the hectic rush towards the shining lake that all too often turned out to be a mudflat shimmering with excited flies. Even without the hazards of confusion and anticlimax, it remained a logically impossible transition. How could one ever truly enter into another subjectivity? And yet the impossibility seemed pedantic in the face of the imagination’s capacity to sense another way of being. She often felt ephemeral connections spring in and out of existence between her mind and other minds, but it was not often a temptation to turn those rainbows into more durable bridges. Her desire to do so now, on so little evidence, was like a kind of seasickness, pitching her between groundless bliss and groundless despair, between a fantasy of happiness and a fantasy of losing the happiness she didn’t yet have.

  She picked up her proofs again. Her book on epigenetics suddenly seemed like a refuge rather than a chore. Since the millennial utopianism that had greeted the completion of the Human Genome Project twenty years ago, the search for the genes that corresponded to every desire and disease, every inclination and physical feature, had been, with a few exceptions, a failure. When Svante Pääbo had been in charge of the chimpanzee genome project, he had expected to find ‘the profoundly interesting genetic prerequisites that make us different from other animals’, but ended up, after the chimpanzee sequence was published, admitting that ‘we cannot see in this why we are so different from chimpanzees’. Not only did we turn out to share almost all of our genes with our fellow primates, but with far more distant relatives as well. The homeobox genes, which determine the position of limbs and other body segments, were almost identical in flies, reptiles, mice and humans. Where most variation was expected, there was least change. Nor was the quantity of human intelligence and self-regard reflected in the quantity of its genes. When the human genome had been sequenced, it turned out to contain twenty-three thousand genes, about the same as a sea urchin’s, but drastically fewer than the forty thousand in rice.

  Ah, yes, here it was, the key paper in Nature on missing heritability (Manolio, et al.), that ended with the sublime sentence, ‘Given how little has actually been explained of the demonstrable genetic influences on most common diseases, despite identification of hundreds of associated genetic variants, the search for the missing heritability provides a potentially valuable path towards further discoveries.’ In what other field of science would something be demonstrable ‘given how little has actually been explained’? In what other scientific field would lack of evidence be described as ‘a potentially valuable path’, except in the sense that all paths that had no actual value could only be ‘potentially’ valuable? It was amazing that a journal which stood for the highest standards of scientific rigour would publish such an incompetently devious sentence. A more honest version would have been, ‘After decades of research, we’ve found almost nothing, but we’ve devoted our careers to this fruitless field, so please give us more money.’ Of course, some evidence might turn up in the future but one of the most valuable contributions made by genetic studies was to show that so far there was no purely genetic influence on the formation of all
but rare monogenic diseases, like Tay-Sachs, haemophilia and Huntington’s, known to be caused by a mutation in a single gene; and there was the extra copy of chromosome twenty-one that produced Down’s syndrome, but after these simple certainties, ‘polygenic scores’ and ‘multifactorial’ explanations had to be brought in to prop up the plausibility of the genetically determined story.

  However familiar it had become, she was still irritated by the phrase ‘missing heritability’, implying that genetic connections might turn up one day, like a favourite family cat, if only enough posters were put in shop windows or stuck on neighbourhood trees. For something to be ‘missing’ it had to have been there in the first place, but as far as the experiments showed, the correspondences were mostly non-existent, and only got upgraded to ‘missing’ by a doctrinaire refusal to revise the original hypothesis. It was a phrase from the same semantic playbook as ‘side effect’, which tried to pretend that among the range of pharmaceutical effects caused by a medicine the undesirable ones were somehow incidental. A patient suffering from blindness or liver failure after taking a medicine might well find the experience just as central as the intended effect. Would a depressive who had spent years feeling cursed by having the less active version of the SLC6A4 gene feel that she was on a ‘potentially valuable’ path when its connection with depression turned out to be ‘missing’ and that she had been waiting for a cure that could not exist, while losing out on those that did? As the daughter of two psychoanalysts, and the sister of a clinical psychologist, Olivia was especially pissed off that so much money had been spent and so many papers had been written pretending that this ‘candidate gene’ was the cause of depression; money that could have been spent on helping depressed people – for instance – or mending potholes.