Gentlemen, I am tormented by questions; resolve them for me.
Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
As the blood drips into the vial, I rue how little of genetics I remember. It is April 2017, an eternity since I stared out the window in high school biology. Now I stand here holding Misha’s sweaty palm and relying on a platoon of metaphors to contemplate the secret of my son’s nature. The doctor compares the genome with an instruction manual. Proteins are the syllables that activate the genes. Nucleotides are the letters that carry the code. Think of chromosomes, the object of today’s inquiry, as numbered pages. Once the doctor ships Misha’s sample to the laboratory, a microarray analysis will count them. Are the pages of his manual all present and accounted for?