28. October 2009 by admin.

Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2

Fear.  Danger.

Michael was getting cold.  Boston in the fall is not exactly tropical.  He felt regret for leaving his raincoat behind in the lab.  He was trying to think what could possibly be the connection between a scientific experiment, its conclusion, a phone call, and a death of a friend and colleague.

Art and he agreed that until the experiment’s result are conclusive; there will be no word to the press, or to anyone else for that matter.  He knew for sure that he kept his part.  He hasn’t told anyone.  In fact, he never even told Barbara.  Perhaps he should have, he was thinking.  But did Arthur keep his side of the agreement?  Was it possible that Art opened his mouth and got himself killed?  But why?  Why would anyone kill over the results of an experiment?  Yes, what he found was groundbreaking, it was outstanding.  But still, the role of junk DNA isn’t exactly cure for cancer?  Is it?

Michael started to play the sequence of events in his mind.  He was hoping that he would find no connection between his dead friend and his experiment.  He was hoping that his friend was killed in an act of random violence, a robbery, or more likely, that Art was in some financial trouble over his gambling habits, or a really upset lady friend.  He knew that Art was no saint, but it was much easier for him to believe that the death of his friend was unrelated to their relationship or their work.

He was trying to think about the experiment.  Years ago, in one of his failed experiments, Michael found out that aging DNA was still synthesizing correct protein molecules.  But the very same experiment showed also, that new DNA showed changes in the junk areas.  In fact it was obvious, that the old patterns which looked random were suddenly more ordered.  At the time, Michael dismissed it as random changes.  Since those changes were inconsequential to the formation of cellular structures, he didn’t see this discovery as important.  It always bothered him though.  What if the changes were not random?  What if the changes were reflecting changes in the organism?  What if changes in the DNA were caused by an illness?  Was it mutation?  Scientists always believed that DNA remained constant during the course of life of all organisms.  Is it possible that this assumption was incorrect?  Were these changes moved on to the next generations?  This thought alone was mind blowing, but at the same time, some was relatively simple to prove or disprove.  Michael actually proved it, and more, in his first experiment.

In the old failed experiment, Michael discovered changes in junk DNA over time.  He assumed that mutation was responsible for the changes.  Sun rays, ultraviolet radiation in the lab, chemicals, maybe even cellular phones.  He didn’t that even with all factors reduced to nothing, change still took place.  In fact, he proved that even weeks apart, junk DNA still changed.  Not by much, but still, there was a traceable change from one sample to the other.  Weeks apart, significant DNA change.

Later on, Michael repeated the experiment with other organisms.  He tried the same with microbes, monkeys, guinea pigs.  The results were all the same.  Junk DNA showed traceable changes in all organisms overtime.  No exceptions.  He even did something mildly unethical and tested his own DNA, only to show the exact same results.  There was no doubt, junk DNA was changing overtime with no apparent reason.

Michael knew at that point that there was something out there.  He also knew that for as long as he was living and breathing, he will be looking for the answers.  He also told Arthur.  He told Arthur for two reasons.  Arthur was the pragmatist between the two of them; he would know what possible applications this discovery could have.  In addition, Art had friends.  Art had access to funds.  He had access to lots of funds.  Art could actually mean the difference between resources to run experiments, instruments, lab animals, assistants, and nothing at all.  Art could spell success much better than he could.

In retrospect, Michael should have known that something was up when Art turned atypically silent for quite a few minutes.  In fact, he didn’t speak at all for some time.  He ripped a couple of pages from a lab paper block and started scribbling.  When he was done he said one sentence only.  He said: “Mike, I will get you all you need to run the experiments, and you will tell nobody about this, not even Barbara”.  Michael complied.  Well, until today.

It was raining slightly, and it was getting colder.  Michael Moore was shivering ever so slightly.  He was thinking about Barbara.  The sound of a siren was heard in the distance.  An old man was taking his old dog for a walk.  Most people were sleeping.  The sound of a slowing car was heard.  Michael tensed in anticipation, but it wasn’t Barbara.  He was getting nervous, cold, and as he was just realizing, hungry.  Across the park he could see a large car driving slowly.  It was an SUV.  He was almost ready to dismiss it as some drunk, and then he looked again.  Smart girl, he thought, when he realized that Barbara was smart enough to take her mother’s car rather than her own.  Just in case, he thought, we need to disappear for a while, whoever knew them would look for either his Toyota or her Chevrolet.  Nobody would look for a black Mercedes SUV, brand new with all the additional features most only dream about.

He came out of the dark, walked over to the park corner.  Barbara saw him right away, slowed down, and waved.  He opened the door and jumped in the car.  “Drive” he said.  “Where are we going?” she asked.  “Anywhere”, he answered, “quickly”.

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23. October 2009 by admin.

Previous chapters

Preface
Chapter 1

Light

Arthur Lewis was five years older than his friend Michael. He was not as smart, not as skilled, not as creative. But he had many other things going for him. He was good looking, or so said the many women who were hoping to get him settled. Arthur, Art as his friends and acquaintances called him, was a scientist. The kind of scientists who would twist the results of an experiment, omit some, even make up some to prove his point. So far, he was not unsuccessful in doing so. With the kind help of his friend Michael Moore, he made a reasonable reputation for himself. Michael didn’t mind the relationship at all. He knew that there was a price to pay for his inability and unwillingness to be in the spotlight. He left all the legwork and all the begging to his charming friend who somehow knew exactly when to show up and ask for a grant, how to make companies interested in what they were doing.

Arthur had some dark sides as well. While Michael was his best friend and colleague, his loyalty to him and in fact to anybody at all, was questionable at best. In the past, on more than one occasion, Arthur submitted Michael’s papers as his own, edited the results of failed experiments. But there was a lot more. Arthur was an opportunist.

Arthur Lewis was born in Newark. His parents, a housewife and a navy NCO, had four more children. Arthur was the one in the middle. Even as a young boy, he had to fend for himself. He had to wrestle with his older brothers, earn his place in the large family, and endure the occasional spanking from his strict father. Arthur was not a spoiled child. The family moved every few years to navy bases around the United States, Asia and Europe. Arthur learned to communicate with different people, in various languages. He knew just about enough about a large variety of topics, and just enough to get by in a few languages. He was an average student, an average friend, an average son to his parents. He was a classic jack of all trades, and master of none.

For Art to be hooking up with Michael was far from natural. The two were so different in almost every aspect of life. They grew up in different places, different backgrounds. They aspired to different things. Art was out for glory and riches. Michael was only looking to satisfy his own curiosity. It was a match made in heaven.

Arthur Lewis hung up the phone, and went straight to the large walk-in closet. He carefully picked a conservative grey suit, a white shirt with his initials on the pocket, and a blue tie. For a second he was considering a Fedora hat, he thought it would be appropriate for his new stature, but dismissed it. He was dressed in no time, sprayed a little Cool Water, took the wallet and the car keys, locked the apartment and headed for the elevator. The hallway was well lit, lit enough to see how pretty the woman waiting by the elevator was. Art Lewis was rushing, but he wasn’t rushing enough to not even consider making a pass at this lovely woman. Who knows? Perhaps she was living across the hall. How convenient. He put on one of his best smiles, the one with the slight twist on the right side. She turned slowly towards him, smiled politely and reached for her purse. From then on, everything went very quickly. The elevator arrived, the doors opened. The woman went in, turned around and put a single bullet between Arthur J. Lewis’ eyes. Arthur collapsed next to the elevator. The doors closed. It was over. Art’s last thought was “what the hell?”

Michael Moore was starting to worry. He didn’t know why, but he felt a growing sense of trouble. He looked at the clock and realized that over an hour passed since he called his friend and colleague. Art lived practically around the corner. His phone call didn’t leave much room for interpretations. He was playing the conversation back in his mind, and realized that he couldn’t have been clearer. They both knew what was at hand, they both knew what the results meant, they were both waiting, expecting, weighing the possible consequences. It was clear. Michael’s discovery spelled money, lots of it, and glory to last more than one lifetime. What was keeping him?

He decided to look into it. He took a minute to burn a DVD with the experiment process and results, locked the computer, turned off the lights and left the lab. He didn’t even bother to pick up his raincoat, knowing that he would be back in a few minutes. As he was locking the door, he had a disturbing thought. He never called Barbara. He took out his cellular phone, speed dialed his home, and when Barbara picked up, he didn’t even wait for her hoarse voice to ask who it was. He said right away, “Barbara, I love you, I always loved you, everything will be better now. I promise”. She gave a sigh and said: “Well, Michael Moore, you have a lot of explaining to do, but I love you too. Please come home soon. The three of us are waiting for you”.

Michael wiped his eye of the tears, and took the elevator to the surface. It was dark outside, the street was completely deserted. There was no taxi to hail, and his car was a few blocks away in a parking lot that was closed between midnight and 6:00 AM. He decided to walk. Ten minutes later he was on Art’s block. An ambulance with red flashing lights was parked outside, and a couple of police cruisers as well. It was the Crime Scene Investigations truck that caught his attention. It appeared that a crime was being investigated. He was curious, but continued on to the building. The lobby was swarming with detectives in uniform and in plain clothes. As he was walking in, the elevator doors opened, and a gurney with a body strapped onto it was rolled out by two plain clothed Coroner’s Office employees. As they were moving the gurney to the truck waiting outside, a serious looking middle aged man went over and asked to see the deceased. The men stopped, the body bag opened, and to his complete surprise, the very familiar face of Arthur Lewis, white faced and blue lipped. He was dead. His eyes were still half opened, and his constant smile was still there. Two thoughts came to Michael’s mind. The first was that his friend, his only friend, was dead. The second was that a woman must have been involved in his friend’s death, as the smile on his face was reserved to pretty women only.

And then the third thought came to his mind. It was a most disturbing thought. Arthur’s death came minutes after a phone call placed by him. Was it possible that the death and the call were related?

Michael Moore was not very well acquainted with the law. He never had any business with the police. In fact, he never even received a parking ticket. But he clearly understood that if the call and the death were indeed related, and if he wanted to understand the connection, he needed to stir clear of the police. He turned around, and left the lobby. He knew that he will be back here some time. He had no idea how soon.

With no car, there was only one person to call. He took out the phone and called the number of his wife. “Barbara”, he said, “I’m in trouble. Please come and pick me up from the park next to the lab”. Just before hanging up he added, “And Barbara, please do not call anyone. It’s a matter of life and death”. The was silence on the other end of the line, but then the soft reassuring voice of a long lost friend said, “On my way”.

Barbara wasn’t always a frustrated wife. There were other times. Right after they met, Barbara showed Michael a completely different world. With her father’s almost unlimited money, and her carefree spirit, she made him, almost forced him to open up, to experiment, to feel. They started attending to jazz clubs, restaurants; they even went to an arcade and to several amusement parks. At first, Michael was very apprehensive, but after a while he learned to like it. He found the thrill in roller coasters, the interesting taste and strange textures of sushi and sashimi. He developed a taste for music. But most of all, Michael was thankful for Barbara’s presence in his life. It was as if he was born when she showed up. He simply couldn’t have enough of her. Not too long after they first met they moved in together. Michael gave up his single dorm room, and Barbara rented a larger apartment in Brooklyn. They bought a car, and two pairs of bicycles. Some commented about Michael becoming bourgeois, but it was mostly done in good spirits and intentions.

Arthur was an exception. He did not like the new presence in his friend’s life. He felt as if he was pushed aside. In fact, it was worse. He felt like his investment is going down the drain. After all, he thought, what would Michael be worth without him?

Barbara picked up the phone and called her mother. Quickly she said that something came up, and that she needs someone to watch the sleeping girls while she was out. Her mother, a forty year veteran as the wife of a businessman, learned not to ask questions. She said she was on her way, and indeed, fifteen minutes later there was a soft knock on the door. The two women exchanged quick kisses on each other’s cheeks, there was a short exchange of words: “be careful”, and “the girls are fast asleep”, and Barbara was out the door.

Fear. Danger.

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10. October 2009 by admin.

http://bigmouth.imserious.org/book-experiment-will-appreciate-feedback/

Chapter I

It all started in the late 1990s.  Michael was a Ph.D. student at Harvard, on a fast track to become the youngest ever Ph.D. in the long history of the prestigious school.  At twenty, he was already an accomplished scientist, a Rhodes Scholar, with numerous published papers in Nature, Science, and many others.  He chose the area of DNA sequences to specialize in.  Fro some reason, even in high school, instead of playing or watching football, he preferred to sit around and try to break the code of the DNA.

During his school years, Michael was known as a mad scientist.  He never missed a class, a lecture.  Papers submitted on time.  He was the professors’ pet.  Indeed, the other students didn’t like him very much, but with Barbara, an undergraduate lab assistant at the time, he didn’t need any friends.

They met on her first day.  A freshman at Harvard, Barbara was excited to the point that she almost fainted at orientation.  Michael, representing the faculty, saw her blush turn into pale, and just before she dropped, he was there right to catch her and gently put her on the floor.  When ten seconds later she opened her eyes, she gave him a look he had never seen before in a woman’s eyes.  The look reserved by women in trouble to their savior.  The look women reserve to a dream lover.  Well he did see that look before, only it was not directed at him.  He became a superhero overnight.  He liked it.

Relationships with women were never Michael’s strong side.  As a young boy in grade school, he was always the youngest, always the shortest.  When he grew up things got worse.  He skipped his first class going to fifth grade right after the third.  Two years later he went to ninth grade being three years younger than the class average.  When his classmates started looking at girls in a slightly different way, and when the girls started to look slightly different, he wasn’t able to comprehend what the big deal was.  He was uncomfortably positioned as the class nerd and the school freak.

Obviously, Michael was never too popular with the girls.  His young age, spectacles, and his short and slim body were augmented by mild acne.  All he could do was watch, dream, and hope for better days.  His behavior became awkward around girls, and then around young women.  He almost accepted the fact that his true love would be found in books and laboratory equipment.  And then he met Barbara.

Until the day he met her, Michael thought that “changing one’s life” was a cliché.  He thought that love at first site only existed in the pulp fiction books and second rate films, he watched on occasion, when the library was closed, and the lab locked down for holidays.

His father, a junior engineer at the local factory didn’t pay much attention to the difficulties experienced by his teenaged son.  He was always worried about providing for the family.  Indeed, Raleigh was not a very expensive town, and their house wasn’t exactly on the right side of the tracks.  Still, expenses were mounting.  Howard Moore was an educated man, a family man, a mildly religious man.  A man loved by few, but liked by many.  Howard was a good father to Michael and his sister, Hannah.  He was working long hours at the factory, from sunrise to sundown.  But when he finally came home, he was a very dedicated father.  When Michael was little, the family story went, the small child knew that his father was about to show up by the angle of the sunlight on the living room wall.  Laura, Michael’s mother would say to reporters many years later that this was the first sign of ingenuity shown by her son.  Many signs followed, but this would be remembered in the collective memory of the family as the very first.

Michael was still staring at the screen when he realized that he was reminiscing for the last five minutes or more.  He knew in his heart, that with this discovery of his, Barbara would forgive him, and even his father, with whom he hadn’t spoken in years, would look at him, lightly touch his shoulder, and whisper: “I’m proud of you son”.

He turned around, looked at the test tubes, checked again the scribbles on both, looked at the screen one more time, and picked up the phone.  “Art”, he said, “I got the proof”.  There was silence on the other side of the phone.  Then there was a loud sigh, and Art said, “Let the circus begin”.  He added “don’t talk to anyone before I come to the lab”.  Then he hung up.

Michael wouldn’t even dream to talk to anyone.  Art and he had an unwritten agreement.  Michael would do the research, would spend nights at the lab, collect specimen, run the experiments, get the results, analyze the numbers.  Art would do what he did best.  Art would be the communicator.  Art would get the grants, get the extremely expensive lab instruments donated, contributed or loaned.  Art would get the credit.  This agreement was acceptable to Michael, and very favorable to Art.  Many of their acquaintances later commented that this strange and unbalanced agreement was not so strange if you knew the parties involved.  The egocentric Art and the geek Mike made a perfect couple.

Michael Moore started to collect his thoughts, and his data.  Following the phone call with his friend and partner he realized that his life were about to change forever.  He had no idea though that his life was about to change in a much more significant way than he thought.  He had no idea that life on the planet was about to change as well.  Secrets, held for millions if not billions of years were about to be exposed for the first time ever.  The history of the world was about to be revealed.  But this time, Michael knew, it was going to have proof.  Not an interpretation, not observations of some educated scholar who usually was part of the administration.  Frame by frame documentation of the planet’s history.

Michael was very young when he started to take interest in the DNA strand.  Indeed, many scientists took interest in DNA.  After the human genome was cracked open, a competition started.

Grants were given, research sprung like mushrooms after the rain.  Every Tom Dick and Harry wrote a one page abstract and won millions of dollars from the Federal Government, foreign governments, pharmaceutical giants, universities, magazines.  You name it, they funded a research project about DNA and the Human Genome.  Not all was lost.  The billions upon billions of dollars of investment yielded some unexpected results.  Medicine was found for some rare conditions, and truthfully also for not so rare diseases as well.  But it was mainly about hope.  People really hoped that if their aging parents weren’t cured with some genetically engineered virus, or some engineered gene, then maybe they will be when their turn comes.  Many if not most of the projects yielded absolutely nothing.  Billions of dollars went up in smoke, countless animals lost their lives, and hope went back the same way it came.  The only remainder was some artificially inflated bank accounts.

Around that time, Michael had started his research about junk DNA.  Being the pragmatic person that he was, Michael never stopped questioning why almost 98% of the DNA has no apparent role.  The 2% of the DNA was sufficient to determine the size, shape, and function of every single protein in an entire living body.  The rest was never explained.  Michael launched a three year research project looking into junk DNA.

His research was not very ambitious, and the conclusion did not disappoint anyone.  And given that many research projects were failing, nobody paid attention to the small university project Michael Moore was conducting.  The project was a failure, as it didn’t provide any explanation for the presence of junk DNA.  But not all was lost.  Michael’s research yielded some results, which registers nowhere but in his own mind.  He learned one very interesting fact.  While functional DNA was not changing over the course of life of an organism, the junk DNA was changing.  Not a lot.  But the change was significant enough to cause questions.  What was troubling was that the change was only seen in male specimen.  Female subjects showed no DNA change over time.

The experiment was to test something completely different.  The experiment was to find out the effects of aging DNA on synthesized protein.  Due to budget constraints, Michael had taken a rabbit, Roger, who had lived in the lab for as long as he remembered.  In fact, Roger was the oldest resident of the lab.  The oldest students were ready to swear that the poor rabbit was in the lab for way over five years.  Roger has been a proud participant in countless experiments.  In fact, at that point in time, Roger may have contributed more to Humans than the majority of the students…  Roger had almost every type of cell frozen in liquid nitrogen downstairs.  For the experiment, Michael had extracted cells from the living Roger.  He also took some leftover cells from an old experiment.

After applying the old and the new DNA to protein building blocks, it turned out that aging had no effect on creating protein.  The DNA, old and new, was doing precisely what it was designed to do.  Both strands made up the exact same proteins.  The result was surprising in that the hypothesis going into the experiment was that the old DNA would show some deviation from the program.  Such a result would have explained the frequency of cancer in older patients.  But it seemed that other reasons were involved.

While comparing the old and the new DNA, Michael had noticed that certain patterns in the “junk” DNA were different.  It seemed that the newer DNA had additions to it.  Patterns simply not present in the old DNA.  It was puzzling indeed.

That experiment was inconsequential, it was short and inexpensive.  There was only one discovery made in the process.  Michael had no idea whether that discovery had any significance at the time, but he already knew that one day he will go back to explore the reasons of the changing DNA.

Light.

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10. October 2009 by admin.

The Real History of the World

 By

 M. D. Segal

Preface

It was almost midnight when Michael Moore looked at his watch.  He glanced at the computer’s clock and knew that the phone was about to ring.  In the last few months, the phone was ringing around this time of day or night rather.  It was Barbara’s bedtime, and she couldn’t resist the urge to call her husband and complain of his absence.  Michael knew she had a point.  Ever since that night, when he looked at the computer screen, his jaw dropped, and his life had changed forever.

Since that night, he basically lived in the lab.  He lost weight, grew a beard, and some colleagues made some nasty comments about his personal hygiene.  He didn’t care that much about the comments, nor did he care about his appearance.  He did, however, care about Barbara and the girls.  Yet his curiosity, and the feeling that he was on the verge of something really great, caused him to almost ignore the mundane activities of raising a family and paying attention to his own wife.  He was completely overtaken by his own discovery.

Barbara, obviously, didn’t share the interest and the feeling.  In fact, she started to hate it.  She was pushing him to use her father’s inheritance and find some other things to do – like sail around the world, or do some volunteer work.

When the phone finally rang, he was startled.  Barbara did not sound like her usual self.  She was upset.  She confronted him without as much as saying hello.  “Another night at the lab?” she asked.  “I’m sorry”, he said, “I’m waiting for some results, and then, I promise, I will come home”.  “Right”, she said and hung up.  Now, he knew, she would sulk for days, and spend lots of time with her mother, who didn’t like or appreciate him anyway.  Her mother, he thought, only liked tall, good looking, tanned, rich guys, who could play golf well.

The screen flashed, and Michael’s mind, sharper than ever, looked at the data and knew: he just made the most important discovery in man’s history, ever.  He had found the collective history of mankind.

And then there was nothing.

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