Chapter 1
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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.