ABSTRACT
In my line of work I don't think very often about carbon or potassium, much less about polypeptide chains or transfer-RNA. I teach American and African-American literature; Janet Lyon, my legal spouse and general partner, teaches modern British literature and women's studies. Nothing about our jobs requires us to be conscious of the biochemical processes that made us—and, more recently, our children—into conscious beings. But in 1985–86, when Janet was pregnant with our first child, Nicholas, I would lie awake for hours, wondering how the baseball-size clump of cells in her uterus was really going to form something living, let alone something capable of thought. I knew that the physical processes that form dogs and drosophila are more or less as intricate, on the molecular level, as those that form humans; but puppies and fruit flies don't go around asking how they got here, or how (another version of the same question) DNA base-pair sequences code for various amino acids. And though humans have been amazed and puzzled by human gestation for quite a while now, it wasn't until a few nanoseconds ago (in geological time) that their wonder began to focus on the chemical minutiae that somehow differentiate living matter from “mere” matter. The fact that self-replicating molecules had eventually come up with a life-form that could actually pick apart the workings of self-replicating molecules ... well, let's just say I found this line of thought something of a distraction. So much so that finally, a friend of ours decided that what I needed was a good dose of demystification. “Michael,” he said, stopping me in the middle of one of my frantic-father frenzies, “I know this is all new to you, but look at it this way— it's just DNA making a home for itself.”
