Leaning against the cool, black top of the lab bench, you stream a thin layer of isopropyl alcohol into the test tube in your hand. You’re twenty years old, an Asian American woman garbed in a white lab coat. It’s your sophomore year in the molecular biology program at a small liberal arts college. As the frigid liquid runs down the tube’s sides, you extend a glass rod into the bottom of the tube. As you twirl the rod, the condensed DNA clings to it. Silver and fine, the strands swirl, catching the light cast by the fluorescent bulbs.
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Deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, the structure that cradles the language of life. Intricate hydrogen bonds form between nucleic acids: adenine joining with thymine, guanine with cytosine. Stacking and turning, the linked pairs create a double helix, babbling code transformed into elegant order.
In the early 1980s, the biomolecular engineer and pianist, Dr. David Dreamer, composed a piece, its melody mirroring the base pairing of human genes. In his collection, DNA Suite, the coding for insulin chains A & B ripple in electronic beats. Through Dreamer’s work, the pulse of a hidden world is revealed, shimmering strands thrumming in the darkness.
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Two years have passed since you watched the silver swirl of DNA gather in a test tube. You stand at the window of a laboratory on the fifth floor of a towering building. Behind you, the centrifuge hums, spinning down the extracts of cells. You imagine the night’s music you cannot hear through the double-paned glass: the crickets drawing the bow of their spined legs, the wind rippling through the first of autumn leaves. On the streets below, the headlights of a lone car gleam, then vanish.
Hours later, you drive up the same road and climb the stairs leading to your tiny one-bedroom apartment. As you look up at the graying ceiling above your twin mattress, you recall an afternoon from years earlier when you were still an undergraduate.
Then, you were twenty-one years old. Clutching a scrap of paper with a Dewey decimal call number, you descended into your college library’s basement. You pulled Sharon Olds’ Satan Says out of a dusty bookshelf. Leaning on the painted cinder block wall, you opened the book to her poem, “Monarchs.” Beneath your fingers, the lines flickered gold and orange, winged creatures floating / south to their transformation.
In the gloom of the basement, you held your breath and slid to the floor. You had never seen a poem like this. A pale hand reached within you, plucking a golden strand within your chest. You began to tremble, a chord reverberated through you, a voice chiming louder and louder.
You returned to your dorm room where you sat at your desk. As your roommate slumbered, lines of a poem flowed from you. In your mind, your mother appeared. She smiled, as her eyes crinkled like the folds / of a Chinese fan. She sings of your birth within the poem’s stanzas: You came out of me / swimming like a fish.
Now, you shift on the twin bed, your mind filling the roar of static. You wonder if you’d made the right decision to choose the sciences over your love of poetry. Did you really want to spend five more years in graduate school? Were you truly happy with the late-night hours at the laboratory? Silence closes around you, moonlight streaming through the dingy blinds of the bedroom window.
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Within the nucleus of every human cell are twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, two-armed structures hovering in darkness. Each chromosome is composed of supercoiled DNA, genes that guide an intricate dance between cells’ protein receptors and arrays of hormones, neurotransmitters, and growth factors. A cell lives, divides, and dies to the rhythm of signal transduction.
In a large-scale study that was published online in The Lancet on February 28, 2013, scientists reported a link between variations in the genes CACNA1C and CACNB2 and five psychiatric illnesses including major depression and bipolar disorder. These genes conduct the formation of calcium channels in neurons. Without these channels, chemical signals cannot flow in and out of the cell. The body teeters on a fulcrum, one base pair away from disaster.
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It’s January and you’ve finished your rotation at the fifth-floor laboratory. You are twenty-three years old. In a few months’ time, your depression has worsened. Your mind strains under the pressure of long nights at the laboratory. You spend nights looking up at the ceiling, wondering: Have I made a mistake? Am I supposed to be a scientist? Who am I? Every morning you wake with a leaden shadow clinging to you. You barely eat, picking at week-old Thai food in crusted takeout containers.
One afternoon, you crawl out of bed and pull on your jeans, sweater, and red coat. You trudge towards your new laboratory, the wind whipping around you. You pass a lake covered with a foot of ice and snow. You imagine lying face down, your ear pressed to the lake’s gleaming surface. You wonder if your fall through the ice would be soundless, or if your body would splinter, fragments ringing like countless bells. Would anyone notice if you vanished? How long could you live lonely and afraid?
This is too much. I am too much, you whisper into the frigid air.
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Though DNA is robust, it can be damaged by accidental breaks. Sometimes the double strands snap under physical strain. There are signs before the breakage, structural problems at the ends of chromosomes, unraveling or deforming of its telomeres. Double strand breaks happen ten times per day in each cell, fissures gaping in the body like little mouths murmuring: help me / help me.
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It’s February and the burden of the shadow is too great for you to bear alone. You make an appointment with a counselor. You sit on her plush buttercup-colored couch, plucking at the silken strands of the chenille throw on your lap.
The counselor sits across from you; her hands folded over a yellow legal pad that rests on her thigh.
“I think I’m depressed,” you say, the words sputtering out of your mouth.
She nods. “Do you enjoy what you do?”
You think of the late nights at the lab, the hum of the centrifuge, the endless hallways, and the glare of florescent lights. You think of the shadow that clings to your slouched back, its heft dragging you lower and lower.
“Something isn’t right,” you say. “I’m not happy.”
The counselor gazes at you. The space between both of you reverberates as she speaks.
“Your heart isn’t singing,” she says.
The room blurs into a swirl of yellow. You think of the choice you made as an undergraduate to abandon poetry for the sciences. To you, this was the practical choice: you could explore beauty through microscope lenses and polyacrylamide gels. Poetry wouldn’t pay bills, you had thought. It couldn’t support the life of a single woman.
Now if you could, you would return to the basement of your college library. You would say to the young woman sitting there: This is what you were created to do. Lifting off the chipped linoleum, she would glide through the gray sky towards her transformation.
On the counselor’s yellow couch, you look out of the window at the leaden clouds. You bury your face in your hands. Failure, failure, failure, thrums in your ears.
You couldn’t bear to live this way any longer.
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In the human immune response cells, B and T lymphocytes, double strand breaks in DNA are made purposely. After their DNA has been severed, the cell’s chromosomes slide together, exchanging sections that code for antigen receptors. Renewed, the cells can detect a larger range of viruses and bacteria. In this way, the body is strengthened through its breaking.
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It is February, a month after your meeting with the counselor. You step into the pharmacy, the door chiming behind you. You wander the aisle and find the pills you were looking for. As you bring four bottles up to the counter, the pharmacist raises an eyebrow, glancing at your unwashed hair and bleary eyes.
You return to your dimly lit apartment and switch on the television. A scene of a summer picnic appears, a couple lifting sparkling bottles of soda to their lips. The camera pans to the face of a smiling woman, her teeth glinting pearly-white. You meet her gaze, then look down at the bottles of pills in your hand.
A day ago, you had calculated the lethal dose in your laboratory notebook. As sunlight wavers through maple trees on the television screen, you crumple the paper sack that held the bottles and toss it into the overflowing trashcan. You empty the bottles into a blue plastic cereal bowl. You ease your hand into it. The slick pills slide around your fingers, creating a golden whorl. The woman in the commercial tilts her head back in a silent stream of laughter. You choke down fistfuls of yellow pills.
Hours later, your parents rush to the hospital after receiving a call from the university. Your friend had found you at your house, your body convulsing on the twin-sized mattress. Now he sits by your bedside, his head bowed in sleep.
In a haze, you hear your mother and father enter the hospital room.
“Mommy, mommy, mommy.” Her name crackles out of your raw dry throat.
Your mother leans over the bed railing and presses her warm, brown hand to your forehead. She whispers Psalm 121, her voice soft and steady. The lines of the poem unfurl, whirling around you: I lift up my eyes to the hills–where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. Your mother summons you back from a shadowed landscape. With a song, she pulls you from the frigid earth.
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The protein, Artemis, was named after the Greek goddess of the hunt, wilderness, and the care of children. It plays an important role in mending DNA double-strand breaks within human cells. When DNA is damaged through radiation, chemicals, or physical strain, Artemis joins with other proteins, responding to the cries of the cell, its chemical signals. Cradling the DNA, Artemis clips off the damaged sites, allowing the DNA to be repaired and strengthened. In the DNA of B and T lymphocytes, Artemis trims bubbles of code after recombination. The strands are then stitched back together. With the closing of the wound, the cells are transformed into swifter, stronger warriors.
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From the window of your parents’ dining room, you gaze out onto the green expanse of the backyard. You remember how you used to run barefoot to the blackberry patches lining its border, the crunch of the fruit between your teeth, the tart juice running from the corners of your mouth. Now it’s early spring and you are twenty-five years old. It’s been two years since your hospitalization. You are now staying with your parents.
Despite the medication and another hospitalization at the mental ward, depression still lingers, a shadow hovering over your shoulder. Your mother enters the dining room carrying a bowl of congee in a blue and white ceramic bowl. Your favorite food, the steaming rice and chicken soup, is sprinkled with green onion. Your mother slides the bowl closer to you over the oak table’s polished surface.
“I’m not hungry,” you say.
“You have to eat,” she says, placing her hand on your back. “I made it just for you.”
As you take a savory mouthful, a warmth spreads from your chest and your taut limbs loosen. You gaze into your mother’s face, her dark eyes filled with concern.
You blink, swiping at your eyes as a mass settles in your belly. You had failed her like you’d failed yourself. You didn’t deserve to live. Your shoulders slouch as you crumple. Your mother embraces you; her scent of warm cooking oils and bone broth enfolds you. She gathers you in her warm, strong arms and binds your broken body together.
“This will not last. You will get better,” she says. As you shake, the darkness lifts from you. For a moment, you blossom, opening to the sun’s rays.
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When a human cell is born, it carries an inheritance of DNA. In the anaphase of mitosis, the original cell’s paired chromosomes are separated by fine strands, the spindle fibers. Pulled apart, the chromosomes travel to opposite sides of the cell. The cell then splits in two. Without DNA repair, new cells would bulge with disordered code. Replicated over and over, this DNA would topple the body into chaos. Damage, repair, rending—all steps towards new growth.
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Now you and your parents sit at a black veneered table at Jiu Thai Asian Restaurant. It’s early February and you’re thirty years old. The aroma of garlic and chili sauce wafts around you as you lean over the steaming bowl of hand-stretched noodles swimming in a rich beef broth. You lift the fragrant strands to your mouth, savoring the chewiness of the delicate noodles. Your mother and father do the same, steam haloing their bowed heads.
You and your parents gather each year to commemorate your recovery from depression.
“I can’t believe it’s been another year,” you say, putting down your spoon.
Your mother meets your gaze, her eyes shimmering. “Yes,” she says. “Look how far you’ve come. Praise God.”
You look down at the red ceramic bowl, reminded of the tradition of your ancestors—the swirling noodles, a symbol of a long and happy future.
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The way DNA functions can be changed by the alteration of one of its base pairs, cytosine. Methylation, the addition of a methyl group to cytosine, switches off gene expression. Genes are reactivated when the methyl group is removed. The resulting cascade of chemical reactions reprogram the body’s cells.
When these changes to DNA happen in the brain, memories are formed. A significant event sparks the enzymatic cleavage of neurons’ DNA. This breakage activates a chain of methylation and demethylation. In this way, chemical signals travel from the hippocampus into the cortex, creating a new, enduring memory.
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The day after your meal with your parents, you sit at a desk in your childhood bedroom. Sunlight washes over you and birdsong wafts through the open window. Taking a breath, you place your trembling hands on a laptop’s keyboard. You return to your time in the mental ward, the nights you spent pacing the hallways. Running your palms over the bumpy, whitewashed wallpaper, you had shuffled back and forth, your body leaden with weariness.
You remember your mother’s visits to the ward, her hands intertwining with your damp fingers, her voice tethering you to the swirling light: “I love you. This will pass.” Again and again, she called for you, retrieving you every time you flailed in the sea’s swell.
Suddenly, the lines of a poem flow from you, a new song surging from you, one of water and women. You weave a melody of spring water welling / from granite throats.
I was born here among these women, you sing, a stone burnished—passed from hand to hand.
As you take another deep breath, the sound of tinkling glass and waltzing silver threads merges the rhythm of your poem’s lines.
The strands of my being, the scientist and poet, weave into one woman. A new creation.
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My ovaries house oocytes containing the chromosomes gifted by my parents. Their DNA echoes with my father’s hymns, the music of my mother’s laughter. During meiosis, these chromosomes intertwine, exchanging genes in a process called crossing over. Each oocyte then cleaves into four eggs, carrying twenty-three chromosomes—each unique cell formed from over seventy trillion combinations of genes. Out of this cloud of possibility, my son emerges.
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A cry resonates through the house I share with my husband. I raise my leaden body from the bed and feel my way through the darkness to J’s room. Dressed in a blue striped onesie, he leans against the crib’s smooth railing.
He reaches for me: “Mamma, mamma.”
I bring him to my chest, carrying him to the cushioned rocker. As we sway, moonlight washes over us. I recall pale light glinting off the frigid lake, the crackling of ice—how in my despair I had almost severed my life’s strand. The memory shudders through me, and I cradle J tighter. How could I prepare him for the depression that might pursue him? My love wasn’t enough to tether him to the earth. I couldn’t protect him forever.
Then I remember the hospital bed, my mother’s warm hand sweeping my sweaty brow. Her song returns to me, the melody that called me back from the depths. I press J to my chest channeling into him the strength of the ancient psalm. The golden notes hum, pushing against the darkness.
Be strong, I sing. Be courageous.
J sighs and nuzzles into my shoulder, twirling a lock of my long dark hair around his fingers. He strokes the nape of my neck, his caress light and tender as the brush of a winged creature.
