Split and Recycled Genes -- Part One

Part One--Recycled Genes


You can't hide from your DNA.  Everyday reinforces this fact fact of life.  My children are like the magic mirrors of fairy tales.  Through their behaviors, I see a constant glimpse of my own many flaws and shortcomings.  My gestures, my temper, and my natural proclivities are thrown back in my face mockingly.  I get a chill up my spine when my own self-consciousness is reflected back by my daughter.  Or my need for instant gratification is expressed by my son.  I catch a chilling vision of my own mother as I put on lipstick, or slice a cake, or admonish my husband for not putting a spice jar away with the label facing forward.

My grandmother was fond of saying, "blood is thicker than water." But are genetic bonds strong enough to reveal ourselves even among strangers? Would we recognize blood kinship even several times removed? When I recognized my father's eyes, profile and build in a fellow classmate, is it possible that he was a distant cousin emerging from the vast gene pool Cuisinart?

Genes and geography make for strange bedfellows.  It has been over thirty years since I attended college in the same geographic area where I now live.  It is not uncommon to run into people I knew way back when.  I often find myself staring across a restaurant or a recital hall thinking: I know that person.   Even more often, I see strangers that so closely resemble someone I once knew that I become convinced they are someone's sister, or brother, or daughter or son.  This city is packed with ghosts of my past; this very fact keeps me tuned in to the faces around me.

There is one friendship from my past that keeps this game of genetic Where's Waldo alive for me.  A guy I knew in school, if he is to be believed, claims to have funded the bulk of his education by making donations to a sperm bank.  I would take issue with the use of the word “donation”—since he was well-compensated and well-entertained for this activity—but that is perhaps a subject for another day.  Apparently, two to three “visits” per week was so lucrative that he was able to graduate without a penny of debt.  He made this fact well known among our circle of friends, causing it become amusing fodder for party conversations.  We would often wonder aloud whether one day the city would be glutted with his likeness, so distinct was his slim physique, the angular cut of his jaw, and his prematurely receding hairline.

After a fourteen year absence, I returned to live in this glorious city that I love so well.  I have  since spent more than a decade stretching into middle age while frequenting the same sites I enjoyed as a student.  Each year, as the students get younger and younger, my genetic guessing game gets a little more challenging.  Certainly by now, the gene pool has diluted any remnants of my friend and his genetic "scholarship program".   I am somewhat relieved to report that I have never encountered a soul that I would even suspect was a genetic "chip" off my long-ago friend’s "block". Perhaps, despite frequent evidence to the contrary, the world is a much bigger place than we realize.  

This is what makes this next story, which is completely true, so amazing. . .

Tomorrow's blog:  Split and Recycled Genes--Part Two