1 Bayner Genetics

Prologue: Deja Vu

Abraham Bayner met Megan McConnell in Boston, Massachusetts, after the end of their first semester at Harvard Medical School. It was Friday, December 15, 1967 – ten days before Christmas and the day after Arthur Kornberg announced that he had created DNA molecules in a test tube exactly like those found in a common virus.

Kornberg’s precise statement the day before had specifically warned against describing his accomplishment as “creating life,” but President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a drawling ex-schoolteacher from Texas, wandered off script.

"Some geniuses at Stanford University have created life in the test tube!" the president crowed, and news outlets around the world repeated his error.

Making DNA from scratch was big news, but Kornberg’s spectacular feat that day was made possible by a less dramatic but far more important discovery that had gone virtually unnoticed outside of scientific circles, maybe because its importance was more difficult to explain, more probably because no fewer than five scientists (including Kornberg himself) had discovered it more or less simultaneously.

DNA ligase, it was called, and it would be as important to the future of genetics as the solid rocket booster would be to space travel. DNA ligase was the chemical glue that geneticists would use down the road to paste a gene from one species of life into another. This precise form of cross-breeding would help scientists fix nature’s flaws, letting them design plants immune to disease and unappetizing to insects. Just as important, it would enable them to transform bacteria into tiny factories capable of manufacturing everything from insulin to diesel fuel.

You could keep Red Sox slugger Carl Yastrzemski. When Abraham Bayner and Megan McConnell thought hero, they thought Arthur Kornberg.

They met in the afternoon at Antonio’s Pizza, on the corner of Huntington and Francis, just across the street from the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, whose name gave Abe a cheap chuckle the first time he saw it.

Meg was there first. She had almost finished her slices when Abe walked in. He was tall, maybe six-foot-four, and had a curly mop of light brown hair that reminded Meg of Bob Dylan’s frizzy do on the cover of Blonde on Blonde. He wore hiking boots and jeans and, under his open winter coat, the first dashiki Meg had ever seen, a colorful cotton pullover printed with a psychedelic design that looked distinctly African.

Abe bought a Coke and two slices of Antonio’s cheap pizza, then looked around for a place to sit. All of the tables were taken. He considered eating at the counter, then saw Meg raise an eyebrow and point to the other side of the booth she’d taken, a cramped cubbyhole made of plywood and two-by-fours.

Abe carried his Coke and the thin paper plate holding his two slices over to the booth and set them on the table.

“Antonio’s is always packed!” he said.

“Cheap pizza in a college town. Who’d a thought?” Meg said. “Have a seat. I’m just about finished.”

She was a twenty-two-year-old Irish-Catholic lass with china-doll skin, flaming red hair as straight as piano wire, and emerald eyes so green they looked alien.

Abe slid into the cramped booth and felt his knees bump into Meg’s.

“Sorry,” he said.

“The pizza’s cheap,” Meg said. “The booths are cheaper.”

“Thanks for sharing,” Abe said. “I’m Abraham Bayner. I hate the name, so please call me Abe.”

“OK, Abe. I’m Megan McConnell. I like Megan, but you can call me Meg if you like. Most people do.”

Abe folded a slice of pizza, took a big bite from its greasy point and locked onto Meg’s eyes.

“What are you staring at?” Meg asked, although he was hardly the first guy attracted to her unusual eyes.

“I’ve never seen anything like them,” he said. “They look artificial.”

“I assure you they’re real. They were a gift from my maternal grandmother.”

“They’re captivating.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Any of your brothers and sisters have eyes like that?”

“I’m an only child.”

“No kidding? Me too.”

Abe took another bite of pizza. It might be cheap, he thought, but it filled the hole.

“So,” he said, “what brings you to Boston?”

“I’m a medical student at Harvard.”

“Me too,” Abe said. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do after I got my graduate degree in Chemistry. I tinkered with the idea of getting a doctorate and just becoming a professor, but that seemed lame, you know? I want to do something. Then I got a call from Dean Ebert, who just about begged me to come to Harvard Med. On full scholarship, no less. How could I turn Robert Ebert down?”

“I turned him down.”

“He offered you a scholarship too?”

“Yeah.”

Meg took a small sip of the Coke she was nursing.

“And you turned him down? I thought you said you were a Harvard Med student.”

“I turned him down at first,” Meg said. “Then he offered me a new car.”

“A car! I didn’t get a car!”

“You accepted his offer too soon, maybe,” Meg said. “I strung Dean Ebert along for a month and he sweetened the deal with a cute little Mustang. Any color I wanted. I told him I still needed to think about it. A month later he called to tell me he’d found a little house to set me up in. At that point, even I couldn’t say no.”

“A house! You devil! I’m living in a studio.”

Meg smiled.

“My dad says when someone makes you a great offer right off the bat, you should always feign disinterest. The offer will always get better, because no one ever gives you their best offer up front. Why would they? Of course, if the Bobster had bottom-lined me, I would have said OK. But he didn’t.”

“We’re talking about Harvard Medical School here, not Crazy Eddie’s Used Car Lot.”

“What’s the difference?” Meg said. She pinched a pepperoni from Abe’s untouched second slice. “Harvard knows the students they want most – the ones most likely to have prestigious careers that will enhance the school's image – are the ones every elite school wants. To attract those students, they realize they’ve got to go the extra mile.”

“You’ve got some nerve, Megan McConnell.”

“That I do, Jew Boy, that I do.”

“How did you know I was Jewish?”

“Your name isn’t exactly Catholic,” Meg said. She popped the pepperoni into her mouth and added, “Hey! I thought Jews didn’t eat pork! What’s up with the pepperoni pizza?”

“I believe in God,” Abe said. “I just don’t believe He cares whether I have pepperoni on my pizza.”

Abe started in on the slice just defaced by Meg’s playful theft and then, with his mouth full, said, “Hey, did you hear about Arthur Kornberg creating life in a test tube?”

“I heard about it,” Meg said, “but Kornberg didn’t create life, he just synthesized a DNA molecule like the one in the phi X174 virus. He didn’t create the whole virus.”

“President Johnson said he created life.”

“Johnson’s a failed high-school teacher. And a warmonger.”

“Fucking Vietnam. I’m glad I’m in school. War is the dumbest thing we do.”

“You got that right.”

Meg tried to take another sip of Coke but got air instead. Abe heard the gurgling sound and offered his Coke to her. She poured a splash of it into her cup.

“Thanks,” Meg said. She watched Abe eat for a minute, then said, “Hey, you want to see the house? It’s just around the corner.”

Abe touched his chin as if in thought, smiled, and said, “I wonder if this is the point at which I should feign disinterest.”

“You overestimate my offer!” Meg said. She kicked playfully at Abe’s left ankle with the instep of her right foot and they both laughed. 

“Eat up and we’ll go,” she said.

Abe gulped down the rest of the second slice and finished the Coke. Then Meg walked him to the Mustang (she’d chosen Candy Apple Red) and drove him to the little house she’d wrangled out of Harvard.

The small Cape Cod looked like a giant dollhouse had been dropped onto a cozy lot on the tree-lined street. The house was covered in bright white clapboards and had sunny yellow shutters on the downstairs windows and on the two little dormers that jutted out from a gray roof. In the New England tradition, the front door was painted fire-engine red so that it could be seen from the street even in a snowstorm. A white birch stood in the small front yard, leafless and ready for winter. All of its discarded leaves had been carefully removed from the little lawn, which itself had turned a dormant tan but still looked thick and healthy and ready for its rebirth in the spring.

“You keep a nice yard,” Abe said.

“Harvard takes care of it,” Meg said as she unlocked the red door. “No sense making their star medical student dig around in the mud, right?”

“Perish the thought!” Abe said.

They went inside and Meg gave him a quick tour. The walls were decorated with enlarged photos of sunflowers, black-eyed Susans and African daisies. There were also several big photos of the campus, one of which was a map. The walls themselves were painted a pale yellow in the places where wood paneling hadn’t been installed. The furniture was a hodgepodge of teak, aluminum and space-age plastic. It was modern, boxy and upholstered in vinyl and synthetic suede. The kitchen was small but equipped with the latest appliances. The refrigerator had an automatic ice maker and under the laminate countertop was the first built-in dishwasher Abe had ever seen.

“They gave all this to you?” Abe said.

“Just to use.”

“It’s beautiful. Just like you.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere, Jew Boy,” Meg said.

She stood on tiptoes, threw her arms around his neck, pulled his face down to hers, and kissed him deeply with lips that tasted of pepperoni. 

Then she whispered in his ear: “I need to take a shower. But I hate to waste all that water on myself.”

Meg saw the puzzled look on Abe’s face and added, “You know what they say: ‘Save water: Shower with a friend.’”

She led him into the bathroom. They undressed each other, kissing as the clothes hit the floor, then stepped into the shower and helped each other get cleaner than a nun’s habit.

After a long shower they dried each other off and she led him into her bedroom, backed him up against the bed, and pushed him onto it before jumping on with him.

Meg grabbed Abe’s erect penis and said, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t feign disinterest, Jew Boy?”

The new lovers enjoyed a few more minutes of petting and kissing before Abe made his move. Meg pushed him away.

”Do you have a condom?” she said.

“Sorry, no,” Abe said. “You’re not on the pill?”

“I don’t think they’ve perfected it yet,” Meg said. “They’re still tweaking the estrogen levels. Anyway, I’m not so keen about screwing with my hormones.”

Meg saw disappointment darken Abe’s face and felt his erection begin to wane. She hopped out of bed, dug into the nightstand drawer, and pulled out a Trojan.

“No worries, Abraham Bayner!” she said, flapping the condom as if it were a packet of coffee sugar.

She brought Abe back to attention, ripped open the little package with her teeth, and rolled the condom on. They spent the rest of the afternoon and that night in bed, exhausting Meg’s rubber supply.

Over the next four years, while they were still in medical school, the couple faithfully used prophylactics. The last thing they wanted to do was interrupt their studies with an unplanned pregnancy. 

When they graduated in 1971, however, they decided to celebrate.

"Just this once," Meg cooed. “I don’t think I’m ovulating.”

“You sure?” Abe asked.

Meg answered him by sliding his unsheathed penis into her. The sex was fantastic. Looking back on that night, Meg thought she could almost feel herself getting pregnant.

Abortion on demand was available in New York, but it wasn’t an option for Meg, who was Catholic enough to be against having an abortion herself. They were quickly married, well before Meg began to show. They loved each other madly even after having been together for four years, they reasoned, so it was only a matter of time before they got married anyway.

Abe was a non-practicing Jew. With Meg being a Catholic – and a pregnant one at that – a secular civil ceremony seemed the best choice, perhaps the only choice. They were married on a rocky beach in Cape Cod. It was a short affair attended by their families and a few friends. Meg’s parents flew in from Arizona. Abe’s mother had died in a car crash when he was ten, but his father drove up from New Jersey. Meg’s uncle Bill, who owned a gas station in Walpole and also was a notary public, officiated.

Abe and Meg wrote their own over-sweetened vows. Meg went first. She’d memorized the words, and so was able to recite them while gazing into Abe’s eyes. 

“Abraham Bayner, I love you as I’ve loved no man. My heart aches with the joy you bring me. My soul sings your praises to the angels of my good fortune. I thank God for you and I vow at this moment and with every breath yet to come to remain at your side come what may: wealth or poverty, luck or misfortune, health or infirmity. I take you to be my husband, my love, my life, until I turn to dust.”

Then it was Abe’s turn. He produced a small slip of paper from his pocket, glanced at it for a second, wadded it up, and threw it dramatically onto the sand.

“Megan McConnell, I love you as I have loved no woman,” he said, transfixed by those green eyes. “No man – least of all the one who stands before you now with his knees knocking like a frightened schoolboy – is worthy of such a love. I would be grateful enough to call you friend. I fear my heart will be unable to hold the happiness that will overwhelm it the moment I call you wife. I promise to strive with all my being to prove myself worthy of you. I vow to stand by you in the darkness and in the light, to hold your hand as we walk together to the end of our blissful journey and return to the eternity from which we came.”

Abe glanced at Meg’s uncle Bill to let him know he was finished.

“I now pronounce you man and wife,” Uncle Bill said. Then he turned to Abe and said, “You may now kiss the bride.”

Abe bent down and kissed his new wife. The unexpected power of it momentarily staggered him. He didn’t hear the wedding party’s applause. He hugged Meg close and whispered into her ear, “Hello, Mrs. Bayner. I love you.” Then they kissed again.

“Hey, hey, you two!” Uncle Bill crowed. “Get a room!”

After the short ceremony, there was music and dancing and drinking. Meg nursed two glasses of wine. Abe got as drunk as Meg had ever seen him. They spent the night on the cape, then returned the next day to Meg’s little Harvard house. A honeymoon would have to wait until they could save up some money.

Besides, they had a life to get on with.

Known for having raced through medical school in record time, the two easily landed jobs at local research institutes affiliated with Harvard University. The pay was good and they were awarded signing bonuses that they used to move into a new three-one ranch (yellow with green shutters) on Grove Street in Waverley. (Meg’s bonus was half again as large as Abe’s.)

Seven months after the wedding, Gwendolyn Bayner was born. She was a healthy baby and over the next three years grew up to be a happy and active toddler with curly red hair and preternaturally green eyes. The floor of the little home was littered with dolls and toys, and the place smelled of baby powder and petroleum jelly when it wasn’t overwhelmed by the aroma of Meg’s corned beef and cabbage.

Not surprisingly, given their academic acumen at Harvard, Abe and Meg excelled at work and were given hefty raises each year. After three years, Meg was promoted from a research assistant to a full researcher.

Life was good.

Then everything changed.

It started when Abe felt the muscles in his legs start to tighten spontaneously. He ignored it for a couple months, hoping it might go away. When it didn’t, he visited a neurologist friend who did some tests and a week later diagnosed Huntington’s disease, a progressive neurological disorder famous for having killed folksinger Woody Guthrie.

Guthrie had died in 1967 – the year Abe and Meg met. He’d made it to fifty-five, but the last dozen years of his life were mostly spent in a brain-dead fog that lifted less and less frequently as his time grew shorter and shorter. 

A high-school dropout who compensated by reading voraciously, Guthrie was famous for having written This Land is Your Land and playing a guitar emblazoned with the phrase This Machine Kills Fascists. He was idolized by most folksingers in the sixties, including Bob Dylan, who played songs for him during visits to the Brooklyn mental hospital where Guthrie finally faded away. Guthrie was married three times and fathered eight children, the first of whom was named Gwendolyn. (Abe and Meg hadn’t known that when they’d named their own daughter.)

Abe delivered the bad news to Meg one night in bed. They’d just made love. It was summer. The window was open, and the sheer drapes ruffled in a light breeze. The window let in just enough moonlight to make everything in the room look gray.

“Huntington’s?” Meg said, staring at the ceiling. “That’s genetic, right?”

“Yeah,” Abe said. “My father’s fifty and he’s fine. You saw him at the wedding. So I didn’t get it from him. It must have come from my mother. We always wondered what caused that crash. She was a good driver. A great one, in fact. Even in snow. So we figured it must have been some sort of mechanical failure. I’m thinking now that maybe it was a seizure.”

“Oh,” Meg said.

Still awash in the afterglow of orgasm, Meg’s mind whirled with thoughts of what Huntington’s would mean. What it would mean was an abbreviated life with a bleak ending for Abe, who would likely die in his forties, or his fifties, if he were as lucky as Woody Guthrie.

It also meant there was a fifty-fifty chance little Gwen had the disease.

Meg wept for a month. She tried to put on a brave face whenever Abe was around, but her puffy red eyes always told him she’d been crying. 

Abe generally accepted his death sentence with relative equanimity, but the reality of it sometimes welled up in him. One gray afternoon in mid-February, Meg found him in bed, curled into a ball and shivering as if a window had been left open. She slipped into bed with him, held him tight, ran her fingers through his curly hair and whispered in his ear, “We’ll just deal with it. Whatever it takes, we’ll deal. I love you.”

Abe was both relieved and ashamed that Meg was there to suffer with him. He sorely needed her, but she deserved better.

“I’m sorry, Meg,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” Meg told him. “It’s nobody’s fault. It’s life.”

Abe’s future was indeed bleak. In the coming years, he’d begin to move more and more erratically and strike odd poses that would make people gawk at him as if he were some sort of invalid, which of course he would be. Later, he’d quite literally lose his mind the same as Woody Guthrie had, when his brain could no longer compensate for the neurons blotted out by the Huntington’s.

Abe knew that one in four Huntington’s victims tried to kill themselves. Far fewer actually succeeded, probably because they waited until they were too far gone to get the job done. No one knew whether they were driven to try by a blossoming insanity or by an entirely rational decision to end the suffering. In any case, Abe thought, he wouldn’t be ready for several years, after the disease had been given enough time to eat through his nervous system like rust on a wheelbarrow left out in the rain. When he became a burden, he promised himself, he’d end it. He was a doctor, after all. He knew plenty of ways to do it, all of them certain, none of them particularly painful.

“Simple as turning off a light switch,” he said, snapping his fingers and thinking that maybe the day he could no longer snap his fingers would be the day he would know it was time.

Abe and Meg agreed to make the best of things. What other choice did they have? Nevertheless, a dark cloud shrouded their lives. They tried not to talk about the Huntington’s, especially not the even chances that their little girl had it, but it was always there, a patient murderer hellbent on making Abe suffer for as long as possible before granting him a merciful end.

Spurred by the shared understanding that their lives together would be truncated, the young couple struggled to squeeze as much happiness as they could out of each day.

Abe laughed gamely with every chance he got, even at corny jokes that weren’t funny, like the ones on Hee Haw reruns. (Redneck, standing in front of a fence: “I crossed a gopher with an elephant.” Others: “What’ja get?” Redneck: “Some awful big holes in my backyard.” Fence board flies up and hits Redneck in the seat of his pants.)

For her part, Meg tried to compensate for the happiness deficit with which they began each day by working hard to make things as perfect as she could. Who could blame her, then, for accusing God of being grossly unfair when it rained on a picnic or during an outing to Fenway Park? Wasn’t it enough to have a husband with Huntington’s and a child with even odds of having it too? How much suffering could one small life be expected to endure? How much more did He expect from her?

Then everything changed again.

This time, it was Meg. She started having difficulty walking, as if some wise guy had put tacky glue on the soles of her shoes. She saw a different neurologist, one recommended by someone at work, and was thunderstruck when she was given the same diagnosis Abe had been given.

“You must be mistaken,” she told the doctor. “My husband has Huntington’s, but it’s not contagious, it’s genetic.”

“Yes it is,” the doctor agreed. “Don’t one of your parents have it?”

“No!” Meg said.

“They must,” the doctor insisted.

“Well they don’t!” Meg cried. “My mother and father are both in their fifties and strong as horses!”

Of course, Meg knew the doctor had to be correct. When she got home, she called her parents in Arizona. Her mother answered the phone.

“The neurologist says it’s Huntington’s, which must have come from one of you, except that it couldn’t have, because you and daddy are long past the age at which you’d be symptomatic,” Meg said.

Meg’s mother was silent.

“Mom?” Meg said.

“I was pregnant by another man the day your father and I were married, Meg,” her mother said. “His name was Frankie…Frank Sanders. I lost track of him. I had no idea he was sick. Otherwise I would have told you. I’m sorry, Meg.”

“How could you have kept this from me all these years? I am not a child!”

“Meg,” her mother said. “You know Catholics simply don’t discuss such things.”

When Meg told Abe about her astounding diagnosis, he was in such disbelief that his first reaction was to laugh out loud. It was beyond unfair. It was cruel.  

Not only did Meg's diagnosis mean that she would suffer the same disastrous future that awaited him, it meant that little Gwen’s chances had just rocketed from fifty percent to at least seventy-five percent, and maybe one-hundred percent, depending on how badly malformed their DNA actually was.

To Abe, one thing seemed certain: Their astonishing misfortune wasn't a result of random chance. The odds that both he and his wife would share such a rare disease were so infinitesimal that Abe could not help thinking that it had been no accident, and who else but God had the power to manage such a horrible eventuality? Certainly He was not above such cruelty, for hadn't He once let the devil beset poor Job, and all just to prove that Job's faith in God was so strong that he would never reproach Him, not even after the devil murdered his family, killed his flock and afflicted him with leprosy?

Neither Abe nor Meg possessed the unwavering faith of Job, and so they grew angry and bitter. How could God be so monstrous? Why didn’t He at least force the disease to show itself early enough so its victims would know not to have a child? It was unfair to let it lurk in the shadows as it did and let unsuspecting parents pass a death sentence on to an innocent child.

It was in this scornful state of mind that Abe and Meg decided to move to Boca Raton, Florida, and start Bayner Genetics. They knew they were smart. People of average intelligence didn’t get scholarships to Harvard Medical – especially not ones that included a car and a house – and they certainly didn’t graduate with honors and with lightning speed, as both of them had. They told themselves if they worked hard enough, if they dedicated every waking moment to finding the cure, they would be successful, and God would have to find some other way to ruin their lives.

Their shared dedication to conquer the disease was fueled mostly by little Gwendolyn, who toddled around the house as if nothing at all were wrong. In their youthful hopefulness and their blind faith in the power of science, they assumed a cure would reveal itself in time – maybe not soon enough to save them, but plenty soon enough to save their little girl.

As Abe and Meg slid into the horror that is Huntington’s disease, Gwendolyn grew up to be a stunning teenager. She had her mother’s pale skin, her fantastic green eyes, and her red hair – although it wasn’t straight like Meg’s but curly like Abe’s. At six-foot-one, she’d also inherited her father’s height.

Abe and Meg kept their shared disease a secret from the girl for as long as they could, but as Gwendolyn grew older and started asking about their symptoms they had no choice but to confirm her suspicions. They could not, however, bring themselves to tell the carefree girl that she probably had the disease too.

They delayed delivering that dreadful message for as long as they could. They finally decided to do it one night after dinner in the summer of 1989. Gwendolyn was eighteen. She’d just graduated from high school and was preparing to head off to the University of Florida. Abe and Meg were each forty-four and well on the way to their graves.

“Your father and I … have something … to tell you,” Meg said.

“I already know,” Gwendolyn said. “I probably have it, too. I know I’m not smart enough to be a geneticist like you guys, but I’m still your child. I’m not stupid.”

Abe and Meg looked at each other with contorted faces that Gwendolyn thought conveyed either relief or bewilderment.

“I looked it up, guys,” she said. “If both your parents have Huntington’s, you probably have it too. Seventy-five-percent chance if you’re lucky, one-hundred-percent chance if you’re not so lucky.”

“We’re … sorry … Gwen,” Abe said.

Shielded by a youthful inability to imagine her own death, Gwendolyn said, “It’s OK, daddy. I’m sure you guys will find a cure. You’re smart as hell.”

Four years later, when Gwendolyn was twenty-two and fresh out of college (she’d majored in music), she met a handsome young investment banker from Miami. They were at a Florida Marlins game, in line to buy beer and hot dogs. He was a few cents short and Gwendolyn, who was in line behind him, offered to pay the difference. Just as Abe had fallen for Meg’s spectacular green eyes, Douglas Douchay fell immediately for Gwendolyn’s.

Before they started dating in earnest, Gwendolyn revealed that she likely had Huntington’s disease. She would probably die in her fifties, she told him, and would descend into madness during her final decade.

A swooning Douglas Douchay, for whom twenty-years seemed close to forever, waved his hand valiantly. No sacrifice was too onerous to endure for his lady. He professed his love for her and proclaimed that twenty or thirty years with her would be worth one-hundred with another. And wouldn’t she be needing a loving spouse to care for her when the disease really started to take hold? He would proudly be that loving spouse, should it come to that.

“I knew from the moment I met you that I loved you,” he said. “In any case, those smart parents of yours – or maybe some other brilliant scientists – may well come up with a cure. The future is unknown. And don’t forget: There’s still a twenty-five percent chance that you’re OK.”

They were married in January 1993. Gwendolyn was pregnant before the wedding dress was in storage. There was no time to waste, not for Gwendolyn and not for her parents, who at forty-eight were sinking fast, with precious little time to enjoy being grandparents.

Because Douglas Douchay did not have Huntington’s, their children would have only a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting the disease, assuming that Gwendolyn had it. Fortunately – or, some said, unfortunately, considering that the disease was incurable – a genetic test for Huntington’s disease had just been discovered. The good news was that the fetus had dodged the bullet. The bad news was that its mother hadn’t.

Gwendolyn gave birth to a perfectly healthy baby girl. She named her Barbara, after her mother's mother, who had kept the identity of Meg's biological father a secret for thirty-two years.

As the years wore on, reality set in on Abe and Meg Bayner. The unwelcome truth flowered as slowly as the disease itself, which progressed in each of them with the patient implacability of a glacier. Within five years, their muscle tightness developed into the typical twitching and posturing. Ten years later, the genetic defect showed up in their speech, and five years after that it began to rob them of their intellect, which in turn killed any hope that they’d find a cure.

Finally, it became undeniably clear (during their diminishing periods of lucidity) that the cure for Huntington’s was far more intractable than they'd imagined.

“This is God … punishing us … for having … premarital sex,” Meg said one night as the two lay in a bed trembling from their own incessant twitching. “We sinned … and this is our penance.”

“I’m sure God … had nothing … to do with this, Meg,” Abe said. “It’s just … horribly bad luck. Two bad … rolls of the dice.”

Gwendolyn’s naïve confidence in her parents notwithstanding, Abe and Meg finally realized that they could no longer reasonably run the company. Starting in the summer of 1994, they began looking for a buyer. They naturally tried to find one among the many other genetics and biotech companies around at the time, but everyone in the close-knit community was fully aware of their rapidly failing health. As a result, they were mercilessly low-balled. No one offered as much as a third of what the company was worth.

As it ended, Abe and Meg's shared remorse for having carelessly afflicted Gwendolyn with the disease – for if God were punishing them for fornicating they were not as innocent as they preferred to believe they were – won the day. They handed Bayner Genetics over to her in 1996, when they were each fifty and had begun to have fewer and fewer good days and more and more bad days. It would be up to Gwendolyn to find her own cure, if she could.

A year after they passed the company to Gwendolyn, Abe and Meg were dead. Abe died first. Because his symptoms had not yet made him a total invalid, his death was unexpected, especially since he died on one of his good days. There were rumors he committed suicide, but they were never verified. (No one, least of all Meg, would have blamed him.)

Meg lasted three months longer. Like her husband, she had not descended into the deepest depths of Huntington’s, and so people could be heard whispering that she, too, had committed suicide. Again, the rumors were never verified. (No one, least of all Gwendolyn, would have blamed her.)

Both Abe and Meg were cremated, at their own direction. Gwendolyn decided not to have funerals. Not for her father. Not for her mother.

“I’ve been mourning their deaths for years,” she said.