HYG101 - A Short story about Neanderthal Genomics, written in 1998

All these recent stories on the Neanderthal sequencing projects reminded me of a short story I wrote while in graduate school. I wrote this story for a class taught by Carl Djerassi, a professor at Stanford and an author of a variety of what he calls "Science in Fiction" novels. In these, he writes about the workings of science and thus the name of the genre.

For this class all the students were supposed to write short stories that were then shared among the students and with Djerassi and each week we would read and discuss two of the stories. The stories written by the other students were great overall - moving and interesting and fun to read and discuss. The class digressed at the end due to Djerassi's desire for the group to write a fiction "Renga." Renga is a form of poetry where one person writes a line and then another writes the next line and together a group is supposed to come up with a poem of interest.

So we wrote a story - with each student in the class writing a paragraph and then sending it on to the next author. In the end, the story was, in my opinion, much worse than all the individual's stories. But amazingly, Djerassi convinced Nature to publish the story and thus I am a co-author on what was the first (and probably last) short story published in Nature. The worst part of it was - Nature made us reduce the lenght of the story to fit some page restrictions. That would be fine I guess if we knew this in advance. But in the end, what this did was cause us to edit the story and remove any hints of the "Renga" nature of the story. I was embarassed by the story and wanted to use a pen name so people would not know it was me. I chose Joan Eisen but for some very particular reasons I had to change my author line back to Jonathan (long story).

OK -back to the main point. I wrote a story that is about sequencing Neanderthal DNA. And though I am not sure any more what I think of the story ... here it is.

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HYG101

David Cohn was unaware that, while he was camping in Death Valley, every five minutes his computer would contact U. C. Berkeley's mainframe system and download any email messages David had received since the last check. David did not find out that he had left his email program open until, fumbling for his keys outside his office, he heard his computer play two randomly selected segments of Mozart's clarinet concerto, announcing that two new messages had just arrived. David had been gone for three weeks and had come in early in the morning so he could check his email in peace before other people would arrive and start asking about his trip or reading his email over his shoulder.