by Lori Strauss
Photo: © Depositphotos.com/Andreus

 

I.

One day, Gregor Mendel woke up with a fright. He looked down at himself to find his leg had transformed into a horrible chromosome. A pinching centromere held together what looked like a sister chromatid, flopping on the other side — grotesque and mocking. It waved about helplessly as he looked at it.

“What has happened?” he thought. He looked around and studied his empty monastery walls and his one easy chair. St. Thomas’s Abbey and its Augustinian friars led simple lives. “I will go back to sleep and this nightmare will be over,” but he was unable to sleep because his leg was missing and had been replaced in its entirety by a giant chromosome.

He thought about his work on inheritance with the pea plants. “Oh no,” he thought, “what a strange coincidence. That this career I’ve spent building the basis for what will be the study of genetics has caused me to partially transform into an overlarge chromosome, one seen easily with the naked eye. Even magnified, this gross appendage will not be completely understood for more than one hundred years.”

He shrugged off the thought. The stress of studying the seven traits of peas had surely gotten to him. He needed to get out of bed for the day and find his leg. The friars, and especially C. F. Napp, the Bishop, would not be happy if didn’t tend the 29,000 pea plants on monastery’s two hectares of land. Besides, how else was he to discover and codify the Laws of Inheritance?

His mind obsessively listed the seed traits — seed shape, flower color, seed coat tint, pod shape, unripe pod color, flower location, and plant height — to draw his focus away from the chromosome, when he heard a knock at the door.

“Gregor,” the voice of Bishop Napp was unmistakeable, “didn’t you want to tend your plants today? You know how much I care for the garden. They need tending and their laws need discovering.”

“Nothing!” Gregor cried, surprised that his voice still worked although he shouldn’t have been. His mouth had not been replaced with mandibles after all, his mouth was still the mouth of a man. It was only his leg that had been replaced with a flopping chromosome. “I mean, I will come shortly. I am slightly unwell.”

“Gregor! This is unlike you. Open your door and I will help you.”

The Bishop arriving directly to his door was unusual and Gregor knew that even with his odd structure he must get up. With difficulty, Gregor swung his leg out of bed. He had the urge to place one of his ludacris telomeres on the floor and see if it could support his weight, but he was worried it might mutate and replicate. Instead he pushed along his easy chair and hobbled to the door and unlocked it. He opened the door in a way where only his humanity was visible to the Bishop.

“You look unwell, Gregor, let me in and I will tend to you as I want you tend to your peas.”

“On occasion, it is best to let a pea stay in his pod, Bishop,” said Gregor, but Bishop Napp was suspicious now and pushed open the door. Gregor toppled to the ground in full view, chromosome and all.

The Bishop gasped in disbelief at what he saw. Here was Gregor, the Augustinian friar who showed the most potential for scholarship, and one who was soon-to-be an abbot, but he was also not Gregor. He was Gregor minus a leg and plus a giant chromosome. The equation did not add up and the Bishop slowly backed away. He tried not to show Gregor his true feelings of disgust. A chromosome outside the body was just too much for even a Bishop to comprehend.

“It’s just that I have transformed into a man with a colossal chromosome attached to me. I’m sure it will go away in time,” Gregor tried to reassure him, but Bishop Napp continued to back away until he was far down the hall.

“Your studies of inheritance are important for the world, Gregor, but I think it’s for the best if they were only accepted posthumously — perhaps thirty years posthumously would be enough!” And with that, the Bishop disappeared out of view.

 

II.

Gregor turned and shut the door and slowly made his way back toward his bed. After awkwardly climbing in, he finally sized up the monstrous chromosome. His sister chromatid waved back at him with both sympathy and resignation.

Gregor became suddenly aware he was very hungry. He hadn’t eaten yet and the sun was climbing high into the sky. He also thought that perhaps a sizeable chromosome took a substantial amount of energy to keep alive. His mind leapt to his peas and he worried about their 14 chromosomes and their needs, as his own sister chromatid began to undulate in a way that was both beautiful and obscene.

With much effort, the sister chromatid produced proteins for Gregor to digest. Although he was unable to show his gratitude in a language she understood, his body used the proteins greedily. At least he would not starve to death.

And so his new life unfolded. Gregor stayed in his room. Hobbling occasionally to the window with his chair to survey his wilting peas and back again to his bed. He tried not to be a burden to his chromosome.

Gregor listened through his walls and his windows to the sounds of the friars going about their daily affairs. He heard that they were going to start farming his crops rather than studying them. Bishop Napp himself was starting to tend the garden to revive the plants.

To distract himself from his distress, Gregor thought about his old professor, Christian Doppler, who had come up with his own effect about waves and speed. And then he thought Franz Unger, also his instructor in Vienna, who encouraged him to study plants. Gregor Mendel knew that he was going to make them proud of his scholarship, but didn’t know exactly how.

 

III.

Gregor began at last to write. He still had man hands and not many tiny legs like a bug so there was no reason not to write. He found that when he finally accepted his chromosome as part of his being he could think more clearly. Through his telomeres — even those on his sister chromatid — histones, and base pairs, he learned about dominant and recessive phenotypes. At long last he began to understand generational inheritance.

Although some Augustinians are hermits, Gregor was not used to being alone. He wished every day to escape the confines of his room. Once he finished his Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment he decided he would see if he could gain acceptance amongst his peers.

Very slowly Gregor made his way to the dining room where he knew the friars and the Bishop would be eating. He noticed the Bishop first, looking fitter than he had in ages from his work in the garden. He noted, happily, that the work was good for him and not all bad things had come from Gregor’s transformation into part man, part behemoth chromosome.

The friars looked up with a shock as he approached. A chromosome outside of a cell was one thing, but without seeing even a nucleus the friars were scandalized. The Bishop, who once had compassion for Gregor now felt the limits of his sympathy had been reached. Gregor saw this look in his eyes and turned in a daze to head back to his room. Suddenly, Gregor felt himself being pelted with small round objects. He looked down only to discover that the Bishop was throwing his very own peas at him.

Gregor was not able to move fast enough and the bombardment caused a pea to become lodged in his centromere, injuring him. When he finally escaped and returned to his room, the pea remained as a visible reminder of his insult to injury.

Once locked away again, Gregor sat down. As he rested, his sister chromatid started to move and separate. The pea had caused the polar fibers of the chromosome to become unbalanced at the centromere. Metaphase swiftly moved into Anaphase as the chromosome separated. The sister chromatid had transformed into a daughter chromosome. Gregor felt a rush of emotion toward this new entity. As a friar he never thought he would have children, let alone a daughter.

As Telophase began, Gregor shut his eyes. He finally felt his chromosome unwinding. He took stock of his life. He had many opportunities and fortunes before his metaphasamorphosis. And even throughout his ordeal he codified his own laws to describe inheritance. He learned from the brightest instructors and fathered both a chromosome and the study of genetics.

In Gregor’s state of peaceful meditation he remained content, until his eyes shut during Cytokinesis, never to open again.

 

 

Lori Strauss is a comedian, writer, animator, and storyteller. She’s a former host of The Moth StorySLAMs and is looking forward to joining the comedy scene in Los Angeles this summer. Follow her on twitter @LMStrauss.