Knockout Mouse Read Online Free

scientist, he insisted on being drawn to women who were fast-track lawyers, agents, marketing directors. He must have thought they had something he didn’t.
    Sheila was anything but fast. In spite of how nicely the black ringlets of hair framed her head, and the elegance of the single bracelet on her wrist, a sadness shadowed her face. She made a valiant effort to keep it tucked away, but it seeped from the corners of her eyes and the sides of her mouth. I wondered where it came from. Maybe she just worked too hard. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how she ducked away from the camera in the parking lot, then refused to admit it. I was getting more and more curious about why.

3
    Jenny called us to dinner. Sheila and I wound up together down at the end of the table. Across from us and over a seat, Wes was absorbed with the tall woman with the earrings. Marion, I heard someone call her, and remembered she was the other date Jenny had in mind for Wes. She had a strong jaw, pale skin, and long, flat blonde hair. Her height, mild European accent, and stylish glasses made her an imposing figure. She was regaling Wes with a story about mold colonies.
    The talk at the rest of the table was of real estate, bandwidth, and the venture capital market. Sheila remained quiet. She ate methodically, using a fork and knife to neatly divide the appetizer of mozzarella, basil, and tomatoes. I noticed she was sniffling and her eyes were rimmed red. She kept rubbing them.
    “Is the cat bothering you?” I asked.
    “Cats. Trees. Grass. I’m pretty much allergic to life.”
    “This area is bad for pollen.”
    “It’s getting worse. Cities and companies don’t plant female trees anymore if the species is dioecious. Just the males. The females drop seeds, fruit, husks—litter people don’t want to clean up. So we get the male trees, spewing pollen.”
    “It’s always the males causing problems.”
    She flicked me a mischievous glance. “So I’ve heard.”
    “But let’s face it, women
are
messy. Dropping eggs all over the place.”
    “It’s tragic.” She shook her head, deadpan. “Chemically driven to make the globe more crowded than it already is. Losing their minds when their biological clocks go off.”
    I laughed. “To be fair, it happens to men, too. Only with them I think it’s more about ego than eggs.”
    “Or genes, the new superego. They demand to be propagated.”
    “So why is it that they make boys want one thing and girls another?”
    “You mean the old, ‘men want sports and women want shoes’? Nature is more clever than you think. We’d get bored with each other if we were too much alike.”
    Sheila returned everything I said with a little extra on it. I liked it. “So what I’ve heard is true. You’re a molecular biologist.”
    “That’s what my badge says. I work at a biotech company.”
    I pictured her in a lab, neatly dividing peptides the way she did her food. “Well, if you invented these tomatoes in the lab, you’re doing good work.”
    She gave a doleful smile. “They’re from a garden.”
    “What kind of genes are you splicing, then?”
    “Gene transfer is old news. The new big thing in the field is proteomics.”
    “The study of proteins,” I said. Kumar had mentioned it.
    “They’re the real building blocks of the body. DNA may spell out the recipes, but proteins do all the work. They’re the big targets for control of disease. We might have thirty or sixty thousand genes in our genome, but hundreds of thousands of proteins are in the proteome. We have a long way to go to map them.”
    “I heard a bit about it this afternoon,” I said, hoping to sneak back to the subject of the parking lot. “I’ve been shooting a project for a company called Kumar Biotechnics.”
    Sheila’s expression betrayed nothing. I went at the question another way and asked who she worked for.
    “LifeScience Molecules. I’m a junior scientist.” She launched into a long explanation of target cells,