SEX MEANS CLONING

by Carol Peters

To create a new person from chemicals, two DNA strands meet in the right place at the right time. They replicate, they entwine, they exchange pieces of each other. The result? A new strand of DNA, ready to clone itself into a new being. What begins as DNA-sex proceeds as DNA-cloning. After a few rounds of cloning, there’s enough DNA available to start building the person. DNA transforms into RNA. Small migrating factories translate RNA into amino acids strung together in a polypeptide chain. The chain clumps up into a functional protein. As the protein scientist says to the gene scientist, DNA may carry the blueprint, but proteins do the real work.

For decades, the accidental DNA meeting ground has been a bar. Dick sees Jane. Jane lifts an eyebrow. Dick buys her a drink, and it’s the age-old story played out in the back seat of a car. Nowadays, laboratory technicians handle DNA in test tubes, so who needs the drink or the car? Instead of engaging in sex with a stranger, we can hand over our DNA samples for entwining with any DNA, including our own. Will the outcome of this scientific facility be carbon copies of the richest human beings of the early twenty-first century? Possibly not.

DNA consists of four elements—cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine. CGAT in scientific shorthand. RNA sounds slightly different—CGAU instead of CGAT because uracils replace the thymines. Here’s a random string of RNA written down in this coding scheme:   CGGUCAAGUCUCAUGGAA. Now let’s clone it. One copy for me, another for you. Side by side, we’ll begin interpreting. We’ll each make stories out of words that begin with the letters in our string. Here’s mine:  Carol got garrulous until Carl’s ancient anteater groped under Carol’s underpants. Or this, more likely to happen in a bar:  Carol’s ankles undulated, grinding gawkily against ashtrays. What did you write? Your story and my story are clones of the original RNA string, but I believe your story is different from mine. We began from identical RNA, but beginnings are not necessarily predictions. Consider that Jane might not have lifted that eyebrow. Dick might have visited a different bar.

A baffling question about RNA is how four nucleotides—adenine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil—can create infinitely varying living creatures. People ask the same question about language. How can twenty-six letters make thousands of words, which lead to millions of stories? The answers are permutation and combination, but how does RNA do it with four letters instead of some more generous number like twenty-six? The answer is the migrating factory inside human cells that reads RNA three nucleotides at a time and translates each three-nucleotide code into an amino acid, of which there are at least twenty. Sounds like enough letters to build a language. After all, the Hawaiian language has only twelve letters but spawns words as exotic as puakenikeni.

Let’s take the same RNA string as above and transform it into an amino acid chain according to the magic decoding ring scientists chose in the middle of the twentieth century. Their one-letter notation maps amino acids to the letters of the English language. Twenty amino acids means some letters are unassigned, but that’s OK, not a big loss. No underpants or undulation this time. According to the code, CGG translates to arginine, which maps to an S; UCA and AGU are RNA-synonyms that both translate to serine, also known as F; CUC = leucine = C; AUG = methionine = D; GAA = glutamic acid = P. Our new writing key is SFFCDP, from which I write:  Some family failures cause displaced persons. You would pen a different poem. How likely is it that another clone of our string would be about family failures and displaced persons? Perhaps you’d write:  Salamanders froth foamy castings during procreation, thereby bringing us back to our earlier topic.

What begins as cloning spills out as cunning imagination. Cloning becomes real sex with the universe, where everything comes into play. My headache because the sun is shining in my eyes. Your ice-encrusted mustache as you stumble home through a stinging sleet. That I like to wear blue eye shadow. That you eschew strong drink. That the names of amino acids are mellifluous and inspire lyricism. Arginine, my cysteine yearns for attention from your tryptophan, my lonely alanine isoleucines the heartbeat of your histidine. Ah, you beefy tyrosine. Phenylalanine my asparagine, I beg of you.

Is it reliable though, all this machinery? Does DNA translate to proteins that work to produce bestsellers? Not every time. DNA makes mistakes when it replicates, so nature has provided a correction machine, a spelling and grammar checker that notices an error in the making and backs up to repair the damage. How reminiscent of Microsoft Word, telling us smartly about transposed letters but not knowing that old-eyed was meant to be cold-eyed. Neither does the DNA correction machine work every time, so errors creep through. Thank goodness. Otherwise we would still be blue-green algae floating in prehistoric seas. The correction occurs in the midst of machined parts labeled replication forks and Okazaki fragments. Lay a silver spoon on the right side of the place setting and repair the dinner plate with super glue. It is impossibly complicated and cannot work, yet usually it does. Thinking about it makes my mind run backward. The DNA-correction machine hints at a sly winking intelligence at the invisible center of things, a phantom peering around a corner and whispering, “Hey! Bet you can’t do this!” Strings of nucleotides turn into left-handed Pulitzer-prize winners.

Between DNA recombination and the humanly flawed correction machine, everything in the universe is possible. Cloning and real sex and writing too. We need a few mistakes, so that a blue-green algae turns bluer or greener, or even the slightest tinge of yellow at dusk. So Dick spies Jane, ankles undulate, salamanders froth. So we swoon from gardenia blossoms and encounter ourselves in orgasm. Biological reductionism says we are nothing more than chemistry. CGGAAUCUA. Circe gushes greetings and astute Ulysses conceals unexpected antidote. SMC. Sensual mating clones. Secretly marked canisters. Sensible matched clogs. Sex means cloning. You try it.