“Scully already deduced that.” Chris looked at them impatiently. He snapped his fingers. “Do not
embarrass me in front of Oxford University, or you will all lift weights with me for the entire month of September.”
Everybody groaned. Chris’s level of physical fitness was legendary, as was his habit of wearing his old Harvard football jersey whenever Yale had a game. He was the only professor who was publicly, and routinely, booed in class.
“Whatever he is, he’s not human,” Jonathan said. “He has twenty-four chromosome pairs.”
Chris looked down at his watch. “Four and a half minutes. Two minutes longer than I thought it would take, but much quicker than Professor Clairmont expected.”
“Touché, Professor Roberts,” Matthew said mildly. Chris’s team slid glances in Matthew’s direction, still trying to figure out what an Oxford professor was doing in a Yale research lab.
“Wait a minute. Rice has twenty-four chromosomes. We’re studying rice?” asked a young woman I’d seen dining at Branford College.
“Of course we’re not studying rice,” Chris said with exasperation. “Since when did rice have a sex, Hazmat?” She must be the owner of the specially labeled sink.
“Chimps?” The young man who offered up this suggestion was handsome, in a studious sort of way, with his blue oxford shirt and wavy brown hair.
Chris circled one of the ideograms at the top of the display with a red Magic Marker. “Does that look like chromosome 2A for a chimp?”
“No,” the young man replied, crestfallen. “The upper arm is too long. That looks like human chromosome 2.”
“It is human chromosome 2.” Chris erased his red mark and started to number the ideograms.
When he got to the twenty-fourth, he circled it. “This is what we’ll be focusing on this semester.
Chromosome 24, known henceforward as CC so that the research team studying genetically modified rice over in Osborn doesn’t get the heebie-jeebies. We have a lot of work to do. The DNA has been sequenced, but very few gene functions have been identified.”
“How many base pairs?” Shotgun asked.
“Somewhere in the neighborhood of forty million,” replied Chris.
“Thank God,” Shotgun murmured, looking straight at Matthew. It sounded like an awful lot to me, but I was glad he was pleased.
“What does CC stand for?” asked a petite Asian woman.
“Before I answer that, I want to remind you that every person here has given Tina a signed nondisclosure agreement,” Chris said.
“Are we working with something that will result in a patent?” A graduate student rubbed his hands together. “Excellent.”
“We are working on a highly sensitive, highly confidential research project with far-reaching implications. What happens in this lab stays in this lab. No talking to your friends. No telling your parents. No boasting in the library. If you talk, you walk. Got it?”
Heads nodded.
“No personal laptops, no cell phones, no photographs. One lab terminal will have Internet access, but only Beaker, Shotgun, and Sherlock will have the access code,” Chris continued, pointing to the senior researchers. “We’ll be keeping lab notebooks the old-fashioned way, written in longhand on paper, and they will all be turned in to Beaker before you swipe out. For those who have forgotten how to use a pen, Bones will show you.”
Bones, the weedy young man with the paper notebook, looked smug. A bit reluctantly the students parted with their cell phones, depositing them in a plastic bucket that Beaker carried around the room.
Meanwhile Shotgun gathered up the laptops and locked them in a cabinet. Once the laboratory had been cleared of contraband electronics, Chris continued.