Be Free!

Along the steep and curvy road towards the medical profession, many obstacles stood in my way. Some were speed bumps, some were hills and some were deep canyons that I had to race towards at top speed and hurdle myself blindly into the air, hoping that I landed safely on the other side. For me, Genetics was one of those canyons. It was a pre-med requirement in college and what many referred to as a “cut-throat” class. At first I thought that meant that if I failed the class, I would essentially be cutting my own throat by ruining my chances of getting into medical school. But by the end, I was pretty sure it meant that any other students in the class would gladly cut my throat if it improved their chances of doing well in the class. Either way, it was not a subject that I was going to enjoy, so I just wanted to survive it.

I entered the lecture hall on the morning of the first day of class. This large room was constructed almost entirely of wood and approximately 500 folded theater-type seats lined up like soldiers preparing for battle. The musty air was soaked with the odor of chalk dust and the audible tension in the voices of the students who were beginning to file in. I took a seat towards the front and smiled at the girl sitting next to me. “Don’t you just love Genetics?” she said with an inappropriately large smile on her face that caused mine to quickly fade. “Love is kind of a ... strong word”, I replied as I covered my neck and sat back in my seat. The Professor began speaking as the lights dimmed. He was a thin man in his 50’s who looked like he hadn’t smiled since Nixon was in office. His face almost cracked as he spoke, “This afternoon, you will begin your fruit fly experiment in lab. It counts for half your grade. Midterms are in 6 weeks. Shall we begin?” Suddenly, he smiled.

My footsteps echoed in the empty hallway as I approached Genetics Lab. I looked in one of the classrooms along the way and saw a group of students sitting around a table staring at a green, foam block in the center trying to figure out how to arrange the colorful flowers piled up along the side. I longed to join them, but forced my feet to continue all the way to the double doors at the end of the hall. A pungent odor stung my nostrils the moment I opened the door. I saw the girl from the lecture, but managed to avoid getting sucked into the gravitational pull of her smile and took a seat at an empty lab bench. I stared at the jar of fruit flies in front of me as the instructor explained how we would be raising generations of flies over the next 2 months and recording traits such as patterns on their wings and eye color in each fly. The final goal was to tell which chromosome the gene for each trait was on and where it was located on the chromosome. This is referred to as gene mapping. Smiling girl was beaming brighter than ever.

I had to work very hard over those 2 months, partly because the information was challenging for me, but mostly because I was afraid of bugs. I managed to overcome both of these shortcomings, but events took a dramatic turn for the worse one Saturday morning. The experiment was drawing to a close and I was on my forth or fifth generation of flies. To count them, I had to place ether over the jar until they fell asleep, then dump them out and examine them one by one under the microscope. I frequently wondered how this was going to help me as a doctor, but one day several years later as a surgical intern, I was picking small pieces of glass from a broken beer bottle out of the scalp of a drunken man and finally understood.

The only other person in the lab that morning with me was smiling girl, who I finally learned would only smile when people who handed down grades were in the room. From the look on her face, she was as hung-over as I was. When I arrived at the lab, I started consuming large amounts of water to help dull my throbbing headache, and soon my bladder was throbbing as well. I had just spread my anesthetized flies out on the counting sheet. I quickly weighed my options and dashed down the hallway to the bathroom. I barely made it in time, and I had to brace myself in the stall for fear of being thrown backwards by the force of the stream.

I immediately knew something was wrong when I returned to the lab and saw smiling girl smiling again. I went over to my desk and a wave of nausea washed over me. Where my generation of about two hundred flies once lay sleeping, now only a couple of drunken flies remained, staggering towards the edge of the desk. My entire experiment was soon hovering silently in the air around me, darting to and fro as I comically tried to grab them in my fists. Soon, I was swatting at them with my textbook. I was determined to take them either dead or alive. They, however, had other things in mind as they promptly headed towards the window I had foolishly opened when I first arrived. In desperation, I began searching the lab for any dead creatures that had wings.

Somehow, I managed to squeak a passing grade out of Genetics. I excelled on the written exams, but my fruit fly experiment left the Professor scratching his head. Clearly, I could not map my flies’ traits to the correct chromosome, nor could I even tell how many chromosomes the poor creatures had. In fact, some of the faculty thought that I actually discovered a brand new species. But in the end, only I and smiling girl knew the truth about what happened that morning. And to this very day, every time I see a fruit fly, I wonder what color eyes it has and if it might be a descendent of my lost generation.