The Hidden Genes of Professor K by Gabriel Farago

Author:Gabriel Farago [Farago, Gabriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Bear & King Publishing
Published: 2016-07-14T22:00:00+00:00

55

Carrington was due to arrive in the evening after a long flight from London. Jana went to collect him from the airport and Alexandra was cooking the long overdue dinner. The unexpected encounter with her abductor at the institute had not only soured a most successful function and personal triumph, but had also rocked Alexandra to the core. She was seriously considering resigning and going back to France. Had it not been for Jana’s reassurance and calm voice of reason, Alexandra would have been packing her bags right now. Instead, she immersed herself in something she loved to do: cooking.

Alexandra opened a bottle of red – a shiraz from the Barossa – and poured herself a glass. The warm, peppery taste of the smooth wine primed her palate for the familiar treat to come. Perfect, she thought. It was definitely the right wine for the dish she had chosen. Because Jana had told her that Marcus loved beef, Alexandra decided to cook Boeuf Bourguignon, one of her favourites. She knew the recipe by heart – her grandmother had taught her well – and enjoyed preparing the ingredients: 2 ½ tablespoons of olive oil; 1 large brown onion, finely chopped; 200g shortcut rindless bacon, halved lengthways and cut into 1 cm strips; a generous cup of red wine … Alexandra reached for the beef, a splendid piece of eye fillet, and began to cut it into five centimetre pieces.

The familiar routine reminded her of her grandmother’s kitchen in her cottage just outside Paris. The treasured memories began to calm Alexandra. The excellent wine – her third glass – helped as well. With a sense of wellbeing washing over her, she relaxed and her mind began to wander.

She had spent many a school holiday at her grandmother’s home in the country. From time to time, Professor K, who knew her grandmother well, came to stay for the weekend. Alexandra remembered sitting in the garden on balmy summer evenings, talking about mathematics – one of Professor K’s favourite subjects – while mum and grandma were preparing dinner. She remembered how she struggled to understand Leibniz’s notation and how her grandmother used to tease her about being more interested in the mysteries of the calculus than baking a cake.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz was a seventeenth century German philosopher and mathematician whose ideas had fascinated Professor K. In fact, Professor K was a closet computer nerd, obsessed with information technology, especially ‘going digital’, which he believed in some way helped him understand information storage and transfer in the genome.

As the mouth-watering aroma of frying onions drifted through the kitchen, Alexandra remembered something in Professor K’s notes she had read the day before: the significance of ‘junk’ DNA. Professor K firmly believed that the huge amount of junk DNA in the human genome contained vital information accumulated over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, which if properly decoded, could provide answers and solutions to many of the fundamental questions taunting medical research. He also believed that

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