Six
The Ticklish Gene
Despite my fascination with fundamental questions about the nature of
life, I was, after all, an orthopedic surgeon, and I was eager to find
things that would help my patients. In addition, to convince the Ar-
tifact Man and all his brothers, Charlie and I were looking for some
direct test of semiconduction in living tissues. The Hall effect and the
freezing of frog nerves each demonstrated a characteristic of semiconduc-
tion but didn't confirm it in standard engineering terms. Unfortunately,
all the direct tests then known worked only with crystals. You needed a
material you could carve into blocks, something that didn't squish when
you put an electrode on it. The only possibility was bone.
To many biologists and physicians, bones are pretty dull. They seem
like a bunch of scarecrow sticks in which nothing much happens, plain
props for a subtler architecture. Many of my patients were in sad shape
because doctors had failed to realize that bone is a living tissue that has
to be treated with respect. It's a common misconception that orthopedic
surgery is like carpentry. All you have to do is put a recalcitrant fracture
together with screws, plates, or nails; if the pieces are firmly fixed after
surgery, you're done. Nothing could be further from the truth. No mat-
ter how firmly you hold them together, the pieces will come loose and
the limb can't be used if the bone doesn't heal.
The Pillars of the Temple
The skeleton doesn't deserve this cavalier treatment. The development of
bones by the first true fishes of the Devonian era nearly 400 million years