DNA; deoxyribonucleic acid; the stuff of which genes are made; the fabric of inheritance. The metal plate is cool in my hands. As I look at this relic that could easily be mistaken for a nondescript piece of scrap metal, fragments of family history flicker through my mind — great-great-grandparents on my mother’s side, part of Imperial Britain, who were married in Calcutta Cathedral in 1867; my father’s ancestor, known in the family as “the original Horace Judson” who fought for the North in the Civil War and whose saber we still have; and his forebears, religious Puritans I suppose, who came to the American colonies from the north of England early in the 17th century.
Then the frame shifts, and I seem to see the way the double helix connects every life-form on the planet, through a lineage that can be traced back billions of years, to the dawn of life on earth. And here I am, sitting among filing cabinets and bookcases and stacks of paper, holding a fragment of the object that first revealed how it all works.
