Carl Djerassi, NO
University of Georgia Press

Jack Foley

THREE AMERICANS SHARE NOBEL PRIZE IN MEDICINE

They studied nitric oxide in the body.
Three American scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine yesterday for making the surprise discovery that a gas best known as an air pollutant is also produced inside the body, where it plays a key role in regulating such diverse functions as blood pressure, nerve firing and immune responses.
—Rick Weiss, The Washington Post, October 13, 1998

"And what he doesn't know about the penis is not worth knowing."
—Renu Krishnan in NO

"I believe sex and reproduction will be separate," said Carl Djerassi on a British radio program. "Sex will be done for fun, love or lust; reproduction will be done under the microscope."

It has been noted that Djerassi—paradoxically referred to as the "Father of the Pill"—gained fame by discovering a way to have sex without reproduction; he has now turned his attention to reproduction without sex.

"Impregnation of a woman's egg in normal intercourse requires tens of millions of sperm," Dr. Djerassi writes:

A man ejaculating even 1 - 3 million sperm is functionally infertile. But in 1992, G. Palermo, H. Joris, R. Devroey, and A. C. Van Steirteghem from the University of Brussels published a sensational paper in Lancet, announcing the fertilization of a human egg with a single sperm by direct injection under the microscope, followed by reinsertion of the egg into the woman's uterus. ICSI—the accepted acronym for "intracytoplasmic sperm injection"—has now become the most powerful means of treating male infertility: nearly 10,000 ICSI babies have been born since 1992.

ICSI is a major feature of the tetrology of novels Djerassi has been publishing since 1989. Provisionally titled Secrets of the Tribe, the books include Cantor's Dilemma (1989), The Bourbaki Gambit (1994), Menachem's Seed (1997) and NO (1998). About NO the author has written, "While a two-letter title would seem to leave little scope for ambiguity, the meaning of my NO is complicated. It refers to the many layers of the negative expletive as well as to the chemical formula of nitric oxide, an industrial gas and global, environmental pollutant. Yet some of the hottest recent biomedical research has also shown that NO fulfills a singularly complicated and sophisticated function in the human body, where (continuously generated) it serves as a biological messenger, indispensable in a staggering variety of processes, including penile erection."

Like the meaning of the title, "penile erection" is a "complicated" issue in Djerassi's fiction. NO is the first of the novels not to name a central male character in the title: it is almost as if the author were asserting a resounding negative—saying no—to Cantor, Bourbaki and Menachem, with their dilemma, gambit and seed. Yet, as the concluding novel of the tetrology, NO in fact features characters and situations from the earlier books. Djerassi himself appears here in a kind of Hitchcock cameo. Discussing Israel's "Wolf Prize," someone mentions Isaac Djerassi, who worked on "methotrexate treatment in leukemia." NO's heroine, Renu Krishnan, answers:

"Not Isaac Djerassi. Carl. From Stanford. He got it for the chemical synthesis of the Pill...I once went to a lecture of his on the future of birth control—dismal according to him—when I was a graduate student in biochemistry at Stanford. A good speaker, but a bit arrogant, I would say."

Renu Krishnan also mentions that the Jerusalem Post has been "touting [the Wolf Prizes] (somewhat grandiosely) as Israel's Nobel Prizes." NO includes a character who has won a Nobel Prize, so I wondered whether the title were also a reference to the first two letters of the phrase, "Nobel Prize." As a scientist, Dr. Djerassi has been granted a great many important and well- deserved awards. But he has not received that one: "NO."

Carl Djerassi characterizes his novels as "science in fiction." He explains the concept in the foreword to The Bourbaki Gambit: "Science is conducted within a close-knit culture whose members are generally reluctant to disclose their tribal secrets. This may be one reason why so few novels, plays, or films use ordinary scientists as main characters":

I call my genre "science-in-fiction" to distinguish it from science fiction. As a tribesman, I demand of myself a degree of accuracy and plausibility that impart to my storytelling a high ratio of fact to fiction.

The accuracy and currency of the science in these books is an important element in their appeal, and Djerassi is quite right to point it out. Yet he is by no means a popularizer. He is a serious novelist who wishes to bring something of the body of his experience as a scientist into his work. "Is it autobiography?" he asks, and answers yes, it is: "Only by dipping deeply and frequently into the well of my accumulated experience as a scientist can I even dare to attempt the task of explicating my tribe's mores to the outsiders or indeed even those insiders who have chosen to pay little attention to our many quirks and foibles." He cautions, however, that though his books are "psychically autobiographical," "the bulk is fiction. And the part that isn't, is generally well disguised."

What is clear is the need for all his characters to face, as he puts it, "the problem of bridging gaps between widely divergent subcultures"—a problem which was certainly a personal one for this "immigrant scientist turned fiction writer in his adopted language." Indeed, Dr. Djerassi has remarked that he speaks no language—not even his first language, German—without accent. A person simultaneously inhabiting "widely divergent subcultures"—and who, in effect, has no "mother tongue"—is necessarily an exile, a homeless person, even perhaps, in Djerassi's mythic projections, a kind of "wandering Jew." That sense of exile hovers over Djerassi's work even when he is writing about scientists—his "tribe." Despite the author's explicit claim to be "a long-term insider of this tribe," there is an outsider consciousness which colors everything in his fiction: again, "NO." (One of the characters in NO is a "mamzer," the quintessential Jewish outsider.) Both love—sex—and intellect are ways of crossing over "gaps," but they often carry with them immense ethical and personal problems. At the center of Menachem's Seed is the discovery of a "new way" to connect sperm and egg, male and female. The "gap" is bridged, but personal problems come flooding in, upsetting everyone's applecart.

The central character of NO, Djerassi's "Viagra" novel, is a young East Indian woman, Renu Krishnan. Djerassi comments in his preface on "the remarkable Asianization of the American academic research laboratory":

Of particular interest to me are the challenges facing the women from India for whom Renu Krishnan, the main protagonist of NO, is meant to be prototypical. Since their academic language back home is English, they do not suffer most of the overt language problems encountered by Chinese or Japanese scientists working in the United States. Yet like all Asian women in contemporary American science, Indians remain triply marginalized: as women in a historically male-dominated field, as foreigners of color (even should they become naturalized citizens) and, finally, coming as they do from a culture in which a woman's role is clearly defined, by the process of eventually losing part of their native culture without gaining an acceptable new one.

Renu Krishnan falls in love with and eventually marries an Israeli scientist, Jephtah Cohn. He explains to her that "Cohn is just a compression of Cohen—the priests." But she has another thought about the name: "The four letters of his family name might have been drawn from the periodic table: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen—the four elements defining all life." It is a wonderful moment. Through the magical powers of language—through a special kind of "naming"—as well as by her love, Djerassi's heroine is momentarily able to bridge the gap between the ancient Hebrew tradition ("Cohen—the priests") and modern science ("the periodic table"). Indeed, "the four letters of his family name" might even suggest the Tetragrammaton, the four letters of the divine "name." Behind the delight Djerassi takes in acronyms such as "ICSI"—and despite the unimpeachable place such acronyms have in scientific parlance—there is a powerful sense of the Cabbala in the writing of this (in Djerassi's phrase) "modern alchemist." In this connection, it is of some significance that Renu's mother is described as "superstitious." At some level in Djerassi's impeccably realistic and "scientific" writing, a magical, even a religious impulse seems to be working itself out.

The field in which Renu is working is "Impotence—or more appropriately for our purpose, erectile dysfunction in men." She is in fact working toward "the holy grail of erection." (At one point she remarks blandly, "Erectile function is exciting territory.") The acronym coined for Renu's work is "MUSA," "Medicated Unit for Sexual Arousal"; the word is also, as she points out, the botonical genus of the banana. Renu's research is abundantly successful, almost too successful. In one excruciating scene her lover, Jephtah, takes an overdose of NO:

At first, everything went normally. Better, in fact; I was excited by the power I could exert on a man with a MUSA in my hand...But then his groans took on a painful sound until, finally, he just rolled over on his side, moaning, knees drawn up as if he were trying to hide his rigid phallus.
I didn't know what to do, other than stroke his head and murmur pointless assurances that the pain and the erection were bound to recede. But Jephtah got up, pacing up and down for at least thirty minutes, biting his hand and trying to muffle his moans.

Like Carl Djerassi, Renu enters the world of "the small, entrepreneurial, research-driven enterprises sometimes collectively referred to as biotech." Many complications, romantic, scientific, and legal, follow. As Djerassi points out in his Preface, "Because of their intellectual origins in educational institutions, biotech ventures have generated a series of contentious problems, arising from the interaction of profit-driven enterprises with supposedly nonprofit institutions and (ideally) disinterested individual scientists. These have caused numerous legal, philosophical, and ethical debates that will continue to influence the conduct of science within the academy, as well as the ways it is disseminated into the economy and culture at large." NOconfronts these various elements with wit and genuine sentiment. I won't spoil the plot for you, but I want to point out that along the way we are made acquainted with such esoteric terms as erectogenic, iontophoresis, polyzeniumpolyolates, ithyphallic, even the rather unusual gravid. (The inevitable petered out also appears.)

NO, along with the rest of Carl Djerassi's tetrology (which does not include his marvelously ironic book, Marx, Deceased), is a fascinating look not only at the world of science but at the world of scientists. As I suggested earlier, Djerassi has great delight in language: puns, acronyms and verbal play are part of the pleasure of his work. Yet his books remain resolutely representational: they deal with a world which exists and in which Carl Djerassi is a major figure. But there are other worlds.

One of the author's favorite philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, opened his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with what was to become a famous sentence: "The world is all that is the case" ("Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist"). Wittgenstein later answered that sentence with one in Philosophical Investigations: "Thought can be of what is not the case." I would not be without the books that make up Secrets of the Tribe; Dr. Djerassi did us a considerable service by writing them. But I would urge this extremely inventive, danger-courting, self-creating man even further. What if he wrote even more about "what is not the case"? What if he moved into a world more purely imagined than the world of his scientists—the world of the Cabbala, perhaps? What sort of a book would that be? I for one would very much like to read it. ICSI: I Can Successfully Impregnate, yes. But also: I Can Successfully Imagine.

One final point: If you haven't read Carl Djerassi's autobiography, The Pill, Pygmy Chimps, and Degas' Horse, I suggest you do: it's a wonderful book.

Jack Foley