MLA Annual Convention 29 December 2007, Chicago: A special session
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
Literature and Science Policy: A New Project for the Humanities
The misfortune lies with a single gene, in an excessive repeat of a single sequence—CAG. Here's biological determinism in its purest form. More than forty repeats of that one little codon, and you're doomed.
—Ian McEwan, Saturday (94)
Huntington's disease. Perowne, the neurosurgeon in Ian McEwan's novel Saturday (2005), readily diagnoses the genetic abnormality that afflicts a petty criminal who is assaulting him. It is like a tic with Perowne. He cannot stop himself from analyzing the biological causes of the poor emotional control, the violent temper, of the man who is mugging him. Perowne regards himself as a “professional reductionist,” a man of science who “can't help thinking it's down to invisible folds and kinks of character, written in code, at the level of molecules” (281). A lifetime of medical experience has led him to conclude that much of our behavior is dictated by biology. But Huntington's disease represents an extreme case. For someone with this condition, the “future is fixed and easily foretold” (94).