Week after week, Dryja extracted the chromosomes from tumors and ran his probe set against the chromosomes. If the probes bound, they usually made a signal on a gel; if a probe was fully missing, the signal was blank. One morning, having run another dozen tumors, Dryja came to the lab and held up the blot against the window and ran his eyes left to right, lane after lane automatically, like a pianist reading a score. In one tumor, he saw a blank space. One of his probes—H3-8, he had called it—was deleted in both chromosomes in that tumor. He felt the brief hot rush of ecstasy, which then
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