It’s a fitting place for Stefansson to be exploring the raw ingredients of life, the nucleotides and other molecules that he first began to study as a medical student at the university here before moving on to the University of Chicago and then to Harvard. There, as a medium-important neurologist, he delved into the mechanics of multiple sclerosis and other maladies of the brain. At first, before new technologies made deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) easier to work with, he cut open the brains of persons who had died of neurological disorders. Later, he parsed out their DNA, looking for links. But the academic approach was too slow, so in 1996 he returned home to Iceland to start a company.
On the court Stefansson destroys my pathetic game, despite being fifty-six years old to my forty-four, a difference he notes everytime he overpowers me to plant a basket. At six feet, five inches, with close-cropped white hair, a pointed beard, and biceps that bulge out of the tight black designer T-shirts he tends to wear, Stefansson looks as formidable as his wild-eyed Norse forebears in the Icelandic sagas he likes to read, those hairy warriors who sailed in flat-keeled longboats one thousand years ago, snatching women from the British Isles and taking them to this bleak edge of the earth.
I haven’t played basketball in years. When I finally grab the ball he flashes me a glare that Erik might have used before hacking to death an enemy in the tenth century.
Prior to playing, we had been talking about a test that Stefansson’s company, deCode Genetics, had just run on my DNA, a journalist-as-guinea-pig experiment to check my nucleotides for genes associated with disease. Back in the States, I had a lab extract three vials of my blood to ship on dry ice to Reykjavik. deCode’s technicians then plucked out my DNA from the white blood cells and tested it against the company’s database of genetic maladies. Do I have a genetic proclivity for heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, osteoporosis, anxiety? “We will tell you if you are crazy, or if you might die of a stroke. You will become our first American lab rat,” he had told me a few months earlier, when we met during a biotech conference in New York.
Stefansson had promised to reveal my results when we returned that afternoon to his office, making me one of the first persons ever to reveal publicly so much personal information about a raft of disease markers hidden in everyone’s genes. In a few years, he says, these tests will be routine: a screening like a cholesterol test that will tell us whether we might one day contract a dread disease or die sooner, rather than later. They also might be used to tease out genes that affect behavior, telling us whether we have a predilection for anger, risk taking, happiness, or homicide. Yet I know this sort of predictive genomics is still very much nascent, the information incomplete, the connections between genes and disease or behavior murky, the forecasting power faulty and poorly understood. But I’m willing to listen, and to imagine the possibilities as described by this Armani Viking.
Of more immediate concern to me is how to react if Stefansson tells me that my nucleotides may be harboring an aberration I never suspected, a dread disease ticking inside me like a secret time bomb ready to strike when I’m fifty years old, or seventy. A fatalist, I don’t think much about how I might get sick or die, but I can’t help but feel a small apprehension.
On the court I’ve got the ball and I’m dribbling toward the basket, making a few clunky moves I remember from years back. I whip around Stefansson; he pushes in close and I feel his hot Viking breath on my face. I zig left; he cuts me off. I zag right, and we crash shoulders as I push to turn a corner around him. He’s behind me, pushing, and I start my leap, holding the ball up, eying the basket when he blurts out, “I have your DNA results.”
“Yeah?” I say, suspended for a moment in the air, feeling that electric rush that says this ball is going to connect, it’s going into the damn basket.
“You are genetically defective.”
I hesitate for all of a split second. He jumps high and grabs the ball, twirls, and races down the court, dribbling and flashing me Erik’s demonic smile.
I’m visiting Kari Stefansson as part of an experiment to unlock the secrets of my own DNA. In due course, I will find out my results. But as I watch him play, his dark green eyes alluring and murderous, I’m struck by a simple revelation. Stefansson in many ways is the early-twenty-first-century equivalent of Erik the Red. He is a marauder and warrior, a larger than life figure who slices through frigid waters in a longboat with an outsized passion to conquer, to achieve glory, and perhaps to get rich, but mostly for the sheer joy of it.
Lest we build him up too much, Kari Stefansson is also just a man. I have seen him tired, and downcast. On one of my visits to Iceland, the stock in his company had dipped down to about two dollars a share, prompting him to fret about an unwanted suitor who might attempt a frontal assault to buy the company out from under him. The Viking was watching his backside—though this Norseman is also a physician who wants to alleviate suffering, if he can. Moody and stormy, he looked depleted after a round of calls to investors and advisors, as if he had been fighting the Furies all day and was still standing, but was exhausted by the effort.
It seems evident that Stefansson’s prickly, infectious personality is crucial to his success in being a scientist and entrepreneur: that peculiar blend of DNA and experience that makes this Viking gene master a genius, bully, and force of nature. As he humbles me by swishing yet another basket, I tease out this idea—that the Stefanssons of this rarified world of scientists and entrepreneurs are driving this era of biological discovery as much as the science itself. This is obvious, though maybe, I think, this is a way to delve into the heart of the matter with genetics: to tease out first what is the crux of the science, and the implications of the discoveries for us humans, by trying to understand its creators—the Prometheuses bringing us fire, the Faustuses taking us to either heaven or hell, the Eves about to bite into another apple on the Tree of Knowledge, and the Erik the Reds blustering about and trying to score big with basketballs and nucleotides.
Here is a man who has glimpsed my most intimate secrets, my DNA, those unique combinations of chemical compounds that make me me: my blue eyes, a crooked left second toe, a tendency to be far more curious than is healthy. I also have this flip in my left eyebrow that my grandmother once called “the lick of God.” All the men in my family for at least five generations have had this upward spike in our left eyebrow that points straight up in the air: My great-grandfather, Harry, had it, my grandfather, my dad, me, and my two sons. Genes are not the only factor; the environment I live in also plays an enormous role: the food I swallow, the gasoline fumes I breathe in when I fill up my gas tank, the ultraviolet rays that permeate the ozone and burn the skin on my nose. But it’s my genes that are the basic ingredients that make me both human and unique—and I’ve just handed them over to Erik the Red.
Stefansson’s aim in Iceland is to unravel genetic secrets from the island’s entire population, looking for patterns in genes that might account for diseases such as stroke and osteoporosis. Thanks to meticulous genealogical records kept for one thousand years in Iceland and collected by deCode into a computerized database they call the Islendingabok, the “Book of Icelanders,” Stefansson can tap into what medical and mortality details exist about the 680,000 people who have lived on the island since the first Vikings arrived here in the ninth century. deCode uses powerful computers to pick out how families inherited disease. The company also has assembled another database containing certain medical details about modern-day patients, with consent, that pertains to diseases deCode is studying. Iceland’s parliament, the Althing, has created an oversight process to protect patient privacy, and to allow patients access to their genetic test results, where it is appropriate. About 110,000 Icelanders so far have willingly handed over their DNA for the program, which asks, for instance, patients with asthma to provide their medical records and their DNA to be tested for nucleotides that are anomalous when compared to the nucleotides of the