A Journey Of Discovery

Jeff Wheelwright’s book “The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess” has so many strands that he had a tough time selling the manuscript’s multiple perspectives to literary agents.

“They said there was too much going on,” Wheelwright said in a phone interview from his home in Morro Bay, Calif. “It’s not a strictly linear nonfiction narrative. I set out to break the form.”

	“The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess: Race, Religion and DNA” by Jeff Wheelwright W.W. Norton, $26.95, 248 pp.

The “wandering gene” of the title is the 185delAG mutation of the BRCA1 gene. The gene is a tumor suppressor; the mutation is linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, often found in Jews.

A young Hispanic woman named Shonnie Medina of Colorado’s San Luis Valley had that mutation and died of breast cancer in 1999. She was descended from Spanish Catholics and Native Americans, but the extended Medina-Martinez family hadn’t known of their distant Jewish ancestry, probably Sephardic Jews who lived in medieval Spain.

Shonnie Medina’s life, her family’s conversion to Jehovah’s Witnesses and her rejection of modern, conventional cancer-fighting treatments is the main strand of the book.

If there is one sentence that poignantly reveals the dualities of Shonnie’s life in her small southern Colorado community, it is this: “Like bookends, these two slim structures, the morada and the Kingdom Hall, enclosed Shonnie’s spiritual life, just as her DNA and her suffering body (genotype and phenotype) bracketed the course of her mortal life.”

The book’s other strands include:

♦ Modern genetic research of the mutation, especially the work and theories of Dr. Harry Ostrer.

♦ The origins of the 185delAG mutation in the context of the history of Jewish migration over thousands of years.

♦ Stanley Hordes’ cultural investigation of crypto-Jews of the American Southwest. Hordes lives in Albuquerque.

♦ A discussion of Jews in medieval Spain who converted to Catholicism (“New Christians”), with special attention to the mystic St. Teresa of Avila.

Wheelwright drew a parallel between the book’s many angles and the 20th-century Cubism movement that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque pioneered.

“When you finish the book you will have learned a lot, but every time you finish a chapter you are forced to start over from a different perspective, just as Cubism forces one plane into the heart of another,” he said.

Wheelwright wrote an adaptation of the book’s Chapter 7 for Discover magazine. A link to it is at www.jeffwheelwright.com.

Jeff Wheelwright discusses, signs “The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess” at 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 26, at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW, at 2 p.m. Jan. 29 at the New Mexico History Museum, Lincoln Ave., Santa Fe.