Liza Blue

These are mine and mine alone.  My karyotype.  Twenty-three pairs of my chromosomes spread across a slide I made when working in a cytogenics lab forty years ago.  They have not changed since then, or before then.   

In a professional karyotype the paired chromosomes with their characteristic banding are snipped out and arranged in order by size, from chromosome 1 to the X and Y sex chromosomes, like a police line-up.  But I left my chromosomes where they lay splattered, after dropping them onto a slide.  

The resulting picture has much more personality.  As a group, the chromosomes look like an aerial view of dancers on a dance floor.  At the center of the picture, chromosome 9 is cutting in on chromosome 2.  Perhaps chromosomes 12, isolated at either side of the picture and obscured by a smear of blood, are desperately seeking each other.    

My individuality is not visible from this level - that would require the identification of the individual genes resulting in the bar code that is a staple of Law and Order SVU.  In fact my karyotype would not look any different from Hitler’s or Mother Teresa’s. 

Regardless I see a distillation of my ancestors. The dour portraits of Henry and Nancy Farwell, my triple great grandparents, hang in my dining room. My genes may have gotten a bit dinged up through five generations and millions of divisions, but 1/32th of my karyotype can be traced back to each of these people. This karyotype is my constant.