Ballet dancers, footballers and all types of athletes have the same needs.
In the good old days, before jockeys had to ‘pass the doctor’ after every fall, many a race had been ridden with a broken collar-bone, or a fractured wrist. Losing a ride in one race may then result in losing the rides on that horse for good, especially if it had won.
My doctor, Geoffrey Kennedy, had managed to get me back in the saddle after injury in record time on many occasions. He knew not only how my body worked but my mind, too. He seemed to sense how much pain I could stand and how much I had been willing to endure in order to get back to racing. He had initially trained as a GP but had become a sports injury specialist after his brother, an international rugby player, had continuously complained to him about the lack of understanding of sports injuries at the local hospital. Geoffrey had opened a specialist clinic in north London and soon a line of A-list sportsmen and women were queuing up at his door. He was now semi- retired and the Kennedy Sports Clinic was thriving in the hands of a younger man, but we old lags still preferred to deal with the master.
Since my riding days had ended, Geoffrey had continued to patch up the damage caused by two-legged rather than four-legged opponents, sometimes willing to turn a blind eye where others might have called in the police.
I rang him while Marina changed out of her bloody clothes. Sure, he’d said, no problem. He would pack his sewing kit and meet us at the Cancer Research UK London Institute in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He wasn’t doing anything except watching the television and it was a while since he had practised his sewing on a beautiful face. All you bloody jockeys are so ugly, he’d said, it’ll be nice to work on a face without a broken nose. His skills would be appreciated, at last.
As I drove, Marina told me what had happened.
‘I was almost home,’ her voice sounded a little strange due to the swollen lip. ‘I was passing those bushes outside Belgravia Court when I was grabbed from behind. He dragged me into that path between the bushes and I thought I was going to be raped.’ She paused. ‘I was quite calm but very frightened. It was like everything was happening in slow motion. He held me from behind and spoke into my ear. I think he might have let me go if I hadn’t scratched him. I reached over my head and felt the wool on his face. So I pulled it up from his neck and dug my nails in.’ She laughed in the dark. ‘He groaned. Serves him right. But he spun me round, called me something unprintable and hit me very hard in the face. I think it was his fists. He had gloves on with shiny bits on them.’
Gloved fists with brass knuckle-dusters, I thought. That fitted; there was too much damage for fists alone.
‘I went down on my knees and he ran off. It was quite a while before I could stand up and make it the twenty yards home.’
If I’d had a spare hand, I would have held hers.
Geoffrey beat us to the Cancer Research Institute from his home in Highgate but Marina kept him waiting as she electronically signed in to the building.
‘Some experiments need constant monitoring,’ she said, ‘so the labs are always open. Some of the staff almost live here at times.’
‘My, my,’ Geoffrey said, seeing Marina in the light. ‘That’s quite a face. Is this a police job, Sid?’
‘No,’ both Marina and I said together.
‘Walked into a door, did you?’ Geoffrey said sarcastically. ‘Correction. Two doors. Very careless.’
We went up in the lift with Geoffrey tut-tutting under his breath.
We walked down endless corridors with cream walls and blue vinyl flooring. Half of the corridor floor space was taken up with rows of grey filing cabinets interspersed by three-foot high cylinders with yellow triangular warning labels stuck on them: ‘Liquid nitrogen — Danger of asphyxiation’. Marina punched numbers into another electronic lock that agreed with a beep to give us entry to her domain.
She flicked on the stark overhead fluorescent lamps and went to sit at one of the laboratory benches where she carefully removed the plastic bag from her pocket and put it in a fridge.
‘That will keep it fresh for a while,’ she said. ‘OK, Doc, do your worst.’
Geoffrey worked for nearly half an hour, cleaning and tidying up the wounds, injecting some local anaesthetic, and finally closing the gaps with two rows of minute blue stitches. I had brought my camera up from the car and, much to Marina’s annoyance, I took a series of shots as her wounds were transformed from an ugly bleeding mess to two neat lines, one horizontal in her eyebrow and the other vertical through her lower lip. With a rapidly blackening eye, she looked like one of those advertisements for wearing seat belts.
‘There,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll have to take them out again in about five or six days but you won’t be able to spot the scars in a few weeks.’
‘I thought stitches dissolved these days,’ Marina said.
‘Those are mostly used for internal stitching,’ he replied, ‘and staples are ugly and tend to leave scars. Nothing like good old-fashioned catgut stitches if you want to leave no trace, or this blue nylon as we tend to use these days And don’t tie them too tight or they pull. These should be fine.’
‘Thank you,’ said Marina. ‘Can I get back to work now?’
‘Sure,’ said the doctor, ‘but those might be a bit sore when the anaesthetic wears off. And I should give you a tetanus shot, unless you’ve had one within the last ten years.’
‘I have no idea,’ said Marina.
‘Well, you’d better have one just to be sure. I brought some with me.’
He stuck a pre-loaded hypodermic needle into Marina’s bottom as she bent over a lab bench.
‘What do you do here?’ he asked. ‘Reminds me of medical school.’
‘This is a haematology lab,’ she said. ‘We look at blood to try and find a marker for various types of cancer. We take blood cells and cut the proteins into amino-acid chains using the enzyme trypsin. Trypsin is, of course, a protein itself.’
Of course, I thought.
‘We look at the chains of amino acids which make up the proteins and see if there are markers which are certain cancer specific. We pass the chains through this mass spectrometer,’ she pointed at a long grey cabinet that reminded me of a deep freeze. ‘It determines the relative masses of each chain and if there is a variation we are not expecting this may be the marker we are looking for.’
I was completely lost but Geoffrey seemed to understand and he was nodding furiously as he moved around, inspecting the mass spectrometer from every angle.
‘Glad to see my taxes are going to a good home,’ he said.
‘No, no!’ said Marina. ‘This institution and all the research we do here is funded by charitable contributions from the public to Cancer Research UK. We are not supported by taxation. It’s very important to us that people know that.’
‘Sorry,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I stand corrected.’
Marina nodded and took the plastic bag out of the fridge.
‘Now from this little lot,’ she said, getting back to her ‘in lab’ mode, ‘what I want is a DNA profile. DNA is the code for making cells. Proteins are the bricks from which the cells are built. The DNA strands are the architect’s plans that show how the bricks go together to build the cell structures.’
‘So people with different DNA have different cell structures?’ I asked.
‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Different DNA produce different-looking people due to slight differences in their architect’s plans. Nearly all the DNA in each person is the same so we all have the same sort of cells — muscles, nerves, skin and so on. We all have two eyes and one nose. It’s just the teeny-weeny differences in the codes which produce our different characteristics, like blue or brown eyes; blondes, brunettes or redheads; black or white skin; short, tall, everything. It’s these minute differences that are distinctive to an individual and it is these differences that allow us to produce a DNA profile which is like a fingerprint, unique.’
Marina was on a roll. ‘I can use restriction enzymes like EcoR1 to cut the DNA strands in this sample into what we call polynucleotides. Then I’ll put them in an agarose gel matrix, a sort of jelly, for electrophoresis. The polynucleotides are charged so they’ll migrate, or move, in the electric field. The amount they migrate is dependent on the size and shape of each polynucleotide. Imagine that the gel acts as a sort of sieve, the bigger the polynucleotide the less distance it will migrate.’
Geoffrey was still nodding. I wasn’t.
‘So in the gel matrix you get separation of polynucleotides into different bands. Then you bake the matrix on
