If you are a male--or have ever lived in the vicinity of one--you know that there is at least one job every man is utterly incapable of performing competently. For some it may be wrapping a gift without using at least a kilometer of Scotch tape. For others it may be folding a shirt without turning it into something resembling an origami frog. For guys like me, the thing that seems to present the greatest problem is shopping for women’s jewelry.
The last time I went looking for a romantic bauble, I wound up leaving the store with a pair of earrings that weighed slightly more than a modest washer-dryer combination and contained a collection of semi- precious stones that turned out to be one step up the ladder of preciousness from Jujyfruits. The luckless recipient of the gift smiled gamely, then consigned the intended treasure to that lost spot in the closet where puka shells, mood rings, and ID bracelets go to die. This kind of gift-buying ineptitude explains why guys like me tend to panic on big wedding anniversaries like the silver, gold, and diamond; we do much better on the less momentous ones, like the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth-- otherwise known as the lawn furniture, office supplies, and Veg-O-Matic anniversaries.
For us aesthetically challenged folks, however, things are about to get a lot easier. Now in development is a revolutionary type of jewelry that could one day relegate the ordinary necklace, bracelet, or brooch to the safe-deposit box of history. This new breed of bangle, conceived by a company called Stargene, in La Jolla, California, would feature not diamonds, rubies, or sapphires but something a lot more precious, if a lot more gooey: human DNA. For the last two years, the whizzes at Stargene have been toying with a line of unconventional amulets that could contain bits of the genetic code for any human being, from Abe Lincoln to Mick Jagger to the members of your own family. True, molecular strands of organic acids have not traditionally been considered things of beauty, but Stargene believes that by the end of the decade precious stones could be competing with chromosomes as the gift of choice for even the most hopeless romantic.
The idea of saving tidbits of special people for sentimental purposes is not a new one. For centuries, soldiers going into battle have carried locks of their wives’ or sweethearts’ hair as both good luck charm and memento. (A harmless custom in short clashes like Operation Desert Storm, this has presented problems during longer conflicts like the Thirteen Years’ War, when most of the female population of Prussia began to bear a disturbing resemblance to Jackie Coogan.) Proud parents of newborns are dedicated collectors of organic mementos, too, routinely pasting their baby’s first locks of hair, first teeth, and, on occasion, first pets and playmates into family scrapbooks. Some people even theorize that the 5,000- year-old Ice Man recently uncovered in the Italian Alps may have been an early, somewhat extreme attempt at preserving an artifact of a loved one-- an attempt that failed when the frosty relic proved impossible to fold into the photo section of a Late Stone Age wallet.
