Ironically, it was Professor Moorhead, the most ardent champion of the old neo-Darwinian model, who had catapulted her into the exciting new field of epigenetics. After graduating, she had initially been thrilled to be given a place in his lab, only to discover that he was a serial seducer of his female students and that working under him was a proposition that he took, like so many others, all too literally. Since Moorhead assumed that human nature was entirely mechanical, as he explained with an irresistible combination of smugness and impatience in his masterwork, The Insatiable Machine, she had assumed that his advances could be mechanically rebuffed, but this particular machine seemed to have a mind of its own, or at least someone else’s mind programmed into it, since it wasn’t strictly speaking entitled to one of its own. With whatever mysterious quantity of free will he brought to the task, Moorhead turned out to be a pest, writing Olivia a thirteen-page letter endorsing his amorous claims with a list of notorious symptoms, including insomnia, starvation and a renewed interest in poetry. Luckily, his unwelcome flattery coincided with her growing interest in epigenetics, a subject that Moorhead regarded as a passing fad, or at least a waste of his graduates’ time, which should have been spent dragging blocks of data across the desert floor of his genetic fundamentalism to erect a mausoleum fit to entomb his reputation. Olivia could still remember when any mention of Moorhead had lowered her mood, fleetingly but irresistibly, like the eclipse she had seen on a field trip in Indonesia, when she stood on a hilltop watching the edge of the moon’s shadow race across the forest, silencing the wildlife with its perplexing darkness. At the time of his repulsive advances she had sidestepped a confrontation by changing the subject of her DPhil. Since then, she had been waiting in vain for what should have been his inevitable downfall, but instead had been forced to watch him leap, like a supercilious chamois, from one improbable perch to the next. He had gone on to acquire a knighthood which had led, by all accounts, to a further decline in his chivalry. Despite her contempt for him, Olivia’s objective had never been to lodge a complaint, but to defeat him in his own field, and to overthrow the oppressive and strangely popular influence of his scientific ideology. In the meantime, she had become a Research Fellow, without teaching or lecturing to distract her.