Geographer of the male genome.

An English literature student called up David C. Page a few years ago and told him she was thinking of doing a thesis that would rebut feminist criticism and bring back a measure of respectability to him and his work. “I didn’t know I was in need of rehabilitation,” Page remarks one late September afternoon in his fourth-fl oor corner offi ce at the Whitehead Institute on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. He retells the incident while resting his “Save the Males” coffee cup on a circular conference table. Ever since he picked up and inspected a random piece of DNA in 1979 as a young researcher and later learned that the glob contained a piece of the Y chromosome, Page has devoted much of his working life to the study of the genetic package that confers maleness. The very idea of investigating the Y chromosome offends those feminists who believe that it serves as nothing more than a subterfuge to promulgate an inherent male bias in biology. And, in Page’s view, some reputable scientists have even pandered to these sentiments by writing books and papers that predict the extinction of men—or the Y’s disappearance. Page has sometimes found himself defending the genome’s smallest chromosome against preconceptions that do not necessarily jibe with the science that comes from the 20 researchers in his laboratory. He has helped dispel calumnies such as that the Y chromosome is a decaying, unintelligible mess—the Animal House of the human genome—or that because the Y has a very limited capacity to exchange genetic information with the X chromosome, it is sickly and dying out, a victim of its own masculine social incompatibility. Bemused and unrehabilitated, Page can point to a long list of scientifi c papers with his name on them that demonstrate that the Y is an infi nitely richer and more complex segment of the genome than ever imagined and one that does not fi t neatly into the prejudices of gender-based interpretations of science. Page seems to be an unlikely candidate to defend maleness. The slim and youthful 48-year-old does not cut a macho fi gure. At home he is surrounded by females: his wife, three daughters, and a female cat and guinea pig. He only developed an interest in the world of science when he arrived at Swarthmore College in 1974 and spent a few summers doing internships at the National Institutes of Health and Brookhaven National Laboratory. While training in the early 1980s under David Botstein, an M.I.T. geneticist, Page developed a molecular probe that he later used to track down what appeared to be the gene that codes for a protein DAVID C. PAGE: THE Y FILES