What Did Pope Francis Know?

What Did Pope Francis Know?

Ross Douthat NY Times

The Catholic Church needs leaders who can purge corruption even among their own theological allies. The pope is failing that test.

During the Catholic Church’s synod on the family in Rome in 2015, a rough-and-tumble affair in which Pope Francis pushed the assembled bishops to liberalize Catholic teaching on remarriage and divorce, one of the attendees, by the pope’s own invitation, was the retired Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels. 

Danneels was a natural pick in one sense: One of the church’s prominent liberals, he had been part of a circle that supported Jorge Bergoglio in the run-up to his election as Francis, and in a synodal fight with conservative bishops, the pope needed all the allies he could get.

In another sense, though, Danneels was a wildly inappropriate choice, because at the conclusion of his career he was caught on tape trying to persuade a young victim of sex abuse not to go public with allegations against the victim’s uncle, Bishop Roger Vangheluwe of Bruges, Belgium. For Pope Francis, who talked a good game about disciplining bishops for covering up sex abuse, hauling a cover-up artist out of retirement for a synod on the family was a statement that ideological loyalties mattered more to him than personal misconduct: Sex abuse might be bad, but what really mattered was being on the correct side of the Catholic civil war.

The Danneels case is useful context for thinking about the bomb that went off on an already cratered Catholic landscape over the weekend, when the former papal nuncio in the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, published a “testimony” accusing a raft of high Vatican officials of longstanding knowledge of the sexual crimes of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. 

Viganò’s document, extraordinary in both content and tone, claims that after years of failed American attempts to get Rome to take action, Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI, placed the already retired McCarrick under some form of sanctions — moving him out of his residence, restricting contact with seminarians, limiting public appearances. It further claims that despite being told that McCarrick was a sexual predator, Francis removed those sanctions, raised McCarrick’s profile and relied on him for advice about major appointments. Oh, and it calls on Francis to resign.

As yet none of the Vatican figures named in the document have stepped forward to either confirm or deny the meat of Viganò’s account. Francis himself offered only a deflecting comment on his flight back from post-Catholic Ireland. However, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., already embattled over sex abuse cover-ups in his own past, has issued a statement denying that Viganò ever communicated directly with him about restrictions on his predecessor.

Meanwhile the pope’s defenders have pointed to Viganò’s own anti-Francis conservatism (manifest in some of his sweeping claims) as reasons to disbelieve his charges, while noting that McCarrick appeared at many events, including with Benedict himself, in the period when he was supposedly under sanctions.

But at the same time evidence in favor of Viganò’s account is trickling out — including a claim of confirmation from people close to Benedict himself. And given the distracted and ineffectual way that the last pope ran the church, it’s very easy to imagine a distracted and ineffectual attempt to restrict McCarrick being subverted and ignored by the cardinal and his allies in the hierarchy.

In which case it’s also easy to imagine a scenario in which Francis didn’t technically “lift” those sanctions so much as acted in ignorance of them, or of their seriousness. He might have been given some knowledge, by Viganò and others, of the allegations against McCarrick but either assumed they couldn’t be that bad (at this point the cardinal mostly stood accused of imposing himself on seminarians, not teenage minors) or else chose to believe a denial from the accused cardinal himself. Why? In part because of perceived self-interest: Francis needed allies, McCarrick was sympathetic to the pope’s planned liberalizing push, and the pope wanted his help reshaping the ranks of American bishops.

In this scenario Francis would be guilty of self-deception and incuriosity but not as nakedly culpable as Viganò implies. And if it’s easy to imagine this scenario because of the Danneels example, it’s also easy to imagine because that’s how things have proceeded consistently in the church since the sex abuse scandals broke: If a given predator or enabler is “on side” for either conservatives or liberals, he will find defenders and protectors for as long as events and revelations permit.

That’s a major reason John Paul II refused to investigate Father Marcel Maciel, the wicked founder of the Legionaries of Christ — because the Legionaries were conservative, and apparently a great success, and that was all that mattered. It’s why many conservative Catholics unwisely defended John Paul II-appointed prelates like Boston's Bernard Law in the early 2000s. It’s why a notorious traditionalist priest, Father Carlos Urrutigoity, could find a welcome from conservative bishops in Pennsylvania and then Paraguay, despite a trail of abuse allegations.

Now it’s why certain organs and apostles of liberal Catholicism are running interference for McCarrick’s protectors — because Francis is their pope, the liberalizer they yearned for all through the John Paul and Benedict years, and all’s fair in the Catholic civil war.

But the inevitable, even providential irony is that this sort of team thinking never leads to theological victory, but only to exposure, shame, disaster. Indeed, the lesson of these bitter decades is that any faction hoping to lead Roman Catholicism out of crisis should begin with purges within its own ranks, with intolerance for any hint of corruption.

Francis, alas for everyone, did the opposite. Elected by cardinals eager for a cleanup at the Vatican, he wanted to be a theological change agent instead — which led him to tolerate the corrupt Roman old guard (whose names fill Viganò’s letter) and to rehabilitate liberal figures like Danneels, McCarrick and Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga of Honduras (a dubious figure with a predator among his underlings and a scandal at his seminary) who deserved the sidelines if not a penitent’s cell.

Now those allies may be the ruin of his pontificate. But this doesn’t mean that the pope should resign — not even if Viganò is fully vindicated. One papal resignation per millennium is more than enough. That cop-out should not be easily available to pontiffs confronted with scandals, including scandals of their own making, any more than it should be available to fathers. 

Instead the faithful should press Francis to fulfill the paternal obligations at which he has failed to date, to purge the corruption he has tolerated and to supply Catholicism with what it has lacked these many years: a leader willing to be zealous and uncompromising against what Benedict called the “filth” in the church, no matter how many heads must roll on his own side of the Catholic civil war.

Neil Simon

Neil Simon, a Master of Comedy on Broadway and Beyond, Is Dead at 91

NY Times Obit.

Neil Simon was one of Broadway’s most successful and bankable writers, writing such hit plays as “Barefoot in the Park” and “The Odd Couple.”

Neil Simon, the playwright whose name was synonymous with Broadway comedy and commercial success in the theater for decades, and who helped redefine popular American humor with an emphasis on the frictions of urban living and the agonizing conflicts of family intimacy, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 91.

His death was announced by his publicist, Bill Evans.

Early in his career, Mr. Simon wrote for television greats, including Phil Silvers and Sid Caesar. Later he wrote for the movies, too. But it was as a playwright that he earned his lasting fame, with a long series of expertly tooled laugh machines that kept his name on Broadway marquees virtually nonstop throughout the late 1960s and ’70s.

Beginning with the breakthrough hits “Barefoot in the Park” (1963) and “The Odd Couple” (1965) and continuing with popular successes like “Plaza Suite” (1968), “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” (1971) and “The Sunshine Boys” (1974), Mr. Simon ruled Broadway when Broadway was still worth ruling.

From 1965 to 1980, plays and musicals written by Mr. Simon racked up more than 9,000 performances, a record not even remotely touched by any other playwright of the era. In 1966 alone, he had four Broadway shows running simultaneously.

He also owned a Broadway theater for a spell in the 1960s, the Eugene O’Neill, and in 1983 had a different Broadway theater named after him, a rare accolade for a living playwright.

For all their popularity with audiences, Mr. Simon’s great successes in the first years of his fame rarely earned wide critical acclaim, and Broadway revivals of “The Odd Couple” in 2005 and “Barefoot in the Park” in 2006 did little to change the general view that his early work was most notable for its surefire conceits and snappy punch lines. In the introduction to one of his play collections, Mr. Simon quoted the critic Clive Barnes as once writing, “Neil Simon is destined to remain rich, successful and underrated.”

But he gained a firmer purchase on critical respect in the 1980s with his darker-hued semi-autobiographical trilogy, “Brighton Beach Memoirs” (1983), “Biloxi Blues” (1985) and “Broadway Bound” (1986), comedy-dramas that were admired for the way they explored the tangle of love, anger and desperation that bound together — and drove apart — a Jewish working-class family, as viewed from the perspective of the youngest son, a restless wisecracker with an eye on showbiz fame.

“The writer at last begins to examine himself honestly, without compromises,” Frank Rich wrote of “Biloxi Blues” in The New York Times, “and the result is his most persuasively serious effort to date — not to mention his funniest play since the golden age” of his first decade.

In 1991, Mr. Simon won a Tony Award as well as the ultimate American playwriting award, the Pulitzer Prize, for “Lost in Yonkers,” another autobiographical comedy, this one about a fiercely withholding mother and her emotionally and intellectually underdeveloped daughter. It was also his last major success on Broadway.

Mr. Simon and Woody Allen, who both worked in the 1950s writing for Mr. Caesar (along with Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart and Carl Reiner, among others), were probably equally significant in shaping the currents of American comedy in the 1960s and ’70s, although their styles, their favored mediums and the critical reception of their work diverged mightily.

Mr. Simon was the populist whose accessible, joke-packed plays about the anxieties of everyday characters could tickle funny bones in theaters across the country as well as in 1,200-seat Broadway houses. Mr. Allen was the darling of the urban art-house cinema and the critical classes who created comedy from the minutiae of his own angst.

But together they helped make the comedy of urban neurosis — distinctly Jewish-inflected — as American as the homespun humor of “Leave It to Beaver.” Mr. Simon’s early plays, often centered on an antagonistic couple of one kind or another wielding cutting one-liners in a New York apartment, helped set the template for the explosion of sitcoms on network television in the 1970s. (The long-running television show based on his “Odd Couple” was one of the best, although a bum business deal meant that Mr. Simon earned little money from it.)

A line can be drawn between the taut plot threads of Mr. Simon’s early comedies — a slob and a neatnik form an irascible all-male marriage in “The Odd Couple,” newlyweds bicker in a new apartment in “Barefoot in the Park,” a laid-off fellow has a meltdown in “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” — and the “nothing”-inspired, kvetching-character-based comedy of the seminal 1990s sitcom “Seinfeld.”

Mr. Simon and his wife, Joan, in 1971.Jack Mitchell

Mr. Allen and Mr. Simon, who shared roots in the urban Jewish lower middle classes, were also united by the classic funnyman’s ability to inspire belly laughs by the millions in other people while managing to find the dark clouds hovering insistently over their own fates, however apparently successful they might seem.

Mr. Simon once wrote of approaching Mr. Allen in a restaurant when both men were at the height of their success, to offer congratulations on Mr. Allen’s “Manhattan.” How was he feeling? “Oh, all right,” Mr. Allen answered. Mr. Simon wrote, “When I saw his dour expression, I saw my own reflected agony.” This, when Mr. Simon himself had two hit shows on Broadway, another play ready for rehearsals and two movies set for production. (Plus an ulcer, of course.)

Agony is at the root of comedy, and for Mr. Simon it was the agony of an unhappy Depression childhood that inspired much of his finest work. And it was the agony of living in Los Angeles that drove his determination to break free from the grind of cranking out jokes for Jerry Lewis on television and make his own name. As he wrote in his 1996 autobiography, “Rewrites” (the first of two volumes), the plush comforts of Hollywood living might extend your life span, but “the catch was when you eventually did die, it surely wouldn’t be from laughing.”

Family Tension

Born on July 4, 1927, in the Bronx, Marvin Neil Simon was the son of a garment industry salesman, Irving Simon, who abandoned the family more than once during his childhood, leaving Mr. Simon’s mother, May, to take care of Mr. Simon and his older brother, Danny. When the family was intact, the mood was darkened by constant battles between the parents.

The tensions of the family, which moved to Washington Heights when Mr. Simon was 5, would find their way into many of his plays, notably the late trilogy but also the early comedies, including his first play, “Come Blow Your Horn” (1961), about a young man leaving home to join his older brother, a bachelor and ladies’ man. And when the family finally broke up for good, the young Mr. Simon went to live with cousins while his brother was sent to live with an aunt, circumstances reflected in “Lost in Yonkers.”

“When an audience laughed, I felt fulfilled,” Mr. Simon wrote in “Rewrites.” “It was a sign of approval, of being accepted. Coming as I did from a childhood where laughter in the house meant security, but was seldom heard as often as a door slamming every time my father took another year’s absence from us, the laughter that came my way in the theater was nourishment.”

Danny Simon, older by eight years, was the signal influence on Neil’s career. “The fact is, I probably never would have been a writer if it were not for Danny,” Mr. Simon wrote. “Once, when I was 15 years old, he said to me, ‘You’re going to be the funniest comedy writer in America.’ Why? Based on what? How funny could I be at 15?”

Mr. Simon graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and attended New York University as an enlistee in the Army Air Forces Air Reserve training program. He continued his studies at the University of Denver while assigned to a base nearby. (His military experience inspired the second play in his late trilogy, “Biloxi Blues.”)

At that time, Danny had begun working in publicity at Warner Bros. in New York. Neil joined him there as a clerk after his discharge from the Air Force. Together they began writing television and radio scripts, eventually making $1,600 a week providing gags and sketches for Mr. Silvers, Jerry Lester, Jackie Gleason and Mr. Caesar on “Your Show of Shows” and later “Caesar’s Hour.”

The writers on “Your Show of Shows:” standing, from left, Danny Simon, Gary Belkin and Neil Simon. Seated, from left, Mel Brooks, Tony Webster, Mel Tolkin and Sid Caesar.NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty Images

Mr. Simon’s military experience inspired “Biloxi Blues” a 1985 play with Matthew Broderick and

Alan Ruck. It was the second in the trilogy that included “Brighton Beach Memoirs” (1983), and “Broadway Bound” (1986).Jay Thompson

“It was a real learning process,” Mr. Simon said of his days among the Caesarians, a group that has become a television legend and inspired Mr. Simon’s 1993 comedy “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” starring Nathan Lane. “We were exhausted,” he said, adding, “On Monday, you would come in knowing you had six new skits to do.”

The Simon brothers also wrote weekly revues for Camp Tamiment, the summer resort in the Poconos. It was there that Neil Simon fell in love with Joan Baim, a dancer and counselor. By the end of the summer, they were married.

A Broadway Name

“Come Blow Your Horn,” the play Mr. Simon wrote to escape the slavery of gag writing for television comics, ran for 677 performances and gained him connections and notice. But it was with “Barefoot in the Park,” a comedy inspired by his and his young wife’s experiences living in a fifth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village, that Mr. Simon became a Broadway name.

It was the first Broadway show directed by Mike Nichols, then best known for his comedy work with Elaine May.

Mr. Nichols would go on to become one of Mr. Simon’s most frequent collaborators, credited by Mr. Simon with helping to shape his early plays through the tryouts and rehearsals. Mr. Nichols won his first Tony Award for directing “The Odd Couple.” He also directed “Plaza Suite,” with George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton, and “The Prisoner of Second Avenue,” with Peter Falk and Lee Grant. Mr. Nichols died in 2014.

Mr. Simon with Mike Nichols after a performance of “The Odd Couple” in 1965. Mr. Nichols won his first Tony Award for directing the play and would go on to become one of Mr. Simon’s most frequent collaborators.Mark Kauffman/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images

“Barefoot in the Park” made a star of Robert Redford, who was cast alongside Elizabeth Ashley. It played for close to four years and made a hot commodity of Mr. Simon in Hollywood. His agent, Irving Lazar, better known as Swifty, sold the movie rights for $400,000. (Mr. Lazar asked Mr. Simon whether he’d be willing to sell the play for $300,000. Mr. Simon jumped at the offer, and Mr. Lazar kept the rest.)

The movie, with a screenplay by Mr. Simon, and with Mr. Redford and Jane Fonda in the starring roles, became a hit when it was released in 1967 at Radio City Music Hall, breaking the box-office record. That record would be smashed by the movie version of “The Odd Couple.” Both movies were directed by Gene Saks, who would direct many of Simon’s later plays, including the “Brighton Beach” trilogy and “Lost in Yonkers.” (Mr. Saks died in 2015.)

Mr. Simon’s screenwriting career included dozens of titles, among them many adaptations of his plays. In addition to “Barefoot in the Park” and “The Odd Couple” (with the original stage star, Walter Matthau, and Jack Lemmon replacing Art Carney), he wrote the screenplays for “The Prisoner of Second Avenue,” with Mr. Lemmon and Anne Bancroft, and “The Sunshine Boys,” with Mr. Matthau and George Burns, as well as “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Lost in Yonkers,” among others.

He also wrote original movies, including, “The Out-of-Towners,” the period spoof “Murder by Death,” “The Goodbye Girl,” “The Cheap Detective,” “Max Dugan Returns,” “The Slugger’s Wife” and “Only When I Laugh,” based on his play “The Gingerbread Lady,” and most notably “The Heartbreak Kid,” a black comedy, based on a story by Bruce Jay Friedman, directed by Elaine May and starring Charles Grodin and Cybill Shepherd.

Richard Dreyfuss won an Oscar for his performance in “The Goodbye Girl” as an impish, irritating actor with whom an unemployed dancer played by Marsha Mason moves in. The movie received a total of nine Academy Award nominations, including one for Mr. Simon’s screenplay. (He received four Oscar screenplay nominations in his career, although he never won.)

Ms. Mason was Mr. Simon’s wife at the time. His first wife, Joan, died of cancer in 1973. He met Ms. Mason at an audition, and they were married four months later. He wrote about their relationship in the play “Chapter Two,” which was made into a movie starring Ms. Mason and James Caan.

“It’s my favorite play for many reasons,” Mr. Simon once said of “Chapter Two.” “It was cathartic for me. In the two years Marsha and I were married, I gave her a rough time — still trying to hold on to my relationship with Joan. Marsha is beautiful and talented, and I found ways to find fault with her. One night in California, everything erupted into a terrible fight. I realized then what I was doing. That’s how I wrote the play.”

Mr. Simon was married five times. After his divorce from Ms. Mason, he married the actress Diane Lander in 1987. They divorced a year later but remarried in 1990, then divorced again. Mr. Simon married the actress Elaine Joyce in 1999. She survives him, along with his daughters Ellen Simon and Nancy Simon from his first marriage and his daughter Bryn Lander Simon from his marriage to Ms. Lander. He is also survived by three grandchildren and one great-grandson. Danny Simon died in 2005.

Marsha Mason and Richard Dreyfuss in a scene from the 1977 film “The Goodbye Girl.” The movie received a total of nine Academy Award nominations, and Mr. Dreyfuss won an Oscar.Warner Bros.

Mr. Simon wrote the book for three successful Broadway musicals in the 1960s. “Little Me” (1962), with music by Cy Coleman and lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, was directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse and featured Mr. Simon’s old boss Sid Caesar playing the multiple loves of an adventuress named Belle Poitrine. “Sweet Charity” (1966) reunited Mr. Simon with Mr. Fosse for a musical based on Federico Fellini’s “Nights of Cabiria,” with music by Mr. Coleman and lyrics by Dorothy Fields. “Promises, Promises,” based on the movie “The Apartment,” featured music by Burt Bacharach and lyrics by Hal David.

“Promises, Promises” was Mr. Simon’s biggest musical success, running 1,281 performances. It was revived on Broadway in 2010.

Mr. Simon returned to musicals in 1981 with “They’re Playing Our Song,” featuring music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager. His last musical book was for an unsuccessful stage adaptation of “The Goodbye Girl” in 1993.

In his most productive period, Mr. Simon wrote plays at the rate of almost one a year and produced almost 30 over his career. Many of the later works, from the 1990s and beyond, were tepidly received and had brief Broadway runs. “Proposals” (1997), a quasi-Chekhovian comedy, and “45 Seconds From Broadway” (2001), his last new play on Broadway, a tribute to a fabled Rialto coffee shop, were quick flops. But “The Dinner Party” (2000) ran for almost a year.

Mr. Simon made headlines in 2003 when Mary Tyler Moore abruptly left his play “Rose’s Dilemma” (2003) at Manhattan Theater Club. That turned out to be his last produced play. He also made news with the announcement of his kidney transplant in 2004. The donor was his longtime press agent and friend, Bill Evans.

Fighting for Respect

Most recently, in the fall of 2009, Mr. Simon expressed surprise and dismay at the quick closing of a much-anticipated Broadway revival of his “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” It was intended to run in repertory with “Broadway Bound” but closed in a week when it received mixed reviews. “I’m dumbfounded,” he said. “After all these years, I still don’t get how Broadway works or what to make of our culture.”

It was a poignant comment from the man who more or less defined Broadway achievement for a couple of decades. But while quick flops were relatively rare in his career, Mr. Simon always fought to gain critical respect. Although he was nominated for 17 Tony Awards, he won just three: for playwright of “The Odd Couple” (best play went to Jason Miller’s “That Championship Season”; there were separate awards for play and playwright) and twice for best play, for “Biloxi Blues” and “Lost in Yonkers.”

“I know how the public sees me, because people are always coming up to me and saying, ‘Thanks for the good times,’” Mr. Simon told The Times in 1991. “But all the success has demeaned me in a way. Critically, the thinking seems to be that if you write too many hits, they can’t be that good.”

Kristin Chenoweth, Neil Simon and Burt Bacharach in 2010 on opening night for a revival of the musical “Promises, Promises.”Charles Sykes/Associated Press

Looking back, Mr. Simon wrote with a still starry-eyed joy of his decision to embark on a playwriting career: “For a man who wants to be his own master, to depend on no one else, to make life conform to his own visions rather than to follow the blueprints of others, playwriting is the perfect occupation. To sit in a room alone for six or seven or 10 hours, sharing the time with characters that you created, is sheer heaven.

“And if not heaven,” the master craftsman of the well-timed joke added, “it’s at least an escape from hell.”

Other than Sam Shepard Mr. Simon captured the mood temper and style and America from the 1960's until yesterday. He was a force and filled with grace and integrity! DAF

Mervyn Rothstein contributed reporting.

How to edit a human

How to edit a human

1848 The Economist Science Magazine

For decades scientists aspired to modify the code of life. Tom Whipple meets Jennifer Doudna, who succeeded.

This story begins nearly four billion years ago, when the Earth was just another rock in just another solar system. In a pool of sludge on that rock, something astonishing happened. A long stringy molecule found a way to copy itself. Similar molecules would later carry the code that would enable life forms to grow, digest, run, breathe, read, launch rockets to the Moon. But for now, that molecule only knew how to do a single, important thing – to reproduce. This was the moment that life emerged.

Since then, as each living organism has multiplied, the codes of life have altered by the tiniest increments generation after generation, stretching across time. Most of these mutations have had little impact. Very, very occasionally, they have been extraordinarily useful. The sum of millions of minuscule modifications over billions of generations has given some organisms the ability to survive in water, land, ice or the desert. They have helped them to beat disease, to be stronger, faster, fly.

Across the aeons of biological time, this process has led one particular organism – us – to grow large brains, develop opposable thumbs and communicate complex ideas. We’ve mastered fire, tools, technology. In the great span of evolution, this transformation happened a mere split second ago. Degree by degree we continue to change.

Six years ago a group of those highly evolved organisms worked out how to shrink evolutionary time. Scientists in laboratories on either side of the Atlantic discovered a way to manipulate the blind stumblings of random mutations. Through meticulous trial after trial and not a little fortune, they found a way to edit the code of life – to tweak the information that makes our eyes blue, muscles strong or IQs high. Humans had advanced so far that we were finally able to control our own evolution.

Jennifer Doudna, one of those scientists, was not the first to edit genes or genetically modify an organism. But the tool that her team discovered made a previously painstaking and expensive process simpler and usable by almost anyone. Entire PhDs were once spent changing a single gene to make one mutant mouse for research.

The eureka moment came in 2012. Doudna remembers the instant when she realised what she had found. She was in her office high above San Francisco bay and her postgraduate student, Martin Jinek, was at the whiteboard. “It was a beautiful California day. I was looking across and seeing the Golden Gate Bridge,” says Doudna, gesturing towards the window: “The sun was streaming in, Martin was writing at the whiteboard.” Stroke by stroke he began sketching a simplified version of a previously obscure molecular mechanism that bacteria use to fight infection.

The device had an ungainly name, CRISPR-Cas9. But realisation now dawned that its function was supremely elegant: it chopped up the DNA of invading viruses. What made that discovery important was that the tool could also be programmed to cut up DNA of any kind. Doudna’s team had worked out how to edit the genome of every living thing – even humans.

Sitting beside that same whiteboard now she finds it hard to convey the magnitude of that instant – she talks of chills going down her neck, of thinking “this is cool” – as it dawned on her that this could transform not only the lives of the scientists who uncovered it, but all of our lives.

Rarely, if ever, has a scientific tool spread as fast as the one they drew that day. It took a millennium for the mathematical concept of zero to be fully accepted in Europe. It took centuries for the first rudimentary microscopes to develop into something scientifically useful. Even the computer took decades to become a mainstay of offices and homes.

In just over five years, the new gene-editing mechanism that Doudna and her colleagues found has attained ubiquity in life-science laboratories. Other means of editing DNA already existed, but CRISPR was better and faster. Yet the speed of CRISPR’s dissemination represents a threat as well as a breakthrough. Anxious about the lack of control, Doudna convened a conference of 500 ethicists, scientists and lawyers in 2015 to consider all the apparently fantastical futures ushered in by the ability to tinker with the code of life. She wanted to set out rules and protocols before the technology was applied to humans.

Doudna was in for a shock. “One attendee [at the conference] pulled me aside and said three manuscripts had been submitted to journals involving experiments on human embryos. He said, ‘You should know this is happening.’” The labs in China had destroyed the embryos they had developed, and the modification had been only partial. Far sooner than predicted, a threshold had been crossed.

That moment in Doudna’s office came 60 years after James Watson and Francis Crick interrupted lunchtime at the Eagle pub in Cambridge with the words “We’ve discovered the meaning of life.” It was only slight hyperbole. They had revealed the structure of DNA, the alphabet in which the code of life was written.

That achievement was monumental. It was also, on its own, useless. Though they knew the letters, they didn’t know what they meant. They couldn’t read the code; they couldn’t write it.

Over subsequent decades genetics researchers have slowly built a DNA dictionary to explain what individual strings of code mean. First in bacteria, then in worms and eventually, in 2003, in humans, we have read full genomes and started piecing together the functions of DNA, the code that builds bodies, keeps them running and occasionally makes them fail. That achievement, too, has been monumental. But even when we can determine the exact mutation that led to a genetic disease, we can’t do anything about it. The search for a means to rewrite that code became the most pressing quest in genetics research.

Although no one realised it at the time, that journey was already under way. In 1987, almost unnoticed, a scientist in Japan spotted an oddity in the genome of a bacterium found in the human gut: a repeating sequence of genetic code, roughly palindromic, in the bacterium’s DNA. If you read along it, this code would appear in one section, then there would be an incomprehensible sequence of code, then it would appear again, and so on. The oddity was noted and the world moved on. The planet is not short of oddities.

Six years later a Spanish researcher spotted the same repeating structure in a microscopic organism from a different part of the living world. Since the common evolutionary ancestor of these two organisms came hundreds of millions of years earlier, it seemed significant that both had this structure. The oddity was upgraded to a curiosity.

For 20 years, that was where it remained. The sequence gained its awkward name: Clustered Regularly Interspersed Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR (pronounced “crisper”). Slowly, we learned more about it. The first breakthrough in establishing the importance of CRISPR came when scientists identified the code that lies between the repeats. It turned out that these sequences appeared elsewhere too: in the genetic code of viruses that had attacked these microbes. Evolution doesn’t create such unlikely coincidences without a purpose.

There was a logical conclusion: microbes were storing the viral code to defend themselves against the viruses. CRISPR seemed to be not just a code but a tool, that both held crucial intelligence on bacteria’s viral enemies and used this intelligence to defeat them. That was when the curiosity became a business proposition – bacteria can be worth a lot of money. So the funding for the next step came from one of the world’s most famous bacteria farmers: Danone, a dairy company that boasts of the good bacteria in its products, and which every year lost cash, cheese and yogurt to viruses that attacked its bacteria.

Two research scientists at Danone began investigating how to use the matching parts of code found on bacteria and viruses to protect the good bacteria they wanted to foster. They found that a small proportion of bacteria were able to capture and store the DNA of invading viruses in their own genomes so that, when they were attacked again, they were essentially immune. Even more excitingly, when those resistant bacteria reproduced, the new bacteria were also protected. So the change wasn’t just a one-off sticking plaster that helped individual bacteria to survive: the immunity they acquired was genetic, and could be passed on to their offspring too.

Suddenly people realised that CRISPR might do more than make yogurt cheaper. Separately, in different labs across the world, groups of scientists started to think about whether this tool could be used to manipulate DNA of all kinds. The race to harness its powers began.

That was when Doudna joined the story. Many other scientists interested in CRISPRwere experts on DNA – the genetic code in every cell. Doudna’s specialism was RNA, which helps DNA translate that code into something usable. Seeing the structure of RNA is hard. Imagine if all you knew about the Eiffel tower came from its shadow at different times of day. Then imagine forming an image of it using just that information, with every strut and platform in place. This type of work has been Doudna life’s pursuit: trying to construct a model of molecules from scatterings left by x-rays or the products left behind as they break down.

Dounda would probably have continued happily on her academic path of quiet distinction were it not for a telephone call one afternoon in 2006 from across the campus at the University of California, Berkeley. Jill Banfield was unusual among CRISPR scientists because she wasn’t interested in its application to humans. She wanted to understand what microbes do with it: for over a decade she has been searching for it in organisms in extreme environments underground, in the heat of geysers, even in slurry ponds at a dairy farm. Banfield needed an expert on RNA, so she began looking on the university intranet for resident RNA experts: “I saw Jennifer’s name, and contacted her.” That phone call marked the first time Doudna had ever heard of CRISPR (later she admitted that she thought it was spelt “crisper”).

By this stage, laboratories around the world were trying to uncover how CRISPR could be used to edit a gene. In Lithuania, Virginijus Siksnys was one of the acknowledged leaders. His laboratory had treated CRISPR like an app, showing how its DNA sequence could be taken from one bacteria and “installed” in another, where it worked perfectly to protect the organism. In the race to discover how to use CRISPR to alter the genome, his laboratory and Doudna’s would eventually come near to a dead heat. “Race” is not quite the right word, though: at this point neither knew for certain where the finish line was.

The first step in determining what CRISPR could do was to break it down into its components, to see what role each part of the CRISPR code played. All DNA works by making proteins; CRISPR is no different. Understanding the function of each protein was the key to developing CRISPR into a deployable device. By generating those same proteins in bulk in the lab, scientists could start experimenting to see what they did.

CRISPR programmes a number of mechanisms, each named after the protein involved: Cas1, Cas2, Cas3, and so on. Slowly, Doudna’s laboratory went through each one to determine its function. Once again luck (and the backing of a wealthy institution) propelled Doudna to the next milestone. In 2011, at a conference in Puerto Rico, Doudna met Emmanuelle Charpentier, a French scientist who was looking at a CRISPRprotein called Cas9 that Doudna hadn’t yet considered. Charpentier needed a biologist to look at its structure.

Charpentier approached two colleagues in Vienna. “One did not have enough manpower, the other not enough money,” says Charpentier. “Life is sometimes unfair.” She recently spoke to one of the scientists who turned her down. “He still thinks of this. He was very much affected.” As well he might be: he works in relative obscurity; Doudna and Charpentier are superstars.

Doudna’s lab had both people and dollars. Over the next year, separated by a continent, Doudna and Charpentier worked on cracking CRISPR’s codes. Their collaboration was professionally rather than personally close. Charpentier’s lab cultured and analysed bacteria to identify the genetic data that made up Cas9 and its function, and shipped that to America. Doudna’s team found a way to manufacture the protein in bulk, using genetically modified bacteria to pump it out and then separate it from the soup of other proteins. Their goal was to surmise how Cas9 cut up the DNA of invading viruses, and if it could be trained to do the same to any length of any DNA they chose – to edit any genome.

Some experiments to test Cas9 were disarmingly simple. “It’s a bit like cooking,” says Doudna. In one they took a few drops of a liquid containing the Cas9 protein, mixed it with a few drops of another liquid that included a protein that helped the molecular mechanism find its target, and added in some DNA to see the effect. Then they heated it up. During the heating process they would periodically take out samples to see if the DNA was changing size or being cut – Doudna moves her hands apart, like a fisherman describing a catch. More often than not, it was. The CRISPR system had gone in and snipped precisely the right section. That was the outcome they were after.

Charpentier speaks of that period in almost unworldly terms. At the time, she was based out of a university in Sweden. “There was either too much light or not enough light, which meant I was available at all times of the day.” Time differences were not a problem. “When we were writing the paper, it was March, April, May, June. You experience nights where you see only light and so you stay awake pretty much all night long. I would come from the lab at 3 in the morning and there would be full light.”

The excitement was heightened by growing certainty that other labs must be close behind, says Doudna. “Emmanuelle would work in the Californian night. I’d wake up in the morning and there would be a new draft of our article in my inbox. Then I’d work on it. We knew there was good reason to try to wrap it up and write it up as quickly as we could.”

Slowly, a picture of the Cas9 system emerged. In Doudna’s office today in Berkeley she has a model of it made out of 3D-printed plastic, the result of those final experiments that uncovered its structure. It sits on a table beside a Japanese katanasword, one of many gifts Doudna has since received on her travels. The model of the Cas9 targeting system looks like a Gordian knot of twisted molecules. She slowly pulls it apart with the patience of a teacher – she still has undergraduate students – demonstrating the section that locates the target DNA and the cleaver that chops it up.

It is that cleaver, Cas9, that is important. A katana of the genome, it carefully slices both sides of the target DNA, breaking the strand. Since DNA is good at repairing itself, the two loose ends of DNA can tie themselves back together, but without the lost code the virus is neutralised. That offered the possibility of a further leap: rather than merely remove part of the DNA, it might be possible to replace it with another strand. Then the DNA should still be able to stitch itself up again. To achieve that would be one miniscule change for a genome – and one giant step for genetics.

No wonder Doudna smiles so widely as she remembers the day when a year of experiments suddenly made sense.

Scientists sometimes complain that society still believes in the idea of the lone genius whose insight allowed him (it’s normally a man) to see further – even if modesty dictates that he says he did so by standing on the shoulders of giants. In this narrative, you forget about the other people in the laboratory, other teams developing the science or working in parallel. No one ever asks a whole laboratory to give a keynote address. TED talks are not delivered by committee.

Doudna is meticulous about attributing credit. There were six authors on the breakthrough paper. She notes that her postgraduate students did much of the lab work. Hundreds developed the field to enable the final discovery. Like the 15 members of the 1953 Everest expedition, all had parts to play. We already know, too, that Doudna’s involvement was not once but twice a matter of chance and money. Yet Charpentier and Doudna are the ones who finally got to the top, the Hillary and Tenzing of CRISPR. They are the ones who get the plaudits, the international speaking engagements, and the prizes. When the Nobel committee gets around to awarding for CRISPR, as it surely will in time, it will only ever be able to honour three people at most. Two places are taken. The others will forever be at the Everest base camp of science, watching their colleagues disappear into the clouds.

What, though, if when Hillary and Tenzing had arrived at the summit to find that someone had already reached it but hadn’t got the message home yet? That type of luck is more awkward.

Just before Doudna and Charpentier realised how Cas9 could be used to edit the genome, scientists in Siksnys’s Lithuanian laboratory had also uncovered its potential. They outlined their findings, going only slightly less far in developing their thoughts on the Cas9 system, in a similar paper submitted two months before Doudna and Charpentier. But thanks to the vagaries of the publication process it ended up in print two months after theirs. The Lithuanians worked out the science first – but Doudna and Charpentier broke the story.

When pressed, Doudna accepts that the Lithuanians have reason to feel hard done by. “Of course, we all have regrets in science. You know, let’s be honest, there’s a serendipity in science,” she says. “In some senses we were in the right place at the right time.” These days science is a human pyramid of giants, with dozens scrambling to reach the top, sometimes stepping over each other on the way.

Doudna acknowledges that luck has played a part. “Here’s how I think about science. We used to do jigsaw puzzles when I was growing up. My dad always had one on the table. It would be a big puzzle with 2,000 pieces. We’d work on it for a period of weeks. Whenever you had 15 minutes you might just swing by and fit in a couple of pieces.” She clearly enjoys this analogy: “In CRISPR there was something similar. A few labs were onto this. Then eventually we get to the point where we put a piece in place and go, ‘Oh holy moly, this is a programmable system.’”

Most accolades have so far been given to Doudna and Charpentier, not the Lithuanians. But in their rush to place the final jigsaw piece of CRISPR’s genetic editing and broadcast it, Doudna and Charpentier forgot something important. In late 2012, an American scientist called Feng Zhang, from MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute, paid $70 to the US patent office to expedite his claim for ownership of the use of CRISPR in mammalian cells.

Doudna’s and Charpentier’s luck had run out. The US patent system, with processes even more opaque than those of academic publishers, was faced with two patents for CRISPR. One came from their laboratories. Their seminal paper had shown that CRISPR was a programmable system that could be used to edit DNA in a lab. But it hadn’t shown that it could do so in animal and plant cells too. Many, including Doudna and Charpentier, thought that was implicit. This was where Zhang’s patent came in. By doing experiments to make explicit the broad implications of CRISPR-Cas9, Zhang reckoned he had gone further. He paid to expedite a patent that claimed as much.

It is common to talk not just of the lone genius of science, but also the single eureka moment. Near Doudna’s office on campus, a series of posters celebrating the 150th anniversary of Berkeley includes one with Doudna’s face on it. “2012 Jennifer Doudna co-develops CRISPR, a new way to fix defective genes”, reads the flag. Yet some CRISPRscientists think that too much weight has been attributed to her flash of inspiration in 2012. George Church, a colleague and friend of both Zhang and Doudna, says that the discoveries that came later are far more than a footnote. In January 2013, his team and Zhang’s first described how Cas9 could edit human cells: “Prior to those papers, Jennifer’s work was about cutting DNA in vitro – not editing DNA in vivo.” In other words, they, not Doudna, were the first to design and use CRISPR tools in living organisms. They also improved the guidance system, CRISPR’s efficiency and developed the genetic tools to evaluate how well it operates. “We have many patents on these topics,” he says, “that did not involve a patent skirmish.”

Doudna looks down and becomes quieter as we move to discussing Zhang. The commercial ownership of CRISPR is currently less clear even than the scientific credit. “People should be saying, ‘This is a really exciting time, an exciting moment in science,’” she says. “Let’s focus on that, rather than bad behaviour.” This is clearly the point at which her magnanimity to her fellow CRISPR scientists runs out.

The ruling matters partly because it will answer who gets the credit for the CRISPRbreakthrough. But it is important for another reason – one that explains why the respective universities are spending millions of dollars on lawyers. Whichever institution is deemed to be the originator of the idea stands to make billions of dollars from it. Gene editing by CRISPR will change some people’s world more than others.

Doudna has the sort of bone structure that you would edit your own genome to produce. She is calm, elegant. Yet she wears her rock-star status awkwardly. She is reserved; she speaks in tones as muted as her clothes. Her TED talk in 2015 had the air of someone facing a slightly difficult tenure committee, rather than conveying the drama of her breakthrough.

Society asks a lot of our modern heroes. We demand not just that they are brilliant in their own field, but glamorous, charismatic and articulate. We make them celebrities. Doudna’s schedule is now so busy she divides her days into 15-minute chunks. She has her own PR team. She crosses the world to speak of a lab in which she now spends little time.

It is an odd life for someone who became a biologist partly to hide from the world. Doudna grew up in Hawaii, a volcano surrounded by the sea. Her family moved there for her father’s work when she was seven: he got a job at the university after completing an English literature PhD late in life. Doudna “felt like a freak” in Hawaii, she says. Tall, blonde and blue-eyed, she was a “pretty extreme ethnic minority” and in the early 1970s, “there was a lot of discrimination. I just looked different. I was a foot taller, I had a big nose compared to Asians, I had hairy arms.” She says strangers would scream at her in the street.

As a child she spent a lot of time alone, in libraries. She read “The Double Helix” (1968), a classic account by James Watson of his discovery of the structure of DNA. “It was the first time I saw science presented as it happens, as a very human endeavour. There were rivalries, competitions, conflicts – and despite that, science gets done.”

“It was a real contrast to the way we were taught science, with a big textbook where you are told ‘Read chapter 3, memorise a bunch of facts.’ There was no sense of how did we get there, why is this important, why do you need to know this? In Watson’s book that came alive for me and I could suddenly imagine myself engaging with other people. That was the first time I thought, ‘Gee, could I spend my life figuring things out?’ It all seemed so exotic.” She applied to Pomona College in Claremont, southern California, and entered a new world.

The CRISPR gene-editing process wasn’t – and still isn’t – perfect. Sometimes it misses, chopping up the wrong piece of DNA. Sometimes it doesn’t cut everything it should. But as a laboratory tool it is already astonishing. And it is improving all the time. On the same day I see Doudna, a paper was published on using CRISPR to improve cancer immunotherapy, and another from a different group that used it to tease out the causes of motor-neurone disease. A few days before we meet, a scientist causes a minor sensation in the brewing world by developing hopless CRISPR craft beer, modifying yeast to produce the oils made by hops. When I ask Doudna if she has tasted it, she looks confused. She wasn’t even aware of the research, done a mile from her own laboratory.

These days, anyone can order the tools Doudna and Charpentier designed online. An American company called Odin (slogan: “biohack the planet”) will send you a diy gene-engineering kit for just $159 to edit the genetic code of a non-harmful strand of E.coli bacteria, complete with a phial of the targeting system, another with the Cas9 protein to cut, some agar to grow the bacteria on and petri dishes, test tubes, pipettes, blue rubber gloves. If you start on a Friday night, you can complete your domestic bio-engineering by the end of the weekend. Success will not be a transformative experience, however – if you do everything right, colonies of bacteria form white or yellow spots on your petri dish (this shows that it was able to multiply, or rather that you edited out the molecule that would have prevented it reproducing).

CRISPR has become almost as essential to laboratories as the pipette, yet it has barely touched on the consciousness of governments or the public. The technology has advanced far ahead of discussion about its implications, let alone regulation of

When we meet, Doudna is reading “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” (1986), a book about Robert Oppenheimer who ran the project that developed the bomb. “I’m at the part of the book where Einstein is writing letters to the US president, trying to get an introduction to him,” she says, and then adds, with the slightest hint of a raised eyebrow: “The scientists working on nuclear energy had the realisation that what they were doing was incredibly powerful and yet at the time nobody in the highest levels of government was aware what was coming.” She doesn’t need to labour the parallels, or the differences. Unlike the atomic bomb, which still requires the investment and resources of a government, CRISPR is easy and democratic. All you need is a supply of Cas9 and an online tutorial.

Doudna’s first intimation of the CRISPR mushroom cloud on the horizon came in 2014. “I was sitting at the desk typing and my phone rang. It was a journalist, wanting an opinion about an article about to be reported in a scientific journal, reporting CRISPR in modified monkeys. That was the turning point.” She pauses to make sure I’ve understood the significance: in traditional medical experimentation there is only one species you move onto once you have tested monkeys. Us.

Like the atomic scientists before her, Doudna felt a sudden, awesome responsibility. The ethics soon found their way into her inbox. A woman recently sent her a picture of her baby son: “They had just learned he had a neurodegenerative disease, that was genetic. There was currently nothing they could do. Even though he was normal then, they knew he was going to face a degenerative process. How do you think about that? If there is a way to fix it, to cure it, it’s hard to argue you shouldn’t do that.”

In the next five to ten years, CRISPR plants will almost certainly reach supermarkets. Soon after we will probably see CRISPR people in our hospitals – treatments that use CRISPR to correct genetic conditions in adults such as sickle-cell disease or inherited blindness. The Francis Crick Institute in London is conducting its own experiments on creating fully edited human embryos, though as its goal is scientific discovery not designer babies, it destroys the embryos.

Eventually, a CRISPR baby will be born. The technology is too easy. There is no world government to stop its use; many argue no one should do so anyway. At the point that baby emerges, perhaps modified to evade a particular disease or perhaps even to look a particular way, theoretical debates will become real.

Doudna knows the influence she and her fellow scientists have is diminishing every day. “I would hope this would be used to create cures, to help people,” she says. Even if the technology is not quite there yet, CRISPR could eventually do plenty else besides. Every week a new paper is published finding more genes that influence looks, intelligence, stamina, even sexuality.

“The dystopic view would be IVF clinics that offer parents a menu of options for kids,” she says. “Nobody has kids by sex anymore. You go to a clinic, pick from a menu, say, ‘I want my kid to be this tall, have this colour of eye, this level of IQ,’ and all those sorts of things. I think that would be terrible.”

The battle is still on for the final credit for CRISPR. But like similar disputes in the past – Newton versus Leibniz, Edison versus Swan – it is as bitter as it is irrelevant. When the final history is told, the use CRISPR is put to will be far more important. And that chapter is just beginning.

Tom Whippleis science editor of the Times and author of “X and WHY: The rules of attraction – why gender still matters”

Photographs Brad TORCHIA

L’Oréal Foundation. Matt McLean

Ruth Ann finally back in his arms.

‘The last time I held her’: How a homeless musician reclaimed the love of his life

Petula Dvorak Washington Post

Mike Rainsberger with his beloved bass, Ruth Ann, inside the bedroom he shares with a roommate in Northwest Washington. He got housing after being homeless for several years. 

Ruth Ann was finally back in his arms.

“May 7, 2017,” he said. “That was the last time I held her.”

In the year and three months he’d been apart from Ruth Ann, his hands went a little janky.

They’d been together for 24 years, so holding her was like coming home, but it would be a couple months before Mike Rainsberger and Ruth Ann were really back in sync.

For the years Mike and Ruth Ann were apart, he was among the 6,000 homeless people in the nation’s capital. Few of them are musicians — and few of them own an Italian, mahogany-faced, carved top, three-quarter upright bass named Ruth Ann.

There are no special programs for a pair like Mike and Ruth Ann.

Until he found a place that was clean and safe enough for her, a place where the humidity level wouldn’t tick above 70 percent on his portable meter, he wouldn’t leave the streets and shelter beds and go indoors alone.

Mike, 49, plays jazz. And Ruth Ann was the last thing his dying mother did for him, withdrawing all her retirement savings in 1994 to buy her gifted son the sonorous, full-figured, curvaceous dark beauty he’d always wanted and now worth about $26,000.

Mike named the bass after his mom, Ruth Ann. And never, ever call his instrument “it.”

“She,” he corrected me, again and again each time we met. “Don’t disrespect her.”

Mike’s fluid moves and sleepy eyes, his smoky voice all sound like jazz. When you close your eyes and listen to him, you hear the music, feel the vibrations of his bass and in no way imagine he’s a white guy from Virginia who used to have a mohawk.

Where he and Ruth Ann have landed isn’t perfect.

The decaying Oxford House, with its crumbling porch and dark, sagging staircase isn’t a luxury. It has the added sting of being just north of the old Bohemian Caverns, the heart of U Street and D.C.’s Black Broadway. So when he gets off the bus, Mike has to walk past the great, subterranean club that was the heart of D.C. jazz, where John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington played. Where, in his prime, Mike Rainsberger played.

But at Oxford House, the place he heard about from the guys at the methadone clinic, the elderly man in a checkered lumberjack shirt and papery skin who opens the door is cool with his music. And the bald, rough-handed man smoking on the porch is cool with Ruth Ann, too. When Mike and Ruth Ann go at it — thrum, thrum, thrappa, thrappa, thrappa, thrum — the recovering addicts of OxfordMike Rainsberger played jazz all over the world before becoming homeless. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)

“To stay in here, we gotta stay clean. That’s all. Stay clean and pay the rent: $525.” Mike said.

In the tiny room upstairs, Mike watched the humidity meter on a sweltering, August afternoon. “Man, it’s up to 79 percent. Man, this is not good. See, she swells up and gets heavy when it’s this humid,” he says, hefting the bass back into a black case. The session’s over.

His story is a familiar one. Bad decisions, bad relationships and no family around to help. Once mom died, he lost his haven. Years in clubs, on the road, on a cruise ship and always out late weren’t good for stability.

Mike started out as a local kid loving hardcore sound. He was a self-taught musician who played in thrasher bands and did some of the New York scene. He has a sleeve of tattoos from those days that he hates. The tattoo he likes to show off? A bass clef on the back of his neck.

Because his life changed when he heard — really heard — jazz. He made it to Shenandoah University and studied at its conservatory and played, played, played. Relentless, classical training, playing so hard his fingers bled at night. He got his degree.

He began hooking up with jazz bands, playing clubs and concerts. He said he knows about 400 jazz standards off the top of his head — band leaders love that about him.

Clubs, coffee houses and concert halls. He got pointers from bass legends Gary Peacock (backstage at the Kennedy Center) and Nap Turner (at Bohemian Caverns).

And Mike took off. He got a job on a cruise ship and played on the world’s oceans — 12 ships total. He played in South America, Russia, Eastern Europe and a bunch of places he can’t remember — 48 countries in all. He played all over America and found a home in New Orleans, where some bad decisions — a she who wasn’t Ruth Ann — sent him on a self-destructive path.

The high-end luthier in charge of Ruth Ann’s repair and maintenance was horrified three years ago when he heard Mike was living on the streets and trying to gig with Ruth Ann in tow. He stored Ruth Ann at his shop and told Mike to get straight and get housed before he’d give her back.

“If only I played horn. Would’ve been easier,” Mike drawledMike Rainsberger’s favorite tattoo: a bass clef on the back of his neck. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)

The gig offers kept coming.

Mike made excuses turning them down. “I’m sick.” “Ruth Ann’s in the shop.”

And his hands got weaker without the daily regimen of playing. His ear got muddled.

When he’d try to get the kind of housing where Ruth Ann would be safe, and he could practice, the housing folks would tell him he wasn’t desperate enough. He gets a small check from Social Security. He’s not dying, in full-blown addiction or mentally ill, so when he’d go to housing folks for help, they’d turn him away.

“When I first met him, he was still being sheltered by Friendship Place,” said Anne Marie Staudenmaier, an attorney at D.C’s Legal Clinic for the Homeless. “I knew that he’s someone who could be successful if you could just get him into permanent supportive housing. He has a talent, a skill to make a living, a good living,” she said. “But their reaction? He’s not vulnerable enough to get to the top of the list.”

Yup, Mike was doing too well to get help. The middle class of homelessness. His story is about housing in a city with shrinking options.

“They can get in if they are very mentally ill, very frail, if they are people who just can’t survive on the outside,” Staudenmaier said. “This really speaks to our lack of affordable housing.”

It’s also a story about a city that is letting jazz die. It’s no secret that jazz musicians live rough. Where would the best songs be if life were easy? The Jazz Foundation of America helps struggling jazz musicians — providing housing in lofts and holding fundraisers in New York. It organizes relief efforts in New Orleans and Puerto Rico, throws a glittery event in Los Angeles and provides work in Chicago.

In D. C.? Not so much.

“D.C. doesn’t support the arts. The artists,” Mike said.

To get back to gigging, Mike has to wheel Ruth Ann on a special cart down D.C. sidewalks. It’s a lot of walking, the bus is too dangerous for her. And to get back to teaching — the bread and butter of his income — he’s got to be in a place where geriatric addicts, kind as they were and earnest in their recovery, aren’t opening the front door.

Right now, he and Ruth Ann are on the inside. But the real uphill climb for them has just begun.