Pierre Tardivel, a French Canadian geneticist, works on identifying junk DNA for the Human Genome Project. There is a 50 percent chance that Pierre is carrying the gene for Huntington’s disease, a fatal disorder. That knowledge drives Pierre to succeed in a race against time to complete his research. But a strange set of circumstances — including a knife attack, the in vitro fertilization of his wife, and an insurance company plot to use DNA samples to weed out clients predisposed to early deaths — draw Tardivel into a story that will ultimately involve the hunt for a Nazi death camp doctor.