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was understood well enough, then or now, to predict when it would. No one could explain it. Understanding of the forces of eros was as crude as the original comprehension of testosterone itself, a hundred and fifty years ago, when a German zoologist had snipped off the testes of young roosters and watched their bright red combs atrophy along with their interest in nearby hens. If he took the severed balls and implanted them in a rooster’s belly, all returned to normal, suggesting that the testes secreted a substance crucial to sexuality—a hormone that was discovered ninety years later by a Dutch scientist, who used almost a ton of bulls’ testicles in isolating less than a third of a gram of testosterone.
    After two or three years, the couple with the club drifted out of touch; Berlin never heard from them again. He had only the weapon as a memento of the case that had stirred his fascination and started him on his career. At Hopkins, John Money became an early mentor. A decade earlier, Money had taken on the case of a baby boy whose penis had been seared off in a botched circumcision. The parents worried that he would never be able to live as a man, and Money, a pioneer in his work with hermaphrodites and a believer that gender and sexual orientation are determined through social learning in early childhood, persuaded the parents to raise the boy, Bruce, as a girl, Brenda. Bruce’s testicles were clipped, and a rudimentary vagina was constructed. Brenda took estrogen to help her grow breasts. Following his patient, Money wrote about her thriving as a girl, and the case was celebrated in Time magazine and in the New York Times .
    He wrote, too, about paraphilias, cataloging and often coining the names of all the types, from acrotomophilia, “a paraphilia of the stigmatic/eligibilic type in which sexuoerotic arousal and facilitation or attainment of orgasm are responsive to and dependent upon a partner who is an amputee,” to zoophilia, the desire for an animal. The paraphilias were, in Money’s view, imprinted in childhood; they were the product of learning more than biology, nurture more than nature. Considering why sexual deviations are, so far as scientists know, mostly limited to the human species, he pointed to the sophistication of the human brain. Erotic “diversity,” he explained, “may be an inevitable evolutionary trade-off—the price paid for the freeing of the primate brain to develop its uniquely human genesis of syntactical speech and creative intelligence.”
    Money’s thinking was defiantly humane. He spoke about men like Jacob, and about sexual sadists and necrophiliacs and pedophiles, as people living not merely with deviant lust but with “disorders of love.” He was willing to apply to paraphiliacs the typical connections between initial desire, falling in love, and long-term “pairbonding.” He might have argued that, condemned by his condition, a man like Michael Ross was searching not only for sex but for love, in his murderous way. He talked about the tenderness and love often felt by pedophiles for their victims; he insisted that these emotions had validity and could be returned. “If I were to see the case of a boy aged ten or eleven who’s intensely erotically attracted toward a man in his twenties or thirties, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way.”
    Berlin was taken with the complexity and bravery of his mentor’s ideas, but he was more tempered in his thinking, and he never shared Money’s faith in the importance of nurture over nature. He felt, now, that time had proved him right. Brenda, with her surgically built semblance of a vagina, and with her drug-induced breasts, had, despite Money’s published reports, never taken on a girl’s psyche, though she’d been brought up as a girl by her parents and never told about the circumciser’s accident and psychologist’s