“Explain it to me Jason. Tell me how you’re going to do it? How do you make a clone? I want to understand.”
“Okay, if you really want to know...”
“I do.”
With his arm around her and her face resting on his chest Jason began to explain the process of genetic cloning that they had mastered in Oxford at the I.G.E.G.G.M.
“Here goes…Cloning Class 101 for Beginners...The first thing to know is that cloning is an entirely natural process that takes place all the time in nature. About one in every 75 human conceptions results in natural clones being produced...we call them identical twins...or monozygotic twins to give them their correct name. To get twins, the fertilised egg, or ovum, splits and produces two separate humans, each with the identical genetic makeup of the other. All we do is mimic that natural process.”
“Yes, but how?”
“Did you do biology at school?”
“No”
“Okay, so, if you let me take a little bit of liberty with the truth so that I can try to explain it simply and help you understand it…Humans are made up of millions of little building blocks. Those building blocks are called Chromosomes and are big enough to easily look at under the latest microscopes. In each human being there are just twenty-three different chromosomes. The chromosomes always pair off, so in a human there are twenty-three different sets of chromosome pairs, which combine together in lots of different ways to produce all the genetic material in our bodies. So, in a human cell, that means there are forty-six chromosomes paired off into twenty-three chromosome pairs. Got it? Good, now each of our cells contains the full set of chromosomes that makes up our bodies. Chromosomes are there to tell our cells how they should build our bodies...”
“...Now chromosomes are themselves made up of building blocks which create the instruction sets which tell the cells how to multiply and what they should become. We call these genetic instruction sets ‘genes’.” He took another sip of wine, and kissed her lightly on the cheek.
“Still with me? Good…now, these ‘genes’ determine what type of cell, a cell is going to become. A chromosome may contain many different genes, but not all of the genes will be genetically active, or ‘switched on’. Some genes will be inactive, or ‘switched off’. It’s the genes which are ‘switched on’ in the cells that determine the future of that particular cell, and what it will be. So, depending on the active genes within the chromosomes, one cell will become an “eye” cell, and another will become a “leg muscle” cell, another a “tongue” cell…and another a “breast” cell...” He said leaning forward and licking the nipple on her naked breast. Lydia retaliated by swiftly smacking him lightly on the top of his head…
“Stop that! Get on with it…”
“So what’s a cell, you may ask? Well, the human cell, or any animal cell for that matter, is really a little chemical factory made of three separate parts. There’s the brain part in the centre of the cell, called the ‘nucleus’, and there’s the fluid surrounding the brain which protects it and contains the chemical soup, called the 'cytoplasm’ and then there’s the cell wall which keeps it all together. What we’re really interested in is the thing in the middle, called the ‘nucleus’. The nucleus is really just a chemical bag containing all the vital parts and it’s full of all the chromosomes. …oops, I missed out a bit...the chemical soup called the ‘cytoplasm’ that surrounds the nucleus is really not empty at all. It’s full of little chemical units called ribosomes...”
“...The ribosomes are the workers in the cells. They get told what to do by the brainy nucleus, and spend most of their time ripping apart chromosomes, and rebuilding them according to the new instruction sets sent out by the brain.”
“ ‘And what are they building?’ you may ask?” Jason waited a minute for Lydia to ask but she didn’t.
“Well, if you did ask, you would find out that the ribosome factory units spent most of their time building other cells. And when they’ve made a new cell, they spit it out through a hole in the cell wall, and then start building a new one. Bored yet?”
“No…I like the way you’re explaining it…sort of makes some sense...”
“Well, thank you young lady!…Okay…So where were we?...Right, the cells can make new cells if they want. That’s what happens when an egg is fertilised…the egg spends the next nine months making millions of new cells, and each time a new cell is formed the original cell splits in two, and then you have two cells making new cells, then four, then eight, then sixteen, etc, until after nine months you’ve got all the cells necessary to make a little human being...”
“…so what is DNA?”
“DNA? ...Remember how I said that the building blocks were called Chromosomes. Well, it turns out that each of the chromosomes can be further split down into tens of thousands of other smaller building blocks or molecules, which fit together in long strings. Each cell is made up of about 3000 million of these building blocks.”
“So what does DNA stand for?”
“Well, the strings are called nucleic acids, because they are chemically slightly acidic, the ‘nucleic’ part coming from the fact that they are used in the nucleus of the cell. The full name for the acids are Deoxyribonucleic Acids…”
“...Now, I said just a second ago that DNA is a string made up of smaller building blocks. Actually, it turns out that a DNA string is made up of various combinations of four basic blocks which fit together in many different ways to make the strings. These smaller blocks are called the ‘bases’ of the DNA.”
“Stop! It’s too much!...” Lydia got up and stretched, walking away from the bed towards the fireplace and the open fire. Bathing in the warmth from the flames, she clasped her hands behind her neck and stared into the mirror above the mantelpiece.
Jason’s eyes wandered down the curvature of her back, admiring the softness and roundness of her buttocks, and the sweep of her thighs downwards to her knees.
She turned around, a question jumping from her tongue.
“Okay…okay...so I remember that I once read in a magazine article that DNA is a helical chain...What’s does that mean?”
“Good question. Remember, I just told you that the DNA was made of four basic building blocks that combine in different ways. Actually, DNA consists of two parallel strands that run together like railway tracks. The rails are made up of long strings of the DNA bases which combine together in special sequences. The bases are called 'A', 'C', 'G', and 'T'. As an example, one string might be made up of bases in the order ATGCCTA. The interesting thing though is that there is a relationship between the order of the bases in one string, and those in the string running alongside it. The bases pair up together, so…for example if you look at base 'A' on one side of the track, you always find 'T' on the other...'C' always pairs with 'G' etc. It's this pairing that links the two sets of strings like a railway track, and the fact that they are linked together somehow induces a natural twist in the double track, making it curl around like a spring, which we call a 'double helix'. ”
“Right…right…” Lydia jumped off the bed again, both hands tugging at her hair as if just by pulling on it her head would somehow open up and let all the facts sink in.
“There’s more...”Jason tried to continue. "Do you want to hear it?"
“Yes.”
“…Well, what you have probably heard me called ‘genes’ are really just ‘sets’ of chemical instructions. Let's look at that for a second...The bases link together in pairs to form long strings, or nucleic acids...and the order in which the bases link together determine what instructions and information the nucleic acids contain. BUT, what we know is that in a long string, not all the instructions are switched on...some parts of the instructions in the strings are somehow deactivated...and as a result, the 'instructions' these genes pass onto the developing cells are different.”
“Why?”
“Well, as I said before, it’s the genes which determine what type of cells they should become
as they divide and multiply. Now imagine that we are looking at two genes, which on the face of it appear to be very similar, both of which are arbitrarily made up of three bits…'A', 'B' and 'C'…"
"…When we look closer, we see that in the first of these two genes, two parts, 'B' and 'C' are deactivated. As a result, it is the ‘A’ part in the first gene which will influence any developing cells it meets to become kidney Cells, for example..."
"…Now, if we look at the second gene, we see that parts 'A' and 'C' are deactivated, and so in this gene it is the active information from part 'B' that will instruct the other cells which it meets in their development cycle to turn, for example, into breast cells. And lovely little cells they are too!”
“Pervert”
“It’s only natural.”
She leant forward and kissed him on the nose.
“So how are you going to make your little clone then....”
“Right, that's the big one...Are you sitting comfortably? Good, then I’ll begin again... Basically, there are a few different types of cells. You get the ‘somatic’ cells which have a complete set of all the genes and chromosomes contained inside them within the nucleus, and you have the ‘germ’ cells which have only half of the information needed to make a human, each germ cell only having twenty three chromosomes, and where each chromosome is looking for their opposite chromosome to make a matching pair...Now, when a germ cell finds the other twenty-three chromosomes that fit, the cell ends up with twenty-three chromosome pairs, all the information it needs to become a proper cell. So guess what we call these "germ" cells?”
“Dunno...what do we call them?”
“Well, basically, they’re better known by you and me as sperm and eggs…”
“..yes...yes…so when the sperm meets the egg, you get two different sets of genetic information, each containing twenty three ‘half ’ sets of chromosomes which then pair up with each other and form the complete library of chromosome information!”
“Exactly. You’re not as thick as you look after all!”
“So, how do you make a clone?”
“Well, an egg is basically a cell with only half of its chromosomes. It spends its time just looking for the rest of its chromosome set, so that it can start multiplying and become something. That’s how a baby is born, you take half the chromosome set from the father and give it to an egg cell containing half the chromosome set from the mother. Now…when we make a clone, this is where we change things a little...We sort of cheat... We take the egg, and take out all the chromosome half-pairs from its nucleus, just leaving it as a bag of cytoplasm contained in the cell wall. So the egg cell is basically now not just missing half of the chromosomes necessary to make a proper nucleus, but in fact, it hasn’t got a nucleus at all!...”
“…The chromosome set we just stole from it contained genetic information from the mother. Now it has no genetic information of its own at all. Nothing...And all the poor little cell wants to know is what it’s meant to be! It’s crying out for a complete set of chromosomes...”
“... Instead of providing half of the chromosome set from the father we now take the complete set from a genetic donor. We do this by taking a cell from the other person, remove the nucleus which contains a full set of chromosome information from the centre of that cell, and then insert that nucleus directly into the egg cell…"
"…Suddenly the egg cell has everything it needs...it has a wall, the cytoplasm fluid, and a little happy complete nucleus. The next thing it does is then to start multiplying. In fact that’s all it does for the next nine months...and before you know it you have a little baby…with one big difference... The baby's cells all contain the exact same nucleus as the one taken from the donor cell. So there is actually no difference to the cells of the baby and the cells of the donor who provided the nucleus. In other words, the baby will be identical to the person who provided the donor cell. Identical. A clone.”
“Bloody hell…it’s all so complicated, but so easy at the same time... Is that what you're going to do with your clone then…Is that how you are going to make him?”
“Not quite. We have a small problem. We are going to make the clone from the blood cells we got from the blood samples. Unfortunately, blood cells are the only other type of cells that don’t contain a full set of chromosomes. But, I have found a way around that. I realised that so long as we could extract some DNA from within the blood cells, we would effectively be able to extract from that DNA, all the information we need which tells us how to build the complete chromosome set."
" …In the past, no one knew how to access this information. Now we do!…You see, I discovered that the DNA has a blue print contained within it of how all the chromosomes are made. So if we are missing some of the chromosomes, we can learn from the DNA itself how all the other missing chromosomes should be made and what they would look like..."
"…We start with the blood cells from the donor. What we do next is to genetically interrogate the DNA obtained from the red blood cells, to obtain the information we need which tells us how to build the full chromosome set belonging to the donor.”
“... Then the next thing we do is to actually manufacture all the chromosomes that are missing, as well as new sets of the ones we already have, and we put them all together to make our own complete chromosome sets and cell nucleuses...”
“... Each artificial nucleus then contains the complete set of the all the chromosomes that would naturally be found in the nuclei of the persons cells that we wish to clone...”
“...The final step is to put one of these ‘artificial’ nuclei into a egg cell which has had its nucleus removed...and there we have it…empty egg meets full chromosome set...becomes happy egg…makes millions of little identical cells and turns into baby clone. Simple, isn’t it?...”
.
Chapter Twenty Three
Oxford, England
.
“So when do you start?” Mike asked a naked Louisa, who lay beside him in his bed, deep in trance.
“Probably next week…everything is well ahead of schedule.”
“And when will you be returning the Crown of Thorns to the French?”
“In a month. That gives us time to take more blood samples from the Crown if we need them. But we probably won’t. Everything is working brilliantly. We solve all the problems we meet just as soon as we find them. We’ve been incredibly lucky so far!”
Mike looked down at Louisa’s body as he stroked her cheek, and pumped her for the latest information on the project. They had just made love after a pleasant evening out in London. He knew he shouldn’t be getting involved with Louisa. This was a mission he couldn’t afford to mess up. It was probably the most important one of his career so far, and hopefully his ticket home to America.
Strangely enough, even that thought began to stir conflicting emotions within him. Did he really want to go home? Where was home now? England? With the possibility of returning home looming over the distant horizon, it only now dawned on him exactly how much he really loved living in England and Europe. In so many ways it was a far better place than the country he came from, and to which he had sworn allegiance.
And there was Louisa... Aside from the fact that he loved to sleep with her, and that she had a body to die for, he had got used to her. She was kind, caring, gentle, and wildly passionate, intelligent, funny and beautiful. More than once he had found himself thinking about her when he shouldn’t have been. If he didn’t know how stupid it sounded, he could be forgiven for thinking that he may be falling in love with her.
On top of that, for the first time in his career he felt guilty about hypnotising someone. Every time he took Louisa into a trance and asked her questions, it was like he was raping her mind. Whereas before that thought might have stirred some weird erotic feeling of power within him, with Louisa it just made him feel bad.
She trusted him and the more he fell for her, the worse he felt.
He shook himself out of it
.
He was a professional…and he had a job to do…Forcing himself to focus, Mike flicked a switch in his mind, and the warmth in his eyes disappeared and was replaced by a cold, steely hardness.
“Louisa, without waking, and while still feeling very relaxed and very happy, I would like you very much to take this pen and paper and draw me a map of the laboratory, and to write down the access codes for all the security gates. Would you do that for me?”
She nodded. Her eyes now open, but her conscious mind not seeing anything.
When she had finished, Mike held her hands and looked into her eyes, speaking very slowly.
“When is the laboratory empty? Tell me a time when you could arrange to work in the laboratory alone?”
“Every Friday night. No one is ever there after nine o’clock. Everyone goes out and winds down from the week's work. Drinking, or spending it with their families.”
“Good. That’s very good Louisa. I am very interested in your work. So interested in fact that I want you to help me. You really want to help. I can tell. You really do.”
“Yes, Mike, I do.”
“Good...Next Friday night I want you to arrange to work in the lab alone. When it’s ten o’clock I want you to feel very relaxed and return to the trance you are in now. You will be able to do everything you normally can do while you are awake, even talk to other people normally, but the next day you will not be able to remember any of it. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“That’s good. At 3am in the morning I will come in my car and meet you outside the lab. I want you to bring the Crown of Thorns down to the car and show it to me. When you meet me, I want you to step into the back of the car, and fall asleep for three minutes while I examine the Crown of Thorns. Then after three minutes I will wake you and then I want you to take the Crown of Thorns back into the laboratory, and replace it exactly where you found it. Then I want you to lock up securely and normally, making sure everything is safe, and then I want you to go home and sleep. When you wake up in the morning as normal, I want you to feel very happy, but not to remember anything at all about what happened from 10pm onwards the night before. Do you understand me?”
BOX SET of THREE TOP 10 MEDICAL THRILLERS Page 104
