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GABON APE-MAN EXPEDITION SET TO GO
Walter Pinkman, Boston Globe staff
An expedition to collect more specimens of Australopithecus boisei, the same species as Thursday, the famous so-called ‘ape-woman,’ is making final arrangements for departure from Boston. The expedition, delayed by prolonged negotiations with the Gabonese government, is being led by Dr. William Lowell of Harvard University.
When the evidence for A. boisei surviving to modern times was first reported, Dr. Lowell was prominent in the ranks of scoffers. Now, he has enthusiastically changed his mind. “I can flatly say that I have never been happier to be proved wrong,” Dr. Lowell said. “My chief regret is that I said some very harsh and unfair things about Dr. Grossington and his team when their work was first published. I now understand that the way it was reported was quite outside their control. I have offered my heartfelt apologies to the Grossington/Marchando team, and I am delighted to report they accepted my apologies with great kindness and grace.”
Dr. Lowell still holds some strong opinions on the boiseans, as he calls them. “There have been endless discussions in the media about the ‘rights’ of these creatures, suggestions that they are people, and not simply another type of animal. These are patent nonsense. A boisean has no more—and no less—right to decent treatment than any other animal. They are a precious scientific resource that must be carefully managed, but they are not a fit topic for any discussion of human rights. After all, they aren’t human.”
Dr. Lowell hopes to bring back several breeding pairs to be housed in a facility now under construction near Dracut, Massachusetts. “If a population can be established here, the possibilities for research are endless. Not just animal behavior, but medical, psychological, and product-safety testing as well. Obviously, we are talking about a set of projects for twenty years or more, but I feel that now is the time to pursue this exciting opportunity for the future.”
There is one other mystery Dr. Lowell is interested in solving. Briefly put, the boiseans were found in a place they shouldn’t have been. “All the australopithecines, all the early hominids, were supposed to be savannah-dwellers, living in West African open plainlands,” Dr. Lowell explained. “Now we find them in deep jungle in West Africa, a totally different environment. It could be that our understanding of the early hominids is way off. Maybe they did live in jungle areas as well, but we never found fossils there because it’s tough for fossils to form in jungle, and even tougher to find them in a jungle. Or maybe this population is the only one to migrate into the jungle, which is why they survived. Or maybe the ancestors of the tribesmen who keep them migrated from the east a few hundred or thousand years ago, bringing the boiseans with them. Whatever the answer, we hope to find it out, and bring back some splendid research animals in the process.”
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Dr. Grossington glanced at his watch as Livingston slumped into the daily morning meeting. Livingston was ten minutes late, and obviously ill at ease. It was the first meeting Livingston had gotten to for a while, thanks to the fussing about of the biochemists, who wanted to check everything eight times. Liv sidled in around the edge of the meeting room and scooped up a stack of doughnuts and a big cup of coffee. He probably hadn’t had much chance to eat recently.
Dr. Grossington, free for the moment of the endless fund raising he had to do, was chairing the meeting. The original group had grown into practically a whole institute. The newcomers—the behaviorists, the language specialists, the support workers and assistants—had started to refer to the old timers as the “Gang of Four.” Grossington was glad to hear the kidding. Maybe it meant morale was improving.
Pete Ardley had been signed on as press agent, on the theory of better the devil you knew. Besides, he was willing to work cheap, thanks to some book contract he had signed. A few strings had been pulled, and Barbara’s ex-husband had been granted a leave of absence from his hospital, so he was on board too, overseeing the medical procedures done on Thursday—for example, making sure there weren’t so many blood samples taken that she got anemia. Apparently, he and Barbara were back together again.
There was a certain amount of research that couldn’t be done at Saint Elizabeth’s. Analytic stuff for the most part. They farmed out the work to the labs equipped for it. The Saint E’s staff was no doubt glad of that. Thursday and her entourage had already taken over two outbuildings and had designs on a third. But that was the sort of administrative problem he was supposed to solve on his own. He took another sip of his coffee as the various working groups went through the daily progress reports. The team approved the idea of a daily ASL session for the staffers, talked through a half-dozen other ideas, and went over what the outside world was saying about the project. Grossington came around to Livingston last, perhaps noticing that the young man was ill at ease. “If that closes the routine reports, I believe that Livingston Jones has some news for us. Mr. Jones?”
Livingston hesitated for a moment, and then rose from his seat. That in itself was a signal they had gotten some results. Important news required a bit more formality than slouching back in his chair. “Well, as most of you know, I’ve been working with a group of biochemists who have been taking a look at Thursday, examining her at the cellular and molecular level—and they’ve got some news. But before I tell you what it is, I’d better give you some quick background. You’ll all have heard the term molecular anthropology. The idea of M.A. is to compare proteins, antibodies, and DNA between various species of primates, and measure the degree of difference between them.
“It’s been known for some time that there’s sort of a molecular clock, ticking along in our genes. The clock works this way: tiny micro-mutations occur at a pretty constant rate in all our genes, from one generation to the next. It’s of course a random process, so you can’t predict when a given mutation when occur, but the overall rate of these random mutations is measurable, so that you can predict very well how many mutations will occur in a given time interval, a time interval on the order of thousands or millions of years.
“What the M.A. people did, some time ago, was measure the degree of difference between human DNA and chimp and gorilla DNA. They discovered that there is only about a one percent difference between ape and human DNA. By taking that amount of change and comparing it to the established ‘clock’ of random microchanges, they could learn how recently we split from the apes, how long ago we had a common ancestor.
“It’s been established that we split from gorillas about seven million years ago, and from chimps about five million years ago.” Livingston leaned down and pushed his papers around, stalling for a minute. “Now, needless to say, a lot of people had trouble with these ideas—that our DNA is ninety-nine percent identical to a chimps, and that we shared a common ancestor with chimps—for all practical purposes, were chimps—only five million years ago. But that’s nothing. Now people are really going to go bananas.” The people around the table laughed, and Livingston looked baffled until he noticed his own unconscious joke and smiled, wanly and awkwardly. The smile didn’t last long. “I’ve been in the M.A. labs at UCLA, watching them run Thursday’s blood proteins, antibodies, and DNA through the same sort of tests—as well as some new ones that were just invented a few months ago.”
Livingston looked around the room, and something in his expression tied Grossington’s stomach into a knot. “The results are that—that she’s human.”
Barbara looked up sharply, suddenly attentive.
Livingston kept talking. “On the molecular level, the measure of DNA similarity—she falls within the range of human values. She is no more different from us than we are from each other.”
“Livingston, that’s ridiculous,” Rupert protested from the far end of the table.
“Maybe so, but it’s also true,” Liv replied unhappily. “Let me see if I can make it a little clearer. Each of us is of course different from one another. Some of that’s environment, and some of it is genetic
. There are thousands of micro-mutations that decide whether you’re black or white, what color your eyes will be, that sort of thing. If not for those mutations, we’d all look alike. You might say we’re all mutants. The trouble is, a major mutation can look just like a minor one when you’re down there, looking at the DNA. No one has even made a real start on actually mapping the entire human genetic code, and we still have no idea what the vast majority of DNA sequences actually mean. Crooked pinky fingers run in my family—most of the men have them. Obviously, there’s a sequence somewhere in my DNA for that, but no one know which one it is. At our current state of knowledge, there’s no way to tell it from the sequences that decide how curly my hair is, or the shape of my nose, or the relative sizes of my teeth—or how big my brain is.”
“There are thousands or millions of micro-mutations in each individual’s genes, but each of us has billions or trillions of DNA sequences. Compare the total number of sequences to the number of mutations, and you’ll see that in spite of the many genetic differences between any two human beings, there are far more similarities.
“How can you say Thursday’s DNA is like ours when no one’s mapped human DNA in the first place?” Amanda Banks asked.
“Good question. Let me see if I can explain. When the molecular anthropologists compare two sets of DNA, they don’t go through and compare every codon. If they tried, they’d be at it till doomsday. Too many codons. What they do instead is take strands of DNA from each animal, and divide each strand in half, lengthwise. That’s easier than it sounds—the strands will split under gentle heating. So, let’s say you have the left-hand strand from a human and the right-hand side from a test animal. You drop both of them into a test tube and basic biochemistry says they’ll stick together at each point where the two strands have the same coding—and not stick where they are different. Measure the strength of the hybrid strands’ bond and you’ve directly measured the overall similarity of the two parent strands. So we can measure similarity without having to read the code itself.
“Now, as I said, all mutations are not equally important, and a little genetic mutation can result in a big change in the organism. It’s just one tiny change or two that causes such drastic disorders as sickle-cell anemia, or Down’s syndrome, or some types of manic-depressive disorders.
“Somewhere in the genetic differences between Thursday and humans are a thousand or two equally tiny mutations that spell out the difference between her and us—but they are hard to find, camouflaged behind the billions or trillions of identical codings and the thousands or millions of unimportant mutations. The point is, there are DNA differences between Thursday and ourselves, but they are so small we can’t spot them easily, and a key coding looks just like a meaningless little blivet of code for earwax consistency. Or else four or five widely separated bits of code could be working in concert to determine intelligence, or manual dexterity—-or toenail toughness. But we don’t know which are the key micro-mutations. On a molecular level, the codings that make Thursday’s brain a third the size of yours and mine are probably not much larger, or more important, or more detectable, than the codings that decide that one human’s brain will be larger than another human’s.
There was a dead silence in the room.
“There are two other findings,” Livingston said quietly. “In spite of the closeness of the DNA match, there are other means, such as faster-mutating mitochondrial DNA, for dating the split, the time when Thursday’s ancestors split from ours. It was between 2.5 and 3 million years ago, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise. It fits in pretty well with the fossil evidence that has been gathered over the years.
“But the last thing. The last thing is the worst. Needless to say, the molecular anthropology team was bothered by the incredible similarity between australopithecine and human DNA. They expected it to be close, but not close as it was. They ran new tests examining nuclear DNA piece by piece, instead of long strands all at once. They—they found some things in the DNA, long sequences, that aren’t just extremely similar to human DNA—they are identical to human DNA. They are human. When they did go through, codon by codon for the sections of DNA they have mapped, there were no unknown codings in those sections of Thursday’s genetic material. If those duplicate zones are factored out, Thursday gets to be a bit less similar to us, to be right where she should be, midway between humans and chimps.
“But those duplicate zones tell us something else.” Livingston paused again for a moment. “Part of the reason there is so little difference between human and australopithecine DNA is that there have been what the M.A. people called human ‘intrusions’ into the australopithecine gene pool. They can’t yet tell if it happened a hundred years ago, or two hundred thousand years back—or both. But it’s happened, very clearly it’s happened.
“Humans, true humans like you and me, have interbred with Thursday’s fairly recent ancestors.”
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Jeffery Grossington found himself wandering again that night, lost in thought. Boiseans and humans interbreeding? His whole world was slipping away, again. He walked the grounds of the hospital, and found his steps leading to the outbuilding where Thursday was kept. On impulse, he went in, went upstairs to her room. He went in through the observation room, and looked at her for a long time through the one-way glass.
She was sitting on the floor, playing with one of the manual dexterity tests, putting the right-shaped block in the right-shaped hole. Her movements were smooth, practiced, skilled, and she wore an expression of calm thought.
Grossington opened the door to her room proper and she looked up, a bit startled. “Hello, Thursday,” he signed.
“Hello.”
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She gestured toward the blocks. “I try learn. Learn blocks.”
Grossington smiled. “Me too. I try to learn.”
Thursday cocked her head at him and looked puzzled. “You know all. What you need try learn?”
Grossington shook his head. Suddenly, he remembered a question at that disastrous first press conference. The reporter wanted to know what he would ask a live australopithecine. It occurred to him he had never asked it. “I try learn answer to question. Maybe can you tell me. Thursday—what is a human being? What is a person?”
Thursday stared at him again. “I not know.”
Grossington shook his head sadly. “Nobody does,” he said out loud. “Not anymore.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
A PETITION
WHEREAS by their own admission scientists representing the Smithsonian Institution, and by extension, the government and people of the United States, did unlawfully kidnap and detain a person known as Thursday while in the Nation of Gabon, and
WHEREAS these same scientists, with the connivance and assistance of the United States Embassy to Gabon, the United States Air Force, and other United States government agencies, did illegally remove this same Thursday from Gabon to the United States in violation of international law regarding piracy and kidnapping, and
WHEREAS this same person Thursday has been held against her will, with no charges preferred or intended against her, and has been denied her right to legal counsel and representation when such representation was offered to her by the American Civil Liberties Union, the World Wildlife Fund Legal Defense Fund, Greenpeace, and many other worthy organizations, and
WHEREAS Thursday has been the subject of repeated and relentless so-called scientific tests conducted on her person without her consultation or consent and
WHEREAS the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service are charged with enforcing laws involving kidnapping and the illegal abduction of persons into this country,
WE THE UNDERSIGNED hereby petition the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service to assure Thursday the full protection of the law, to free her from her illegal and unjust imprisonment, and to provide her with a
ll lawful assistance, allowing her to choose of her own free will whether to remain here or to return to her native shores, and to investigate and prosecute those responsible for this flagrant violation of federal civil rights laws . . . .
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Barbara hesitated before entering Thursday’s room. Was today the day to try the first step? Thursday had made great strides in her signing over the past month, and for that matter, so had Barbara. She had some intelligence all right, but would it be sufficient to get the idea across today? Was Thursday up to understanding enough? Would she ever be? Forget it, Barbara thought. There’ll never be as many answers as questions in this business. She took a deep breath and opened the door.
There was Thursday, sitting on the edge of her bed, looking with rapt attention at the drawings in a picture book—that she was holding upside down. Another intriguing mystery. It was pretty clear that she could see and understand that a flat picture was a representation of something else. She could see a kitten in a picture of a kitten—if you showed her the picture right side up. But she simply could not see it as the same image when she looked at it upside down. Could not, or perhaps would not. Some of the researchers thought there were times when she was just as happy to look at the shapes and colors as abstracts, and choose not to puzzle out a picture’s meaning, whereas a human eye would insist on trying to fit the pictures to a pattern, an image. A human would match the upside-down picture to an upside-down image of a cat, realize the book was the wrong way to, and correct the error. Thursday didn’t work that way. By choice or capacity, to her, one copy of Mother Goose was four equally interesting books—one each right-side up, upside down, and on its side either way.
Barbara made a scuffling noise to get Thursday’s attention without startling her. Thursday looked up from her book, grunted with pleasure, and dropped Mother Goose on the floor. The whole room had long since lost its prison-barracks spareness and developed a sloppy, comfortably lived-in look, with the toys and gadgets used to test Thursday strewn everywhere, and bright-colored blankets and pillows scattered on the floor. It reminded Barbara of her own room as a teen-ager.
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