by John Darnton
Jude drove fast, one arm resting on the open window and his foot solidly on the gas, moving smoothly in and out of the fast lane to pass every car in sight. He wanted to put New York far behind them, but it also felt good, therapeutic even, to command a machine and push it hard, concentrating on little else. They didn't stop for food until they were deep into the Amish country of Pennsylvania. They pulled off the turnpike at an exit and found a roadhouse that served large hamburgers smothered in onions.
Tizzie took over the wheel. She put on her glasses—she was nearsighted. On the way back to the turnpike, they passed a horse-drawn wagon with a rear lantern. Sitting up in the driver's perch was a solitary man dressed in a dark jacket; he did not look at them as they passed.
"Who is that?" asked Skyler.
Tizzie told him about the Amish and their religious beliefs that caused them to shun modernity. He asked her what religion she belonged to; she said she had been raised without any religion in a household of atheists. But lately she had begun to read the Bible, and felt more and more of an attraction to its teachings.
"But I thought science contradicted it," said Skyler. "How can you be someone who believes in science and also uphold religion?"
"There's no contradiction at all," she replied. "A number of great scientists are religious believers. Some of them say that the more they learn and discover, the greater is their belief. Their work reinforces their faith that there is a larger force than ourselves animating the universe."
Skyler contemplated the idea, and finally said: "I'm glad to hear you say that. On the island we weren't allowed to read the Bible ourselves. The only person who talked about it was Baptiste, and he sometimes read passages from the Book of Revelation. He said it depicted the end of the old world and the rise of science."
"It's an allegory. So people turn it into whatever they want."
Jude smiled at the exchange. Tizzie has taken it upon herself to be his mentor and guide, he thought. And I have to admit, he seems to be a fast learner. What was interesting about the thought, he realized, was how proud he himself felt.
Chapter 18
Jude and Skyler waited on a bench in the Animal Services unit of the Agricultural School of the University of Wisconsin. The day before, they had driven straight through to Chicago. Tizzie wanted to see her ailing parents in Milwaukee again, and the two of them had decided to meet another scientist recommended by the science editor, so they had driven to Madison. Jude had called ahead for an appointment; he'd said he needed an interview for a magazine article.
The campus on the edge of Lake Mendota seemed to go on forever. The agricultural school at 1675 Observatory Drive was like a small farm, with a silo and a large red barn connected to animal pens—yet this farm was on the cutting edge of research that was pushing embryology into a new and unknown world.
A young man approached down a corridor, his hair long enough to brush his shoulders; he was wearing a checked shirt, black chinos and cowboy boots. It wasn't until he extended his hand that they realized this was the person they had come to see. Dr. Julian Hartman was an eukaryotic cell biologist so adept at transferring nuclei from one cell to another that he was known as "the man with golden hands." He was also said to have a lock on the Nobel Prize someday soon.
He must have read the surprise upon their faces.
"I know," he said good-naturedly. "Everyone thinks I must be older than I am."
Hartman gave them a quick tour of the lab, which was smaller than they'd expected, consisting of only three rooms. One contained a large freezer modified with twenty small doors and a computer-run temperature-control system. The other two rooms were for lab work. Each had two large double-vision inverted microscopes fitted with hydraulic manipulators for minuscule movements.
Across one wall was an illuminated panel, similar to those used by radiologists, but instead of X rays it displayed blown-up photos of eggs. Most were attached by suction to a blunt-nosed retainer. Some were pierced by a glass pipette sharpened to a point. The pipette looked like a vacuum cleaner hose, and the nucleus it was taking out looked like a ball that just fit inside it.
Hartman provided a narrative of the photos, explaining step by step how the nucleus was removed from an unfertilized egg and another nucleus put in its place, then given a tiny shock—1.25 kilovolts for 80 microseconds—to complete the merger and kick-start the process of cell division.
"Electric shock to start it off. Ironic, isn't it, when you think of Frankenstein? Maybe Mary Shelley was right, after all."
Nearby was a bulletin board pinned with photographs of animals. There were cattle, sheep, rabbits, even white rats. Many came in pairs or triplets or quadruples, and when Jude examined them, he realized that all the animals in each group looked exactly alike. Dates of birth were scrawled below.
"My children," said Hartman, following Jude's glance. "It bugs my wife to no end when I say that."
He pointed at a picture of two sheep looking up rather stupidly from a straw-filled pen.
"Mabel and Muriel. My first success. They're still kicking—in fact, they're mothers themselves now. I didn't produce all of these. There are four or five of us in this line of work around the world, and whenever we have a success, we send off a photo to the others. Bragging rights."
"But why?" asked Skyler. "I don't mean, why do you send photos. I mean, why do it at all? What do you hope to get?"
"The potential applications are almost too numerous to describe," Hartman replied. "For one thing, imagine being able to keep cells frozen to conserve genetic material in endangered species. You could bring them to life whenever you wanted, and create as many or as few as you needed."
He picked up a photo of a sheep. "This is Tracey. She was produced at the Roslin Institute, the same place that gave us Dolly. She has been made to carry a gene for an enzyme known as alpha one antitrypsyn, and she expresses this protein in her milk so you can milk her and extract it. It is extremely important, because it is the protein that is missing in people with the lung disorder emphysema.
"Lots of other work is going on to eliminate diseases and produce pharmaceutical proteins and allow trans-species organ transplantation. Pigs are in many ways ideal as donors, but the human body usually rejects their organs. If we could modify their cells, we would have an endless supply. Do you know that, every year, three thousand people in the U.S. die on the waiting list for organs, and another hundred thousand die before they even make it onto the list?
"Farmers have always had prize animals. A perfect cow. Imagine taking that cow and producing hundreds. Or maybe front-ending the process—producing thousands in a lab and selecting out the ones you want and maybe changing them here or there by adding or subtracting a gene. And then, when you get the truly perfect one, through cloning you could just keep it going and produce an endless number.
"The key thing is the number. Genetic modification is difficult. You don't know where to insert the gene, and you can't tell where it's going to end up. But if we can culture cells in a dish in the thousands or the millions, we don't have to insert it with precision. We don't even have to know exactly how it works. All we have to do is to be able to locate it. Then we just select only those cells which carry the modification we require. See, when you've got millions, you can modify them all in bulk and look for the ones you need."
"So basically," said Jude, "it's like imitating the conditions for evolution, but doing it all at once, all at the same time."
"Precisely," said Hartman, beaming.
"And you're the one who's doing the choosing, not nature or God or the environment or circumstance."
"Right again."
"But doesn't it ever go wrong?"
Hartman smiled. "Look, I won't pretend there aren't problems. It's a tricky business. Let's face it, you're subjecting that little cell to a lot of poking and prodding. You actually invade it and perform major surgery. You're implanting an alien set of chromosomes—maybe the chromosomes aren't in a resting state, maybe
they'll divide out of synch with the embryonic cells. If you're lucky, the embryo will die. And they do—Doctors Wilmut and Campbell produced Dolly, but to get her, there were two hundred and seventy-six embryos that died at various stages."
"Are there abnormalities that live?"
"Of course. You don't hear about those, naturally. There are all kinds of reports and rumors about gigantism."
"Gigantism. Whats that?"
"They simply grow too big. Sometimes too big for the surrogate mother to give birth to. Many of the cattle clones done by the Grenada company in Texas showed this abnormality. We don't know yet what's responsible.
"Look, life's not perfect. Mistakes happen even in nature—especially in nature. There comes a time when you just have to bow down before it. You know your body changes with age. What's that mean on the level of individual cells? They change, too. They reproduce over and over, and little mistakes creep in. Proteins misread or miscopy all those miles of DNA. It's like a Xerox machine that is constantly on the go, where the copies don't just fade but actually drop letters or add letters here and there. After a million copies have been run off, the document isn't nearly as legible.
"So now what happens if we take the nucleus of an old cell and put it inside a new egg? Do we really have a brand-new fertilized egg ready to take on the challenge of life? Or do we have a tired old nucleus inside a young egg? That's a question nobody knows the answer to.
"And you know when we'll know?"
Jude shook his head.
"We'll know if we start getting a lot of strange-looking human beings."
Hartman's tour had come to an end. He sat down at a wooden table near his desk.
Skyler, who had been quiet most of the time, spoke up. "And is it possible, Dr. Hartman, to clone human beings?"
Hartman smiled, the kind of smile that suggested he had been asked that question innumerable times before.
"Let me put it this way. All the prerequisites are in place. In vitro fertilization—by far the most essential—has been done since 1971. The ability to enucleate DNA—getting better and better all the time. Freezing sperm cells and egg cells—we've been doing that for years. So all the machinery's there. If we can do it with lesser mammals—and we have—we can do it with humans. In fact, there's only one barrier."
"What's that?"
"Public opposition. Ethics. A sense a lot of people have that its a violation of nature or what nature intends."
"But if a group came along and didn't feel itself bound by ethical considerations, could it, say, produce a child, clone it, freeze the clone, and then reactivate it years later?"
"Sure. The science is there. You're talking about the merger of two already existing and well-understood procedures—cloning and cryopreservation. In March 1998 a baby was born in Los Angeles from an embryo that had been frozen for seven and a half years. They thought it was a record until they learned that a baby born in Philadelphia had come from an embryo that had been frozen four months longer.
"Of course—for delayed cloning—you'd have to have a compelling reason to do it. I mean, who would want to have a child and then want to produce an exact duplicate years later? There's only one reason I can think of—or at least one acceptable reason."
"And that is?" asked Jude.
"Grief. If you had a child that you loved, and that child died, and the loss was so unbearably painful, you might want to try to re-create him. Of course, that would be hopeless—it ignores all the psychological and other physiological factors that form a personality. And anyway, the scenario presumes that the parent is already thinking about replacing the child before the birth, and even for total pessimists, that's a bit of a stretch."
"You said one acceptable reason," noted Skyler. "What's the unacceptable one?"
"It's too absurd even to talk about. It's the province of sci fi writers, and it could never happen."
"But for the sake of discussion, what is it?"
"Well, it would be to create a bank of spare parts. We were talking about organ transplants earlier. Despite all the advances, we're still in the Dark Ages. We still have to flood the recipient patient with immunosuppression drugs; sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. We set up elaborate computer files to search for that one-in-a-thousand match for bone marrow. We put people on lists waiting for other people to get into fatal accidents. Imagine being able to perform a transplant without fearing that the body's immune system will reject the organ. The organ wouldn't be foreign, because its genetic makeup would be identical to the one it is replacing. It would already rightfully belong to the host. All those wonderful tiny commandos that have been trained to hunt down intruders—the leukocyte antigens and T cells—they'd be disarmed. The body would welcome it with open arms. That's been a dream of surgeons for thirty years, ever since Christiaan Barnard put the heart from a twenty-four-year-old woman who died in a car crash into the chest of fifty-five-year-old Louis Washkansky and gave him an extra eighteen days of life."
Hartman had worked himself up into a speech and seemed a little embarrassed by it. Jude and Skyler remained silent.
The scientist took a piece of paper from a pad on his desk and unclipped a pen from his breast pocket, scribbling something. He handed it to Skyler.
"Let's talk more. Here's my address. Come for dinner tonight. Seven o'clock. Needless to say—informal."
"One final question," said Jude. "Is there a record of transplants? That list you spoke of, is it accessible and could someone go back and look at all the transplants that were done?"
"Certainly," replied Hartman. "The computer's database holds every transplant ever performed in every hospital in the country. If you want, I can gain access for you."
"I would appreciate that."
¨
Tizzie took a taxi to her house, and as it drove along familiar Lake Drive, lined with oaks and green lawns, she felt a nostalgic tug. She knew every tree, every twist in the road. They all retained memories for her, even memories just beyond reach that she nonetheless knew were there. The world of her childhood, so secure and now so distant, never lessened its hold upon her.
She had been raised an only child, never understanding that tone of sympathy in people's voice when they learned of it. For her it was glorious to stand at the center of her parents' love, no competitor for their affection or even their attention. She was free to sulk like a child at the age of fifteen or to pretend to maturity at twelve. When she cried at night out of fear, they would come running, both of them. She tried it sometimes just to test them, and they never failed her. They both came, but when she replayed it in her memory, it was her father's hands reaching down to her that she remembered.
They had spent their first years out west, a time she was too young to remember, and then they had bought the house in White Fish Bay. She did not remember much about where they had come from, but she remembered the day they had arrived, the excitement of the moving van, their belongings looking so peculiar packed and jammed together all in one huge truck. Her doll carriage had been placed in its own cardboard box. The other children on the block had gathered on the sidewalk and examined the contents, while she had pretended to ignore them. But within a day, they had become friends.
Her father was a doctor, and for a while his office was in an annex of their house. She loved going there, the medicinal smells, his black bag, the stethoscope, the scales, and once or twice she snuck in and hid in a closet to watch while he examined patients. Some years later, when his practice grew, he moved it to a clinic of brick buildings and clipped lawns, and they gave the office over to her for sleepovers, to be plastered with posters of the Carpenters and Abba and, later, heavy metal groups.
Her childhood was idyllic except for a period of intense nightmares that made every evening a time of incipient terror as bedtime approached. "Night terror" was, in fact, a name she heard her father use once, in a hushed conversation with her mother. It came, she heard him theorize, from a child's coming to grips with the c
oncept of death. Her uncle had recently died, and at his funeral he had been laid out in an open casket, his jowls gray and puffy and frighteningly cold-looking. Her father said the phase would pass, and so it did, but somehow she felt it had marked her.
The uncle who had died, Ben, had been her favorite. He would blow into town in a red convertible and take her for a spin, breaking the speed limit. It was like playing hooky. If Ben was the prodigal son, though, her other uncle, Henry, was the priggish opposite. He rarely spoke to her or even seemed to notice her, and on those occasions when he did, she felt as if she were in the principal's office. And yet he was of supreme importance in their household and a powerful influence in her upbringing. When he visited, her parents seemed to wait on him and to hang on his words. She was made to feel that she must never, ever be impolite to him.
Like many only children, she was coddled and protected. Health was paramount. She was given vitamins and diet supplements; her father examined her at the least sign of illness, and her inoculations were kept up to date. The pencil marks on the wall to record her growth spurts were not frivolous—they were read as signposts of a sound body. Her father offered her a gold watch if she would reach eighteen without lighting a cigarette, and threatened to ground her for a month if she did. She won the watch.
But her adolescence turned predictably and proverbially stormy. She began fighting with her parents, mostly with her mother but even with her father, sulking and slamming doors and bursting out in tears. She threatened to leave. And one day she did leave, having saved enough money to take a bus to San Francisco. She had visions of joining the flower children, except that, of course, she got there fifteen years too late. North Beach was a wasteland of druggies and wastrels, and one night, staying in a flophouse, she was mugged by two men. The next day she called home, and her father sent her money to come home. She didn't venture far after that, until Berkeley, and when she left for there, she had the queasy sense that she was abandoning her parents.
