Besides being a friend, he soon came to see Jesus as a fellow sufferer - not little by little but quite abruptly, when he came to the end of the Gospel according to St Matthew. ‘Eli, Eli, lamma sabaktáni: that is, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? ” ’ That sentence struck him like a bolt of lightning. God had deserted his own Son. He had abandoned Him to his fate. This was only too familiar to Victor. Hadn’t his own father likewise abandoned him?
Did Victor imagine himself to be Jesus? Certainly not, because, first, he possessed no imagination. Secondly, he did realise that Jesus and he were two separate beings. It would be more accurate to say that Victor thought that he was like Jesus. They shared the same fate and therefore they were both good. Jesus had done more good than Victor, to be sure, but Victor still had plenty of time to catch up. If he became a doctor, then at least he’d be able to heal the sick. That’s the way he thought. If . . . then.
There was one thing he just couldn’t understand: how had his own father ever become a doctor? Doctors were supposed to do good, weren’t they?
Over time, Karl Hoppe’s medical practice began to thrive once more. The doctor had seen the error of his ways - in the opinion of the villagers, anyway; though they did ask themselves what on earth his son was doing at that school. But at least Victor was now safely in God’s hands again. Which was how Father Kaisergruber put it.
The doctor himself, however, was not doing so well, his patients noticed. It was difficult to draw him into conversation. He seldom laughed any more. He was losing weight. He did continue to practise medicine, and to do his job well, which was the most important thing, wasn’t it?
He doesn’t even look me in the eye - that’s how far it’s gone; that’s how far I’ve allowed it to go. That was how Karl Hoppe put it to himself whenever his son was home for a few days, after months away at school.
It also struck him that Victor’s intelligence seemed to be progressing in leaps and bounds. His homework, in grammar as well as arithmetic, was increasingly difficult. And Brother Rombout confirmed this. He said that Victor was his best student, head and shoulders ahead of the other boys.
The doctor always had to swallow when he heard that. He never let on that Victor had once been declared feeble-minded.
He wanted to know if his son was as silent in the classroom as he was at home.
‘Yes,’ the brother affirmed, ‘Victor is rather introverted. A lot goes in, but not much comes out.’ Then he added: ‘He doesn’t have any friends.’
There’s another thing Victor and I won’t ever be, thought the doctor: friends.
Later he again made a mental list of all the things his son might hold against him. There were times when he was ready to discuss these things with Victor. He wanted Victor to know what his mother had been like and why the two of them had decided to send him to the institution. He also considered giving Victor the patient file the sisters had kept on him - he had never been able to bring himself to throw it out, perhaps because he wasn’t quite ready to pretend that that chapter in Victor’s life had never really happened. He also intended to explain to Victor some day why he had hit him. What he wanted to say was that something had just come over him, something more powerful than he was. Finally, he would like to ask Victor to forgive him.
But every time he made up his mind to talk to him, he would decide at the last minute that it was better for Victor to forget rather than forgive. The blows he had dealt him would probably be the hardest thing for his son to forget, but the years the boy had spent in the mental institution were bound to fade from his memory in good time. He had been so young, after all. And who remembers what happened before their fifth birthday anyway?
The seventeenth of December 1980, early morning.
‘Done it.’
‘Victor?’
‘Yes, it’s Victor.’
‘Victor, it’s four-fifteen in the morning!’
‘Done it,’ he said again.
‘What have you done?’ asked Rex Cremer, annoyed.
‘The mice. The clones.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I’ve cloned the mice.’
The dean was dumbstruck. Victor’s flat tone of voice, as if he were simply reporting something routine, was completely at odds with the bombshell he’d just delivered.
‘Victor, are you serious?’
‘Yes.’
‘How many are there?’
‘Three.’
‘Where are you? Are you at the university?’
‘I’m here, yes.’
‘I’m on my way.’
On the way to the university Rex Cremer tried to work it out in his head. Fifteen months had gone by since he had recruited Victor and in that time Victor had not produced anything remarkable. The other biologists had urged Rex to put an end to the experiment, but he had stood his ground and backed Dr Hoppe. His stance was informed not so much by hope as by the fact that he was not yet ready to admit that he’d been wrong about Victor. When he had been woken by the phone call that morning, he had just come back from a week’s holiday. He had spoken with Victor just before he left. If what Victor had told him on the phone was true, then at the time they’d spoken the embryos had already been implanted, the birth of the mice imminent. Yet Victor hadn’t breathed a word - as if he had been reluctant to say anything until he possessed some concrete proof.
When the dean arrived on campus, he went straight to the lab, where he found Victor hunched over a microscope.
‘So where are they, Victor?’
Without raising his head Victor pointed at a table in a corner of the lab. It held a Plexiglas cage half-filled with shredded paper. Rex leaned down and counted seven young mice and one grown white mouse. He immediately saw that the half-naked mice were several days old; he had assumed that they’d just been born. So Victor had kept quiet about this even longer than he’d thought.
‘How old are they?’ he asked.
Victor wagged four fingers above his head.
‘In that case why did you wait to call me until now?’
‘Because I couldn’t be sure until I could tell what colour they were,’ Victor replied, sliding another Petri dish under the microscope. ‘I had to wait until the hair started growing in.’
The dean leaned down closely over the cage, and now he noticed the barely detectable colour difference.
‘White and brown mice?’
‘The ones with the brown coats are the clones,’ Victor informed him. ‘The white ones are normal mice. The clones are from the eggs of a black mouse; the eggs’ nuclei were replaced with nuclei from five-day-old embryos from a brown mother. And the surrogate birth mother was a white mouse.’
It took some time for his words to sink in. Rex tried repeating to himself what Victor had said. So Victor had removed the nuclei of the eggs of a black mouse and substituted donor nuclei from developing embryos that he had taken from a brown mouse. The three brown mice in the glass cage, therefore, had to be clones of mouse embryos; they weren’t the product of normal cell division. Victor had therefore succeeded, for the first time in the history of science, in cloning a mammal. Rex was flabbergasted.
‘By Jove, you did it!’ he cried.
But Victor did not respond. He was adjusting the microscope with his left hand while jotting something down on a sheet of paper with his right.
The dean turned back to the mice. ‘Victor, this is a world first,’ he said emphatically. ‘Do you realise?’
‘The world will know about it soon enough,’ Victor replied flatly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve already written the report and sent it off, to the editor of Cell.’
‘But you can’t! You mustn’t. I mean . . . You should have presented it to us first, or to me, at the very least. That’s not the way we do things here. Certainly not in this case.’
‘It had to be done quickly,’ Victor replied.
Rex took a deep breath, his eyes fixed on his colleague’s back
.
‘And why Cell?’ he asked. ‘You gave your last article to Science. It has greater impact, surely?’
‘They ask too many questions.’
‘But they have to! That is why they—’
‘There are times when one should simply accept the facts.’
‘Victor, you are extremely accomplished, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to account for what you do.’
‘I don’t have to answer to anyone,’ Victor answered sullenly. Pushing his stool back, he stood up and strode over to the table. He picked up one of the cloned mice, set the little animal on the palm of his hand and pointed it at the dean.
‘This is my answer,’ he said.
Rex stared at Victor in astonishment. It wasn’t his words or his anger that surprised him, but his altered appearance. He now sported a carroty beard, something Rex had never seen on him, and there were heavy blue bags under his eyes, setting off the paleness of the skin on his forehead and cheekbones. He must have gone without shaving for at least a week and probably hadn’t slept much in all that time either.
‘Victor, how long have you been at work?’
Victor glanced at his watch, and then looked away, as if trying to count how many hours he’d been awake. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Victor . . .’
Victor was stroking his beard absent-mindedly.
‘Victor,’ Rex said again, ‘perhaps you should go and rest for a few hours. I’ll stay here and cover for you in the meantime.’
Victor nodded and stared at the mouse on top of his hand. He cautiously ran his finger a few times down the animal’s spine, as if wanting to reassure it before he left. Then he put the mouse back in the cage with the other mice, turned on his heel and walked to the door.
‘Victor, where can I find your report?’ asked Rex. ‘I’d like to read it.’
‘By the fax machine,’ he replied, circling his left hand in the air.
Rex Cremer wondered what all the fuss had been about, for the article was exceptionally explicit and clear. Victor had described the method he’d used thoroughly, step by step. After each step, moreover, he had evaluated the results, and had even posed a few critical questions at the end, as if to involve other scientists in the quest for answers. Furthermore, he had stressed the importance to his method of cytochalasin B, the agent about which Cremer had already published his own article. Finally, he had been able to support all of the results with data that would have been inconceivable before.
When the dean gave the other biologists at the university the news, they were quite indignant at first, but after reading the report they too were forced to admit that the method he described was indeed revolutionary - and, on first perusal, so simple that it was really a wonder nobody had thought of it before. They looked forward to hearing the reaction from the scientific community when the article was published.
That happened on 10 January 1981. Cell published a full-page photo of the cloned mice on its cover, and Victor Hoppe’s piece was the lead article. The reaction was overwhelming. Prominent scientists from all over the world were filled with astonishment, but gave generous praise - the word ‘genius’ was touted more than once - and the news was written up in both national and foreign newspapers. Requests for interviews with Victor Hoppe came pouring in, but he turned down every one, nor was he prepared to pose for any photographs with his mice. After much persuasion he finally did give in somewhat, granting the university permission to circulate the passport photo taken of him when he had been hired, the same one he had on his ID badge. At the time that photo was taken he hadn’t yet had the beard, which he was never to shave off again.
Rex Cremer was the university’s spokesman and, as one might have expected, he was asked by the members of the press if this meant that cloning humans was now a possibility and if Dr Hoppe, or any other scientist, might venture to do so. Rex told them that it was too early even to think about walking on two legs when the science had only just begun to crawl. He also stressed that these clones were clones grown from embryos, and that the cloning of adult animals would be quite another story. For that to happen one would have to use the nuclei of mature cells, cells that had already developed some specific function. We certainly won’t see it happening in this century, he declared, and he believed it too.
Strictly speaking, Victor ought to have repeated his experiment, even if only once, because reproducibility is an essential scientific principle. But his mind didn’t work that way. It told him he had to go on to the next step. If he managed to achieve one thing, then he would have to start on the next. If . . . then. That was what he knew. Not if . . . if. But Rex Cramer, who had tried several times in vain to get Victor to repeat the experiment, didn’t know that.
‘Victor, you must repeat the experiment. You can’t just assume that it will work a second time. Besides, there are a number of questions unanswered. Do cloned mice live as long as other mice? Can they reproduce? Are the offspring fertile? These are points other scientists have already been raising, Victor, and I find myself unable to give them any answers.’
‘Time will tell,’ said Victor.
‘But even then you’ll have to show that your experiment wasn’t just a fluke,’ Rex said, raising his voice. ‘There’s no way round it.’
‘Only circus animals repeat their tricks over and over again.’
‘OK, then what do you want to do, Victor?’
‘I want to clone adult mammals.’
The dean sighed.
‘If I succeed,’ Victor went on, ‘that will be proof enough that my technique works. Isn’t that what they want?’
‘But they won’t wait. It’ll take years.’
‘It won’t take me years.’
‘Victor, be sensible, just this once. I know your abilities, but—’
‘It is feasible, if the donor cells can be deprogrammed,’ Victor broke in. ‘If we can return them to their elemental stage. Back to G0. Another possibility is to alter the programming of the receptor eggs. That can be done by electrical stimulation. Anyway, the cycles have to be synchronised at the moment of fusion, because if not you’ll get abnormal chromosomes.’
For a moment Rex wished he could tell Victor that he was wrong, but he couldn’t. What Victor was saying made eminent sense, and the way he described it made it seem so straightforward that it was almost as if all he had to do was pour some liquids into a bottle and shake them up a bit.
‘Victor, the faculty will never approve . . .’
‘I’m doing it anyway.’
‘That’s not the way we work here. I’ve already told—’
‘If I can’t do it here, then—’
‘Goddamn it, Victor, you’re not making it easy for me! You’re lucky that I’ve always stood by you so far, I hope you realise that!’
‘I’ve never asked you to.’
‘That is true,’ the dean was forced to admit, with a sigh. He realised he was facing a serious dilemma. If he forced Victor to play by the rules, Victor would leave. And that, naturally, would mean a great loss to his department, which had just been given a large grant by the university to continue the research. But if he were to give Victor carte blanche, the other biologists, who did have to be accountable for their work, were sure to raise a ruckus. It might just have been possible to indulge Victor in this if he had shown a little more team spirit and openness with his confrères, but that had not been the case. He was not in any way cut out for teamwork. He would not listen to authority, never took other people into account and never showed appreciation for anything or anyone else. His talent did make up for that to some extent, but for how much longer?
‘Victor, give me some time to think it over.’
‘There is no time.’
‘What difference can a few days make?’
‘God created the world in a few days.’
‘Victor, you’re driving me insane! Listen . . .’
Suddenly Rex pulled himself up short. Onc
e again, Victor had mentioned God, and something clicked in Rex’s mind. He had always considered Victor’s allusions to God as some sort of joke, but suddenly he wasn’t so sure. In the fifteen months that he had known him Victor had never once told a joke. He’d never even laughed at anyone else’s jokes; he took everything seriously. The dean hadn’t really thought about this until now, but it was possible that Victor was entirely serious when he talked about God. Rex did not believe in God himself, he had not been raised religious. His parents were free-thinkers and had always left it up to him whether to believe or not.
‘You don’t have to answer this, but . . .’ he began, and perhaps he was even hoping he would not get an answer: ‘. . . do you believe in God?’
‘As the creator of all living things - yes, I do,’ answered Victor, as if it were a given.
‘And then who created God?’
‘Man.’
For a moment the dean was rattled, not only by the sincerity of Victor’s answer but equally by the response itself. God had made man and man had made God - that was what it boiled down to. The one led to the other, and the other led back to the first. It was extraordinarily simple, as simple as all of Victor’s explanations. It made Rex think of the snake that bites its own tail, devouring more and more of itself until there’s nothing left. It made sense in a logical way, but from a practical standpoint it was impossible. When Rex taught a genetics class, he often used the snake example to demonstrate the difference between religion and science. In religion, proof was immaterial; in science, proof was all that mattered. He had always regarded religion and science as being completely separate things. An unbridgeable chasm lay between them. But evidently that chasm did not exist for Victor; or perhaps it did, but there was a bridge spanning it - with Victor standing on the bridge. Which would also explain his behaviour, and especially his mindset. As he had once said, some things simply had to be taken for granted. That was the religious man speaking, not the scientist. So, in that sense, a single positive result was all the proof Victor needed; and that was why, in his view, further testing was unnecessary.
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