Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  “It still sounds like bullshit to me,” the policeman repeated, as if he were some obstinate DNA satellite hopelessly intent on taking over an entire genome.

  “You might not like its implications, Chief Inspector,” I said, tiredly, “but that’s not enough to make it bullshit. I don’t know exactly how Hemans did it, because he isn’t going to tell us until he gets some guarantees, but I already know how I’d go about trying to copy the trick, now that I know that it can be done. Transforming and activating the protogenes is probably the easy part, given that every sequencer in the world is avid to learn how to write as well as read the language of the bases. I’m pretty sure I could figure out a way to do that. If I could also figure out a way to delay an embryo’s phylotypic stage—that’s the moment at which the control of an embryo’s development is transferred from the maternal environment to the embryo’s own genes—I might be able to stop the homeotic genes kicking in at all. Given that the onset of the phylotypic stage is much later in some species than others that doesn’t seem be any great hurdle to leap. A careful inspection of the research Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby published before they got together at Hollinghurst Manor suggests that they were probably using human maternal tissue as a mediator in the embryonic induction process. That’s not genetic engineering, of course—there’s no law against interspecific transplantation of mature tissues or the use of human somatic cells in tissue-cultures. Believe me, sir: Applied Homeotics is a whole new field of biotechnology. None of the existing rules apply.”

  “So you’re telling me that every fucking farm animal in the realm—not to mention every household pet—is potentially human?” The Special Branch man was looking at me with as much contempt and distaste as Hemans had, but with even less justification.

  “No,” I said, patiently. “I’m telling you that the embryos they produce as parents are now potentially human. It still adds a whole new dimension to the ethics of animal usage, but we don’t yet know how far that dimension extends. We can be reasonably sure that birds and reptiles don’t have the required stocks of protein-template genes, and some of the smaller mammals probably don’t have them either, but the question of where the limits of potential metamorphosis actually lie is a minor one. The point is that unless we’re the victims of a monstrous hoax, humanity is determined almost entirely by the development of the embryo. If so, Hemans is right. Alice and all her kind are as human as you or I. An even more important question, of course, is what this kind of technology might allow us to make of human beings.”

  I paused for effect, but nobody jumped in with an exclamation of astonishment. They were all waiting, guardedly, to see what came next.

  “We, after all, are merely nature’s humans,” I told them. “We’re a product of the rough-and-ready process of natural selection, and control of the expression of our genes has been left to other genes. Homeotic genes were never an ideal solution to the problem of embryo-formation—they were just the best improvisation that DNA could come up with on its own. Alice’s humanity is the product of relatively unskilled artifice—and the evidence we’ve so far seen suggests that relatively unskilled artifice might already be the slightly better maker of men. If it isn’t, then it certainly will be, just as soon as we bring our ingenuity fully to bear on the problem.

  “The genie’s out of the bottle, gentlemen. We can pass all the laws we like against the genetic engineering of human beings, and we can make sure, if we care to, that what Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby have actually done to pig embryos will in future fall within the scope of those laws—but that won’t alter the fact that human beings and the world they have made are imperfect in more ways than any of us would care to count, and that Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby have found a new way to allow us to set to work on those imperfections. If Alice is telling the truth, we’ve already passed through the looking-glass, and there’s no way back. You might be able to stop the animals walking and talking, but you won’t be able to stop the people. If a mere pig can be a better human than any of us, imagine what our own children might become, with the proper assistance!”

  The minister and his junior nodded gravely, but that was just the legacy of good schooling by their image-consultants. The chief inspector looked dumbfounded. The permanent under-secretary was the only one who was keeping up, after his own crude fashion. “You’re talking about building a master race,” he said, reflexively. If in doubt, hoist a scarecrow.

  “I’m talking about D-I-Y supermen,” I told him, frankly. “I’m talking about something that can be done with standard equipment on a chicken-feed budget, after a little bit of practice on the family pet. I’m talking anarchy, not mad dictators. If you intend to make a deal with the Three Musketeers, you need to know what cards they’re holding. It’s still conceivable that they’re bluffing, and that Alice was just feeding us a line, but I can’t believe that—and if they’re not bluffing, the old world has already ended. The GE-Crime Unit will catch up with the runaways eventually, but it’s already too late. Their story has been told, and will be told, again and again and again.”

  Nobody told me I was crazy. The policeman might have lacked imagination, but he wasn’t stupid enough to continue to argue that his reflexive prejudices were worth more than my educated judgment. “We could still shoot the lot,” he muttered—but he knew, deep down, that it wouldn’t do the trick, even if that option could be put back on the agenda.

  “What can we do?” asked the permanent under-secretary, who had already moved reluctantly on to the next stage.

  I knew that it wouldn’t be easy to persuade him, but nobody ever said that working for the Home Office was going to be easy. The instinct of government is to govern, to take control, to keep as tight a hold on the reins as humanly possible.

  “Basically,” I said, “we have two options. We can be Napoleon, or we can be Snowball. Neither way will be easy—in fact, I suspect that all hell has already been let loose—so I figure that we might as well try to do the right thing. For once in our lives, let’s not even try to stand in the way of progress. I know you’re not going to be grateful for the advice, but my vote is that we simply let them all go and let them get on with it.”

  “Let public opinion take care of them, you mean,” the junior minister said, still trying his damnedest to misunderstand. “Let the mob take care of them, the way they take care of child molesters.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, let artifice take its course. Let the pioneers of Applied Homeotics do what they have to, and what they can. Even the pigs.”

  It wasn’t easy to persuade them, but Hemans and his collaborators had a battery of lawyers on their side, as well as reason and stubbornness, and in the end, the situation simply wasn’t governable, even by the government. Eventually, I made them see that.

  They weren’t grateful, of course, but I never expected them to be. Sometimes, you just have to settle for being right.

  * * * *

  By the time I saw Alice again she was twenty-two and famous, although she never went anywhere without her bodyguards. She came to my lab to see what I was working on, and to thank me for the small part I had played in winning her precarious freedom.

  “You did save my life,” I pointed out, when we’d done the tour and had time to reflect.

  “That was Ed and Kath,” she admitted. “They were the ones who picked you up and dragged you down the stairs. All I did was hit you with the axe when you tried to grab it.”

  “But you hit me with the flat bit, not the edge,” I said. “If you’d hit me with the edge, I’d be dead—and so, I suspect, would you.”

  “They really wanted to kill us all,” she said, as if it were still very hard for her to comprehend.

  “Only some of them—and only because they didn’t understand,” I told her, hoping that it was the truth. “None of us understood, not even Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby, although they’d had longer to think about it than anybody else. None of us really understood what it meant to be hum
an, because we’d never had to explore the limits of the argument before—and none of us understood what scope there was for us to be more than human. We simply didn’t realize how easy it is to be creative, once you have the basic stock of protein-producing genes—and protogenes—to work with. Maybe we should have, given what we knew about the diversity of Earthly species and the unreliability of mutation as a means of change, but we didn’t. We needed a lesson to bring it home to us. How does it feel to be accepted as human just as the species is becoming obsolete?”

  “My children will have the same chances as anyone else’s,” she pointed out. I wasn’t so sure about that. She was now as human as anyone else, in law as well as in fact, but there were an awful lot of people who hadn’t yet conceded the point. My children, on the other hand, really would have opportunities of which I had never dreamed ten years before; the people who wanted to reserve the privileges of creativity to imaginary gods wouldn’t be able to stop my making sure of that.

  “I was sorry to hear about Hemans,” I said. Hemans had been taken out by a sniper eight months before. I had no reason to think that he and Alice were particularly close, but it seemed only polite to offer my condolences.

  “Me too,” she said. “It always upsets me to hear about my friends being shot.”

  “What happened at the manor really wasn’t a conspiracy,” I told her, although I’d never been entirely sure. “It was a genuine mistake. It’s in the nature of Armed Response Units that they sometimes make mistakes, especially when they’re working in the dark.”

  “I remember Dr. Hemans saying the same thing, afterwards,” she admitted. “But some mistakes work out better than others, don’t they?” She wasn’t talking about the wayward ways of mutation. She was talking about the freak of chance that made me go on when I should have turned back, and the one that had made Ed and Kath pause to pull me out of the fume-filled corridor and down the cellar steps to safety. She was talking about the freak of chance that had made me go on when things got tough at the Home Office, blowing my career in government in order to make sure that nobody could put a lid on it even for a little while, and that the government couldn’t even make a convincing show of governing the unfolding situation. She was talking about the mistake that Hemans and his colleagues had made when they decided to try something wildly ambitious, and found that it succeeded far too well. She was talking about the fact that science proceeds by trial and error, and that the errors sometimes turn out to be far more important than the intentions.

  “Yes they do,” I agreed. “If that weren’t the case, progress wouldn’t be possible at all. But it is. In spite of the fact that every significant advance in biotechnology is seen by the vast majority of horrified onlookers as a hideous perversion, we do make progress. We keep on passing through the looking glass, finding new worlds and new selves.”

  “You’ve been practicing,” she said. “Do you really think you can talk yourself back into the corridors of power?”

  “Not a snowball’s chance in hell,” I admitted. “But I did my bit for the revolution when I had the chance—and there aren’t many of nature’s humans who can say that, are there?”

  “There never used to be,” Alice admitted. “But things are different now. Human history is only just beginning.”

  THE LAST SUPPER

  I had reserved the table at Trimalchio’s way back in January, three months in advance. It was Tamara’s birthday treat, and I figured that it would also be the perfect occasion to ask her to marry me. I wanted the circumstances to be as favorable as possible to maximize my chances of success. Rumor has it that a lot of celebrities were clamoring to get in, not because they had any inkling of what was about to happen but simply because it was Saturday night—and ever since Jerome had joined the hallowed ranks of superstar chefs Trimalchio’s was the place to be seen—but Jerome wasn’t the kind of man to start canceling reservations in order to accommodate TV personalities. He was a man of honor.

  We had to run the gauntlet when we arrived, of course, but we weren’t in the least frightened. We didn’t feel that we were in any real danger from the anti-GM brigade who were baying for Jerome’s blood. They were very noisy, of course—their cause had been on the skids for years, and the hard core had responded by becoming even more fanatical and dogmatic—but they knew from bitter experience that attacking customers qualified as a instant PR disaster. The only people in physical danger were the members of the increasingly vociferous counter-demonstration: Jerome’s most ardent fans. For every banner proclaiming that he was a “Frankenstein Chef” or a “Kitchen Devil” there was one proclaiming him to be the messiah of the new gastronomy. There were even a few innocently hyperbolic placards carrying forward a grand old south London tradition that went way back to the 1960s and the first rock superstars, which simply said: JEROME IS GOD.

  I found the sprint from the taxi quite exhilarating, although Tamara was a little bit annoyed that none of the paparazzi bothered to aim a flashbulb in our direction. I assured her that she looked as good as any of the models who were distracting their attention, and apologized for the fact that mere riches didn’t make me as newsworthy as the sons of hereditary peers. She did look wonderful. Her peacock-blue evening dress and pastel hosiery were smart in the old sense as well as the new: a perfect refutation of the fashion-dinosaur argument that no matter how useful and hygienic they might be, active fibers would never look as good as ancient silks and velvets.

  We didn’t get the best table, of course. I suppose anyone who was there to be seen would have reckoned it the worst, and there was a distinct frown on Tamara’s face as we were shown to it, but it suited my purposes very well. I wanted to be in a quiet corner, where Tamara and I would have eyes only for one another. We didn’t have to worry about being unable to catch the waiter’s eye—the staff at Trimalchio’s was the best in London and it wasn’t as if we had any choices to make. Jerome’s clients were expected to eat and drink exactly what he provided and be grateful, and that was fine by us.

  When she had first read about him in the Style section of the Sunday Times, Tamara had been as fervent in her support of Jerome’s insistence on a set menu as she was of his determination to experiment with the best Genetically Modified foodstuffs that the world had to offer. “The man is a great artist,” she had assured me, way back on New Year’s Eve, in the course of what was then a purely hypothetical discussion. “He plans a meal as a perfect ensemble. He leaves pick-and-mix to the sweetie counter in Woolworth’s, where it belongs. I was at uni with one of the geneticists he works with, and the firm has regular dealings with his suppliers. A lot of the GM-chefs are content to use modern substitutes for the ingredients in traditional recipes, but Jerome’s a genuine inventor. He’s right at the cutting edge of food science, and that puts him at the cutting edge of biotech itself. There’d be no point in offering his customers a choice of dishes because he uses so many ingredients that none of his clients—even his regulars—have ever had the opportunity of tasting. Even if they’ve encountered the raw materials, they can’t possibly have the slightest idea what a master chef can do with them.”

  “I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” I’d said at the time. “Individual tastes do differ—one man’s meat and all that.”

  “Don’t be silly, Ben,” she’d said. “Faddy eating is the sign of a bad upbringing. Your petty prejudices are quite irrational. They have nothing to do with matters of individual taste.”

  I loved her very dearly. It would only have spoiled our mood to press the point that, however irrational it might be, there were certain foods I simply hated, especially anchovies and escargots, and certain others to which I strongly suspected that I might be allergic—including mussels and locusts, no matter what modifications had been made to their genomes.

  “A great chef is a great artist,” Tamara had added. “His customers have to have faith in him. He has every right to demand that they trust his judgment.”

  “I guess you’r
e right,” I had admitted, as the seeds of my plan had taken root. As we took our seats and the waiter handed Tamara a card headed SUPPER: DIRECTORY OF COURSES I crossed my fingers, hoping that if anything turned up that I didn’t like I would either be able to stomach it in spite of my inclinations or dispose of it surreptitiously. The one thing I couldn’t do, of course, was leave it on the plate. Newspaper reports alleged that Jerome was wont to emerge from his kitchen wielding a heavy ladle in response to that kind of insult. I could certainly expect a negative answer to my proposal if we were asked to leave in mid-meal—and the bored paparazzi inevitably took a great and exceedingly unflattering interest in anyone coming out of Trimalchio’s in advance of the sated and spiritually-uplifted crowd.

  * * * *

  Our table was lit by two candles—molded in GM-tallow, of course—and decorated by a discreet bouquet of flowers set in a tiny vase. I couldn’t put a name to the flowers, but that was hardly surprising. Jerome only used originals. It was entirely possible that there was at least one species in the array that had only existed for a matter of weeks and would become extinct that very night.

  The aperitif was as clear and colorless as water, but its texture suggested that it was a complex organic cocktail. When I remarked that I found it refreshing but oddly tasteless, Tamara explained that that was the whole point. It was intended to restore the “virginity of the tongue” by clearing away the lingering legacy of past experience.

  The hors d’oeuvres were served in little silver dishes mounted on the heads of rampant chimeras formed from some kind of acrylic plastic. The workmanship was exceptionally fine; you could almost see the individual scales in the chimera’s hind-parts. I didn’t bother to point this out to Tamara in case she took it as another example of what she called “nanotechnologist’s disease.” “The trouble with you, Ben,” she had said during the big row we had had after Christmas, “is that you’re obsessed with tiny things. With you, it’s not just a matter of not being able to see the wood for the trees—it’s a matter of not being able to see the forest for the cracks in the bark of a fallen twig.” For much the same reason, I didn’t bother to point out the marvelous intricacy of the patterns engraved in black and white on the skins of the olives. Tamara made up for my reticence by waxing lyrical about the technical difficulties that Jerome’s geneticists had had to overcome in order to ensure that the honeyed poppy-seeds used to season the roast dormice could be grown in situ, within the flesh of the living animal.