Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  “If the way you’re talking is any guide,” the receptionist said, wryly, “you’re almost back to normal. We’ll soon have to throw you back into the wide and wicked world.”

  “It’s not as wide or as wicked as all that,” Anna said, with due kindness and consideration, “and certainly not as worldly. One day, though, all the fallen angels will learn how to fly again, and how to soar to undiscovered heights—and then we’ll begin to find out what the true bounds of experience are.”

  “I take it back,” the receptionist said. “I hope you haven’t been plaguing your poor sister’s ears with that kind of talk—she won’t want to take you out again if you have.”

  “No,” said Anna, “I don’t suppose she will. But then, she’s not really my sister, and never was. I’m one of a kind.” And for once, there was no inner or outer voice to say, Don’t flatter yourself, or Better be grateful for what you’ve got, or We’re all sisters under the skin, or any of the other shallow and rough-hewn saws whose cutting edges she had always tried so very hard to resist.

  ANOTHER BRANCH OF THE FAMILY TREE

  The appeal hearing was set for the twenty-sixth of March, the day after my seventy-second birthday—which would have been Kathy’s seventy-second birthday too, had she lived.

  I couldn’t contest the evidence. They’d taken root samples from the wall that was under threat and they had proof positive that it was my tree that was doing the damage, corrupting the foundations of the Manderleys’ oh-so-precious house. It wasn’t as if there could possibly be any mistake about the identification; there wasn’t another tree like mine in the entire world. There never had been, and there never would be; its uniqueness was the most powerful card I could play up in court by way of fighting the destruction order—although I always intended to make my final defense on other grounds.

  I honestly think that I might have carried it off, if we’d still had the jury system. They still had the jury system when Kathy and I were together; we’d grown up with it, and all the other quaint little institutions that made the mad, bad old days of the twentieth century. We would have grown up with it a good few years longer, had Kathy had the chance to keep on growing. As things turned out. the tree eventually grew in her stead; if it had only stuck to growing up, everything would have been fine, but trees grow sideways as well, according to their nature. A tree must have roots, and the roots must spread out as far as they need to and as far as they can, in search of water to nourish the crown.

  In the mad, bad old days of the twentieth century, water was easier to come by, even for trees. People hadn’t grown quite so expert—or quite so desperate—in capturing and plundering every accessible drop. In the old days, the trees in the avenue where Kathy and I lived with Mother and Father had to be sycamores, because they were the only ones tough enough to get by in that kind of urban environment. When the Water Reclamation Schemes came in, not long after I went to live with Uncle Michael and Auntie Steph, even the sycamores had to be replaced by genetically-engineered mosaics that were part-palm and part-euphorbia. When I first planted my tree, which appeared to uninformed observers to be a mere oak, I was assured by more than one passer-by that it couldn’t survive, but it did. We Galtons have always been a tough family. We’ve never been ones to let ordinary difficulties stand in our way—or, for that matter, extraordinary ones like the foundations of other people’s houses.

  A jury would have been an ordinary difficulty. I could have appealed to a jury on compassionate grounds. Judge Humphrey Gerrard, on the other hand, was an extraordinary difficulty. To obtain a verdict from a judge, you have to make him see reason, and judges are not renowned for their ability to do that.

  To make matters worse, Judge Humphrey—as his absurdly old-fashioned name suggested—was about the same age as I was. He would have looked even older, but he was wearing a wig—not the ceremonial kind, which had gone the way of juries, but the standard kind, which was still awaiting the long-belated day when my fellow wizards of biotechnology would finally get around to finding a cure for baldness. I knew that my being older than he was would make the situation even worse. These days, when everyone who doesn’t stop a bullet can expect to reach a hundred and twenty, seventy-two shouldn’t be reckoned old—but old attitudes die hard, especially among the old. When Judge Humphrey Gerrard looked at me, he didn’t see a wizard of biotechnology; he saw a batty old woman who had no right to be wasting his time.

  “I’m very sorry that this matter has arisen, sir,” I told him, trying with all my might to sound humble and sincere. “It’s unfortunate that my tree’s quest for sustenance has taken her roots beyond the bounds of my own property, and even more unfortunate that she has come into contact with the foundations of someone else’s house. I appreciate the fact that it’s an old house, and I understand that its owners regard it as a precious object—but it is, at the end of the day, only a house. In this day and age, I cannot believe that any court in the world—least of all a British court—could, when faced with the decision as to whether a tree or a house should be sacrificed, condemn the tree.”

  “That seems to me to be a brutal simplification of the decision that I am required to make, Miss Galton,” the judge riposted, lingering over the Miss as if to suggest that the implication of permanent singularity was somehow unnatural. “You are leaving out of account the fact that Mister Manderley’s house is situated within the boundaries of his own property, where it has every right to be, whereas the roots of your tree have recklessly exceeded the bounds of your own, committing a serious—not to mention dangerous—trespass.”

  “What does a tree know of property rights?” I countered, attempting to sound pathetic rather than admonitory. “It is no fault of hers that she is ignorant of the boundaries inscribed by the law. A tree cannot commit a trespass; only creatures that know the meaning of sin can do that. A tree is innocent; she cannot be held accountable.”

  “No one is trying to hold the tree accountable, Miss Galton,” the appalling Humphrey replied, allowing the ghost of a smile to play upon his lubricious lips. “The tree, like the ground upon which it stands, is your property. You are responsible for its trespasses. That is why you have been summoned to the court, while the tree continues to enjoy the bliss of its ignorance.”

  He raised his right hand to stroke his chin, luxuriating in self-satisfaction. I could see why judges number alongside grief counselors and traffic coordinators as favorite targets of hobbyist terrorists. I knew that I had lost, but I had to keep going.

  “I could no more prevent the roots of the tree from following their inbuilt imperative,” I said, with dignity, “than I could prevent the sun from rising in the morning. The fact remains: a tree is infinitely more precious than a house. A unique tree—and no one has disputed that there is not another tree like this one in all the world—cannot be condemned to death merely in order to save a house from the slight probability of collapse. The house can be restabilized, remodeled, or even rebuilt; if I could afford to pay for that to be done, I would do it gladly. If I could afford to pay for the entire Manderley house to be taken down brick by ancient brick and reassembled on another site, I would do it unhesitatingly. The fact that I cannot does not alter the point of principle. A house is a house and a tree is a tree; one is dead, the other alive.”

  “Both, however, are artifacts,” Judge Gerrard replied, having put away his smile and dropped his hand to the oaken table before him. “Your tree is, as you say, unique—and that is because it is the product of genetic engineering. Its uniqueness is a mere matter of circumstance; you have, according to the evidence laid before me, worked throughout your life as a genetic engineer, and were once reckoned one of the country’s foremost experts in modified cloning. My expertise lies in another area, but I am assured by the experts that have appeared before me that the reproduction of the tree that stands at the heart of this dispute would be a perfectly simple matter—much simpler, in fact, than the reproduction of the house, which has been handed down
to Mister Manderley from his great-grandfather.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but he wouldn’t hear me. That horrid right hand rose again, sternly forbidding me to speak while he hurried on.

  “You might, if you so wished,” he told me, not caring about any reasonable objection I might make, “grow a dozen or a hundred trees exactly like the one whose roots are threatening Mister Manderley’s foundations. If you do, however, you would be well advised to plant them in situations where they could not threaten other people’s properties. Given that, I cannot see what grounds you have for asserting that the tree in question is so very precious that it should be allowed to demolish Mister Manderley’s house. I am, therefore, minded to confirm the destruction order that Mister Manderley obtained from the local authority.”

  In the mad, bad old days I could, of course, have appealed to the House of Lords, but New Britain has put away such childish things along with jury trials, ceremonial wigs, and the principle that the sanctity of the family should always outweigh the rights of property. Legally, the matter was ended, and there was nothing further I could say or do. Alas, the silence that fell as Judge Humphrey lowered his imperious hand was too tempting to resist.

  “Anyone who attempts to fell that tree,” I said, risking an unaffordable fine—and hence, perhaps, imprisonment—for contempt of court, “will have to do it over my dead body.”

  The judge presumably thought that it was a kindness to pretend that he had not heard the remark—or perhaps he simply thought that someone as old and batty as I could not possibly mean what I said. Nobody knows as yet how long we might live, with the aid of the technologies that I and millions of others have labored long and hard to provide, and we all hope that even a hundred and twenty years might be a mere beginning, but people like Judge Humphrey Gerrard are not yet used to taking people like me entirely seriously.

  I suppose I shall have to help them to learn. That’s the principal duty left to me, now.

  * * * *

  What a joy it was to be a twin, when genetic science was in its infancy! Kathy and I were in demand from the moment we were born. We always felt, by virtue of the attention lavished upon us, that we had been born to greatness. Our mentors and investigators encouraged that notion by continually calling attention to the implications of family tradition conveyed by our august surname, although we were not actually descended from the great Francis Galton. “Another branch of the family tree, no doubt,” was all that Doctor Burden said, when Mother raised the quibble.

  It would not have mattered had we been born Smiths or Joneses or Patels in some inner-city wilderness. Nor would it have made a difference had we had plainer faces, or IQs of merely average dimensions. The researchers would have beaten a path to our door in any case, and begged or bribed their way into our affections, so that we might play our part in their psychometric rituals. The fact remained, however, that we were Galtons, and we were stars. The psychometricians loved us, or so it seemed to us—and Doctor Burden seemed to love us most of all.

  Many of our assiduous testers were clinical as well as kind, telling us little or nothing about what they were at, lest our understanding prejudice the results of their enquiries, but Doctor Burden wasn’t like that. Doctor Burden believed in informed consent, and he wanted us to understand everything long before we were really capable of understanding anything. Doctor Burden also had a talent to amuse, which we appreciated. We never really loved Doctor Burden, but we did believe that he loved us, and we always did our best to live up to his expectations.

  Some of our fellow twin-pairs resented the intrusiveness of the research—the physical probing, the ceaseless inquisition, the relentless challenging of the intellect with puzzle after puzzle—but Kathy and I thrived on it. Our participation was never less than wholehearted. Mother used to joke, if my memory serves me right, that the first words we learned to speak were not “Mummy” and “Daddy” but “genes” and “environment.”

  I am reasonably certain that by the time we were seven years old we already knew, partly by observation of our fellows and partly by pestering Doctor Burden with our own ceaseless inquisition, that most pairs of identical twins tended to adopt one of two contrasting strategies in dealing with their existential situation. Kathy and I made a choice rather than happening on our own strategy by chance—and having decided that we wanted to be “overlapping” twins rather than “complementary” twins, we became utterly determined to overlap more fully, and more ingeniously, than any twins ever had before. The only person we told about our choice was Doctor Burden, because we knew that he would laugh instead of frown, and thought that he would love us all the more.

  He did laugh; of that much, I can still be certain.

  Complementary twins deal with their identicality by carefully differentiating themselves from one another. They divide up their potential, so that one becomes the extrovert twin and the other the introvert, one the sporty twin and the other the reader, one the arty twin and the other the mathematician, one the twin who dresses in blue, the other the twin who prefers brown. Complementary twins are careful to forge separate identities, to become different people. They are the majority, although other people often fail to notice or appreciate their endeavors, being far more intent on spotting coincidences.

  Overlapping twins, on the other hand, deal with their identicality by becoming interchangeable. They pool their potential and develop it in collaboration, happily flattering the expectation of the world that they will act, think and dress alike. In extreme cases, they develop private languages, make a habit of finishing one another’s sentences, and deliberately set out to confuse anyone who tries to tell them apart. They regularly answer to one another’s name and deny their own. They become helium atoms in a hydrogen world, two nuclei bound inseparably together. If they do so reflexively, they might become deeply disturbed, even psychotic—but if they do it carefully and consciously and cleverly, they might delight and fascinate the world.

  It’s not for me to judge the extent of our success, especially now, but Kathy and I certainly believed that we had contrived to fascinate the world. The coincidence-spotters delighted in our every contrivance, and we bathed in the glow of their delight, exchanging winks and nudges all the while with Doctor Burden, the sharer of our innermost secrets. Mother and Father had their reservations, of course, but they could not have interfered even if they had tried. Kathy and I were invincible.

  I don’t remember that Kathy and I ever formally decided to become geneticists ourselves. To have discussed the matter would have implied that there were other possibilities, and there were not. After all, no other ambition could have delighted our audience half so much.

  Many pairs of complementary twins made the same decision, of course—it was obvious as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first that biotechnology would be the force that shaped the future, and that nothing else was really worth doing if you were young and had half a mind—but complementary twins always began by choosing divergent specialisms. When Kathy and I were thirteen, our friends were already deciding that if one of each pair were to be involved in mapping and sequencing the other must be involved in transgenic splicing, or that if one were to take an interest in computerized protein-design the other must investigate embryonic switching-mechanisms. It seemed obvious to everyone, however—not merely to Kathy and myself—that our mutual field would be cloning.

  We knew, as we blew out the thirteen candles on our shared birthday-cake, that we would become experts in asexual reproduction. We knew, too, that our achievements in that field would be astonishing. We knew, without an atom of doubt, that we would do great things, and that we would do them together. What we didn’t know—how could we?—was that I, and I alone, would slip on a patch of black ice outside the front gate on the third of January in the year two thousand and two, and break my shinbone against the unforgiving pavement edge.

  I had to stay in the hospital overnight. Hurrying to visit me the next morning—spurred
on, I cannot doubt, by Kathy’s urgent demands—Father drove the family car into another expanse of that same black ice, and skidded into the path of a number thirty-two bus.

  Mother died instantly, Father only a few hours later.

  Kathy hung on for four long days—and they were, I can assure you, exceedingly long days—but in the end she died without recovering consciousness.

  The person I had been died with her, and another was belatedly born.

  * * * *

  When the bailiff had gone off in search of a further court order, the police set up barricades across the street, one up the hill and one down. The crowd behind them continued to grow, and the gawkers set about giving the police a great deal of grief. Every third adult and every second child had a video camera, and every one of them wanted to get closer. Zoom lenses and focused microphones can only accomplish so much; with so many competitors swarming around, whoever was going to sell their footage to the evening news was going to need an edge. When the time came, they would be avid for any favors I cared to throw their way.

  You have to feel sorry for the police, nowadays; now that virtually all crime is machine-detectable, they have to devote the greater part of their time to suicides, sieges, and shooters. It’s not the fun job it used to be.

  For a few minutes, I thought the Chief Inspector was actually going to wrestle Old Mister Manderley to the ground, cuff him, and ship him off to the station, but it didn’t quite come to that. Old military men always have an advantage when dealing with the police; they understand the power of a sharply-barked order. The gawkers protested, of course, even though Mister Manderley didn’t have a camera or a mike, but their protests only allowed the Chief Inspector to repair his injured pride by rounding on them like a rabid rottweiler.