Next: A Novel (24 page)

QUESTION: Could it be done with genetic engineering?

DR. SHEN: That is difficult to say. It would be extremely difficult from a technical standpoint.

From an ethical standpoint, I would say it is impossible.

QUESTION: But an American scientist already applied to patent a human hybrid.

DR. SHEN: Professor Stuart Newman of New York was refused a patent on a part-human hybrid. But he did not make a hybrid. Dr. Newman said he applied for the patent to draw attention to the ethical issues involved. The ethical issues remain unresolved.

QUESTION: Dr. Shen, do you think a hybrid will eventually be created?

DR. SHEN:I called this press conference to end speculation, not to increase it. But if you ask my personal opinion, I think, yes—it will eventually be done.

CH038

The memory haunted Mark Sanger—the image burned in his mind of that poor animal, stranded on the beach at night in Costa Rica, helpless as the jaguar pounced, bit off her head, and proceeded to eat the flesh while her legs still kicked feebly. And all with the sound of crunching bones. The bones of her head.

Mark Sanger had not expected to see anything so horrific. He had come to the beach at Tortuguero to witness the giant leatherback turtles crawling out of the ocean to lay their eggs in the sand. As a biologist, he knew this was a great migration the planet had witnessed for countless eons. The female turtles were engaged in one of the great demonstrations of maternal caring, crawling high onto the beach, depositing their eggs deep in the ground, covering them with exhausted flippers, then carefully sweeping the sand clean, obliterating any trace of the eggs beneath. It was a slow, gentle ceremony, directed by genes that survived from millennia past.

Then came the jaguar, a black streak in the night. And suddenly last summer everything changed for Mark Sanger. The brutality of the attack, its speed and viciousness, shocked him profoundly.

It confirmed his suspicion that the natural world had gone badly wrong. Everything that mankind was doing on the planet had upset the delicate balance of nature. The pollution, the rampant industrialization, the loss of habitat—when animals were squeezed and cornered, they behaved viciously, in a desperate effort to survive.

That was the explanation for the ghastly attack he had witnessed. The natural world was in collapse. He mentioned this to the very handsome naturalist Ramon Valdez, who had accompanied him. Valdez shook his head. “No, Señor Sanger, this is always the way it has been since my father and grandfather, and grandfather before. They always spoke of the jaguar attacks in the night. It is part of the cycle of life.”

“But there are more attacks now,” Sanger said. “Because of all the pollution…”

“No, señor. There is no change. Every month, the jaguars take two to four turtles. We have records going back many years.”

“The violence we see here is not normal.”

A short distance away, the jaguar was still eating the mother. Bones still crunching.

“But itis normal,” Ramon Valdez said. “It is the way things are.”

Sanger did not want to talk about it anymore. Clearly, Valdez was an apologist for the industrialists and polluters, the big American companies that dominated Costa Rica and other Latin American countries. Not surprising to find such a person here, since the CIA had controlled Costa Rica for decades. This wasn’t a country; it was a subsidiary of American business interests. And American businesses did not give a damn for the environment.

Ramon Valdez said, “The jaguars must eat, too. I think better a turtle than to take a human baby.”

That, Mark Sanger thought, was a matter of opinion.

Back at home in Berkeley, Sanger sat in his loft and pondered what to do. Although Sanger told people he was a biologist, he had no formal training in the field. He had attended one year of college before dropping out to work briefly for a landscape architecture firm, Cather and Holly; the only biology he had taken was a course in high school. The son of a banker, Sanger possessed a substantial trust fund and did not need to work to support himself. He did, however, need a purpose in life. Wealth, in his experience, made the quest for self-identity even more difficult. And the older he got, the harder it was to think about going back and finishing college.

Recently, he had started to define himself as an artist, and artists did not need formal training. In fact, formal education interfered with the artist’s ability to feel the zeitgeist, to ride the waves of change rolling through society, and to formulate a response to them. Sanger was very well informed in his opinion. He read the Berkeley papers, and sometimes magazines like Mother Jones, and several of the environmental magazines. Not every month, but sometimes. True, he often just looked at the pictures, skimming the stories. But that was all that was necessary to track the zeitgeist.

Art was about feeling. About how it felt to live in this materialistic world, with its gaudy luxuries, false promises, and profound disappointments. What was wrong with people today was that they ignored their feelings.

It was the job of art to bring true feelings alive. To shock people into awareness. That was why so many young artists were using genetic techniques and living material to create art. Wet art, they called it. Tissue art. Many artists now worked full-time in science labs, and the art that resulted was distinctly scientific. One artist had grown steaks in a Petri dish, and then ate them in public, as a performance. (Supposedly they tasted awful. Anyway, they were genetically modified. Ugh.) An artist in France had made a glowing bunny rabbit by inserting luminescent genes from a firefly or something. And still other artists had changed the hair color of animals, giving them rainbow hues, and had grown porcupine quills on the head of a cute puppy.

These works of art provoked strong feelings. Many people were disgusted. But, then, Sanger thought, they should be disgusted. They should feel the same revulsion that he himself had felt watching the slaughter of a mother turtle by a jaguar on a beach in Costa Rica. That horrid perversion of nature, that repellent savagery that he could not put out of his mind.

And that, of course, was the reason to make art.

Not art for art’s sake. Rather, art to benefit the world, art to help the environment. That was Mark Sanger’s goal, and he set about to attain it.

LOCAL DOCTOR ARRESTED FOR ORGAN THEFT

Long Beach Memorial Hospital Staffer Implicated; Thieves Sold Bones, Blood, Organs A prominent Long Beach physician has been arrested for selling organs illegally removed from dead bodies at Long Beach Memorial Hospital. Dr. Martin Roberts, chief administrator of the pathology laboratory, which conducts autopsies at the hospital, was charged on 143 counts of illegally harvesting body parts from cadavers, and selling the contraband to tissue banks.

Said Long Beach District Attorney Barbara Bates, “This indictment reads like a B-movie horror story.” Bates also alleged in her indictment that Dr. Roberts forged death certificates, falsified lab results, and colluded with local funeral homes and cemeteries to conceal his reign of error.

The case is only the most recent episode in a nationwide pandemic of modern-day bodysnatching. Other cases include “Dr. Mike” Mastromarino, a millionaire Brooklyn, N.Y., dentist who, over a five-year period, purportedly stole organs from thousands of cadavers, including bones from the 95-year-old Alastair Cooke; a Fort Lee, N.J., biomedical firm that sold Mastromarino’s body parts to tissue banks across the United States; a crematorium in San Diego alleged to have stolen body parts from the cadavers entrusted to it; another in Lake Elsinore, California, where body parts were kept in huge freezers prior to sale; and UCLA Medical Center, where 500 bodies were cut up and sold for $700,000, some to the firm of Johnson & Johnson.

“The problem is worldwide,” said DA Bates. “Tissue theft has been reported in England, Canada, Australia, Russia, Germany, and France. We believe such thefts now occur everywhere in the world,” Bates added. “Patients are very concerned.”

Dr. Roberts pleaded innocent to all charges in Superior Court and was released on a $1 million bond. Also indicted were four other Long Beach Memorial Hospital staffers, including Marilee Hunter, the head of the hospital genetics lab.

Long Beach Memorial administrator Kevin McCormick expressed shock at the indictments, and said that “Dr. Roberts’s behavior contravenes everything that our institution stands for.” He said he had ordered a thorough review of hospital procedures and would make the report public when it was completed.

Prosecutors say the events were brought to their attention by a whistle-blower, Raza Rashad. Mr.

Rashad is a first-year medical student in San Francisco who had previously worked in Dr.

Roberts’s pathology lab, where he had witnessed firsthand numerous illegal activities there. “Mr.

Rashad’s testimony was vital to building the prosecutor’s case,” Bates said.

CH039

Josh Winkler hurried into the animal facility to see what Tom Weller was talking about. “How many rats died?” he said.

“Nine.”

The stiff bodies of nine dead rats lying on their sides in nine successive cages made Josh Winkler start to sweat. “We’ll have to dissect them,” he said. “When did they die?”

“Must have been during the night,” Tom said. “They were fed at six; no notation of problems then.” Tom was looking at a clipboard.

“What study group were they in?” Josh said. Fearing he already knew the answer.

“A-7,” Tom said. “The maturity gene study.”

Jesus.

Josh tried to remain calm. “And how old were they?”

“Ummm…let’s see. Thirty-eight weeks and four days.”

Oh God.

The average life span of a lab rat was 160 weeks—a little over three years. These rats had died in a quarter of that time. He took a deep breath. “And what about the others in the cohort?”

“There were twenty in the original study group,” Tom said. “All identical, all the same age. Two of them died a few days ago, of respiratory infection. I didn’t think much about it at the time. As for the others…well, you better see for yourself.” He led Josh down the row of cages to the other rats. It was immediately clear what their condition was.

“Ragged coats, inactive, excessive sleeping, trouble standing on their hind legs, muscle wasting, hind leg paralysis in four of them…”

Josh stared. “They’re old ,” he said. “They’re all old. ”

“Yes,” Tom said. “It’s unmistakable: premature aging. I went back and checked the dead rats from two days ago. One had a pituitary adenoma and the other had spinal cord degeneration.”

“Signs of age…”

“Right,” Tom said. “Signs of age. Maybe this gene won’t be the wonder product Rick is counting on after all. Not if it causes early death. It’d be a disaster.”

“How am I feeling?”Adam said, as they sat together at lunch. “I feel fine, Josh, thanks to you.

I’m a little tired sometimes. And my skin is dry. I’m getting a few wrinkles. But I feel okay.

Why?”

“Just wondered,” Josh said, as casually as he could. He tried not to stare at his older brother. In fact, Adam’s appearance had changed dramatically. Where he once had a touch of gray at the temples, he now had a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. His hairline had receded. The skin around his eyes and lips was noticeably wrinkled. His forehead was deeply creased. He looked much older.

Adam was thirty-two.

Jesus.

“No, uh, drugs?” Josh asked.

“No, no. That’s over, thank God,” Adam said. He had ordered a hamburger, but he put it down after a few bites.

“Doesn’t taste good?”

“Got a sore tooth. I need to see the dentist.” Adam touched his cheek. “I hate complaining.

Actually, I was thinking I’d better get some exercise. I need exercise. Sometimes I get constipated.”

“You going to join your old b-ball group?” Josh said brightly. His brother used to play basketball twice a week with the investment bankers.

“Uh, no,” Adam said. “I was thinking doubles tennis, or maybe golf.”

“Good idea,” Josh said.

A silence fell over the table. Adam pushed his plate aside. “I know I look older,” he said. “You don’t need to pretend you haven’t noticed. Everybody’s noticed it. I asked Mom, and she said that Dad was the same way; he just suddenly looked older in his thirties. Almost overnight. So maybe it’s genetic.”

“Yeah, could be.”

“Why?” Adam said. “Do you know something?”

“Me? No.”

“You just suddenly wanted to have lunch, urgently, today? Couldn’t wait?”

“I hadn’t seen you in a while, that’s all.”

“Cut the crap, Josh,” he said. “You were always a shitty liar.”

Josh sighed. “Adam,” he said, “I think we should do some tests.”

“For what?”

“Bone density, lung capacity. And an MRI.”

“For what? What are these tests for?” He stared at Josh. “For aging?”

“Yes.”

“I’m aging too fast? Is it that gene spray?”

“We need to find out,” Josh said. “I want to call Ernie.” Ernie Lawrence was the family physician.

“Okay, set it up.”

CH040

Speaking in Washington at a noon briefing for congressmen, Professor William Garfield of the University of Minnesota said, “Despite what you hear, nobody has ever proven a single gene causes a single human behavioral trait. Some of my colleagues believe such associations may eventually be found. Others don’t think it will ever happen, that the interaction of genes and environment is just too complex. But, in any case, we see reports of new ‘genes for’ this or that in the papers every day, and none of them has ever proven true in the end.”

“What are you talking about?” said the aide to Senator Wilson. “What about the gay gene, that causes gayness?”

“A statistical association. Not causal. No gene causes sexual orientation.”

“What about the violence gene?”

“Not verified in later research.”

“A sleep gene was reported…”

“In rats.”

“The gene for alcoholism?”

“Didn’t hold up.”

“What about the diabetes gene?”

“So far,” he said, “we’ve identified ninety-six genes involved in diabetes. We’ll undoubtedly find more.”