Interior: a lab at Truecyte, one of Thomas Kurton’s many experimental spin-offs. A long room with eight rows of fifteen-foot workbenches, half of them capped by chemical fume hoods. Glassware and reagents spread a chaos across shelves and countertops, although the gloved, safety-goggled lab workers know exactly where everything is.
Some of the profuse gear could be straight out of labs two centuries old: pipettes and flasks, burners and retorts. But the crucial new gear has all gone digitaclass="underline" inscrutable black boxes covered in LEDs, sealed microelectronic sarcophagi that swallow up samples and report the relevant chemistry in clean columns on bright monitors; devices the size of bread machines that accept matchbox cartridges filled with tens of thousands of biological macromolecules suspended in arrays; sensors that read millions of data points in minutes, that make errors only once every few million reads, and that spit out answers to questions three billion years in the making.
The whole room is charged and alert, perched on the threshold of the next liberation.
Thomas Kurton’s close-up fills the video frame, a koala with a shy smile. He could fund-raise for some endangered wildlife fund. At fifty-seven, the man looks like he’s just been awarded a Presidential Junior Investigators grant to visit the National Institutes of Health over summer vacation.
TONIA S CHIFF:
You sure you don’t have a painting tucked away in the attic somewhere, taking the hits for you?
KURTON [deadpan]:
Actually, all you need is a high-resolution JPEG, these days.
He’s befriending the camera-slipping it a rum candy out on the far edges of the playground, while the proctor is distracted by more hardened delinquents. It’s just fun for him, however many times he’s done this, and fun for the casual viewer, stumbling onto Over the Limit after the sudden-death quarterfinal rounds of Be America’s Next UN Ambassador.
KURTON:
Oddly enough, it’s much easier to repair genes in egg cells than it is to do somatic gene therapy in a living person. And the beauty of germline engineering is that the fixes are inheritable! In a few decades, we’re going to be doing everything that way
Crosscut to Tonia Schiff. She’s in a distressed-denim skirt and embroidered vest. She tried once to lose the boho chic, to adopt a wool-suit gravitas for a segment on how easy it would be for anyone to introduce neurotoxins into the air systems of a large office building. But the focus groups weren’t having it. Schiff-hip was essential to the show’s sangfroid. Over the Limit is Tonia, and Tonia is the girl whose hands-in-the-air, wry bewilderment could make anyone’s heart skip a beat, just before the real bedlam hits.
SCHIFF [waving her legal pad]:
Okay, let’s just talk about that “inheritable” for a sec. I mean, forever is a long time, right? Suppose the gene doctors decide that they’ve made a mistake with my mail-order kid
Kurton laughs from the belly. He loves Schiff as much as the next viewer. America’s most irreverent science television journalist.
KURTON:
Well, that’s where the artificial chromosome pairs come in. We can insert them, right alongside the regular set, and load them up with useful genes, as we discover them. And we can flick these genes off and on as desired, without interfering with other gene regulation.
SCHIFF:
Plug-and-play chromosomes. Why didn’t I think of that?
KURTON:
Offspring wouldn’t inherit the artificial chromosome cartridge, of course. But they could get an upgraded version, with all the advances in genetic knowledge since their parents were born.
SCHIFF:
Kind of like downloading a patch to your computer operating system.
KURTON:
Exactly!
SCHIFF [looking around the lab for a SWAT team]:
Ri-ight. And would Microsoft be involved in any of these upgrades?
A cutaway animation sequence follows, base pairs assembling into genes and genes flying in and out of rotating chromosomes, spinning out kinky proteins that bind and catalyze stray chemicals like some sorcerer’s apprentice part-stamping factory. The chemicals swarm into a face, at which the screen splits repeatedly, filling up with patent lawyers, philosophers, a clergyman, a science writer, a senator-judge, and several geneticist-businessmen-those who need to safeguard innovation and those who need to save us from it. Each face gets five words, then ten, the words overlapping, finally all surging together in one mighty Stockhausen tone cluster.
Then, in a wash of time-lapse shots backed by looping, stacked ghetto-house tracks, there comes a collage of courtroom dramas and judicial mind-benders, divorced couples suing each other over frozen embryos, companies making fortunes on cancer screens derived from the genetic material of uncompensated subjects, companies suppressing patented genetic tests that reveal the effectiveness of their patented medications.
Over the Limit: That the show has avoided extinction for four years is already freakish. That each episode passes for compelling television is a miracle of protective coloration. The fight for eyeballs is as merciless as any in nature.
“The Genie” returns to archaic talk. Schiff steers Kurton away from his enhancement fantasies toward practical business, but he keeps sailing out into waters that teem with more astonishing life. And every time, like a lithe pilot fish, Schiff follows him.
She can’t help herself. Her heart, too, beats to something transhuman. You can see it in her face: she’s already working on whole new segments to follow this one. You can see it in the way she tilts in her chair. She’s ready to enhance herself. So are 78 percent of the show’s demographic. Her job is to erase all trace of the thousands of staff hours of research and make every twist of this script sound freshly improvised. Fresh: the core engine of the information economy. Every idea spontaneous, every argument off the cuff. Every word to be consumed before expiration date.
S CHIFF:
I understand you recently became a technology consultant for a start-up venture that specializes in pet cloning.
KURTON:
Regenovia creates delayed identical twins of animals who played important roles in their owners’ lives. For some people, it’s a chance to reexperience all the qualities they loved in their companions.
SCHIFF:
Is it true that a California woman has mortgaged her house to raise the $50,000 needed to bring her dog back from the dead?
KURTON:
A lot of us might be willing to pay as much, for meaningful connection with another living thing.
Kurton’s smart house in Maine does not quite read poetry to him, but it does almost everything else. It darkens and lightens windows, detects motion and shuts off extraneous appliances. The cottage is a monster hybrid, a family summer cabin from the twenties where, just behind the cedar wainscoting, just inside the retrofitted beaded ceiling, cables course and signals seethe in all flavors and protocols. Despite the tangled network of digital devices, Post-it notes cover every surface, like mating butterflies massing in a hidden glade. Thomas sits among them in his rocking chair, with the spray of the Atlantic surf visible outside his smart window, chatting about drugs tailored to fit the individual genome.
Jump to that haunted Cassandra, Anne Harter, in her Oxford warren, her eyes darting everywhere but into the lens:
These people want royalties for tests that used to be free.
They’re prosecuting others for mentioning patented scientific discoveries in public. They own entire organisms.