Journalists of every stripe converge on Kurton, and he talks to all of them. “We’ve done the research,” he tells a prominent op-ed commentator, for a wire-syndicated piece called “Fixing the Price of Delight”: “And we’ve determined $800 million to be a fair pro rata evaluation of the accumulated future benefits of our finding, as enjoyed by all its direct descendants into the indefinite future ”
In short, a nuisance suit, but one whose motives baffle all commentators. Thomas Kurton, who has long taken a beating for hustling humanity into the consumer-genomics era, is now hammered in scores of blogs for gratuitously impeding a free-market transaction and asserting ownership over a woman’s genes.
Several posses of self-deputizing reporters descend on the Houston clinic for comment. Dr. Sidney Green, the facility’s director, declares that his staff will carry on with their collection of the woman’s gametes unless restrained by a court of law.
As the public furor spins out, the wheels of justice fail to find traction. Legal analysts split between those who see this case as no different from a routine egg donation and those who feel that denying Truecyte compensation would reverse three decades of intellectual-property rulings. Uphold the claim, and everyone might soon be paying licensing fees to procreate. Throw it out, and billions of dollars of bio-economic property rights will go up in pollen dust.
An Episcopalian priest turned bioethicist who teaches at Illinois Institute of Technology goes on Chicago talk radio to try to slow down “this terrible and dehumanizing drift toward the trade in human traits.” He points out that successful donation can happen fairly efficiently these days, and if the extracted things get fertilized and turned into embryos soon after collection, no amount of law short of slaughter of the innocents will be able to reverse that step. But the judge in the Truecyte filing refuses to be hurried.
The alarmed congressman from Illinois’s Seventh Congressional District makes a speech on Capitol Hill. It’s really just a long-planned attack on the use of paid studies in the pharmaceutical industry. But the congressman works in a reference to the “joy genome” controversy in his home district, playing to his constituency while insisting on the need to rein in the bio-economy.
In all the noise, Jen falls badly in the eyes of those millions who so recently took her to their hearts. As far as the vocal majority is concerned, she’s become something sinister. Sure, lots of people take money for their potential offspring, but few agree to take so much. How could this shining woman, the standard-bearer of bodily happiness, put such a price tag on her gift? She should place it in the public domain.
Thassa’s egg contract makes her fair game for every kind of Web-disinhibited public attack. She turns pariah in several demographic sectors, especially among the adoring teenage girls who aped her Oona appearance just a few news cycles ago. A West Coast techno band writes her into a biting song, which ultimately goes on to make ten times more money than Houston wants to pay Thassa for her eggs.
Pastor Mike Burns, from the South Barrington megachurch, preaches a much e-mailed sermon in which he distances himself from his earlier proclamations about Thassadit Amzwar. “God may send us many messages, but we make our own errors in translation. Thank God He’s always ready to forgive!”
A great national debate ensues on whether feeling happy is the same as being happy, and over the ways in which earned happiness differs from happiness purchased by one’s parents at birth. This debate plays out on sitcoms everywhere.
The Economist runs an experimental, Java-based decision market program that allows people to bid on the actual price-somewhere between $32,000 and $800 million-that a tenfold increase in the odds of inheriting an unshakably happy disposition should fetch on the open market. The running average closes in asymptotically on $740,000, which is, coincidentally, close to the lifetime cost of chronic, nonresponsive bipolar disorder.
A giant international reality-show production company called Endemic successfully markets the idea of a sudden-death competition pitting gangs of potential sperm donors against one another for the honor of fertilizing a single woman, who must eliminate them on the basis of their genotypes until only one remains. The company tells the skeptical press that the concept was in development long before Thassa’s egg auction went public.
Three writers from National Lampoon, Inc. (AMEX: NLN) start a humor site called
Throughout, Thomas Kurton goes on giving his careful, scientific opinion on every question that anyone places in front of him. He does one final television interview with Tonia Schiff, for her genomic-happiness episode. They sit on a bench in the Boston Common, twenty yards from where Ralph Waldo Emerson turned into a transparent eyeball and saw all the currents of the Universal Being circulating through him. On film, Kurton struggles to remain game, but he comes across as stoic at best.
I frankly don’t understand most of this reaction. Mass psychology is too hard for me. Genomics is trivial, compared to sociology.
Tonia Schiff seems almost indignant. She asks whether Truecyte can honestly demand a licensing fee on an unmodified human genome. He replies:
We’re licensing the laborious and expensive discovery that a particular combination of alleles increases the probability of a particularly desirable health benefit. If you want to keep encouraging innovation, you have to reward that.
She asks him why Truecyte, a for-profit venture, has undercut their own business interests by demanding a fee that no potential client could pay. He replies that many human institutions have paid much larger sums for much smaller return. She can’t flush him out of hiding. When she goads him into predicting how large the genomic-happiness industry might be in ten years, he responds with all the resignation of a Tibetan monk.
If a reasonably alert person wants to be exhilarated, she just has to read a little evolution. Think of it: a Jupiter flyby, emerging out of nothing. A few slavish chemicals producing damn near omnipotent brains That discovery is better than any drug, any luxury commodity, or any religion. Science should be enough to make any person endlessly well. Why do we need happiness when we can have knowing?
When she suggests that very few people are temperamentally capable of sharing his vision, he bites out his words.
Listen: Six hundred generations ago, we were scratching on the walls of caves. Now we’re sequencing genomes. Three billion years of accident is about to become something truly meaningful. If that doesn’t inspire us, we don’t deserve to survive ourselves.
When the camera stops, journalist and subject say goodbye without so much as shaking hands.
Saint Augustine, the old Berber, once wrote, Factus est Deus homo ut homo fieret Deus: God became man so that man might become God. He also said, even more popularly, Dilige et quod vis fac: Love, and do as you wish. But that was before our abilities so far outstripped our love.
Oona decides on a follow-up show long before the demands for one start swelling. Dr. Sidney Green, afraid of the legal repercussions of anything he might say in public, hedges until his accountants run spreadsheets on all the possible scenarios and his lawyers devise an unbeatable game plan. Thomas Kurton is ready in a heartbeat for a second chance.
But when Oona’s people try to contact Thassadit Amzwar, they discover what the wired world has known for two days: Jen has gone missing. She can’t be raised by any medium. A continuous vigil outside her Mesquakie dorm attests that nothing remotely resembling a five-foot-one North African woman has come anywhere near the building. The bandwidth swarms with so many flavors of rumor that the police begin to make inquiries. The school has no idea of her whereabouts. Kurton swears he’s had no communication with her since their joint TV appearance. No one comes forward with any further information.