Hope washed the breakfast dishes, tidied Nick’s toys – which got everywhere even in the hour between him getting up and going to nursery – and made the beds and tidied Nick’s room. Max the toy monkey followed her around, picking toys up and offering them for her to play with. After a while he started to say ‘Max hungry’, so she set him to sleep mode and stuck him on the recharger. She made a coffee, hung up her apron, sat down at the kitchen table, opened her glasses and started working in China but not in Chinese. She took a break at eleven and checked the BBC. The nature kids issue had been knocked right off the front screen by a truck-bomb blast at a motorway intersection outside Munich: scores dead, hundreds injured, toll expected to rise. The atrocity had been claimed by the Neues Rote Armee Fraktion, a hitherto unheard-from local affiliate of the transnational insurgent franchise that everyone called the Naxals. Hope stared at fallen flyovers and mangled cars for as long as she could bear to listen. Then she shuddered and flipped to ParentsNet, where the nature kids thread had more or less taken over.
No new light there. Hope decided to skip the crowd-sourced wisdom of pseudonymous strangers and consult some real people. She wrote an email and fired it off to six friends, then got back to work. By lunchtime she had four responses.
Sheila: Hi Hope, Good to hear from you! Yes this is outrageous but remember it will go to appeal. Also legal challenge to faith exemption (i.e. need to extend it to non-faith conscience cases) has good precedent all the way back to that climate-change guy. Look up humanism for example, that’s explicitly covered. So not to worry and obviously has no personal bearing on you because the machinery won’t have ground out anything for a year at least. Best wishes re the pregnancy of course, you have morning sickness to look forward to ha-ha. xxx
Fatima: Yeah well, if you think ParentsNet has gone wild about this take a look at the British Persian sites!!! But seriously, have you thought about Nature Kids Network, it’s a community for parents like you? Some woo-woo and anti-vaccers but mostly quite level-headed. They’re the place to go for serious advice, and they’ve already got lawyers on board. Though to be honest Hope, I never did understand the objection, though I quite appreciate it’s up to you and if what you’re afraid of does come about I will be on the streets for you. Keep well.
James: Hi Hope, interesting points. Tricky one really. I understand your concern, but as a doctor, I see too many kids with congenital conditions or so-called childhood illnesses (which can have very nasty consequences even when minor) that could have been completely avoided had their parents agreed to the fix to be as gung-ho as you are about the parents’ so-called ‘rights’. It’s like the tobacco/alcohol ban in pregnancy – lots of problems with that if you pose it as a ‘rights’ or ‘freedom’ issue, and there was a lot of fuss about that before the ban, and it was predicted to be unenforceable and all that, but when it came in it was complied with except for the usual chav element, and the medical benefits are plain in the stats and hard to argue with if you’ve ever seen a case of foetal alcohol syndrome (which I have, though not recently, I wonder why? No I don’t). Obviously I’m entirely sympathetic to you, don’t get me wrong, and I’ll stand by you if they come for you (which they won’t) but as a doctor and as a friend my advice to you is to change the problem by changing your mind and just taking the goddamn fix.
Must dash but let’s you and us meet up for dinner sometime. Regards to Hugh.
Deirdre: Lovely seeing you the other day, with you all the way on this one, let’s have a chat over drinks oops coffee soon. Bye 4 now!
What a great posse of friends I have, Hope thought. James in particular annoyed her, but she knew it was just the medicine talking. Doctors nearly always turned out like that.
She dismissed James from her mind, and mentally from her Christmas-card list, and followed up Sheila’s suggestion. A search on humanism and a quick scan of the results left her more despondent than before. For a start, the humanist organisations and most humanist thinkers seemed entirely in favour of the fix, though not at all for making it compulsory or even hard to avoid. But what depressed her more was that she didn’t even agree with humanism. That there was no God was a given, as far as Hope was concerned, and being nice to people and making the most of your life struck her as a reasonable enough conclusion to draw from it, and in any case what she wanted to do. But beside the spires of theology and the watch-towers of ideology, it seemed a very shaky hut indeed, and not one that offered her much shelter or would stand up in court.
She couldn’t see a way to make her objection to the fix a deduction from any body of thought. It came from a body of flesh, her own, and that was enough for her. She doubted that this would be enough for anyone else.
One p.m. Back to China.
2. The Science Bit
At the same moment, on the other side of town, another woman sat tapping a virtual keyboard. Unlike Hope, she was not working from home. She sat on a tall stool at a table in the corner of a laboratory on the tenth floor of the SynBioTech building in Hayes, Middlesex, where the EMI building had been. She was writing an article for Memo, the daily news site for people who read, if at all, on commutes. She was very pleased to be writing it, because she thought there was an important message to get across to the public (even the travelling public) and because it would earn her a hundred pounds.
Her name – her name can wait. What we are interested in, right now, is what she was writing. It was this.
Over the past ten years, synthetic biology – syn bio, as everyone in the trade calls it – has changed our lives in many unexpected ways. Now, with the Kasrani case, it looks like changing it again – and unexpectedly, again!
But first – what is synthetic biology?
One way of putting it is that it’s like genetic engineering, but done by real engineers. Just as civil engineering doesn’t mean building a dam by bulldozing soil from the riverbanks into some convenient shallow, syn bio doesn’t take whatever happens to be there in the DNA and modify it. Instead, it builds new genes – and other biologically active molecules – from scratch, out of their basic components, and according to a detailed understanding of how they work.
The differences between this approach and the trial-and-error, suck-it-and-see methods of what used to be called ‘genetic engineering’ are immense. Synthetic biology has given us New Trees, which take up carbon dioxide twice as fast as natural trees, and endless varieties of other new plants, from the tough new woods to the ethanol fruits. Closest to home, it’s given us the fix, a complex of gene-correcting machinery made up into a simple tablet which when swallowed during pregnancy fixes errors in the baby’s genome, and confers immunity to almost all childhood ailments. Generations of animal testing and rigorous checking in software models run on the best supercomputers in the world have shown its safety and efficacy. For five years now, it’s been freely available to all mothers in the EU (and, by the way, made available without patents to companies in the developing world). None of the major religions has any objection to it – no human material goes into it, and it doesn’t add or take away from the human genome: it just corrects existing errors. Its effects aren’t even hereditary – it’s carefully designed not to affect the sex cells. The amount of pain and heartbreak and suffering it has already prevented is beyond calculation – and beyond dispute.