Looking back now, I think that perhaps we truly were mad.
But it was a glorious madness. I can't describe the excitement we felt. And even now I wouldn't trade those times for anything. We shared a feeling of masterfulness. I'm not sure there is such a word, but if it doesn't exist, it should. We felt that we were on the verge of something epochal, that just beyond our questing fingertips lay the secret of mastering Creation.
And it was just the two of us. That was the most enthralling part of it. Only Derr and I had the Big Picture. We had technicians for the scut work, of course, but the duties of each were narrowly circumscribed. My three-floor town house was partially converted into two labs. Some worked in the third-floor lab, others worked in the basement lab. Only we knew where the sum of all the scut work was headed. The whole would truly be greater than the sum of its parts.
We started small. We looked for an aquatic, oviparous reptile with good-size eggs. We settled for an amphibian. That was Derr's idea. He had trained in Europe where frogs are frequently used for research. We obtained a supply of green frogs and some special pure-white albino frogs. We were ready to begin.
After much trial and error we perfected a microscopic technique of removing the haploid nucleus from the egg of a green frog and replacing it with a diploid nucleus removed from a body cell of a white frog. All the genetic information from the albino frog now resided in the egg cell from the green. The egg cell, in a sense, had been fertilized. After many failures and botch-ups, we eventually got it right. Soon we were awash in white tadpoles.
This was ground-breaking work that would have set the scientific community (and no doubt the religious and philosophical communities as well) on its ear. Think of it: We were reproducing without recourse to the sexual process! This was a mammoth achievement!
But we could not publish. Everything we were doing in Project Genesis was classified top secret. In a very real sense the government owned our work. I won't say it made no difference to us. It most certainly did. But we felt we could wait. We could not publish now, but someday we would. At that moment we were, quite frankly, much too busy even to consider wasting the time it would take to document our work for publication.
After perfecting our microtechnique we moved on to mammals. I won't bore you with the details of each species we tried—it's all recounted on a day-by-day basis in the gray journals—but suffice it to say that after a seemingly endless run of daily grinding work, we felt we were ready to tackle the human ovum.
Our first problem, naturally, was where to get the raw material. One does not simply send out to a laboratory supply house and order a gross of human ova. We were entering a very sensitive area. We would have had to tread softly even if we were on our own, but with the extra burden of security from the government, we felt hamstrung.
I then came up with the bright idea of letting the government help us out. I told our contact in the War Department that we needed human ovaries. Colonel Laughlin was one of the few in the entire government who knew of the existence of Project Genesis. He paused only a moment, then said, "How many?"
It wasn't long before we began receiving regular shipments of human ovaries in iced saline solution. Some were cancerous, but many were merely cystic and provided us with a small supply of viable normal ova. These we nurtured in a nutrient solution while we practiced our microtechniques.
We came to learn that the human ovum would not tolerate too much manipulation. The double trauma of removing the original nucleus and inserting another was apparently more than the cell membrane could stand. We ruptured one test ovum after another. So we devised a method of using ultraviolet light to inactivate the original genetic material within the ovum. We could then leave the old haploid nucleus where it was and insert the new nucleus right next to it in the cytoplasm.
Finally it came time to find the human diploid nuclei to transplant into the ova. This was going to be a problem. Along the way, as Derr and I progressed through a number of mammals toward human tissue, we had learned that we could not use just any nucleus from any cell in a mammal's body. Once a mammalian cell becomes fully differentiated (i.e., becomes a functioning part of the skin or the liver or any other organ), its nucleus loses its capacity to regenerate an entire organism. We had to go to the wellspring of the gamete, the diploid cell that divides into two haploid gametes: the primary spermatocyte. And to obtain those we would have to burrow into a healthy, functioning human testicle.
I volunteered myself.
Call it part of the madness that was upon us. Call it pragmatism as well. Colonel Laughlin sent us what testicular specimens he could, but none of them were suitable. Undamaged, undiseased testicles were difficult to come by.
Besides, I had a number of reasons for wanting my own genotype thrust into the ovum. The first might be called ego. I admit that without apology. This whole project was my idea. I wanted to see my work result in a new generation of Roderick Hanleys. The second was more practicaclass="underline" I had to be certain of the race of the donor genotype. Do not rear up on your egalitarian steed at this, I had my reasons, and soon you will understand them.
Through Colonel Laughlin we arranged for an army urologist to do a wedge resection on my left testicle under local anesthesia. (He tied off an annoying varicocele while he was there, so it was not a totally frivolous procedure from the surgeon's viewpoint.) Derr took the section and culled out the primary spermatocytes. With these living and thriving in their nutrient bath, we were ready to begin the next phase.
It was time to find an incubator—a woman who would host the manipulated ovum and bear the resultant child.
Derr and I had decided on a number of characteristics: She had to be young, healthy, and single, with a clockwork menstrual cycle. And she had to be Negro. As I alluded above, this final criterion was not prompted by a racist bias. It was based on solid, scientific reasoning. Our plan was to insert a diploid nucleus from one of my primary spermatocytes into a human ovum and, in turn, insert that ovum into the uterus of a human female. We had to be sure that the resultant child (if all went as hoped) had actually arisen from the manipulated cell.
My genotype is lily white. My parents came from the British Isles late in the last century and I doubt very much that anyone in my family tree had ever even seen a Negro, much less had sexual relations with one. Therefore, if after nine months our host mother gave birth to a male who exhibited the slightest hint of Negroid features, we could be quite sure that the child did not carry my genotype. (A female child would obviously not be ours, either.)
Although not exactly parallel, we were doing on human terms what we had done with the frogs when we started: inserting the genotype from an albino into an egg from a green frog. Just as a white hatchling was proof of our success with the frogs, a lily-white infant boy from a Negro womb would confirm our success with a human genotype. (Yes, I'm sure you can come up with a very rare exception, but we had to be satisfied with this level of control.)
Once we had proven we could do it, we would report our success to the government. The War Department could then begin its search for the man who would provide the genotype for the American supersoldier.