“Our meeting was at ten o’clock, but Chrom-Med runs information seminars starting at nine-thirty, so I booked a place.”
Mr. Wright looks surprised.
“It’s a bit like the nuclear industry used to be,” I say. “Wanting everything to look open and innocent. ‘Visit our nuclear processing facility and bring a picnic!’ You know the kind of thing.”
Mr. Wright smiles, but the strangest thing has happened. For a moment, as I was speaking, I heard myself talking like you.
It was the morning rush hour and the tube was packed. As I stood squashed up against other commuters, I remembered, appalled, the note I’d put up on the college notice board asking your friends to meet me. In the turmoil after your funeral I’d somehow forgotten. It was at twelve that day. I felt far more apprehensive about that than my meeting with Professor Rosen.
At just before 9:30 a.m. I arrived at the Chrom-Med building—ten stories high in glass with transparent lifts going up the outside like bubbles in sparkling mineral water. Light tubes encircled the building with purple and blue bolts of light shooting around its circumference; “science fiction becomes science fact” seemed to be the message.
The sparkling fantasy image was tarnished by a knot of around ten demonstrators holding placards, one saying NO TO DESIGNER BABIES! Another, LEAVE PLAYING GOD TO GOD! There were no shouts to go with the placards, the demonstrators yawning and lackluster, as if it were too early to be up and about. I wondered if they were there to get on the telly, although media coverage had tailed off in the last few weeks with the TV using library footage now. Maybe they’d turned out because it was the first day in weeks it wasn’t snowing or sleeting or raining.
As I got nearer I heard one demonstrator, a multipierced woman with angrily spiky hair, talking to a journalist.
“…and only the rich will be able to afford the genes to make their children cleverer and more beautiful and more athletic. Only the rich will be able to afford the genes that will stop their children getting cancer or heart disease.”
The journalist was just holding the Dictaphone, looking a little bored, but the spiky-haired protester was undaunted and furiously continued. “They will eventually create a genetic superclass. And there won’t be any chance of intermarrying. Who’s going to marry someone uglier than they are, and weaker, more stupid and prone to illness? After a few generations they will have created two species of people: one gene rich and one gene poor.”
I went up to the spiky-haired demonstrator. “Have you ever met someone with cystic fibrosis? Or muscular dystrophy? Or Huntington’s disease?” I asked.
She glared at me, annoyed I’d interrupted her flow.
“You don’t know what it’s like living with cystic fibrosis, knowing that it’s killing you, that you’re drowning in your own phlegm. You don’t know anything about it at all, do you?”
She moved away from me.
“You’re lucky,” I called after her. “Nature made you gene-rich.”
And then I walked into the building.
I gave my name through a security grill on the door and was buzzed in. I signed my name at reception and presented my passport as I’d been instructed. A camera behind the desk automatically took my photo to make an identity card and then I was allowed through. I’m not sure what they were scanning for, but the machines were far more sophisticated than anything I’d been through at airport security checks. Fifteen of us were then shown into a seminar room, dominated by a large screen, and were welcomed by a young woman called Nancy, our perky “facilitator.”
After an elementary lesson in genetics, Perky Nancy showed us a short film of mice that had been injected as embryos with a jellyfish gene. In the film, the lights went off—and hey presto!—the mice glowed green. There were many oohs and aahs, and I noticed that only one other person, a middle-aged man with a gray ponytail, wasn’t entertained, like me.
Perky Nancy played us the next film, which showed mice in a maze. “And here’s Einstein and his friends,” she enthused. “These little fellows have an extra copy of a gene that codes for memory, making them much cleverer.”
In the film, Einstein and his friends were finding their way around a maze at dazzling speed compared with the meanderings of their dimmer, nongenetically engineered friends.
The man with the gray ponytail spoke up, his voice aggressive. “Does this ‘IQ’ gene get into the germ line?” he asked.
Nancy smiled at the rest of us. “That means, is the gene passed on to their babies?” She turned, still smiling, to Ponytail Man. “Yes. The original mice were given the genetic enhancement nearly ten years ago now. They were these little fellows’ great, great, great—well I’m running out of greats—grandparents. Seriously, though, this IQ gene has been passed on through many generations.”
Ponytail Man’s posture as well as his tone was belligerent. “When will you be testing it on humans? You’ll make a killing then, won’t you?”
Perky Nancy’s expression didn’t flicker. “The law doesn’t allow genetic enhancement in people. Only the treating of disease.”
“But as soon as it’s legal, you’ll be ready and waiting, right?”
“Scientific endeavor can be purely to forward our knowledge, nothing more sinister or commercial than that,” responded Perky Nancy. Maybe she had flashcards for this kind of question.
“You’re floating on the stock market, right?” he asked.
“It’s not my job to talk about the financial aspect of the company.”
“But you have shares? Every employee has shares, right?”
“As I said—”
He interrupted. “So you’d cover up anything that went wrong. Wouldn’t want it to be public?”
Perky Nancy’s tone was sweet but I sensed steel under her linen suit. “I can assure you that we are totally open here. And nothing whatsoever has gone ‘wrong’ as you put it.”
She pressed a button and played us the next film footage, which showed mice in a cage with a researcher helpfully putting in a ruler. It was then that you realized their size—not so much by measuring them against the ruler but against the size of the researcher’s hand. They were enormous.
“We gave these mice a gene to boost muscle growth,” enthused Perky Nancy. “But the gene for that had a surprising effect elsewhere. It made the mice not only much bigger but also meek. We thought we’d get Arnold Schwarzenegger and we ended up with a very muscular Bambi.”
Laughter from the group and again only Ponytail Man and I didn’t join in. As if controlling her own mirth, Perky Nancy continued, “There is a serious point to this experiment, though. It shows us that the same gene can code for two totally different and unrelated things.”
It’s what I’d been worried about with you. I hadn’t been such a fusspot after all.
As Perky Nancy led our group out of the seminar room, I saw a security guard talking to gray Ponytail Man. They were arguing but I couldn’t hear what the argument was about; then Ponytail Man was led firmly away.
We walked in the other direction and were escorted into a large room that had been totally devoted to the CF trial. There were photographs of cured babies and newspaper headlines from all over the world. Perky Nancy galloped us through the beginners’ guide to cystic fibrosis as a huge screen behind her showed a child with CF. I noticed the others in our little party gazing at it, but I looked at Perky Nancy, her cheeks pink, her voice trilling with enthusiasm.
“The story of the cure for cystic fibrosis started in 1989, when an international team of scientists found the defective gene that causes cystic fibrosis. That sounds easy, but remember that in every cell of every human body there are forty-six chromosomes and on each chromosome are thirty thousand genes. Finding that one gene was a fantastic achievement. And the search for a cure was on!”