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!”
She made it sound like the opening to a
She turned to the screen, where the child was struggling to breathe, and her voice quavered a little. Maybe it did that every time she showed the film.
“The problem was how to get a healthy gene into a sufferer’s body,” she continued. “The existing method of using a virus was far from ideal. There were risks associated with it and often it wore off too quickly. Then Professor Rosen, backed by Chrom-Med, created an artificial chromosome. It was a new and totally safe way of getting the healthy gene into the body.”
An anxious-faced young man in an Oxford University sweatshirt spoke up. “You’re saying you put an
“Yes,” said Perky Nancy, starry eyed. “In treated patients each cell will have forty-seven, not forty-six, chromosomes. But it’s only a microchromosome and—”
He interrupted her and the group tensed. Was he replacing gray Ponytail Man as the rude member of the group? “Does this extra chromosome get into the germ line?” he asked.
“Yes, it’ll be passed down to future generations.”
“Don’t you find that worrying?”
“Not really, no,” said Perky Nancy, smiling. Her anodyne response seemed to mop up any hostility he might have had. Or maybe I just couldn’t see it anymore because Nancy had dimmed the lights.
On the huge screen a film began, showing the double helix of DNA blown up millions of times. I saw with thirteen other people the two faulty CF genes highlighted. And then, incredibly, I watched the faulty genes being
