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CH036

W
hat are
you talking about?” Lynn Kendall said, staring at Dave, who sat quietly on the living room couch.

“This monkey is your
son
?”

“Well, not exactly…”

“Not
exactly
?” She paced around the living room. “What the hell does
that
mean, Henry?”

It had been a normal Saturday afternoon. Their teenage daughter, Tracy, was in the backyard, sunbathing and talking on the telephone, and not doing her homework. Her brother, Jamie, was splashing in the wading pool. Lynn had spent the day inside the house, finishing a job on a tight deadline. She’d been working hard on it for the last three days, so she was surprised when she opened the front door and her husband had walked in, leading a chimpanzee by the hand.

“Henry? Is he your son or not?”

“He is, in a way.”

“In a way. That’s clear. I’m glad you cleared that up.” She spun, glared at him. An awful thought occurred to her. “Wait a minute. Wait just a minute. Are you trying to tell me that you had sex with a—”

“No, no,” her husband said, holding up his hands. “No, honey. Nothing like that. It was just an experiment.”

“Just an experiment. Jesus. An experiment? What kind of experiment, Henry?”

The monkey sat curled up, holding his toes in his hand. Looking up at the two adults.

“Try to keep your voice down,” Henry said. “You’re upsetting him.”

“I’m upsetting him? I’m upsetting him? He’s a fucking monkey, Henry!”

“Ape.”

“Ape, monkey…Henry, what is he doing here? Why is he in our house?”

“Well…I’m not…Actually, he’s come to live with us.”

“He’s come to live with us. Out of the blue. You have a monkey son and you never knew about it. He just suddenly arrives with you. Great. That makes sense. That makes perfect sense. Anybody can understand that. Why didn’t you tell me, Henry? Oh, never mind, let it be a surprise. I’m driving home with my monkey son but I’ll tell you about it when I walk in the door. That’s great, Henry. I’m glad we had all those therapy sessions about intimacy and communications.”

“Lynn, I’m sorry—”

“You’re always sorry. Henry: what are you going to do with him? Are you going to take him to the zoo, or what?”

“I don’t like the zoo,” Dave said, speaking for the first time.

“I didn’t ask you,” Lynn said. “You keep out of this.”

And then she froze.

She turned.

She stared.

“He talks?”

“Yes,” Dave said. “Are you my mother?”

Lynn Kendall
didn’t actually pass out, but she began to tremble, and when her knees buckled Henry caught her and helped her to sit in her favorite chair, facing the coffee table, next to the couch. Dave didn’t move. He just stared with wide eyes. Henry went into the kitchen and got his wife some lemonade, and brought it back to her.

“Here,” he said. “Drink this.”

“I want a damn martini.”

“Honey, those days are over.” Lynn was AA.

“I don’t know what days are what,” she said. She was staring at Dave. “He talks. The monkey talks.”

“Ape.”

“I’m sorry I upsetted you,” Dave said to her.

“Thank you, uh…”

“His name is Dave,” Henry said. “He doesn’t always get his tenses right.”

Dave said, “Sometimes people get upsetted by me. They feel bad.”

“Dave,” she said. “This is not about you, honey. You seem to be very nice. This is about him.” She jerked her thumb toward Henry. “The asshole.”

“What is ah-sole?”

“He’s probably never heard swearing,” Henry said. “You need to watch your language.”

“How do you watch language?” Dave said. “It’s noises. You can’t watch noises.”

“I’m very confused,” Lynn said, sinking into her chair.

“It’s an expression,” Henry said. “A figure of speech.”

“Oh, I see,” Dave said.

There was a silence. His wife sighed. Henry patted her arm.

“Do you have any trees?” Dave said. “I like to climb trees.”

At that moment
Jamie came into the house. “Hey, Mom, I need a towel—” He broke off and stared at the chimp.

“Hello,” Dave said.

Jamie blinked, recovered fast. “Hey, neat!” he said. “I’m Jamie.”

“My name is Dave. Do you have any trees to climb?”

“Sure! A big one! Come on!”

Jamie headed for the door. Dave looked questioningly at Lynn and Henry.

“Go ahead,” Henry said. “It’s okay.”

Dave leapt off the couch, and scampered to the door, following Jamie.

“How do you know he won’t run away?” Lynn said.

“I don’t think he will.”

“Because he’s your son…”

The door banged shut. Outside, they heard their daughter screaming and shrieking, “What is that?”

They heard Jamie say, “He’s a chimp, and we’re climbing trees.”

“Where’d you get him, Jamie?”

“He’s Dad’s.”

“Does he bite?”

They couldn’t make out Jamie’s answer, but through the window they saw the tree branches swaying and moving. Giggles and laughter from outside.

“What are you going to do with him?” Lynn said.

“I don’t know,” Henry said.

“Well, he can’t stay here.”

“I know that.”

“I won’t have a dog in the house. I certainly won’t have an ape.”

“I know.”

“And besides there’s no room for him.”

“I know.”

“This is really a mess,” she said.

He said nothing, just nodded.

“How the hell did this happen, Henry?” she said.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

“I’m listening.”

When the
human genome was decoded, he explained, scientists discovered that the genome of a chimpanzee was nearly identical to that of a man. “All that separates our two species,” he said, “is five hundred genes.”

Of course, that number was deceptive, because human beings and sea urchins also shared a lot of genes. In fact, nearly every creature on the planet shared tens of thousands of the same genes. There was a great underlying unity of all life, genetically speaking.

So that created a lot of interest in what had caused the differences
in different species. Five hundred genes weren’t a lot, yet a great chasm seemed to separate chimps from human beings.

“Many species can crossbreed to produce hybrids—lions and tigers, leopards and jaguars, dolphins and whales, buffalo and cattle, zebras and horses, camels and llamas. Grizzlies and polar bears sometimes mate in the wild, producing grolars. So there was a question of whether chimps and humans could hybridize to make a humanzee. The answer seems to be no.”

“Somebody has tried?”

“Many times. Starting back to the 1920s.”

But even if hybridization were impossible, Henry explained, one might still insert human genes directly into a chimp embryo to create a transgenic animal. Four years back, when Henry was on sabbatical at the National Institutes of Health, he was studying autism, and he wanted to know which genes might account for the difference in communication abilities between people and apes. “Because chimps can communicate,” he said. “They have a range of cries and hand gestures; they can organize themselves into very effective hunting parties to kill small animals. So they have communication, but no language. Like severe autistics. That’s what interested me.”

“And what did you do?” his wife asked.

In the laboratory, under a microscope, he inserted human genes into a chimpanzee embryo. His own genes.

“Including the genes for speech?” she asked.

“Actually, all of them.”

“You inserted all your genes.”

“Look, I never expected the experiment to go to term,” he said. “I was looking to retrieve a fetus.”

“A fetus, not an animal?”

If the transgenic fetus survived eight or nine weeks before it spontaneously aborted, there would be enough differentiation that he could dissect the fetus and advance his understanding of speech in apes.

“You expected the fetus to die?”

“Yes. I was just hoping that it would carry long enough—”

“And then you were going to cut the fetus up?”

“Dissect it, yes.”

“Your own genes, your own fetus—you did this in order to have something to dissect?” She was looking at him like he was a monster.

“Lynn, it was an experiment. We do this kind of thing all the—” He broke off. No point going there. “Look,” he said, “the genes were close at hand. I didn’t have to get anybody’s permission to use them. It was an experiment. It wasn’t about me.”

“It is now,” she said.

The question
Henry was trying to answer was fundamental. Chimps and humans had split from a common ancestor six million years ago. And scientists had long ago noticed that chimpanzees most closely resemble human beings at their fetal stage. This suggested that human beings differed from chimps in part because of difference in intrauterine development. Human development could be thought of as having been arrested at the chimp fetal stage. Some scientists felt it was related to the eventual growth of the human brain, which doubled in the first year after birth. But Henry’s interest was in speech, and for speech to occur, the vocal cords had to move down the throat from the mouth, creating a voice box. That happened in humans, but not in chimps. The entire developmental sequence was immensely complicated.

Henry hoped to harvest a transgenic fetus, and from that to gain some knowledge of what drove the change in human development that made speech possible. At least, that was his original experimental plan.

“Why didn’t you remove the fetus as you intended?” she asked him.

Because that summer, several chimps contracted viral encephalitis, and the healthy chimps had to be moved away for quarantine. They were taken to different labs around the East Coast. “I never heard anything about the embryo I implanted. I just assumed that the female had spontaneously aborted in a quarantine facility somewhere, and the fetal material was discarded. I couldn’t inquire too closely…”

“Because what you did was illegal.”

“Well. That’s a strong word. I assumed the experiment had failed, and it was over.”

“Guess not.”

“No,” he said. “I guess not.”

What happened was that the female gave birth to a full-term infant, and the two were returned to Bethesda. The infant chimp appeared to be normal in every respect. Its skin was somewhat pale, especially around the mouth, where there was no hair. But chimps varied widely in the amount of pigmentation they showed. No one thought anything of it.

As the infant grew, it appeared less normal. The face, which was originally flat, did not bulge outward with age. The facial features remained rather infantile. Still, nobody thought to question the baby’s appearance—until they discovered on a routine blood exam that the infant tested negative for the Gc sialic acid enzyme. Since all apes carry this enzyme, the test was obviously wrong, and repeated. It again came back negative. The infant chimp did not have the enzyme.

“Absence of that enzyme is a human trait,” Henry said. “Sialic acid is a kind of sugar. No humans have the Gc form of sialic acid. All apes have it.”

“But this infant didn’t.”

“Right. So they did a DNA panel, and quickly realized that the infant didn’t have the usual 1.5 percent difference in genes from a human being. It had many fewer differences. And they started to put it all together.”

“And tested the chimp’s DNA against everybody who had worked in the lab.”

“Yes.”

“And found he matched your DNA.”

“Yes. Bellarmino’s office sent me a sample a few weeks ago. I guess to give me a heads-up.”

“What’d you do?”

“Took it to a friend for analysis.”

“Your friend in Long Beach?”

“Yes.”

“And Bellarmino?”

“He just doesn’t want to be responsible, when word gets out.” He shook his head. “I was driving home, and I was just west of Chicago when I got a call from this guy Rovak, at the animal lab. And he says, you’re on your own with this one, pal. That’s their attitude. My problem, not theirs.”

Lynn frowned.
“Why isn’t this a major discovery? Shouldn’t this make you famous around the world? You’ve created the first transgenic ape.”

“The problem,” Henry said, “is that I can be censured for it, or even put in jail. Because I didn’t have permission from the committees that oversee primate research. Because the NIH now forbids transgenic work on any animal other than rats. Because all the anti-GM whackos and Frankenfood nuts will be up in arms over this. Because the NIH doesn’t want any involvement in this and will deny any knowledge of it.”

“So you can’t tell anyone where Dave came from? That’s a problem, Henry, because you’ll never keep him a secret.”

“I know,” he said miserably.

“Tracy’s on the phone right now, telling all her friends about the cute little ape in her backyard.”

“Yes…”

“Her girlfriends will be over here in a few minutes. How are you going to explain Dave to them? Because after the girls will come the reporters.” Lynn glanced at her watch. “In one, two hours, max. What’ll you say?”

“I don’t know. Maybe…I’ll say the work was done in another country. In China. Or in South Korea. And they sent him here.”

“And what will Dave say, when the reporters talk to him?”

“I’ll ask him not to talk to them.”

“Reporters won’t leave this alone, Henry. They’ll be camped outside the house with long lenses; they’ll be circling in helicopters overhead. They’ll be on the next plane to China or Korea to talk to the person who did this. And when they don’t find that person…then what?”

She stared at him, then walked to the door. She looked into the
backyard, where Dave was playing with Jamie. The two of them yelling and swinging through the trees. She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “You know, his skin really is quite pale.”

“I know.”

“His face is flat, almost human. What would he look like with a haircut?”

And so was born
Gandler-Kreukheim syndrome, a rare genetic mutation causing short stature, excessive body hair, and facial deformities that yielded a rather ape-like appearance. The syndrome was so rare, it had only been documented four times in the last century. First, in an aristocratic Hungarian family in Budapest in 1923. Two children were born with the syndrome, described in the medical literature by an Austrian physician, Dr. Emil Kreukheim. The second appearance occurred in an Inuit child born in northern Alaska in 1944. A third child, a girl, was born in São Paulo in 1957, but she died of infection a few weeks after birth. A fourth child, in Bruges, Belgium, in 1988, was briefly seen by media but subsequently vanished. His whereabouts were now unknown.