Next (36 page)
Authors: Michael Crichton
Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Adventure
T
he overhead
lights came on in the autopsy room, bank after bank. It made a dramatic opening shot, Gorevitch thought. The figure in the lab coat was distinguished-looking in a severe way: silver hair, wire-rim glasses. He was the internationally renowned primate anatomist Jorg Erickson.
Using a handheld camera, Gorevitch said, “Dr. Erickson, what are we doing today?”
“We are examining a world-famous specimen, the putative talking orangutan of Indonesia. This animal is said to have spoken in at least two languages. Well, we shall see.”
Dr. Erickson turned to the steel table, where the carcass was draped in a white cloth. He pulled the cloth away with a flourish. “This is a sub-adult or juvenile
Pongo abelii,
a Sumatran orangutan, distinguished by its smaller size from the Borneo orangutan. This specimen is male, approximately three years of age, in apparent good health, with no external scars or injuries…All right, now we begin.” He picked up a scalpel.
“With a midsagittal incision, I expose the anterior musculature of the throat and pharynx. Note the superior and inferior belly of the omohyoid, and here, the sternohyoid…Hmmm.” Erickson was bent over the animal’s neck. Gorevitch found it difficult to maneuver for a shot.
“What do you see, Professor?”
“I am looking now at the stylohyoid and the cricothyroid muscles,
here, and here…And this is quite interesting. Ordinarily in
Pongo
we find the anterior musculature poorly developed, and lacking the fine motor control of the human speech apparatus. But this creature appears to be a transitional case, bearing some features of the classic pongid pharynx, and some features more characteristic of the human neck. Notice the sternocleidomastoid…”
Gorevitch thought,
Sternocleidomastoid.
Jesus. They would have to dub in a voice-over. “Professor, perhaps you could say it in English?”
“No, the terms are Latin, I don’t know the translation—”
“I mean, can you explain in layman’s terms? For our viewers?”
“Ah, of course. All these superficial muscles, most of which attach to the hyoid—that is to say, the Adam’s apple—these muscles are more human than ape-like.”
“What could account for that?”
“Some mutation, obviously.”
“And the rest of the animal? Is it more human, as well?”
“I have not seen the rest of the animal,” Erickson said severely. “But we will get there, in due time. I shall be especially interested to inspect any rotation of the axis of the foramen magnum, and of course the depth and arrangement of sulci of the motor cortex, to the extent that gray matter has been preserved.”
“Do you expect to find human-like changes in the brain?”
“Frankly, no. I do not,” Erickson said. He turned his attention to the top of the skull, running his gloved hands over the sparse hair of the orang’s scalp, feeling the bones beneath. “You see, in this animal, parietal bones slope inward, toward the top of the cranium. That is a classic pongid or chimp finding. Whereas humans have bulging parietal bones. The top of their heads are wider than the bottom.”
Erickson stepped back from the table. Gorevitch said, “So you are saying this animal is a mixture of human and ape?”
“No,” Erickson said. “This is an ape. It is an aberrant ape, to be sure. But it is merely an ape.”
JOHN B. WATSON INVESTMENT GROUP
For Immediate Release
John B. “Jack” Watson,
world-famous philanthropist and founder of the Watson Investment Group, died today in Shanghai, China. Mr. Watson was internationally lauded for his charitable work and his efforts on behalf of the poor and downtrodden of the world. Mr. Watson had been ill for only a short time, but he suffered from an extremely aggressive form of cancer. He checked into a private Shanghai clinic and died three days later. He is mourned by friends and colleagues around the world.
STORY, DETAILS TK
H
enry Kendall
was surprised that Gerard could help Dave with his math homework. But that wouldn’t last long. Eventually, Dave would probably need special schooling. Dave had inherited the chimp’s short attention span. He found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the other kids in class, particularly in reading, which was agony for him. And his physical prowess put him in another league on the playground. The other children wouldn’t let him play. So he had become an excellent surfer.
And by now, the truth was out. There had been a particularly distressing article in
People
magazine, “The Modern Family,” which said, “The most up-to-date family is no longer a same-sex family, or a blended family, or an interracial family. That’s all so last century, says Tracy Kendall. And she should know, because the Kendall family of La Jolla, California, is transgenic and interspecies—creating more excitement in the household than a barrel of monkeys!”
Henry had been called to testify before Congress, which he found a peculiar experience. The congressmen spoke to the cameras for two hours. Then they got up and left, pleading urgent business elsewhere. Then the witnesses spoke for six minutes each, but there were no congressmen there to hear their remarks. Later, the congressmen all announced they would soon deliver major speeches on the subject of transgenic creation.
Henry was named Scientist of the Year by the Society for Libertarian Biology. Jeremy Rifkin called him a “war criminal.” He had
been excoriated by the National Council of Churches. The pope excommunicated him, only later to discover that he wasn’t Catholic; they had the wrong Henry Kendall. The NIH criticized his work, but the replacement for Robert Bellarmino as head of genetics was William Gladstone, and he was much more open-minded and less self-aggrandizing than Bellarmino had been. Henry now traveled continuously, lecturing about transgenic techniques at university seminars around the country.
He was the subject of intense controversy. The Reverend Billy John Harker of Tennessee called him “Satan incarnate.” Bill Mayer, noted left-wing reactionary, published a long and much-discussed article in the
New York Review of Books
entitled “Banished from Eden: Why We Must Prevent Transgenic Travesties.” The article failed to mention that transgenic animals had been in existence for two decades already. Dogs, cats, bacteria, mice, sheep, and cattle had all been created. When a senior NIH scientist was asked about the article, he coughed and said, “What’s the
New York Review
?”
Lynn Kendall ran the TransGenic Times web site, which detailed the daily life of Dave, Gerard, and her fully human children, Jamie and Tracy.
After a year in
La Jolla, Gerard began to make dial-tone sounds. He had done it before, but the tones were mysterious to the Kendalls. Evidently they were the tones of a foreign telephone exchange, but they failed to identify which country. “Where did you come from, Gerard?” they would ask.
“I can’t sleep a wink anymore, ever since you first walked out the door.” He had become enamored of American country music. “All you ever do is bring me down.”
“What country, Gerard?”
To that, they never received an answer. He spoke some French, and he often talked with a British accent. They assumed he was European.
Then one day one of Henry’s graduate students from France was having dinner at their house, and he heard Gerard’s tones. “My God,”
he said, “I know what he is doing.” He listened for a moment. “There is no city code,” he said. “But otherwise…let’s try.” He pulled out his own cell phone, and began to key in numbers. “Do it again, Gerard.”
Gerard repeated the tones.
“And again.”
“Life is a book, you’ve got to read it,” Gerard sang. “Life is a story and you’ve got to tell it…”
“I know this song,” the graduate student said.
“What is it?” Henry said.
“It’s Eurovision. Gerard, the tones.”
Eventually, Gerard did the dial tones. The graduate student placed the call. His first guess was to try Paris. A woman answered the phone. He said in French, “Excuse me, but do you know of a grey parrot who is named Gerard?”
The woman began to cry. “Let me speak to him,” she said. “Is he all right?”
“He is fine.”
They held the phone by Gerard’s perch, and he listened to the woman’s voice. His head bobbed excitedly. Then he said, “Is this where you live? Oh, Mother’s going to love it here!”
Gail Bond arrived to visit a few days later. She stayed a week, and then returned alone. Gerard, it seemed, wanted to stay. For days afterward, he sang:
My baby used to stay out all night long,
She made me cry, she done me wrong,
She hurt my eyes open, that’s no lie,
Tables turn and now her turn to cry,
Because I used to love her, but it’s all over now…
All in all,
things were working out much better than anyone expected. The family was busy, but everyone got along. There were only two worrisome trends. Henry noticed that Dave had developed a few gray
hairs around his muzzle. So it was possible that Dave, like most other transgenics, might die earlier than usual.
And one autumn day, while Dave was walking with Henry at the county fair, holding Henry’s hand, a farmer in overalls came up and said, “I’d like to get me one of them to work on my farm.”
That gave Henry a chill.
Q1: NEXT challenges the reader’s sense of what is happening, what is true and what is invented. How much of what’s in the book has already taken place?
It’s odd but nearly everything in the book has already happened, or is about to happen. The book does look to the future a bit, particularly with regard to some transgenic animals that become important characters. But for the most part NEXT is not really speculative fiction at all.
Q2: What scares
you
the most about NEXT? And conversely, which possibilities do you find the most encouraging?
I’m not really scared about anything in the genetic realm. My research actually reassured me, because I concluded that many of the things people discuss with great fear or great longing—such as designer babies, or extended longevity—are probably not going to happen.
I think that we’ll have some remarkable new therapies from this area, and we will also find that the genome is vastly more complicated than we anticipated. In that sense, the genome is a bit like the human brain—much harder to understand than we once imagined.
Q3: What first sparked your interest in genetics?
It’s a longstanding interest for me. I studied genetics and evolution in college, and of course as a medical student. Genetics has been one of the most exciting areas of scientific research in my lifetime. It’s hard to remember that when I was born in the 1940s, people weren’t really sure what a “gene” consisted of. And they thought human beings had 24 chromosomes, instead of 23! And they had no idea at all how an embryo grew and differentiated into a live birth.
Q4: In the past you’ve said that you usually do research to answer a question of your own that interests you. What was the origin of NEXT? (possibly for Powell’s)
This novel began when I attended a genetics conference at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. I learned just how fast the field was progressing, and how inappropriate certain legal positions were. The field obviously needed some broader attention from the public.
In terms of the novel, the question I asked was: what’s the current view of how the genome operates—how you get from genotype to phenotype? Because such ideas have changed hugely in the last decades. Of course, this question is ultimately the old nature/nurture issue, and so it is politically charged. How much of our behavior is ruled by genes, and how much by upbringing and experience? I ultimately concluded I couldn’t really address this question in the book, because it is so complex. But I arrived at answers for myself that surprised and satisfied me.
My answer is that genes are an integral part of our adaptive apparatus as organisms in an environment. So we find both heightened importance for nature and also for nurture. But the whole interaction is far more complicated than people thought fifty years ago. And it continues to change.
Q5: NEXT poses many complex questions and presents the audience with many moral gray areas. Where do you stand on the ethics of genetic engineering, stem cell research, genetic therapy and gene patents?
I oppose patenting genes, and argue such patents should never have been granted in the first place. The genome is our common heritage, going back millions of years, and it is absurd that anyone should own any part of it. I hope this book helps undo gene patents. The practice is obstructive and even dangerous.
Genetic therapy is highly experimental. It has great promise and great hazards. Stem cell research is more a political football than a theraputic issue, at this point. Politically it’s a continuation of the abortion controversy that has wracked this country for nearly half a century, with no end in sight. What stem cell research will ultimately offer us is wholly unknown. It may be hugely powerful. It may be a dead end. But in any case I oppose bans on research. They don’t work and they displace the arguments, which become about the ban and not about the subject of the research itself.
As for the ethics of genetic engineering, most people argue excitedly about what is not possible. If it were possible to pop genes in and out of embryos, to make designer babies, then we would indeed have serious ethical questions to face. At the moment, that is not possible at all. I therefore don’t think that talking about it does a lot of good. On major human life decisions, I don’t think there is great value in deciding what you will do until you are actually faced with the issue. For example, I think it is fruitless to speculate what you would do if you had a fatal disease. Eventually we all get one, and our behavior at that point will probably not be what we imagined.
Similarly, I think we don’t know in advance how we will respond to opportunities in new technology. We just don’t know.
Q6: What is the latest court ruling as to what constitutes cell ownership? Are there any upcoming cases that you’re keeping an eye on?
Rules regarding tissues are fragmented. A recent Sixth Circuit decision regarding the tissue collection of Dr. William Catalona has set back the effots of patients to have some control over what happens to their tissues, once donated to medical research. There are good reasons why patients deserve such control. If you give your tissue for prostate research, you might not want the tissues used for other purposes you disagree with. You might have religious or other objections. You might have legal concerns, because if your genetic information was published your insurance might be cancelled. These are genuine concerns.
Federal guidelines regarding tissues are much more humane. And they don’t interfere with research. We need Congress to make these guidelines the law of the land.
Q7: One of your characters warns that science is as corruptible an enterprise as any other, academics and entrepreneurs are way too cozy and data can be massaged to achieve any desired result. Is this something the American public should be more aware of?
I hope that such unsavory narratives as the Vioxx scandal will convince the public that we need better and more independent sources of information. But it is also true that the British slaughter of livestock at the height of the BSE scare now seems to have been unnecessary, the result of a flawed computer prediction. We are going to see more such errors in many areas of science. I believe we live in the greatest era of snake oil salesmen in the history of mankind. Unless government acts to assure us
of independently verified information, we will continue to suffer bad science policies, and even deaths.
Q8: How do you stay informed about current and cutting-edge science? How much do you read? Are you actively involved in the scientific community?
There is no secret. I just read a lot. I don’t talk to a lot of scientists. It’s faster to read than talk.
Q9: Many of your previous books have ignited public discussion and debate. Do you think NEXT will provoke a similar response?
I am never sure how the public reaction to my books will be. I’m usually surprised. I won’t make any predictions about this book.
Q10: In 2005, you appeared before the United States Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works to discuss the politicization of scientific research. What was your message? Why is this such a big problem and what is the solution?
Essentially I argued that what we need is a government policy that assures independently verified information in any area that is important to policy. This is the essence of the scientific method. There are well-established statistical procedures to make sure that the information you get is unbiased. It’s simple enough to do, although expensive. But bad information is expensive, and bad policies are very expensive.
I argue that we live in a technological society where science matters, and it is up to the government to make sure that what we’re told is accurate.
For this rather ordinary argument I was thoroughly attacked. There are many people out there who don’t want their data to be checked!
Q11: What’s so striking about all your books and now NEXT in particular is your ability to make complicated science comprehensible to a mass audience while also showcasing your tremendous expertise. How do you pull that off time after time?
Again, there’s no secret. Making the story clear is accomplished by rewriting and rewriting until the technical passages are understandable. In any book, there are usually a few pages that I end up rewriting about twenty times.
Q12: After the final thrilling page, what would you most like readers to take away from NEXT?
The future is bright and exciting, and it will challenge us to think in fresh ways about our lives. But among our challenges today, we have some legal problems in genetics that need to be fixed. We need some laws passed, and some laws changed.
But I am optimistic about the future. Very optimistic.
