The Prize (77 page)

‘Of course. But I mean the
whole
story, dear.’

The Stockholm
Expressen
reporter in the front row was immediately interested. ‘What is the whole story, Dr. Marceau?’ he asked her.

Denise abandoned Claude to his perplexity and firmly took over the reins. ‘I think it is rather amusing, an ironic sidelight, that this discovery of ours, for which we are being honoured, deals with the male spermatozoa, yet the project was initiated by a female. As my husband will generously corroborate, it was
I
, quite by chance—but who knows? perhaps nothing like this is pure chance—who first brought up the possibility.’

The
Expressen
man sniffed his lead. ‘Pardon, Dr. Marceau, but are you saying that you, alone, hit upon the discovery?’

Denise could feel the divan move beneath Claude’s angry quiver, and she was pleased. Still, it would win her no sympathy to let this get out of hand. ‘Oh, nothing like that,
exactly
. My husband and I worked closely,
after
I had brought up the possibility. Make no mistake about it, we are a team. We are
ensemble
. Our accomplishment, for whatever it be worth, cannot be divided in two, now or ever. All I have tried to say is—and I thought it would amuse you gentlemen—someone had to conceive the hypothesis, and, in this case, it happened to be I.’

‘Yes, in that sense it is true,’ Claude said, too quickly, too uneasily, suspecting danger and trying to avert it and keep the peace. ‘Six years ago—we were having lunch, with colleagues—a new paper on the female ovum was being bandied about. The talk turned to heredity—heredity control—’

‘—and I looked at Claude,’ interrupted Denise, determined to have the attention of the press, and concentrating on the
Le Monde
reporter, ‘and I said—I remember the very words this day—I said, “Suppose it were possible to preserve the living spermatozoa of a Charlemagne or an Erasmus, or the unfertilized egg of a Cleopatra, and implant them today, by modern means, centuries after their donors were dead?” Those were my words, and that was our beginning.’ She turned sweetly to her husband. ‘Remember, dear?’

‘Yes,’ he said dully, ‘it was a fortuitous remark. It was then that
I
suggested—’ Ah, thought Denise, he is irritated. Good, good. ‘—that we look into the matter further.’ He turned to the reporters. ‘And we did, for six years, together.’

Denise beamed at the rows of faces. ‘I could never have done it
alone
. My husband was wonderful. It was a work of devoted collaboration. There is a telepathy between us, you might even call it a
mystique
bond. I know what he thinks, he knows what I think, and we save precious time by these perceptions.’

Claude shifted uncomfortably on the divan, and reached for his sherry on the end table, as the reporters bent their heads and scribbled on their pads.

The Agence France-Presse man lifted his hand, and then posed the next inquiry. ‘Dr. Marceau,’ he asked Denise, ‘I wonder if you could clarify for all of us—not in scientific detail, necessarily—we are laymen—but clarify what your discovery is all about. Were you the first in this field or had others worked on the same problem?’

‘Now, that is two questions, but I will do my best with both of them,’ Denise replied with a charming smile. ‘Let us take the last one first. What made our discovery possible was the successful application of artificial insemination to humans. This was first attempted in London a century and a half ago. The greatest advance in artificial impregnation was made in 1939, by Dr. Gregory Pincus of America, Clark University, if I recall correctly. He transplanted the egg from the ovum of one female rabbit into another female rabbit, and an offspring was successfully produced. Now, despite religious opposition, and sometimes legal barriers, artificial insemination is widely practised. In America alone, I am told, there have been fifty thousand so-called test-tube children, that is, children conceived without intercourse. Once this artificial means of procreation was possible, and acceptable, the next step was—well, the step my husband and I took—controlled heredity.’ She turned to her husband. ‘Before I inveigled you into this field, Claude, how many others, would you say, were researching along the same lines?’

Claude did not deign to look at her or reply directly to her. He addressed the Agence France-Presse man. ‘In France, our own Dr. Jean Rostand, back in 1946, kept a frog’s seminal cells alive. In London, a bull’s semen, treated with glycerine and carbonic snow, was kept alive. You must understand, sir, that the problem was to keep the male sperm from perishing, so that it could be transferred. In artificial insemination, the donor’s sperm was rarely more than two hours old. The problem was—how to keep this same human sperm alive not for two hours but two months or two years or two centuries, and still preserve its power to fertilize the female egg. The Dr. Pincus of whom my wife spoke, with Dr. Hudson Hoagland, both Americans, made remarkable experiments in this field. They thought it possible that a genius could sire a family of several hundred and do it a century after he was in his grave—by leaving behind him vitrified sperms. The hopes this opened for humanity were staggering. Our own Dr. Rostand remarked, “Under a system of artificial selection, the proportion of human beings of high quality would be bound to become greater—and, indeed, much greater—than it is in our time,” It was our problem to make this dream a reality, and I am proud that we have succeeded.’

‘And the means?’ repeated the Agence France-Presse man.

‘I promised to answer that,’ said Denise Marceau, deliberately taking over again. ‘After I convinced Claude it was more than a fancy—he is at heart a sceptic, like all fine investigators—he joined me wholeheartedly in tackling the problem of vitrification. We followed the leads of other geneticists—that is, applied glycerol to protect the sperm before freezing and later thawing. We found glycerol little more than sixty per cent effective. Only six out of ten human sperm cells survived this freezing at one hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The problem that haunted us was to get a higher percentage of sperms to survive freezing, and to have them survive not a few months of cold storage but many years. After ceaseless trial and error—I suspect Claude wanted to throw up his hands many times, but I had a woman’s persistence, abetted by intuition, about the project—we finally discovered the compound that we call P-437—our private joke is that the P stands for patience—and our experiments have proved that we can keep a male sperm in storage, and alive in suspended animation, for more than five years, probably ten.’

‘Magnificent,’ said the Agence France-Presse man, writing furiously.

‘Doctor,’ the
Svenska Dagbladet
reporter called to her from the third row, ‘you originally suggested that the living spermatozoa of a Charlemagne or Erasmus could be implanted in a modern-day woman. Dr. Marceau, your husband, spoke of dead geniuses giving the world today newborn children, families of hundreds, from their frozen sperms. Do you honestly believe this will become a reality?’

‘I believe so,’ said Denise, flatly. ‘Now it is possible, at last. There is a practical obstacle, of course. It requires fifty million sperms for a single human artificial insemination. Most geniuses, unfortunately, are recognized when they are old, less fertile than in their youth, sometimes sterile or impotent in their last years.’

‘Mozart was a genius at six,’ said the
Svenska Dagbladet
reporter.

‘
Voilà
,’ agreed Denise. ‘And he lived until thirty-five. The perfect subject. Had our discovery been made in the eighteenth century, what a heritage the world might now have from its Mozarts.’

‘Did you entertain such notions during your six years of research?’ inquired the Reuters man who sat in front of Jacobsson.

‘Constantly,’ said Denise. ‘I am a scientist first, but also a woman and a romantic.’ She glanced playfully at Claude’s stern face. ‘My husband, perhaps to our advantage, is less tolerant of romantic fairy tales. His life is the test tube.’ She turned towards the Reuters man. ‘When we had almost succeeded, I was beside myself with my imaginings. And now that our work is a reality, I am as thrilled as before by the human possibilities. Consider. If our P-437 had existed in the sixteenth century, Anne Hathaway might have loaned your Shakespeare to the cause. Today Shakespeare’s actual sperms might be taken out of storage, thawed, and a dozen of your English ladies impregnated with them and in nine months these ladies would bear his children. Consider further. If our P-437 had existed in the last five hundred years, we would today have a storage bank containing the living reproductive sperms of Galileo, Pasteur, Newton, Darwin—Voltaire, Milton, Goethe, Balzac, Guy de Maupassant—Garrick, Casanova, Napoleon Bonaparte, Nietzsche, Benjamin Franklin—and tomorrow morning, I could go to this storage bank, remove and thaw the sperms of any of these geniuses, impregnate selected women in Sweden, England, America, or in my native France, and by next autumn, there would be delivered squealing sons and daughters spawned decades or centuries ago by Galileo or Goethe or Benjamin Franklin. Had we made our discovery earlier in our own lifetime, we might have in the storage bank the living sperms of Luther Burbank or Professor Einstein or Paderewski or, for that matter, Rudolph Valentino.’

‘Or Judas Iscariot,’ muttered the
Die Weltwoche
reporter from Zürich.

‘Oh, we need never take him out of the storage bank,’ said Denise. ‘Or we could thaw his sperms and throw them away.’

‘When do you start collecting the sperms from our present day geniuses?’ asked the Associated Press man.

‘Not yet, not so soon,’ said Denise. ‘But perhaps soon enough. More work must be done, more experiments by others. Claude and I have finished our work. Others must carry on, find the limits. And then we will be ready.’

‘What new field are you going to enter into next?’ asked the Associated Press man.

Denise demurely gestured towards Claude. ‘I prefer that my husband give that reply.’

Claude was caught off guard. ‘I—I do not know what we will try next. We have some ideas, but it is too early—we shall see.’

‘Madame—that is,
Docteur
—Marceau,’ called the Reuters representative, ‘to return, for a moment, to your rather optimistic hopes about the value of storing the sperms of the genius—do you mind?’

‘Go ahead, please.’

‘I could not help but remember a well-known anecdote about George Bernard Shaw. One day, the wild, uninhibited Isadora Duncan suggested to him that they cohabit in order to produce a perfect child. “Think of it,” I believe she told him, “our child would have my beauty and your brains.” Shaw replied, “But suppose, my dear, it turned out to have my beauty and your brains?”’ Everyone in the room laughed, including Denise, and then the Reuters man added, ‘Well, Dr. Marceau, in the case of your sperms, what if the result were the other way around?’

When the laughter subsided, Denise assumed a solemn demeanour. ‘Yes, I understand. It is really a serious matter. Of course, genius does not always, or even frequently, produce genius. Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd, did not automatically inherit the abilities of his illustrious father. And Lord Byron’s surviving daughter, Ada, what did she produce in maturity? A system for betting on horse-races that was a failure, and she died at thirty-six, shattered and deranged. On the other hand, John Adams, the second American president, gave the world John Quincy Adams, the sixth American president. And consider, also, Dumas
père
and Dumas
fils
. Here, genius was passed on. No doubt, it is a gamble. Yet controlled breeding, as applied to bulls and cows, has shown gratifying results in England. From the standpoint of modern eugenics, we can improve the human race by skilful mating of pedigreed human beings, men and women physically fit and of measured high mentality. Genius may not always be the result. Borrowing the heredity of Erasmus may not give us another Erasmus centuries later. But the odds would favour the possibility. Certainly, by using the sperms of brilliant men or physically healthy men, and implanting them in young women with the same characteristics, we will improve our chances of populating the world, one day, someday, with a superior people. There is no guarantee, but this is the hope, and for myself, I believe it is a promising one.’

An aged waiter, in a white jacket, appeared with a tray crowded with glasses, some filled with sherry, the rest with whisky. He glanced at Denise, and she nodded, welcoming the respite.