trees. Milk is, admittedly, in the running, but my belief is that it will prove to be too difficult and too time-consuming to produce breeding populations of transformed sheep, goats, and cattle. If milk ultimately wins out as the carrier of choice, the rabbits, whose use has been pioneered by the Dutch, will probably win out as producers; what they lack in terms of the prolific production of milk, they make up in terms of the prolific production of more rabbits. They too are kept in faculties whose architecture owes something to the inspiration of Mouseworld.”
“Which the designers failed to patent?”
“Alas, yes. The world was very different then. The so-called ‘Green Revolution’ was planned and carried out by workers in the public sector, who published everything and ignored the niceties of intellectual property rights. The bio technological revolution, on the other hand, is being planned and carried out by employees of large corporations, which only publish ads and slogans and try very hard to claim intellectual property rights to everything—including their ads and their slogans. If you look with educated eyes, you can see it happening in Mouseworld, as the privileged inhabitants of the central H Block become increasingly anonymous and furtive, hiding secrets into which no one but each mouse’s master manipulator is supposed to know. That is more the kind of spin-off I had in mind when I first raised the issue.”
“Professor Miller doesn’t seem to have much sympathy for the notion that the four cities are an accurate parable of the human predicament,” Lisa told him.
“Perhaps he is insensitive to the deeper subtleties of the parable,” Chan suggested. “He tends to think of the mice in the central block as something separate from the cities, so when he speaks of Mouseworld as a parable, he only has in mind the population problem, but the population problem is not all there is to Mouseworld, any more than it is all there is to the human world. I am not saying, of course, that every other aspect of the human world is mirrored in the confusion of that magical H—but I do say that those with the eyes to see it will find more mirrors there than they might expect.”
“The models,” Lisa said, to demonstrate that she was on the ball. “Around the walls, the more or less healthy masses, but in the ghetto, the seriously sick.”
In the wake of the Human Genome Project, there had been a boom in the use of transgenic mice as “models” of every known human genetic-deficiency disease. All kinds of gene-based diseases that were difficult to investigate in living human patients could be inflicted on “knockout mice” by deliberately damaging the relevant gene in mouse embryos, which could then produce true-breeding populations of mice, all of whose members were victims. Where variant forms of a still-functional gene were responsible for pathological symptoms, the variant forms could be transplanted from humans into mice in place of the deleted native version, with only a little less trouble. The development of the diseases could be tracked much more closely in model mice because specimens could be killed and dissected at every relevant stage, and the populations also provided valuable preliminary testing grounds for possible treatments and cures.
“That’s right,” said Chan, bowing his head slightly to acknowledge her alacrity. “But you must follow the analogy farther.”
She tried. The evening sun, which was shining in a margin of clear sky but Ht abundant clouds from below, was filling the room with a peculiarly fiery light. Where it reflected from the transparent-plastic faces of the cages, it was more red than gold.
“You mean that the models are temporary residents in Mouseworld,” she ventured eventually. “The business is booming now, but it’ll be a short-term thing. As we find the treatments and the cures, the models will become obsolete—and in the human world too, the
“Which the designers failed to patent?”
“Alas, yes. The world was very different then. The so-called ‘Green Revolution’ was planned and carried out by workers in the public sector, who published everything and ignored the niceties of intellectual property rights. The bio technological revolution, on the other hand, is being planned and carried out by employees of large corporations, which only publish ads and slogans and try very hard to claim intellectual property rights to everything—including their ads and their slogans. If you look with educated eyes, you can see it happening in Mouseworld, as the privileged inhabitants of the central H Block become increasingly anonymous and furtive, hiding secrets into which no one but each mouse’s master manipulator is supposed to know. That is more the kind of spin-off I had in mind when I first raised the issue.”
“Professor Miller doesn’t seem to have much sympathy for the notion that the four cities are an accurate parable of the human predicament,” Lisa told him.
“Perhaps he is insensitive to the deeper subtleties of the parable,” Chan suggested. “He tends to think of the mice in the central block as something separate from the cities, so when he speaks of Mouseworld as a parable, he only has in mind the population problem, but the population problem is not all there is to Mouseworld, any more than it is all there is to the human world. I am not saying, of course, that every other aspect of the human world is mirrored in the confusion of that magical H—but I do say that those with the eyes to see it will find more mirrors there than they might expect.”
“The models,” Lisa said, to demonstrate that she was on the ball. “Around the walls, the more or less healthy masses, but in the ghetto, the seriously sick.”
In the wake of the Human Genome Project, there had been a boom in the use of transgenic mice as “models” of every known human genetic-deficiency disease. All kinds of gene-based diseases that were difficult to investigate in living human patients could be inflicted on “knockout mice” by deliberately damaging the relevant gene in mouse embryos, which could then produce true-breeding populations of mice, all of whose members were victims. Where variant forms of a still-functional gene were responsible for pathological symptoms, the variant forms could be transplanted from humans into mice in place of the deleted native version, with only a little less trouble. The development of the diseases could be tracked much more closely in model mice because specimens could be killed and dissected at every relevant stage, and the populations also provided valuable preliminary testing grounds for possible treatments and cures.
“That’s right,” said Chan, bowing his head slightly to acknowledge her alacrity. “But you must follow the analogy farther.”
She tried. The evening sun, which was shining in a margin of clear sky but Ht abundant clouds from below, was filling the room with a peculiarly fiery light. Where it reflected from the transparent-plastic faces of the cages, it was more red than gold.
“You mean that the models are temporary residents in Mouseworld,” she ventured eventually. “The business is booming now, but it’ll be a short-term thing. As we find the treatments and the cures, the models will become obsolete—and in the human world too, the
Similar Books
