success took place right before we landed on the moon—this was almost ten years before Louise Brown, the first official test tube baby, was born.”
“Who was funding you?”
“We’ll get to that in a moment. But imagine, if you will, how excited we were that we’d created a person in a lab. And yet we couldn’t publish, we couldn’t go public. It was all very hush-hush. I found out why later. Our benefactor, it seems, was looking for more than reproductive technology. After proving that sexual reproduction was possible in vitro, he next wanted us to prove that asexual reproduction was possible in humans.”
“Cloning?”
“Sort of. Asexual reproduction is having offspring with only one parent. This usually results in an exact genetic copy. Many things reproduce in this way—protozoan, fungi, seaweed, coral, insects, fish, lizards, even some birds under artificial conditions. The word clone comes from the Greek word for twig. Cut off a twig, plant it, grow a new tree. In theory, anyway.”
The doctor was pacing before them, gesturing with his hands. He was talking at a terrific clip, the words coming out so fast they ran together. Tom thought of a champagne bottle, finally uncorked after decades in a cellar.
“It was hard work. How can you create life without a sperm and egg? We knew about chromosomes. Humans have forty-six, getting half from the mother and half from the father. But what if there was no father? Could we fool an egg into thinking it was a zygote, that it had been fertilized, using only the chromosomes of one parent?”
Harold shook his head sadly.
“Set backs. Years of setbacks. We were trying to implant a karyoplast into the cytoplasm of a zygote. Nuclear transfer. Forcing a morula or blastocyst without two haploids.”
“I don’t know what the hell you just said.” Roy got off the sofa.
He gave Tom a look of intent, patting the Foxhound in the pocket. Off to check the rest of the place out. “Anyone want some water?”
“Kitchen is through there. How about you two? Am I going too fast?”
Tom ventured a guess. “You were scraping out fertilized eggs and adding your own genes?”
“Exactly. But it didn’t work. We couldn’t get the enucleated egg and the donor cell to fuse. We tried the Sendai virus, electrofusion—
nothing worked. Then, as a control, I tried it with a non fertilized ova.
It fused into a zygote like magic.”
“So all you did was put a human cell in an empty egg and it grew?” Bert seemed surprised.
“Well, my boy, you make twenty years of research sound simple.
Actually, it was much more difficult than that. You had to actually put the donor cells in the gap-zero phase by starving them. You see, cells go through phases—”
“Doctor.” Tom held up his hand. “You might as well be speaking Martian. We believe you when you say it was hard work.”
“Darn tootin’. And we finally did it—grew an embryo in agar and transplanted it into the uterus of a woman, who successfully gave birth to a healthy baby. We did it many times, in fact. You can imagine how excited we were. But again, it had to be kept quiet, and again, it wasn’t enough. Our next miracle was to bring dead cells back to life. Which, of course, is impossible.”
“It can’t be impossible.” Bert leaned back and crossed his legs.
“Because here we are.”
“Oh, but it is impossible. Once tissue is dead, it’s dead.
Frankenstein’s monster will forever remain in the realm of fiction. My team did enough work on that to settle the debate forever.”
“So how...?”
“Are you sure no one would like some coffee? You can’t imagine how wonderful it is to tell this, after so long. I don’t even have access to my notes. There won’t be any memoirs, any posthumous Nobel Prize. He took everything.”
“Who did?”
“We’ll get to that in a moment. Anyhoo, once we proved that regenerating dead tissue was impossible, we did the next best thing.
We copied it.”
Tom
“Who was funding you?”
“We’ll get to that in a moment. But imagine, if you will, how excited we were that we’d created a person in a lab. And yet we couldn’t publish, we couldn’t go public. It was all very hush-hush. I found out why later. Our benefactor, it seems, was looking for more than reproductive technology. After proving that sexual reproduction was possible in vitro, he next wanted us to prove that asexual reproduction was possible in humans.”
“Cloning?”
“Sort of. Asexual reproduction is having offspring with only one parent. This usually results in an exact genetic copy. Many things reproduce in this way—protozoan, fungi, seaweed, coral, insects, fish, lizards, even some birds under artificial conditions. The word clone comes from the Greek word for twig. Cut off a twig, plant it, grow a new tree. In theory, anyway.”
The doctor was pacing before them, gesturing with his hands. He was talking at a terrific clip, the words coming out so fast they ran together. Tom thought of a champagne bottle, finally uncorked after decades in a cellar.
“It was hard work. How can you create life without a sperm and egg? We knew about chromosomes. Humans have forty-six, getting half from the mother and half from the father. But what if there was no father? Could we fool an egg into thinking it was a zygote, that it had been fertilized, using only the chromosomes of one parent?”
Harold shook his head sadly.
“Set backs. Years of setbacks. We were trying to implant a karyoplast into the cytoplasm of a zygote. Nuclear transfer. Forcing a morula or blastocyst without two haploids.”
“I don’t know what the hell you just said.” Roy got off the sofa.
He gave Tom a look of intent, patting the Foxhound in the pocket. Off to check the rest of the place out. “Anyone want some water?”
“Kitchen is through there. How about you two? Am I going too fast?”
Tom ventured a guess. “You were scraping out fertilized eggs and adding your own genes?”
“Exactly. But it didn’t work. We couldn’t get the enucleated egg and the donor cell to fuse. We tried the Sendai virus, electrofusion—
nothing worked. Then, as a control, I tried it with a non fertilized ova.
It fused into a zygote like magic.”
“So all you did was put a human cell in an empty egg and it grew?” Bert seemed surprised.
“Well, my boy, you make twenty years of research sound simple.
Actually, it was much more difficult than that. You had to actually put the donor cells in the gap-zero phase by starving them. You see, cells go through phases—”
“Doctor.” Tom held up his hand. “You might as well be speaking Martian. We believe you when you say it was hard work.”
“Darn tootin’. And we finally did it—grew an embryo in agar and transplanted it into the uterus of a woman, who successfully gave birth to a healthy baby. We did it many times, in fact. You can imagine how excited we were. But again, it had to be kept quiet, and again, it wasn’t enough. Our next miracle was to bring dead cells back to life. Which, of course, is impossible.”
“It can’t be impossible.” Bert leaned back and crossed his legs.
“Because here we are.”
“Oh, but it is impossible. Once tissue is dead, it’s dead.
Frankenstein’s monster will forever remain in the realm of fiction. My team did enough work on that to settle the debate forever.”
“So how...?”
“Are you sure no one would like some coffee? You can’t imagine how wonderful it is to tell this, after so long. I don’t even have access to my notes. There won’t be any memoirs, any posthumous Nobel Prize. He took everything.”
“Who did?”
“We’ll get to that in a moment. Anyhoo, once we proved that regenerating dead tissue was impossible, we did the next best thing.
We copied it.”
Tom
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