Mutants (2 page)

Somites in a human embryo. From Franz Keibel 1908
Normentafel zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen.
(Frietson Galis, University of Leiden)

Phocomelia. Skeleton of Marc Cazotte a.k.a. Pepin (1757–1801). From Willem Vrolik 1844–49
Tabulae ad illustrandam embryogenesin hominis et mammalium tarn naturalem quam abnormem.
(Wellcome Library, London)

Split-hand-split-foot, or ectrodacytly, or lobster-claw syndrome. Girl with radiograph of mother’s foot, England. From Karl Pearsor 1908 ‘On the inheritance of the deformity known as split-foot or lobster claw’. (
Biometrika
9:330–1. Author’s collection)

Acheiropody. An
aleijadinho
, Brazil 1970s. (Ademar Freire-Maia, UNESP – Paulista State University)

Phocomelia. Marc Cazotte a.k.a. Pepin (1757–1801). From Willem Vrolik 1844–49
Tabulae ad illustrandam embryogenesin hominis et mammalium tarn naturalem quam abnormem.
(Wellcome Library, London)

Mirror-image polydactyly. From William Bateson 1894
Materials for the study of variation.
(Imperial College London)

Thanatophoric dysplasia. Stillborn infant, Amsterdam c.1847. From Willem Vrolik 1844–49
Tabulae ad illustrandam embryogenesin hominis et mammalium tarn naturalem quam
abnormem. (Wellcome Library, London)

Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva. Harry Eastlack (1930–73), USA 1953. (Linda Lindgren, Los Angeles, and Gretchen Worden, Mütter Museum, Philadelphia)

Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva. Harry Eastlack (1930–73). (1990 © Scott Lindgren, courtesy Blast Books, New York)

Pseudoachondroplasia. Elizabeth Ovitz (1914–92) and siblings. Bat Galim, Israel c.1949. (Yehuda Koren and Eliat Negev, Jerusalem)

Achondroplasia. Mary Ashberry (d.1856) with skull of stillborn infant. (Linda Lindgren, Los Angeles, and Gretchen Worden, Mütter Museum, Philadelphia)

Osteogenesis imperfecta type II. Stillborn infant, Amsterdam. (Jan-Roelof Oostra, Vrolik Museum, Amsterdam)

Pycnodysostosis (putative). Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901). (Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi, Tarn, France)

Pygmy depicted with achondroplasia. Attic red-figure rhyton c.480 BC. (Hermitage, St Petersburg)

Pituitary dwarfism. Joseph Boruwlaski (1739–1837). Unknown painter (Norodwe Museum, Crakow)

Pituitary gigantism. Charles Byrne (1761–1783). (Hunterian Museum. Reproduced by kind permission of The Royal College of Surgeons of England)

Skeletons of Aka pygmy woman, Caucasian male, gorilla. Pygmy skeleton collected by Emin Pasha, Congo 1883. (Wellcome Library, London)

Negritos. Port Blair, Andaman Islands, 1869–80. E.H. Mann. (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland)

Thibaut-Francesco and Chair-Allah-Luigi, Verona c.1874. From Armand de Quatrefages 1895
The pygmies
. (Author’s collection)

Daru or Taron man. Upper Burma c.1937. From F. Kingdon Ward 1927
Plant hunter’s paradise.
(J. Rasmussen and The Royal Geographical Society, London)

Myxdematous cretins aged about twenty, with normal man. Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire) c.1968. (François Delange,
ICCIDD
Brussels)

Castrato. Senesino singing Handel’s
Flavio
, London c.1723. Attrib. William Hogarth. (Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

Proteus syndrome. James Merrick (1862–90). (The London Hospital)

Hermaphroditus asleep. After Nicholas Poussin 1693. (Wellcome Library, London)

Female internal genitalia. From Andreas Vesalius 1543
De humani corporis fabrica.
(Wellcome Library, London)

Clitoris and vestibular bulbs. From Georg Ludwig Kobelt 1844
Die Männlichen und Weiblichen Wollusts-Organe des Menschen und Einiger Saugetiere.
(Wellcome Library, London)

Male pseudohermaphroditism. Herculine Barbin (1838–68). From E. Goujon 1869 ‘Étude d’un cas d’hermaphrodisme bisexuel imparfait chez l’homme’.
Journal de l’anatomie et de la physiologie normales et pathologiques de l’homme et des animaux
6:599–616 (British Library)

Oculocutaneous albinism type II. Zulu man, Natal. From Karl Pearson et al. 1913
A monograph on albinism in man.
(Wellcome Library, London)

Linnaeus’
Homo trogylodytes
or Bontius’s orang. From Karl Pearson et al. 1913
A monograph on albinism in man.
(Wellcome Library, London)

Oculocutaneous albinism type II. Geneviève. From George Leclerc Buffon 1777
Histoire naturelle générale et particulière.
(Wellcome Library, London)

Piebalding. Marie Sabina, Columbia 1749. From G.L. Buffon 1777
Histoire naturelle générale et particulière.
(British Library)

Piebalding. Lisbey, Honduras 1912. From Karl Pearson et al. 1913
A monograph on albinism in man.
(Wellcome Library, London)

Hypertrichosis lanuginosa. Arrigo Gonsalvus, Rome 1599. Detail from Agostino Carracci
Arrigo Peloso, Pietro Matto e Amon Nano.
(Capodimonte Museum, Naples. © 2003 Photo Scala, Florence)

Hypertrichosis lanuginosa. Petrus Gonsalvus, Austria c.1582. Unknown painter, German school. (Sammlungen Schloss Ambras/Kunsthistorische Museum, Vienna. Photograph © Erich Lessing/AKG, London)

Hypertrichosis lanuginosa. Maphoon, Burma c.1856. E.H. Mann. (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland)

Supernumerary breast on thigh. (Wellcome Library, London)

Artemis Ephesia in Sweden. Frontispiece of Linnaeus 1761
Fauna svecica.
(Wellcome Library, London)

Luigi Cornaro (1464–1566). Tintoretto. (Galleria Palatine. © 1990 Photo Scala, Florence)

Skull of an Australian Aborigine, Arnhem Land. From Armand de Quatrefages 1882
Crania ethnica: les cranes des races humaines.

Variation in human skulls. From Armand de Quatrefages 1882
Crania ethnica: les cranes des races humaines.

Group of Selk’nam, Tierra del Fuego c.1914. (The Royal Geographical Society, London)

My mind is bent to tell of bodies

changed to other forms.

O
VID
, Metamorphoses

This book is about the making of the human body. It is about the devices that enable a single cell buried in the obscure recesses of the womb to develop into an embryo, a foetus, an infant and finally an adult. It provides an answer provisional and incomplete, yet clear in outline, to the question: how do we come to be?

In part the answer to this question is readily apparent. Our bodies – I hesitate to add our minds – are the products of our genes. At least our genes contain the information, the instruction manual, that allows the cells of an embryo to make the various parts of our bodies. But this answer, so easily given, conceals a world about which we know very little. Genetics, to quote one popular writer on the subject, is a language. ‘It has a vocabulary – the genes themselves – a grammar, the way in which the inherited information is arranged, and a literature,
the thousands of instructions needed to make a human being.’ Just so. What he failed to add is that the language of the genes is largely unintelligible.

On 15 February 2001, an international consortium of scientists reported the complete, or nearly complete, sequence of the human genome. We have, we were told, some thirty thousand genes. There it was, arrayed before us, the instruction manual for making a human. Anyone may read this manual – it is freely available on the Web. But it is hardly worth the bother. The average Englishman may as well attempt the
Analects
of Confucius in the original for all the wisdom that it imparts. Even geneticists find most of its contents baffling. When they scan the genome they find, here and there, words whose meanings are clear enough. The meaning of others can be guessed at, perhaps because they are cognates of more familiar ones. Some of the grammar, the syntactical rules by which genes combine to give their utterances meaning, is understood as well. But the syntax of genes is vastly more complex, more subtle and nuanced, than that of any language spoken by man. And though its literature is not exactly a closed book, it is one we have scarcely begun to read.

It is not that we do not know
how
to decipher the genome. This book is full of experiments that attempt to do just that. Such experiments usually entail engineering embryos – either by surgically adding or removing organs, or else by adding or removing genes. Of course, the embryos always belong to animals: newts, frogs, chickens and mice. They tell us a great deal about ourselves since, as it happens, the genetic grammars of all
creatures are quite similar. But just as, over time, the vocabulary and grammatical rules of human languages diverge from one another in ways large and small, so too do the languages of genes. To learn from animals alone is to run the risk of an error rather like that made by Leonardo da Vinci when he sketched a human foetus attached to what is clearly the placenta of a cow. We need, ultimately, some direct way into the human genome and into the human body. Cleopatra, one source alleges, ordered the dissection of pregnant slave girls so that she could observe the progress of their embryos. While we may admire her curiosity and ability to fit laboratory work into a busy social schedule, we can hardly follow her lead. We must approach the human body more circumspectly. We must find mutants.

[A
N
INTRODUCTION
]

I
T
WAS
M
ARCH
1512, and a Florentine apothecary named Lucca Landucci was writing up his diary. He had much to write about. Northern Italy was engulfed by war. Maximillian of Germany and Louis XII of France were locked in combat with the Spanish, English and Pope Julius II for control of the Venetian Republic. City after city was ravaged as the armies
traversed the campagna. Ravenna fell eighteen days after the monster’s birth. ‘It was evident,’ wrote Landucci, ‘what evil the monster had meant for them! It seems as if some great misfortune always befalls the city when such things are born.’

F
RONTISPIECE
TO
F
ORTUNIO
L
ICETI
1634
De monstrorum natura caussis et differentiis.

T
HE
M
ONSTER
OF
R
AVENNA
(1512). F
ROM
U
LISSE
A
LDROVANDI
1642
Monstrorum historia.

Landucci had not actually seen the monster. It had been starved to death by order of Julius II, and Landucci’s account is of a drawing that was on public display in Florence. That image was among the first of many. Printed woodcuts and engravings spread the news of the monster throughout Europe, and as they spread, the monster acquired a new, posthumous, existence. When it left Ravenna it had two legs; by the time it arrived in Paris it had only one. In some prints it had bat wings, in others they were more like a bird’s; it had hermaphrodite genitalia or
else a single large erection. It became mixed up with the images of another monster born in Florence in 1506, and then fused with a medieval icon of sinful humanity called ‘Frau Welt’ – a kind of bat-winged, single-legged Harpy who grasped the globe in her talons.

As the monster travelled and mutated, it also accreted ever more complex layers of meaning. Italians took it as a warning of the horrors of war. The French, making more analytical effort, interpreted its horn as pride, its wings as mental frivolity and inconstancy, its lack of arms as the absence of good works, its raptor’s foot as rapacity, and its deformed genitalia as sodomy – the usual Italian vices in other words. Some said that it was the child of a respectable married woman; others that it was the product of a union between a nun and a friar. All this allegorical
freight makes it hard to know what the monster really was. But it seems likely that it was simply a child who was born with a severe, rare, but quite unmysterious genetic disorder. One can even hazard a guess at Roberts’s syndrome, a deformity found in children who are born with an especially destructive mutation. That, at least, would account for the limb and genital anomalies, if not the two serpents on its waist and the supernumerary eye on its knee.