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“I like this,” Lynn said. She was typing on her portable. “What’s the name of that hairy syndrome? Excessive familial hairiness?”

“Hypertrichosis,” Henry said.

“Right.” She kept typing. “So Gandler-Kreukheim is related…to hypertrichosis. Actually…congenital hypertrichosis langinosa. And there’ve only been fifty cases reported in the last four hundred years.”

“Are you writing that, or reading that?”

“Both.” She sat back. “Okay,” she said, “that’s all I need for now. You better go tell Dave.”

“Tell him what?”

“That he’s human. He probably thinks he is, anyway.”

“Okay.” As Henry walked to the door, he said, “You really think this will work?”

“I know it will,” Lynn said. “California has laws against invading the privacy of special children. Many of these kids have serious deformities. They’ve got enough challenges growing up and going to school
without the added burden of media exposure. Big fines if the media do it. They won’t.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“It’s the best we can do for now,” she said. She was typing again.

He paused at the door. “If Dave is a human being,” he said, “we can’t very well send him to a circus.”

“Oh no,” Lynn said. “No, no. Dave lives with us. He’s part of our family now—thanks to you. We have no choice.”

Henry went outside. Tracy and her friends were standing beneath the tree, pointing into the branches. “Look at the monkey! Look at him!”

“No,” Henry said to them. “He’s not a monkey. And please don’t embarrass him. Dave suffers from a rare genetic syndrome…” And he explained it to them, as they listened wide-eyed.

Jamie had
a trundle bed that he used when friends slept over. Lynn pulled it out, and Dave slept on it, alongside Jamie. His last words were “It’s very soft,” and almost immediately he was asleep, while Lynn ran her hands soothingly through his hair. Jamie said, “This is so neat, Mom. It’s like having a brother.”

“It is, isn’t it,” she said.

She turned out the light and closed the door. When she looked back in on them later, she found that Dave had twisted his sheets into a circle around him, making a kind of nest in the middle of the bed.

“No,” Tracy said,
standing in the kitchen, hands on hips. “No, he cannot live in our house. How could you do this to me, Dad?”

“Do what?”

“You know what the other kids are going to say. He’s a monkey that looks like a person, Dad. And he sounds like you with a stuffy nose.” She was near tears. “He’s related to you, isn’t he? He has your genes.”

“Now, Tracy…”

“I am
so
embarrassed.” She started to sob. “I had a chance to be a freshman cheerleader.”

“Tracy,” he said, “I’m sure you will—”

“This was my year, Dad!”

“It’s still your year.”

“Not if I have a monkey in my house!”

She went to the refrigerator for a Coke, came back, still sobbing. That was when her mother walked in. “He’s not a monkey,” Lynn said firmly. “He is an unfortunate young boy who suffers from a serious disease.”

“Oh, sure, Mom.”

“Go look it up yourself. Google it.”

“I will!” Still sobbing, she walked over to the computer. Henry glanced at Lynn, then moved to look over his daughter’s shoulder.

“I had no idea,” Tracy said, staring at the screen. “There have only been four or five cases in all of history. That poor kid!”

“He’s very special,” Henry said. “I hope you will treat him better now.” He put his hand on Tracy’s shoulder and glanced back at his wife. “All this in a couple of hours?”

“I’ve been busy,” she said.

CH037

T
here were
fifty reporters in the conference room of Shanghai’s Hua Ting Hotel, sitting at row after row of green felt–covered tables. The TV cameras were all at the back of the room, and sitting on the floor up front were the cameramen, with their bulky telephoto lenses.

Strobes flashed as Professor Shen Zhihong, head of the Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, in Shanghai, stepped up to the microphones. Wearing a black suit, Shen was a distinguished-looking man, and his English was excellent. Before becoming the head of IBCB, he had spent ten years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a professor of cell biology at MIT.

“I do not know whether I am telling you good news or bad news,” he said. “But I suspect it may be disappointing news. Nevertheless, I will set certain rumors finally to rest.”

For some reason, he explained, rumors of unethical research in China began to circulate after the 12th East Asia Joint Symposium on Biomedical Research at Shaoxing City, in Zhejiang Province. “I have no idea why,” Shen said. “The conference was quite ordinary, and technical in nature.” However, at the next conference, in Seoul, reporters from Taiwan and Tokyo were asking pointed questions.

“I was therefore advised by Byeong Jae Lee, the head of molecular biology at Seoul National University, to address this matter directly. He has some experience with the power of rumors.”

There were knowing chuckles in the audience. Shen was referring,
of course, to the worldwide scandal that had erupted around the eminent Korean geneticist Hwang Woo-Suk.

“Therefore, I shall come directly to the point,” he said. “For many years there have been rumors that Chinese scientists were attempting to create a hybrid of human and chimpanzee. According to the story, back in 1967, a surgeon named Ji Yongxiang fertilized a female chimpanzee with human sperm. The chimp was in the third month of pregnancy when outraged citizens stormed his lab and ended the experiment. The chimpanzee later died, but researchers at the Chinese Academy of Science supposedly said they would continue the research.”

Shen paused. “That is the first story. It is entirely untrue. No chimpanzee was ever impregnated by Dr. Yongxiang or anyone else in China. Nor has a chimpanzee been impregnated anywhere in the world. If it had happened, you would know about it.

“Then, in 1980, a new story circulated that Italian researchers had seen human-chimp embryos in a Beijing laboratory. I heard this story when I was a professor at MIT. I asked to meet the Italian researchers in question. They could never be found. They were always the friend of a friend.”

Shen waited while strobes flashed again. The cameramen crawling around at his feet were annoying. After a moment, he continued. “Next, a few years ago, was the story that a Mongolian prostitute gave birth to a baby with the features of a chimpanzee. This chimp-man was said to look like a human being, but was very hairy, with large hands and feet. The chimp-man drank whiskey and spoke in sentences. According to the story, this chimp is now at the Chinese Space Agency headquarters in Chao Yang District. He can sometimes be seen at the windows, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigar. Supposedly he will be sent to the moon because it is too dangerous to send a human.

“This story, too, is false. All the stories are false. I know these stories are tantalizing, or amusing. But they are not true. Why they should be located in China, I am not sure. Especially since the country with the least regulation of genetic experiments is the United States. You can do almost anything there. It was there that a gibbon was success
fully mated with a siamang—primates that are genetically more distant than a human and chimp. Several live births resulted. This happened at Georgia State University. Almost thirty years ago.”

He then opened the floor to questions. According to the transcript:

QUESTION:
Dr. Shen, is the U.S. working on a chimp hybrid?

DR. SHEN:
I have no reason to think so. I am merely observing that the U.S. has the fewest rules.

QUESTION:
Is it possible to fertilize a chimpanzee with human sperm?

DR. SHEN:
I would say no. That has been tried for nearly a century. Going back to the 1920s, when Stalin ordered the most famous animal breeder in Russia to do it, to make a new race of soldiers for him. His name was Ivanov, and he failed, and was thrown in jail. A few years later, Hitler’s scientists tried it, and also failed. Today we know that the genomes of humans and chimps are very close, but the uterine conditions are considerably different. So, I would say no.

QUESTION:
Could it be done with genetic engineering?

DR. SHEN:
That is difficult to say. It would be extremely difficult from a technical standpoint. From an ethical standpoint, I would say it is impossible.

QUESTION:
But an American scientist already applied to patent a human hybrid.

DR. SHEN:
Professor Stuart Newman of New York was refused a patent on a part-human hybrid. But he did not make a hybrid. Dr. Newman said he applied for the patent to draw attention to the ethical issues involved. The ethical issues remain unresolved.

QUESTION:
Dr. Shen, do you think a hybrid will eventually be created?

DR. SHEN:
I called this press conference to end speculation, not to increase it. But if you ask my personal opinion, I think, yes—it will eventually be done.

CH038

T
he memory
haunted Mark Sanger—the image burned in his mind of that poor animal, stranded on the beach at night in Costa Rica, helpless as the jaguar pounced, bit off her head, and proceeded to eat the flesh while her legs still kicked feebly. And all with the sound of crunching bones. The bones of her head.

Mark Sanger had not expected to see anything so horrific. He had come to the beach at Tortuguero to witness the giant leatherback turtles crawling out of the ocean to lay their eggs in the sand. As a biologist, he knew this was a great migration the planet had witnessed for countless eons. The female turtles were engaged in one of the great demonstrations of maternal caring, crawling high onto the beach, depositing their eggs deep in the ground, covering them with exhausted flippers, then carefully sweeping the sand clean, obliterating any trace of the eggs beneath. It was a slow, gentle ceremony, directed by genes that survived from millennia past.

Then came the jaguar, a black streak in the night. And suddenly last summer everything changed for Mark Sanger. The brutality of the attack, its speed and viciousness, shocked him profoundly. It confirmed his suspicion that the natural world had gone badly wrong. Everything that mankind was doing on the planet had upset the delicate balance of nature. The pollution, the rampant industrialization, the loss of habitat—when animals were squeezed and cornered, they behaved viciously, in a desperate effort to survive.

That was the explanation for the ghastly attack he had witnessed.
The natural world was in collapse. He mentioned this to the very handsome naturalist Ramon Valdez, who had accompanied him. Valdez shook his head. “No, Señor Sanger, this is always the way it has been since my father and grandfather, and grandfather before. They always spoke of the jaguar attacks in the night. It is part of the cycle of life.”

“But there are more attacks now,” Sanger said. “Because of all the pollution…”

“No, señor. There is no change. Every month, the jaguars take two to four turtles. We have records going back many years.”

“The violence we see here is
not
normal.”

A short distance away, the jaguar was still eating the mother. Bones still crunching.

“But it
is
normal,” Ramon Valdez said. “It is the way things are.”

Sanger did not want to talk about it anymore. Clearly, Valdez was an apologist for the industrialists and polluters, the big American companies that dominated Costa Rica and other Latin American countries. Not surprising to find such a person here, since the CIA had controlled Costa Rica for decades. This wasn’t a country; it was a subsidiary of American business interests. And American businesses did not give a damn for the environment.

Ramon Valdez said, “The jaguars must eat, too. I think better a turtle than to take a human baby.”

That, Mark Sanger thought, was a matter of opinion.

Back at home
in Berkeley, Sanger sat in his loft and pondered what to do. Although Sanger told people he was a biologist, he had no formal training in the field. He had attended one year of college before dropping out to work briefly for a landscape architecture firm, Cather and Holly; the only biology he had taken was a course in high school. The son of a banker, Sanger possessed a substantial trust fund and did not need to work to support himself. He did, however, need a purpose in life. Wealth, in his experience, made the quest for self-identity even more difficult. And the older he got, the harder it was to think about going back and finishing college.

Recently, he had started to define himself as an artist, and artists did not need formal training. In fact, formal education interfered with the artist’s ability to feel the zeitgeist, to ride the waves of change rolling through society, and to formulate a response to them. Sanger was very well informed in his opinion. He read the Berkeley papers, and sometimes magazines like
Mother Jones,
and several of the environmental magazines. Not every month, but sometimes. True, he often just looked at the pictures, skimming the stories. But that was all that was necessary to track the zeitgeist.

Art was about
feeling.
About how it
felt
to live in this materialistic world, with its gaudy luxuries, false promises, and profound disappointments. What was wrong with people today was that they ignored their feelings.

It was the job of art to bring true feelings alive. To shock people into awareness. That was why so many young artists were using genetic techniques and living material to create art. Wet art, they called it. Tissue art. Many artists now worked full-time in science labs, and the art that resulted was distinctly scientific. One artist had grown steaks in a Petri dish, and then ate them in public, as a performance. (Supposedly they tasted awful. Anyway, they were genetically modified. Ugh.) An artist in France had made a glowing bunny rabbit by inserting luminescent genes from a firefly or something. And still other artists had changed the hair color of animals, giving them rainbow hues, and had grown porcupine quills on the head of a cute puppy.

These works of art provoked strong feelings. Many people were disgusted. But, then, Sanger thought, they should be disgusted. They should feel the same revulsion that he himself had felt watching the slaughter of a mother turtle by a jaguar on a beach in Costa Rica. That horrid perversion of nature, that repellent savagery that he could not put out of his mind.

And that, of course, was the reason to make art.

Not art for art’s sake. Rather, art to benefit the world, art to help the environment. That was Mark Sanger’s goal, and he set about to attain it.