The Angel Maker (17 page)

‘You mustn’t say that!’

He had taken another step in her direction. She took another step backwards. Sensing she had found a sore spot, she went on: ‘You can’t take the truth. You haven’t the guts to face it. You overestimated yourself.’

‘You mustn’t say that,’ he repeated. He was shaking his head even more vehemently than before, like a child caught doing something he shouldn’t be doing, who refuses to own up to it. The doctor made a sudden lunge forward. Charlotte Maenhout was caught completely off guard and instinctively took another step back. Only then did she realise that she was standing right at the edge of the stairs. But it was already too late.

 

‘Doctor ? My car won’t start. Could you . . .’

The watchman, who had entered the doctor’s house, froze. ‘Oh my God!’ he cried.

Dr Hoppe was kneeling next to Frau Maenhout, who was sprawled at the foot of the stairs. He pressed his index and middle finger to her throat, waited a few seconds, then looked up.

‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ he said.

Otto Reisiger slowly crossed himself.

 

He hadn’t meant this to happen. Victor Hoppe hadn’t wanted this. He had simply wanted to give the sword back to her. That was all. But then she had said things. Alleged things. And something had got into him that was more powerful than he was. Evil had got into him. He knew it. And what was evil had to be vanquished. That he also knew.

In the scientific literature, Victor Hoppe’s career is usually summed up as follows:

The German embryologist Victor Hoppe received his doctorate from the University of Aachen in the sixties with an outstanding thesis on cell-cycle regulation. He spent several years in Bonn working as a fertility specialist, and in 1979 he astonished the scientific community by producing mouse offspring of single-gender parentage. He held a research chair at the University of Aachen and in December 1980 he astonished the scientific community again by cloning mice. He was the first scientist to successfully apply the cloning technique to a mammal. Three years later he was accused of fraud by his colleagues. It seemed that his experiments could not be replicated using his data, and Dr Hoppe refused to give a demonstration of his methods. In June 1984, after an investigation by an independent commission, he ended his research at the university and turned his back on academia. Some scientists later expressed some regret about the entire episode, suggesting that with the removal of Dr Hoppe a great talent had been lost, whereas others continued to maintain that his work was just amateur bungling.

That is how it is still characterised, even today. Except for the doctor’s nationality, everything else is true. But it’s only half the truth. Examine it under a microscope, and quite another story will emerge.

 

In London on Tuesday, 16 December 1980, at half past four in the afternoon, the editor-in-chief of the science journal Cell received a phone call from Dr Victor Hoppe. The name sounded familiar to the editor, but he couldn’t immediately place it. Speaking in English with a German accent, the doctor asked him when the deadline for the next issue of Cell was. Excitedly he added that he had some important news. His voice sounded muffled, as if he were holding a handkerchief over the mouthpiece.

The editor informed him that the deadline for the January issue had been a week earlier, and he was expecting the proofs on his desk any moment now. Articles for the February issue were still being considered.

Dr Hoppe did not want to wait that long. ‘It’s too important,’ he said.

Warily, the editor asked him what it was about. There was some hesitation on the other end of the line. Then he heard a very self-assured, ‘Cloning. I’ve cloned some mice.’

That made the editor sit up. If true, this was indeed important news. The announcement also jogged his memory, and he suddenly knew who Victor Hoppe was: the German biologist who had published a significant article in the journal Science some years before, on mouse-embryo engineering.

‘Well! That truly would be a first,’ said the editor.

‘I would like to publish a report on my experiments as soon as possible, you understand.’

‘I quite understand,’ the editor replied, suddenly most accommodating. ‘I may be able to arrange something for the current issue. Could you fax me the article today?’

‘No, not until tomorrow.’

‘That’s going to be tight. I’ll need it by twelve o’clock at the very latest. Is that possible?’

There was actually another day’s leeway, but the editor did not tell him that. The more time he gave the doctor, the greater the chance that other journals would find out about it and might try to get the scoop.

‘Twelve o’clock. I think I can do that.’

‘Excellent. How many mice have you cloned, if I may ask?’

‘Three. Three in all.’

‘That’s fantastic. I’m looking forward to reading your account.’

‘Just a few minor details and it’s finished. You can count on it.’

When Victor Hoppe, in Aachen, put down the receiver, he had not actually put down on paper very much of the article he was supposed to deliver the next day. He did have an outline in his head, and had jotted down the data every step of the way. He had also taken some photos, but that was all he had. He knew that it was his technique, in particular, that he had to emphasise. Most of his colleagues used viruses as vectors in cell hybridisation, whereby they forfeited the process most important to cloning. He, on the other hand, used a method developed in the seventies by Professor Derek Bromhall of England, which Dr Hoppe had then refined: using a microscopic dropper, or pipette, he would insert a foreign nucleus into the cell and, keeping the micropipette in situ would then suck out the cell’s original nucleus. That way the cell membrane needed to be pierced only once, making for swifter healing. The recently discovered agent cytochalasin B, with which he then treated the cell, worked to keep the cell supple, encouraging it to fuse with the new nucleus.

It was all very simple in theory, but in practice this method required a great deal of expertise and a thousand times more dexterity than you’d need to thread a needle. Many of his attempts failed, either because the cell membrane was too badly damaged, or because too much cytoplasm was sucked out together with the nucleus. The fusion of the nucleus and the new cell was also seldom straightforward, and the chance of a re-engineered cell developing into an actual embryo was completely down to luck. The data Dr Hoppe had recorded didn’t lie. Of the five hundred and forty-two selected white mouse cells, less than half survived the microsurgical intervention in which the nucleus was replaced with another harvested from a brown mouse. Of the remaining group, only forty-eight cells successfully fused with the new nucleus. These were cultured for four days, at which point it transpired that only sixteen of the cells had developed into tiny embryos and were therefore suitable for implanting into the uteri of some white mice. Despite the low numbers - less than three per cent of the cells had made it to the penultimate stage - it was a great achievement for Victor Hoppe, an achievement to which his colleagues had never even come close, because to date all their attempts had come to naught at the Petri-dish stage.

Then he’d had to wait three weeks until the embryos were fully gestational and could be born. He had used that period to start a new series of cells. To his dismay, of these not one survived the culture stage, which meant that he was forced to pin all his hopes on the implanted embryos. The young mice would be born hairless; the doctor would find out if his cloning experiment had been successful only three days later, when the pelts began to grow. The sixteen doctored cells would have to produce brown mice, while the fifteen control eggs that had been fertilised normally, which he had implanted into various uteri at the same time as the others, would be expected to produce mice with their mothers’ white pelt.

The mice were born on 13 December 1980, in a University of Aachen laboratory. As a precautionary measure, they were taken out by Caesarean section. The procedure was a simple one compared to the microsurgery required to substitute the nuclear material of the cells. Still, he had to concentrate with all his might, because he was so nervous that his hands were shaking.

The first of the five white mothers - in order to tell them apart he had marked them with ink, from one to five dots each - did not provide the hoped-for result; indeed, of the eight neonates, all of them stillborn, only three were physically recognisable as mice. Of the other five, two were as wrinkled as raisins and the next two looked more like some shrivelled three-month-old human embryo. The skin of the last deformed mouse was thinner than crêpe paper, so transparent that you could see all its innards. Dr Hoppe was disappointed, but after dunking his first mouse’s offspring in formaldehyde, he proceeded to cut open the second mother with fresh hope. In this case too, four of the five implanted embryos were stillborn; they had fused together in pairs. One of the pairs shared a spine, the other pair had just one set of hindquarters. But his attention was immediately drawn to the fifth specimen, which was twice as big as the others, and not just that, it was alive! But that was as far as it went. The little creature was scarcely moving - the only evidence of life was some twitching of the hind legs - so the doctor quickly grabbed a tiny pipette and began pumping air into its minuscule mouth.

‘Breathe! Breathe!’ he cried as if addressing something human.

‘Breathe! Breathe!’

Dr Karl Hoppe’s distorted voice rang through the house at 1 Napoleonstrasse in Wolfheim, where he had just helped to deliver his wife of a son. It was a Monday morning, 4 June 1945. The pains had started two days earlier, although the actual labour had lasted nine hours.

So it was a boy. In that case his name would be Victor. That was something they had decided on beforehand. However, the child’s sex wasn’t the first thing the father had looked for. His gaze had initially gone to his child’s face. Through the veil of slime and blood over the mouth, nose and cheeks he had immediately seen that his fears had come true: the boy had the same harelip that he had inherited from his own father.

In the village, many people thought that, if a child was born with that particular deformity, it was because the mother had seen a dead hare when she was ten weeks pregnant. Even his own wife believed the old wives’ tale, although he had warned her that it was something that ran in the Hoppe family, as did red hair. She had nevertheless shunned the butcher’s shop for the entire length of her pregnancy, and whenever she was forced to walk past the shop window, with its display of meats, she had taken care to stare straight ahead.

It hadn’t helped. The child was born with a harelip. It was the first thing his wife had asked him. Not if it was a boy or a girl, but if it had . . . With a trembling hand she had pointed at her own mouth, which was slick with sweat. He had merely nodded and then announced that it was a boy, hoping that would take her mind off it. She had closed her eyes and sighed.

The boy’s breath was coming out ragged, and so an oxygen mask was immediately clapped onto his impaired mouth. Dr Hoppe began squeezing a black balloon at three-second intervals to pump air into his son’s lungs.

‘Breathe! Breathe!’ he cried.

If he stopped the artificial respiration, the child might die before it had properly lived. As he automatically went on squeezing the balloon, however, the doctor did ask himself whether it might not be best for the boy if he did not make it. He had assisted in the birth of several disfigured babies before this, children with impairments far more dire than a cleft palate; yet this question had never even occurred to him then. He had always made every effort to save the child’s life, as he had been trained to do, but now, in the case of his own son, his very first child, he was plagued with doubt. Memories of his own childhood suddenly gave him pause. Every squeeze of the balloon felt like a stab in his gut. When he abruptly stopped pumping, telling himself he was only checking to see if his son was able to breathe on his own, it felt as if a heavy load had been lifted from his shoulders.

‘Is he alive, Karl?’ he heard behind him. ‘For God’s sake, tell me he’s still alive.’

His wife’s pleading shook him out of his stupor and he went back to pumping air into his son’s lungs with all his might.

The screeching that started up some moments later furnished the mother with the answer to her question.

 

The mouse did not make it, notwithstanding Victor’s best efforts. Thirteen dead mice and not a single live specimen. That was the result halfway through. It gave the doctor a sense of doom, which turned out to be premature, however, because half an hour later he extracted six live young from the third mouse. Two of these were conjoined at the skull, to be sure, and expired almost instantly, but the other four looked perfect. Each mouse was the size and shape of a child’s pinkie, but with a tail, four legs and two ears. The skin was hairless and pink. The eyes were closed and bulged out. The mouths immediately started opening and closing, rooting for a nipple. Victor gave a sigh of relief. Of these six implanted embryos, three were reconstructed ones. So there had to be at least one cloned specimen among these four survivors. The doctor’s hands shook as he deposited the four nurslings into a box of shredded paper, which he then placed under a heat lamp. He would feed them some milk with a dropper the first day, and then each would be put in with one of the adult mice that had given birth the natural way a few days earlier. Inexperienced mothers sometimes ate their own newborn offspring.

He extracted four more live specimens from the fourth mouse, and the last one also brought more hope than disappointment, for five of its seven implanted embryos had developed into live mice, so that the total offspring came to thirteen: a result that was far beyond his expectations.