The List (11 page)

Bert elbowed Roy in the ribs. “Rib jab Buick Allegra red, no hit backs.”

“Soon as I see a Toyota, I’m gonna break your jaw.”

Harold leaned over and spoke to Tom out of the side of his mouth.

“Are they always like this?”

“Neither of them plays well with others.”

Luckily for all involved, Harold pulled onto a dirt road and they didn’t see another vehicle until they reached the ranch. And a ranch it was. Tom, being Midwestern, assumed the term was used to describe any single floor house. But Dr. Harper owned actual acres of fenced-in property, complete with grazing livestock.

“What in the hell is that thing?” Roy pointed.

“That’s Emma. She’s an Israeli Black Ostrich.”

Bert whacked him. “Israeli black ostrich, no hit-backs.”

Roy hit him back anyway.

“You raise ostriches?” Tom regretted the stupid question as it left his mouth. They passed a dozen more birds before coming to a stop at the house.

“Largest of the ratites. Their meat is red, 80% leaner than beef.

One egg is the same volume as two dozen chicken eggs. Shells and feathers fetch top dollar, and the leather is softer than lamb. Plus, they’re a hoot to have around.”

One of the birds walked up to the truck and stared at Roy, its head only a foot away from his face. Roy recoiled.

“No need to be afraid,” Harold said. “She just wants her head scratched.”

The bird’s head bobbed up and down, seemingly in agreement.

“I don’t like it. Make it go away.”

Bert reached over and patted the ostrich.

“See? Very docile animal. You can even ride some of the larger ones. Perhaps you’d like to try it later.”

The bird cocked its head and chirped. Then pecked Roy in the nose.

“Docile my ass.”

Roy took out his gun. The ostrich screamed, then turned its tail and ran off.

“Oh, they hate guns.” Harold got out of the Jeep. “We had some poachers here, years ago, killed four of the birds. Whenever they see a gun or hear a bang, they head for the barn.”

There were two structures on the property, the house and the stable. Both had a rough hewn, rustic quality to their design, with unfinished log trim and cedar shingles. Bert unstrapped his luggage and Harold led them into the larger of the buildings.

Tom frowned when he wasn’t met with air conditioning. Two fans spun lazily in the high, vaulted ceiling, pushing around the heat. In keeping with the log cabin concept, various pine support beams made crisscross patterns throughout the great room. There was a large chandelier, made from several dozen antlers, hanging between the two fans, and a bearskin rug, complete with head, on the floor.

“Welcome to the Harper Ranch. Anyone for coffee? Nothing beats the heat like a hot beverage.”

There were no takers.

“I’ll just be a moment. Old man, need the caffeine.” Harold left for the kitchen and Tom gave his partner a nod. Roy removed the Foxhound from his pocket and turned it on.

“What is...?”

Tom slapped a hand over Bert’s mouth and put a finger to his lips.

Roy worked the room, waving the Foxhound’s antenna this way and that. He was quick but thorough.

“Clean.” He put the bug detector away just as Harold came back.

The doctor was holding an oversized mug of steaming coffee. He took a sip and set it on the table. Tom caught the aroma and had to admit it smelled pretty damn good.

“Fine, then let’s sit down, shall we? Plenty to discuss, that’s for sure.”

Harold ushered them onto two sofas. Tom sat and stared at the ceiling-high stone fireplace. Why the house needed it was beyond his reasoning. Harold took the floor before them.

“The easiest way to do this, I think, is to start from the beginning.

Forty years ago. I was one of only a handful of scientists trying to attempt in vitro fertilization—fertilizing an egg outside of the womb.

My team worked with gametes from mice, then cows, and then finally with human sperm and ova.”

Harold paused to sip some coffee.

“The work was funded in secret, done privately. We did it in Mexico. Not that we were breaking any US laws, per se, but pure science is always easier without regulation, and we had a doozy of a problem to solve. My first 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 raised an eyebrow. “You cloned it?”

“No, you can’t clone dead tissue. The cell has to be alive, in the dormant G-zero phase, before we can take out the DNA. In a dead cell, the DNA won’t replicate. It’s a shell, a corpse. But since all DNA is simply building blocks made up of protein, all we had to do is reconstruct a dead person’s genetic code. Rebuild it out of raw material, so to speak, in the exact same way as the original.”

Roy came back with a glass of water. He shook his head at Tom and sat down carefully on his donut.

Tom puzzled over Harold’s latest words but couldn’t get them to ring true. Even with today’s technology, it was impossible to build a strand of DNA from the ground up. There was just no way.

“Doctor, I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

Bert shrugged. “I got lost right after he mentioned the twigs.”

Tom continued. “Maybe I can believe you doing all of these reproductive experiments years ahead of the scientific community, and I can even believe that you cloned a person from a live cell. But human DNA wasn’t even completely mapped until a few years ago, and that took a decade, using the biggest super computers. I read the article in Time. Even then, it was only mapped—that’s just the general picture.

To get an exact replica, it needs to be sequenced, and that’s still a long way off.”

“You’re right. We didn’t have the technology back then to sequence the entire human genome. Let alone the genomes of the ten people that we cloned. There are over 50,000 genes in a human being, made up of billions of base pairs. We never could have sorted them all out and put them in the right order.”

Tom leaned forward, arms on his knees. “So how did you do it?”

Harold’s face lit up. “We took a picture. A very special picture.

And from the picture we made a living cell.”

“Please explain.”

“In 1953, Watson and Crick used X-ray crystallography to discover the structure of a DNA molecule. They bounced radiation off of DNA and formed an image on photographic film, coming up with the double helix configuration. How much do you know about DNA?”

Tom thought back to high school biology, over twelve years ago.

“It’s made up of four bases. They match up with each other in special orders. When the DNA replicates, it unzips, and then free floating proteins match up with the each side of the zipper and make a carbon copy.”

“Excellent. The four nucleotide bases are adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. When they stack up in specific combinations they make genes—sections of DNA that code for protein. Genes make up chromosomes, and chromosomes make up that double spiral staircase we call DNA.”

“I remember this.” Roy nodded. “The bases are A, T, C, and G. G

always teams with C, and A always teams with G.”

“Exactly! That was what made it work. We fooled the DNA into copying itself.”

“You lost me again.”

“Never even had me.” Bert frowned. “I’ve been counting the antlers in that lamp.”

“It was actually very simple.” Harold sat on the coffee table and faced them. “We built a special camera. Its lens was an electron microscope—still not powerful enough for us to actually see every base nucleotide, but we didn’t need to. Only the film did. Then we harvested some dead cells from each donor and took pictures of the nucleus—that’s the center part of the cell where all the DNA is bundled up.”

“So far, so good.”

“Now, you all know how film works? It makes a negative, an opposite of the picture that is going to be developed. We used a film stock that was seeded with base nucleotides.”

Tom smiled. “I think I get it.”

“Hello!” Bert raised his hand. “Can you explain, for the benefit of the stupid people?”

“We took a picture of the DNA using film that had A, C, G, and T

in it. Now, there are four forces in the universe; gravity, electromagnetic, strong, and weak. Many scientists believe they are all simply different applications of one, universal force. Is the force that keeps the earth revolving around the sun the same force that holds atoms together? Or makes adenine always want to pair with guanine?”

“I’m going to go back to counting antlers.”

“Stick with me, Bert. After taking a picture of the nuclear DNA with seeded film, we ran an electromagnetic current through the negative. It worked. When a free floating adenine saw the negative picture of a thymine, it tried to attach itself. It couldn’t, of course, because that wasn’t a real thymine molecule—it was only a picture.

But it did line up correctly, along with all of the other molecules. We made half of the zipper. Then we scraped the negative, added more bases, and the other half of the zipper formed. The DNA rebuilt itself in the correct order.”

Bert nodded. “I get it. It’s like you took a picture of a skunk, and another skunk thought it was real and tried to mate.”

This comparison temporarily stymied the doctor.

“Well, I guess, sort of. The base pairs lined up to the negative as if it were real. When we finished, we had a batch of fresh DNA. We inserted this into an enucleated liver cell, cultured them, put them in gap-zero, then removed the nucleus again and transferred it to an egg.

From the egg it went to the mother, and nine months later, tada!

Clones!”

“And the twig?”

“Get off the twig, Bert.” Tom turned to Harold. “So I’m not an actual clone of Jefferson. I’m more like a copy?”

“Genetically, you’re identical. You have an exact DNA match.

But your body was never part of his, no. In fact, there are quite a few subtle differences. For example, the enucleated liver cells that we cultured your DNA in—they were mine. They were just empty shells, but still my genetic material. The same with the donor eggs from the mother—again they were scraped out, but the cell membrane was still from another human being.”

“So I’m part Einstein, part you, and part Mexican woman?”

Harold shook his head. “No, Bert. You’re all Einstein.”

This brought a snort from Roy.