Genocide of One: A Thriller (24 page)

It was obvious why the NSA had viewed Pierce’s e-mail as a problem: the ability of
this Mbuti child to perform prime factorization. An ability like that would disable
modern codes. This could pose a major national security threat.

But for Rubens this risk assessment was shortsighted. The question was what would
happen to the whole world if an intelligence surpassing that of humans appeared. The
precarious order that mankind had, after great pains, managed to maintain would collapse
at a single stroke.

On the same day that he read the intercepted e-mail Rubens spent a good many hours
in the library at his alma mater, Georgetown. He needed to dig into this question
of whether it was possible for mankind to continue to evolve.

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the idea of natural selection
almost simultaneously, and in the 150 years since then it has kept its place as the
central hypothesis of biological evolution. Sudden mutations change the traits of
organisms, and if these changes are a disadvantage in terms of survival, the line
dies out. If they are an advantage for survival, then the organism survives and leaves
behind descendants. This process continues through generations, with the accumulation
of subtle variations finally changing the species itself. Neither of these two scientists
knew about Mendelian genetics, let alone the existence of DNA, and arriving at this
theory solely on the basis of observation of nature revealed amazing powers of insight.
But because of this their theory has been criticized as only telling half the story
of the phenomenon of evolution. Darwinian theory only considers what happens after
sudden mutation takes place and doesn’t touch on the mechanism by which such mutation
occurs. Their theory does not explain the whole process.

Later advances in molecular biology led to increased understanding of evolution. Outside
factors such as radiation, or mistakes in DNA replication when reproductive cells
are created, can lead to variation in the genetic information in organisms. In reality,
of the three billion base pairs in the human genome, an average of one DNA base every
two years changes into a different base. Most of these random changes, however, are
neutral and do not affect survival one way or the other, and it is a matter of pure
chance whether they become fixed in the entire species.

Rubens learned that there had been further major discoveries in molecular biology
in the previous few decades that rewrote many accepted theories. Sudden mutation not
only causes single-base substitution but changes the genome. In the history of biological
evolution one gene can be copied, or move to a different position, or the entire DNA
can be copied whole and doubled. There is no doubt that these dynamic changes in base
sequence are the driving force behind biological evolution. Also, at the end of the
last century the surprising discovery was made that even without a change in DNA,
organisms can change their traits. The methyl group and acetyl group of chemicals
can promote or suppress the expression of genes. Moreover, these chemical modifications
are accurately transmitted from parent to child, so once these changes occur the next
generation inherits them.

The more Rubens learned about the mechanism behind changes in DNA, the more he decided
that biological evolution takes place much more rapidly than previously thought—in
other words, on a much shorter time scale than geologic time.

As the Heisman Report indicated, “Organisms accumulate subtle changes over long periods
of time, but also at certain times can display sudden transformations.”

What if we focus on human evolution? Six million years ago a species of primates branched
off into two lines. One line became chimpanzees, the other humans. But oddly enough,
while in the intervening six million years chimpanzees have hardly changed at all,
the other line evolved from
Ardipithecus
to humans, producing at least twenty different varieties of human beings until arriving
at present-day Homo sapiens. This wasn’t a straight line but branched off numerous
times, and in ancient days it was common for multiple species of humans to coexist
on the earth. Modern man, who left Africa fifty thousand years ago and spread over
the entire planet, must have encountered hominids and Neanderthals. And the answer
was becoming clearer as to why, compared to chimpanzees, human evolution was so accelerated.

Several genes were discovered in the human brain that sped up the rate of evolution.
One is the HAR1 gene (human accelerated regions), which is involved in the development
of the cerebral cortex. In the three hundred million years of biological evolution
since this gene appeared, it made only two base substitutions, but in the six million
years of human evolution eighteen of these base substitutions have taken place. So
among all the subfamilies on earth, only Homininae have changed the direction of evolution
and shown an explosive development in intellect.

Rubens also turned his attention to the FOXP2 gene. Chimpanzees share this gene with
humans, and the genetic difference between them and humans is slight, but despite
this there is a tremendous difference in language ability between the two species.
FOXP2 is a transcription-factor type of gene. While it accelerates the expression
of sixty-one genes, it suppresses fifty-five other genes. A change in just this one
gene thus can affect the function of more than a hundred other genes. The result is
that humans have the ability to acquire advanced language skills.

In light of the accelerated regions in human DNA, and the great influence subtle changes
in genes can have, Rubens couldn’t dismiss Professor Pierce’s report of human evolution
as mere nonsense. Also, just before he was about to write his assessment, Rubens ran
across some additional crucial research. Modern man, who appeared two hundred thousand
years ago, continued living a primitive life for 190,000 years. Why did mankind suddenly
start building civilizations? The answer to this riddle is found in the human genome.
A gene called ASPM, which appeared six thousand years ago, left evidence of having
transformed the human brain. After this it is believed that divergent evolution took
place, meaning that geographically separated groups acquired the same functions and
civilizations sprang up one after another. If this hypothesis is correct, then modern
man has already experienced the evolution of the brain, albeit on a small scale. Rubens
realized that before arguing about whether this kind of human evolution is possible,
it was crucial to understand that it had already taken place.

After he left the library Rubens went back to his town house in Georgetown, sat down
at his computer, and wrote up his assessment in a single sitting. He tried to use
a cautious tone in the conclusion:

On the appointed day Rubens turned in his assessment to the chief of external affairs.
He was immediately given another assignment.

“This incident will be in the president’s daily briefing,” he was told. “They’ll ask
us for a contingency plan, so I’d like you to get a head start on that.”

“By contingency plan you mean—”

“What we should do with the creature.”

This put Rubens in a tough spot. They didn’t want a plan based on biology but simply
a way to get rid of a national security threat. Three choices immediately sprang to
mind—leaving the creature alone, taking it captive, or killing it—though he felt none
of these was a perfect solution.

Rubens went back to the library to gather information for the contingency plan. A
basic question still lay untouched, namely, why had the Pygmy child’s genes mutated?
Or, to take it back farther, what had happened with the parents’ reproductive cells?

He read through various documents and came up with three hypotheses he thought might
help in formulating a contingency plan. And he painstakingly investigated each one.

The first item that caught his eye was research into the structure of DNA nucleosomes.
The document discussed the discovery that there is periodic base substitution in medaka,
a type of fish. DNA, a long, stringy double helix, does not sit inside a cell as is
but is wrapped around a spherical protein called a histone, much as a thread is wrapped
around a spool. Compared to the length of DNA, a histone is small, so once DNA is
wrapped around one histone it then neatly wraps around the next to form a line of
countless spools. The mutation observed in medaka DNA, as if corresponding to the
periodicity of this spool structure, occurs at an interval of every two hundred bases.
When this research is applied to the nature of human evolution, it becomes evident
that there are places where it is easier for base substitution to occur, and the genes
involved in the growth of the brain in Homininae just happen to coincide with those
regions. Random base substitution takes place over and over, but most of the fertilized
eggs are naturally miscarried because of genetic errors. But now, among the Mbuti
people in jungles of the Congo, an individual was born whose brain had evolved. If
this conjecture were correct, the mutation in reproductive cells would not have taken
place among all the members of the Kanga band but only in one of the parents of the
child. So the response plan should focus on the parent and child only.

The second hypothesis dealt with the Tunguska event. In 1908 a massive, mysterious
explosion took place deep in Siberia, in the Tunguska region. A huge ball of fire
in the sky flattened some eighty million trees and blew people off their feet as far
as sixty kilometers from the hypocenter. In terms of TNT explosive power, the explosion
was fifteen megatons, equivalent to the energy of a thousand Hiroshima-size bombs.
It was still unclear what, exactly, exploded, though speculation centered on a comet
or asteroid exploding in the atmosphere. What drew Rubens’s attention were the abnormal
changes in plants afterward. Plants near the hypocenter grew three times faster than
normal and in some cases transformed into different shapes, showing a clear genetic
abnormality. The same phenomenon was seen after nuclear explosions, although, oddly
enough, no residual radiation was detected near the Tunguska site. Still, the mutation
rate for plants was much higher than it was after nuclear contamination.

Rubens next asked, through the external affairs chief, for military reconnaissance
data from the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office. He discovered that every year
reconnaissance satellites detect an average of seven explosions of small celestial
bodies in the atmosphere. These are far smaller than the explosion in Tunguska, though
still about the size of the Nagasaki atomic bomb—twenty kilotons. If these astronomical
phenomena produced genetic changes in organisms, and if one had taken place in the
sky above the Ituri jungle, where the Mbuti live, it’s possible it affected all the
people who live in the vicinity. But multiple checks of the NRO database showed no
such explosions over the skies of the Congo in the last twenty years. Most of these
astronomical phenomena take place over the ocean, far from any humans. So Rubens rejected
this second hypothesis.

The final hypothesis was the one that ultimately determined the direction of the response
plan, namely, the virus evolution theory. It was simply one of the hypotheses concerning
biological evolution, but it contained an idea that Rubens couldn’t ignore. Because
viruses cannot replicate on their own, they do so using the cells they’ve infected.
They inject their own DNA into the DNA of the host cell and then replicate. But for
some reason, in certain cases once the DNA has been inserted the virus becomes inactive.
When that happens the base sequence of the virus is included in the host cell, and
that mutation is transferred to the daughter cells each time there is cell division.
The genome is transformed. In some cases the infecting virus takes in part of the
host cell’s genes and replicates. This virus in turn infects a new individual, and
once it becomes inactive the original host’s DNA is incorporated into the next host’s
DNA. This phenomenon takes place in the reproductive cells, becomes a fertilized egg,
and if the added base sequence acquires a new function, that becomes a part of evolution.
If the virus evolution theory were correct, it would be possible for biological evolution
to take place multiple times and simultaneously through viral infection.

Applied to the issue at hand, the theory would enable a scenario in which a new type
of virus appeared in the jungles of the Congo, infecting the Mbuti and leading to
an evolutionary transformation.

Rubens looked into whether there had been any epidemiological investigations of a
viral infection among the Mbuti and found that a Japanese virologist, Seiji Koga,
had conducted onsite fieldwork into HIV infections. Happily for Rubens, the fieldwork
included the forty members of the Kanga band. Maybe Koga had unwittingly detected
an unknown virus that would produce evolutionary changes in humans.

His scholarly interest aroused, Rubens immediately ordered the original Japanese paper
and had the NSA translate it. Unfortunately, this proved fruitless. The investigation
had taken place ten years ago, well before the time the three-year-old Mbuti child
was born. And the Mbuti were found to not be infected by any virus whatsoever.

It was conceivable that the new virus appeared after Dr. Koga’s investigation, so
as far as the response plan was concerned the possibility remained that the evolutionary
change could take place simultaneously among multiple individuals.