Mendel's Dwarf (37 page)

In the 1930s, Trofim Denisovich and his henchmen set about trying to prove that inheritance doesn’t actually exist in any coherent, Mendelian form. The environment is everything. It is the environment that induces changes in the organism and these changes subsequently become inheritable. This theory, with its echoes of Darwin’s pangenesis, fitted admirably into the creed of communism, where all men are malleable and, given the perfect socialist environment, will grow into perfect socialist beings. In fact Lysenko treated his experimental plants in much the way that Stalin treated the peoples of the Soviet Empire. He transplanted them, he froze them, he generally oppressed them and mistreated them.

By 1940 Lysenko was director of the Institute of Genetics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. At the meeting of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences of 1939 he had made a personal attack on the leading Soviet geneticist, Vavilov, and in 1940 Vavilov was arrested. He was exiled to Siberia and died in the care of the Gulag in 1943—all for studying Mendelian genetics. What, one wonders, would Father Gregor have made of that?

Lysenko finally put his seal on the study of genetics in the Soviet Union at the 1948 meeting of the Lenin All-Union Academy. The remaining Mendelian geneticists recanted, and the teaching of Mendel’s work was banned throughout the Soviet Union and beyond into the countries of the Soviet Bloc. The ban continued until 1965, which, by the purest coincidence, was the one-hundredth anniversary of the delivery of Father Gregor’s paper to the Brünn Society for Natural Science. Although Trofim Denisovich was then stripped of his political powers, he was not stripped of anything else. He retained rank, honors, and academic
posts, and continued into ripe and august retirement, finally dying in 1976.

In the inner room of the Mendel Museum there is the portrait of Mendel in his abbot’s costume, looking grim and bilious—the so-called Great Prelate Portrait. There is also a typewritten list on a table:

Biologists don’t actually expect to be on the firing line, but given the nature of what they do, I suppose it’s inevitable. Look what happened to the chemists and the physicists.

Here’s another question: Benedict Lambert is sitting in his laboratory playing God. He has eight embryos in eight little tubes. Four of the embryos are proto-Benedicts, proto-dwarfs; the other four are, for want of a better word, normal. How should he choose?

Of course we all know that God has opted for the easy way out. He has decided on chance as the way to select one combination of genes from another. If you want to shun euphemisms, then God allows pure luck to decide whether a mutant child or a normal child shall be born. But Benedict Lambert has the possibility of beating God’s proxy and overturning the tables of chance. He can choose. Wasn’t choice what betrayed Adam and Eve? They chose to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and once they had done that, they knew that they were naked, and they chose to try to hide it. That was how God found them out. It was the last remnants of their innocence that let them down. If they’d been streetwise, they’d have brazened it out. They’d have kept to their nakedness and pretended not to notice—they would have deceived God. Presumably we’d all be a lot better off now if they had.

So to Benedict Lambert. What did he choose? That’s your test. Eight green bottles sitting on the wall; eight plastic tubes sitting in the refrigerator. What to do with them? Which of them accidentally fell?

I know you don’t really need this; you’re already up there with me, aren’t you? You’re already confronting nature from the awesome viewpoint of God. Nevertheless, allow me to spell it out. Here are your options. You may:

1. select two of the four normal embryos and send them over to the clinic for implantation within the willing, warm, wet, waiting uterus of Mrs. Jean Miller née Piercey, or

2. select the four achondroplastics, the four stunted little beings, the four children of Ben, and send them over instead, and curse the whole bloody world and all its machinations and injustices, or

3. refuse to usurp the powers of God and choose instead to become as helpless as He … by choosing one normal embryo and one achondroplastic and leaving the result to blind and careless chance.

Which?

1
. ANSWER: They are, in order, Hitler (
Mein Kampf
, 1924); Goddard (
Feeble-mindedness: its causes and consequences
, 1914); and Pearson (with Moul,
Annals of Eugenics
, 1925).

J
ean Piercey lying supine on a table, with her knees drawn up and the coralline folds of her vulva displayed to view. I am afraid I can only imagine it. It was Anthony Lupron, gowned and masked and accompanied by two acolyte nurses, who performed the embryo transfer, not I. It was he who inserted the speculum and aspirated mucus from the tight little bud of her cervix. It was he who glanced up over her crest of hair and asked whether everything was okay, whether she felt relaxed and comfortable, whether the Janáček playing gently in the background—
Piano Cycle: On an Overgrown Path
—was loud enough. It was he who loaded the embryos and slid the catheter tube gently, gently into her vagina and up through the cervical canal into her womb. She winced slightly. “Patience,” he murmured. “Almost done.” Delicately the catheter spat. A soft, aspirant sound. Ah.

“There.”

Slowly, slowly they lowered her legs. The gentle strains of Janáček soothed her. A nurse stroked her brow while the bed was tilted back to raise her hips above the level of her head. “Now just you relax,” they said.

So it was Anthony Lupron who committed the ultimate deflowering of Jean Piercey. I was merely in the waiting room with her husband.

A scented cave, a dwarf’s cavern dripping with stalactites and running with hidden rivulets and concealing somewhere deep within its declivities sparkling treasure—glittering jeweled eggs, something from the workshop of a cosmic Fabergé, something fabulous and priceless, something lost to human knowledge. It lies there convoluted and burgeoning, folding itself into fantastic shapes, coiling and infolding, metamorphosing and changing. A sea-change, into something rich and strange. Those are eyes that were mere pearls. Coral is become bone …

There are still moments in the manipulation of man or molecule when you are powerless. You splice a gene into a bacterium, transfer it to a culture medium … and you wait. You transfect a mouse embryo with human DNA and watch, breathless, to see what happens. You spit two glistening embryos through a catheter tube into a receptive womb … and wait, listening. Human chorionic gonadotrophin, a 25-kilodalton glycoprotein hormone, is the first cry a budding infant makes, a tiny molecular cry for recognition amid the roaring and screaming of the mother’s blood. You sample at day fourteen, listening for that cry, sniffing with antibodies for that infinitesimal scent. Like a dragon, you can smell treasure.

I was fumbling around the kitchen, preparing breakfast, when the phone rang. Caught between toaster and coffee machine, caught between ferment and fear, I lifted the receiver with caution.

“Is that you, Ben?” But it was not the distant tones of Jean, or the detached tones of Anthony Lupron with the result, positive or negative, of the HCG test. It was my sister, Beatrice. “I hoped I’d catch you before you left for work,” she said. “I’m reading the
Daily Mail
. You’re in it.”

“I’m in it?” My first sensation was one of panic. Visions of gnomic treasure evaporated. I pictured only the mundane facts,
those little tubes in the deep freeze, each with its tiny plug of frozen matter at the bottom. I thought of my careful circumvention of the ethics committee, my assiduous manipulation of phials of sperm to substitute mine for his, to commit adultery by sleight of hand. Had Miss Allele MacMaster got wind of something irregular and blown the story to the newspapers? Or had Jean herself, nursing who knew what seed, been overwhelmed by a fit of conscience?

“Ben? Are you still there?”

“What does it say?”

Beatrice hesitated. My family has always hesitated when confronted by me. They have always had to think carefully about how to dress up the most mundane thought, sugar the most innocuous pill. She hesitated, and in the pause I wrote my own headlines:
GENETICIST CHOOSES HIS EMBRYOS; SPERM SWITCH IN FUTURISTIC ADULTERY; BRAVE NEW DWARF
. The possibilities were legion. A thoughtful leader in the
Times
would discuss the ethical implications of embryo selection in terms both circumspect and self-righteous. The
Mail
would rave about the end of civilization. Members of the Warnock Committee would beat their public breasts. And I, cringing dwarf, would be torn limb from limb by the hounds of public opinion. I already could hear them baying in the distance. “What does it say, for God’s sake?”

“It says ‘Dwarf Biologist Discovers Himself.’ ”

“Read it.”

“All of it?”

“Just the start.”

Beatrice cleared her throat. The sound came
down
the line like a little flutter of embarrassment. “Apparently it’s all about that lecture you gave. ‘Super geneticist Ben Lambert has finished his search of a lifetime. Genetic engineering techniques and years of patience have finally led him to discover the gene that has ruled his
own
existence, for Ben, thirty-eight and a
researcher at one of the world’s leading genetics laboratories, is’ ”—another hesitation—“ ‘a dwarf. Little in body but big in spirit, he …’ ” Her voice trailed off. “It sort of goes on like that for a column and a half.”

I breathed relief. I felt like a murderer pulled up for a speeding offense. When I passed the newsstand that morning, the man held up the
Sun
for me to see. “This you, Ben?” he asked. “Must be you, I guess. Not many of you around, are there?” Somehow, by one of those quirks that govern such things, the story had filtered down out of the scientific journals and flooded all at once into the various tributaries, ditches and sewers alike, of the popular press. There on an inside page in the
Sun
, opposite Pouting, Protuberant Pamela, was Brave Benedict. The news vendor looked at me with renewed curiosity, as though fame were something just as interesting as deformity. “Seems you done yourself a bit of good. What’s it all about, then?”