Perfect People (5 page)

‘Essentially, yes,’ Dettore said. ‘Better maximization of the nutrients, more efficient conversion of starches, sugars, proteins, better storage and release mechanisms, more elegant insulin controls but without any additional appetite.’

Naomi nodded. ‘These are good things – they’re going to mean he stays in shape easily and he won’t have weight problems.’ She was silent for a moment and then she said, ‘I’m comfortable about these in a way that I’m not about tampering with his sleep patterns.’

John leaned forward and poured himself some more coffee from the metal pot on the table, grinning. ‘You sleep too much, darling.’

‘Rubbish! I need my sleep.’

‘Exactly my point. If you’re not woken, you can easily sleep nine hours, even ten. Dr Dettore is right in one sense – it wastes so much of your life.’

‘I like my sleep!’

‘And if your genes were programmed so that you only needed two hours, darling, you’d like those hours of sleep just as much.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Then she looked away, out of the window. There was a container ship in the distance, sitting high on the horizon, looking so elevated it might have been mounted on a plinth. ‘You have to understand where I’m coming from in my own mind in all of this, Dr – er – Leo. I just want my child to be free of any risk of the disease that killed our son. It’s great that you can also eliminate the other bad genes John and I are carrying, for prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, depression, diabetes. I want to give our child advantages in life, sure, what parent wouldn’t, but I don’t want him to be too different from other human beings, do you understand that? I don’t want him to be a freak.’

Dettore sat upright, folded his arms and rocked back and forward a few times, like a big child himself. ‘Naomi, I hear what you’re saying. You want your kid to be just a regular guy with corners of talent and occasional brilliance, right?’

‘I – I suppose, yes. Exactly.’

‘I’d go along with that, except there is one thing you have to take into account. You have to compare a model of the world today, with a model of what the world will be like when your son becomes an adult. You’re twenty-eight years old, and the world is not substantially different to when you were a little girl. But, in twenty-eight years’ time?’ He opened his arms expansively. ‘I’m telling you that in twenty-eight years’ time the world
will
be different. There will be a genetic underclass that will create a divide bigger than you can imagine. You compare the knowledge, skills, advantages you have right now over some poor young woman your age brought up in the Third World, working on a paddy field in China, or maybe in the bush in Angola.’

Dettore stood up, went over to his desk and tapped his computer keyboard for some moments. A map of the world appeared on the large wall screen opposite them. There were some pink blotches, but mostly the countries were in white.

‘There are seven billion people in the world. Do you know how many of them can read or write?’ He looked at John, then Naomi.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t.’

‘If I tell you that twenty-three per cent of adults in the United States, the most technologically advanced nation in the world, are illiterate, does that give you any clues? Forty-four million who cannot read in the
United States
, for heaven’s sakes! It’s less than a billion in the whole world who can. Less than twenty per cent. Just those pink areas on the map. The average rural dweller in the Third World receives less information in his or her entire lifetime than is contained in one issue of the
LA Times.
’

A phone rang; he glanced down at it, then ignored it and after a few moments it stopped. ‘Naomi,’ he said gently, ‘you may not be comfortable with this fact, but you are already a member of a master-race. I don’t think you’d want to go trade places with too many other people on this planet. I don’t think you’d want your child to be brought up on the Russian steppes, or in a Himalayan tea plantation, or some settlement out in the Gobi Desert. Am I right?’

‘Of course.’

‘But you’d be prepared to take the risk that your son ends up in a kind of intellectual Third World?’

She looked at him and said nothing.

‘These are early days,’ Dettore said. ‘In thirty years’ time, all children from families or nations that can afford it are going to be genetically enhanced. You see the options you have on that list we’re working through? At the moment they are just options, but when you start living in a world where every expectant mother is ticking her way through that same list, are you going to leave all the boxes blank? No way! Not unless you want to have a totally disadvantaged kid – one who won’t be able to keep up or compete in the world.’

‘I’ll tell you what really worries me about this whole thing – and I know it worries John, too, because we’ve discussed this endlessly over the past months, since you accepted us, and it’s this’ – she shrugged – ‘this whole
eugenics
thing. It has a bad history, bad associations.’

Dettore perched on the edge of his desk and leaned towards Naomi. ‘If we human beings never try to improve the genes of our offspring because eighty years ago a madman called Mr Hitler tried to do it, then in my opinion we may have won the Second World War, but Mr Hitler will have won the peace that followed.’ He looked very solemn. ‘Edward Gibbon wrote,
All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
He was right. Any civilization, any generation that does not advance will eventually decline.’

‘And didn’t Einstein say that if he had known that the consequences of his work would have led to the atom bomb, he would have become a watchmaker instead?’ Naomi said.

‘Sure,’ Dettore said. ‘And if Einstein had become a watchmaker, we might today be living in a world where Hitler’s eugenics was our future.’

‘Instead of yours?’ Naomi said. Instantly she regretted the remark. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean—’

‘I think what she’s saying is that it’s one perspective against another,’ John butted in quickly.

‘It’s OK, it’s a valid point,’ Dettore said. ‘Plenty of people have made the comparison. I’ve been called the Antichrist, a Neo-Nazi, Dr Frankenstein, you name it. I just hope I have more humanity than Mr Hitler did. And maybe a little more humility, too.’

He gave such a meek, disarming smile that Naomi felt sorry for offending him. ‘I honestly didn’t mean to make such a crass—’

The geneticist jumped to his feet, walked over, took her hand gently. ‘Naomi, you must have been to hell and back losing Halley. Now you are going through another incredibly difficult time. These four weeks on this ship are going to be physically tough for you as well as mentally tough. It’s very important you always say what you feel, and for you to recognize if you reach the point where you’ve changed your mind and want out. We have to be honest with each other, OK?’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

He released her hand but continued to hold her gaze. ‘The world is changing, Naomi, that’s why you and John are here. Because you are smart enough to realize that.’

There was a long silence. Naomi looked through the window at the vast expanse of flat blue water and at the container ship still visible on the horizon. She looked at her husband, then at the geneticist, then down at the form, thinking about Halley, remembering why they were here.

Dreyens-Schlemmer disease affects the body’s immune system in a similar but far more aggressive way than lupus. It progressively induces a sustained innate immune response. It was as if it turned Halley’s own first line of defence into a corrosive acid, literally eating away his own internal organs. He had died, after screaming non-stop for two days for the pain to cease, no drug able to help him, haemorrhaging blood through his mouth, nose, ears and rectum.

Dreyens-Schlemmer disease was identified in 1978 by two scientists at Heidelberg University in Germany. Because it was so rare, affecting fewer than one hundred children in the world at any one time, their discovery was of largely academic value only. Pharmaceutical companies are not interested because the costs of their research could never be recouped. The only way to defeat Dreyens-Schlemmer disease would be through a long, slow process of eliminating it by breeding it out of the human species.

Most people who carried the relatively rare gene for it had perfectly healthy children without any problem at all. It was only in the extreme circumstance when two unwitting carriers of the recessive gene produced a baby together that the problem could arise.

Neither John nor Naomi had any previous family history of Dreyens-Schlemmer – so far as they knew. But after Halley’s birth – and by then too late – they had discovered they were both carriers of the gene. Which meant there was a one in four chance any child they had would be affected.

Naomi looked at Dettore again. ‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘The world might be changing, but I’m not smart enough to understand how. Maybe I don’t even want to understand. It scares me.’

In the deserted gymnasium, John’s shoes pounded on the treadmill of the running machine; it was ten to seven in the morning. Perspiration guttered down his face and down his body; beads of water streaked his glasses, making it hard to read the television monitor that was tuned to CNN business news and displaying lists of the previous day’s closing NASDAQ prices.

From as far back into childhood as John could remember, he had been driven by a hunger for knowledge. He loved collecting tadpoles in the spring, watching them sprout legs, lose their tails, change into tiny frogs. He badgered his mother each school holiday to drive him from their home town of Örebro, in central Sweden, to Stockholm, to the Natural History Museum and the National Museum of Science and Technology. When he was eighteen he’d gone to London to a summer school to improve his English, and had spent almost the entire three months inside the Science, Natural History and British Museums.

John particularly admired the great scientists of past eras. People like Archimedes, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Pasteur, whose work, he considered, had shaped our modern world. And just as much, he admired the big men of physics and mathematics of the twentieth century, such as Einstein, Fermi, Oppenheimer, von Neumann, Feynman, Schrödinger, Turing, whose work, he believed, would shape our futures. All of them were people who had taken huge risks with their time and their reputations.

If John had been asked what his ambition was, he would have answered that he had no interest in becoming rich, but he would love to have his own name up there, one day, among the big men of science. Once, when he was ten, a few weeks after his father, a dreamer and failed businessman, had died in debt, he wrote down a list of what he wanted to achieve in life:

Whenever John felt low, he looked at the list. At some time during his teens he had transferred it from his little red notebook onto his computer, and subsequently from computer to computer. Reading it always made him smile; but it made him sad, too.

I’m thirty-six and haven’t yet achieved one damned thing on that list.

He felt particularly bad about his neglect of his mother. As an only child he felt very responsible for her. She’d married again when he was eighteen, shortly before he’d gone to Uppsala University, to a widower, a schools inspector who had visited the
högsta-diet
– senior school – where she taught mathematics. A quiet but decent man, he was the opposite of John’s own father in just about every way. Five years later he died of a heart attack, and his mother had been on her own ever since, fiercely independent, despite the fact that she was losing her eyesight through macular degeneration.

As a child, John had been an avid science-fiction reader, his head full of theories and questions. Theories about why we existed, about how certain animals and insects had acquired their characteristics. Questions about why some creatures, like the common ant and the cockroach, had seemingly ceased evolving a million years ago – yet others, such as human beings, continued. Why had some animal brains stopped growing hundreds of thousands of years ago? Was it because having too smart a brain was a hindrance to survival rather than an asset? Would humans eventually destroy themselves precisely because evolution was making them too smart for their own good?

Or, as he explored in his work, did humans risk destroying themselves because they were developing technology at a faster pace than their brains were developing? And were they in need of a major evolutionary leap forward to catch up?

The ship lurched suddenly, unbalancing him, and he had to grab the handrail to stop himself falling sideways off the treadmill belt. Through the open door he could hear the water in the plunge pool sloshing. He hadn’t felt as sick as Naomi had, but he still wasn’t totally acclimatized yet to the motion.

Neither he nor Naomi had slept much again last night. The same questions were going through his mind now that they had discussed over and over. Yes, they both agreed that they wanted to give their son all the advantages they would have liked their own parents to have given them. But they didn’t want him being
too
different and finding himself unable to relate or connect to people.