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CHAPTER 005

Get this,”Charlie Huggins said, looking at the television in the kitchen of his house in San Diego. The sound was turned off, but he was reading the crawl beneath. “It says, ‘Talking Ape Cited in Sumatra.’”

“You mean it got a speeding ticket?” his wife said, glancing at the screen. She was making breakfast.

“No,” Huggins said. “They must mean the ape was ‘sighted.’ With an ‘s.’”

“The ape was sighted? Meaning the ape could see?” His wife was a high school English teacher. She liked these jokes.

“No, honey. The story says…some people in Sumatra encountered an ape in the jungle that talked.”

“I thought apes can’t talk,” his wife said.

“Well, that’s what the story says.”

“So it has to be a lie.”

“You think? Uh, now…Britney Spears is not getting divorced. I’m relieved. She may be pregnant again. From the pictures it looks like it. And Posh Spice wore a nice green dress to a gala. And Sting says he can have sex for eight hours without stopping.”

“Scrambled or over easy?” his wife said.

“Tantric, apparently.”

“I mean your eggs.”

“Scrambled.”

“Call the kids, will you?” she said. “Everything’s almost ready.”

“Okay.” Charlie got up from the table and headed for the stairs. When he got to the living room, the phone rang. It was the lab.

In the laboratories of Radial Genomics Inc., in the eucalyptus groves of the University of California at San Diego, Henry Kendall drummed his fingers on the countertop while he waited for Charlie to pick up. The phone rang three times. Where the fuck was he? Finally, Charlie’s voice: “Hello?”

“Charlie,” Henry said. “Did you hear the news?”

“What news?”

“The ape in Sumatra, for Christ’s sake.”

“That has to be bullshit,” Charlie said.

“Why?”

“Come on, Henry. You know it’s bullshit.”

“They said the ape spoke Dutch.”

“It’s bullshit.”

“It might have been Uttenbroek’s team,” Kendall said.

“Nah. The ape was big, two or three years old.”

“So? Uttenbroek could have done it a few years ago. His team’s advanced enough. Besides, those guys from Utrecht are all liars.”

Charlie Huggins sighed. “It’s illegal in the Netherlands to do that research.”

“Right. Which is why they would go to Sumatra to do it.”

“Henry, the technology’s much too difficult. We’re years away from making a transgenic ape. You know that.”

“I don’t know that. You hear what Utrecht announced yesterday? They harvested bull stem cells and cultured them in mouse testicles. I would saythat is difficult. I would say that is fucking cutting edge.”

“Especially for the bulls.”

“I don’t see anything funny here.”

“Can’t you imagine the poor mice, dragging around giant purple bulls’ balls?”

“Still not laughing…”

“Henry,” Charlie said. “Are you telling me you see one report on television about a talking ape, and you actually believe it?”

“I’m afraid I do.”

“Henry.” Charlie sounded exasperated. “It’s television. This story’s right up there with the two-headed snake. Pull yourself together.”

“The two-headed snake was real.”

“I have to get the kids to school. I’ll talk to you later.” And Charlie hung up.

Fucker. His wife always took the kids to school.

He’s avoiding me.

Henry Kendall walked around the lab, stared out the window, paced some more. He took a deep breath. Of course he knew Charlie was right. It had to be a fake story.

But…what if it wasn’t?

It was truethat Henry Kendall had a tendency to be high-strung; his hands sometimes shook when he spoke, especially when he was excited. And he was a bit of a klutz, always stumbling, banging into things at the lab. He had a nervous stomach. He was a worrier.

But what Henry couldn’t tell Charlie was that the real reason he was worried now had to do with a conversation that had taken place a week ago. It seemed meaningless at the time.

Now it took on a more ominous quality.

Some ditsy secretary from the National Institutes of Health had called the lab and asked for Dr. Kendall. When he answered the phone, she said, “Are you Dr. Henry A. Kendall?”

“Yes…”

“Is it correct that you came to the NIH on a six-month sabbatical four years ago?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Was that from May until October?”

“I think it was. What’s this about?”

“And did you conduct part of your research at the primate facility in Maryland?”

“Yes.”

“And is it correct that when you came to the NIH in May of that year, you underwent the usual testing for communicable diseases, because you were going to do primate research?”

“Yes,” Henry said. They had done a battery of tests, everything from HIV to hepatitis to flu. They’d drawn a lot of blood. “May I ask what this is about?”

“I am just filling out some additional paperwork,” she said, “for Dr. Bellarmino.”

Henry felt a chill.

Rob Bellarmino was the head of the genetics section of NIH. He hadn’t been there four years before, when Henry was there, but he was in charge of things now. And he was no particular friend of either Henry or Charlie.

“Is there some problem?” Henry asked. He had the distinct feeling there was.

“No, no,” she said. “We’ve just misplaced some of our paperwork, and Dr. Bellarmino is a stickler about records. While you were at the primate facility, did you do any research involving a female chimpanzee named Mary? Her lab number was F-402.”

“You know, I don’t remember,” Henry said. “It’s a long time back. I worked with several chimps. I don’t recall specifically.”

“She was pregnant during that summer.”

“I’m sorry, I just don’t remember.”

“That was the summer we had an outbreak of encephalitis, and they had to quarantine most of the chimps. Is that right?”

“Yes, I remember the quarantine. They sent chimps all around the country to different facilities.”

“Thank you, Dr. Kendall. Oh-while I have you on the phone, can I verify your address? We have 348 Marbury Madison Drive, La Jolla?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Thanks for your time, Dr. Kendall.”

That was the entire conversation. All Henry really thought, at the time, was that Bellarmino was a tricky son of a bitch; you never knew what he was up to.

But now…with this primate in Sumatra…

Henry shook his head.

Charlie Huggins could argue all he wanted, but it was a fact that scientists had already made a transgenic monkey. They’d done it years ago. There were all kinds of transgenic mammals these days-dogs, cats, everything. It was not out of the question that the talking orang was a transgenic animal.

Henry’s work at NIH had been concerned with the genetic basis of autism. He’d gone to the primate facility because he wanted to know which genes accounted for the differences in communication abilities between humans and apes. And he had done some work with chimp embryos. It didn’t lead anywhere. In fact, he had hardly gotten started before the encephalitis outbreak halted his research. He ended up back at Bethesda and working in a lab for the duration of his sabbatical.

That was all he knew.

At least, all he knew for sure.

Species Split Did Not End Sex, Researchers Find a Controversial Result from Genetics

Researchers at Harvard and MIT have concluded that the split between humans and chimpanzees occurred more recently than previously thought. Gene investigators had long known that apes and human beings both derived from a common ancestor, who walked the earth some 18 million years ago. Gibbons split off first, 16 million years ago. Orangutans split about 12 million years ago. Gorillas split 10 million years ago. Chimpanzees and human beings were the last to split, about 9 million years ago.

However, after decoding the human genome in 2001, geneticists discovered that human beings and chimps differed in only 1.5% of their genes-about 500 genes in all. This was far fewer than expected. By 2003, scientists had begun to catalog precisely which genes differed between the species. It is now clear that many structural proteins, including hemoglobin and cytochrome c proteins, are identical in chimps and humans. Human and chimp blood are identical. If the species split 9 million years ago, why are they still so alike?

Harvard geneticists believe humans and chimpanzees continued to interbreed long after the species split. Such interbreeding, or hybridization, puts evolutionary pressure on the X chromosome, causing it to change more rapidly than normal. The researchers found that the newest genes on the human genome appear on the X chromosome.

From this, researchers argue that ancestral humans continued to breed with chimps until 5.4 million years ago, when the split became permanent. This new view stands in sharp contrast to the consensus view that once speciation occurs, hybridization is “a negligible influence.” But according to Dr. David Reich of Harvard, the fact that hybridization has rarely been seen in other species “may simply be due to the fact that we have not been looking for it.”

The Harvard researchers caution that interbreeding of humans and chimpanzees is not possible in the present day. They point out that press reports of hybrid “humanzees” have invariably proven false.