Perfect People

21

John arrived in his office shortly after nine, cold and shivery, with a maelstrom of bad stuff going on inside his head. He sat at his desk with a cup of black coffee and a cup of cold water, prised two Tylenol capsules from their foil and swallowed them.

Rain rattled against the window. It was blowing a gale outside, his jacket was damp, his chinos were soaked and clinging to his legs, and his loafers were sodden after stepping off the sidewalk into a deep puddle.

At eleven o’clock he had to give a lecture to thirty students, in which he was to talk about the areas where the advances of medicine were having a bad impact on human evolution. Because of a whole range of scientific and medical developments during the past few thousand years, from primitive dentistry and optical lenses, through to organ transplants and new controls for chronic killer diseases like diabetes, it was no longer the fittest or best-adapted humans who survived.

Once, the gene lines of people with no teeth would have died out because they couldn’t eat, and similarly those with bad vision would have more easily fallen prey to wild animals or enemies, and died out also, but this was no longer the case. These people survived with their defects and continued breeding, passing the defects to their offspring. Likewise people with the genes for organ failure or chronic diseases survived and bred. Every year more defective people were coming into the world rather than fewer. Science was already, stealthily and unwittingly, taking over from Darwinian principles of natural selection.

John had done experiments with his students on computer models of evolution with and without the impact of medical advances. Left unimpeded, humans would have evolved, naturally, into a far stronger species than they were now. He told his students that in the next experiment they designed they would add something new into the equation: genetic engineering. That was the only way to counteract the gradual erosion of our species by medicine. Without genetic engineering, over the next hundred thousand years – a mere three hundred generations’ time – the computer models had shown that those people who lived in affluent societies would be dangerously weakened.

He had been looking forward to this talk, but now with the events of the past twenty-four hours, he had lost all enthusiasm. He just wanted, desperately, to try to sort everything out.

Naomi’s accusation really hurt him. He buried his head in his hands. She was in a state and would calm down; he hadn’t done anything other than talk to the reporter, he had a clear conscience about that. But just what the hell had he said to her?

The reporter had lied about their friendship. Why? To get him to talk?

Off the record. It had been off the record. Hadn’t it?

He dialled Dr Rosengarten, then logged on to his email while the phone was ringing. The obstetrician’s secretary answered. Dr Rosengarten was in theatre all morning. She took down John’s number and told him she would have him call him back when he was free.

He glanced down the fresh list of emails in his inbox. He’d put a few speculative feelers out to a number of universities and institutions over the past weeks, but there were no responses this morning. In a year’s time if he didn’t get tenure here, he would be out of a job. With almost all his savings gone on the baby Naomi was now carrying, he was feeling panicky. His book would still take another year to finish – and in any event he would not make anything like enough from it to live on. He faced the very real possibility that he might have to move out of his field altogether and take a research and development job in some place like Silicon Valley with a computer company. Not a prospect he relished.

Twenty past nine, Los Angeles time. The East Coast was three hours ahead. Twenty after midday. Dettore might be back by now. He dialled his number.

Four rings and then the voice mail again: ‘You’ve reached the Dettore Clinic. Please leave your name, number – don’t forget your country code – and any message, and someone will call you back shortly.’

He left another message, and replaced the receiver. His secretary came in with a pile of mail and he asked her if she’d go get him another cup of water. Then he fished Sally Kimberly’s card from his wallet and dialled her direct line.

It didn’t even ring. Instead he heard her recorded voice. ‘Hi, you’ve reached Sally Kimberly. I’m out right now, but leave a message, or reach me on my cellphone.’

He left a message asking her to call him urgently, then dialled her cellphone, but her voice mail kicked in instantly on that, too. He left a second message.

Then, as he hung up, he realized what it was that had been bugging him last night – the feeling he’d had that there was something missing from the room: it was the photograph of Naomi that was normally on his desk. One of his favourite pictures of her, taken a couple of years back when they’d revisited Turkey. She was tanned, her fair hair bleached almost blonde by the salt and sun, standing on the prow of an elderly gulet, sunglasses pushed up on her head, arms outstretched, doing a parody of Kate Winslet in the film Titanic.

He stood up and looked around. The photographer must have moved it last night; he’d rearranged a load of stuff. But where the hell had he put it?

His secretary came in. He asked her about the photograph, but she assured him she had not touched it. Then he sat back down and sipped the water, switching his thoughts to Dr Rosengarten.

What he needed to understand was, if Rosengarten had been right and it was a girl, just how easy would it have been for Dettore to have got the sex of the child wrong? Was it harder than the other genes that he had altered – or easier? Was it just one slip, or was their baby a total mess?

He called up his addresses file, typed in a key word, and a name and a phone number came up. Dr Maria Annand. She was an infertility specialist at Cedars-Sinai. He’d been to see her with Naomi six months ago for tests, at the request of Dr Dettore, before being accepted by him. Dettore had wanted confirmation that it was still viable for Naomi to conceive, before putting them to the expense of coming to see him.

He dialled the number. By luck, he caught her just as she was leaving for an appointment.

‘Look, Dr Annand, I have a quick question I want to ask you. If you have an embryo sexed, what are the percentage chances of getting it correct?’

‘You mean like selecting a male or female?’

‘Exactly.’

‘That’s done regularly on people carrying sex-specific disease genes. It would normally be done through pre-implantation genetics – when you are creating the embryo. When it gets to eight cells, you take a single cell from the blastocyst of the developing embryo, and the embryo doesn’t notice. You have it sexed. It’s very simple.’

‘What margin of error is there?’

‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ she said.

‘Let’s say a couple want a boy. They have pre-implantation genetics to select the sex – but later they discover they are not having a boy, but a girl. How likely is that to happen?’

She sounded adamant. ‘Extremely unlikely. Any error on the sexing of a foetus is remote – it’s so basic.’

‘But it must happen? Surely?’

‘You look at the chromosomes, look at the numbers. There’s no way you’re going to make a mistake.’

‘There are always mistakes in science,’ John said.

‘OK, right, you can get a mix-up in a lab, sure. That happened recently. A fertility clinic mixed up the embryos of a black couple and a white couple – they put back the wrong embryo – the white couple had a black baby. That can happen.’

‘The wrong embryo?’ John echoed.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You are saying that’s the only way it could happen?’

‘You’ll have to forgive me,’ Dr Annand said. ‘I have to rush – I’m really late.’

‘Sure, appreciate your time, thanks.’

‘Call me later if you want to talk this through further,’ she said.

‘I may do that. So – just to get this right – the wrong embryo – that’s the only way? The entire wrong embryo?’

‘Yes. That would actually be more likely than getting the sex wrong.’