Sister

15

Mr. Wright has listened to my encounter with Emilio and I am trying to detect whether he thinks less of me. Mrs. Crush Secretary bustles in with coffee for Mr. Wright in a china cup, Maryland cookies balanced on the saucer, the chocolate melting onto the white china. I have a plastic cup with no biscuits. Mr. Wright is a little embarrassed by the favoritism. He waits for her to leave and puts one of his cookies next to my cup.

“You said the funeral gave you two new leads?”

Lead? Did I really use the word? Sometimes I hear my new vocabulary and for a moment the absurdity of all this threatens to turn my life into farce.

“It’s Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the candlestick.”

“Bee, you’re so silly. It’s Professor Plum in the library with the rope!”

Mr. Wright is waiting. “Yes. The other was Professor Rosen.”

Although most people at your funeral were blurred by grief and rain, I noticed Professor Rosen, maybe because he was a known face from television. He was among the crowd who couldn’t fit inside the church, holding an umbrella with vents, a scientist’s umbrella, letting the wind through while other mourners had their umbrellas turned inside out. Afterward he came up to me and awkwardly stretched out his hand, then let it fall to his side, as if too shy to continue with the gesture. “Alfred Rosen. I wanted to apologize to you, for the e-mail that the PR woman sent you. It was callous.” His glasses were misted and he used a handkerchief to wipe them clean. “I have e-mailed you my personal contact details, should you want to ask me anything further. I’d be happy to answer any questions that you have.” His language was starched and his posture tense—I noticed that much—but nothing else because my thoughts were with you.

“I phoned Professor Rosen on the number he’d given me, about a week after the funeral.”

I gloss over that week of emotional turmoil after your funeral, when I didn’t think straight, couldn’t eat and barely spoke. I continue briskly, trying to blot out the memory of that time.

“He said he was going away on a lecture tour and suggested we meet before he left.”

“Were you suspicious of him?” asks Mr. Wright.

“No. I had no reason to think either he or the trial were connected to Tess’s death. By then I thought the payments to the women were probably innocent, as the people at the hospital had said, but I hadn’t directly asked him, so I wanted to do that.”

I thought I had to question everything, be suspicious of everyone. I couldn’t afford to go down just one avenue, but had to explore all of them until at the end of one, at the center of the maze, I would find your killer.

“Our meeting was at ten o’clock, but Chrom-Med runs information seminars starting at nine-thirty, so I booked a place.”

Mr. Wright looks surprised.

“It’s a bit like the nuclear industry used to be,” I say. “Wanting everything to look open and innocent. ‘Visit our nuclear processing facility and bring a picnic!’ You know the kind of thing.”

Mr. Wright smiles, but the strangest thing has happened. For a moment, as I was speaking, I heard myself talking like you.

It was the morning rush hour and the tube was packed. As I stood squashed up against other commuters, I remembered, appalled, the note I’d put up on the college notice board asking your friends to meet me. In the turmoil after your funeral I’d somehow forgotten. It was at twelve that day. I felt far more apprehensive about that than my meeting with Professor Rosen.

At just before 9:30 a.m. I arrived at the Chrom-Med building—ten stories high in glass with transparent lifts going up the outside like bubbles in sparkling mineral water. Light tubes encircled the building with purple and blue bolts of light shooting around its circumference; “science fiction becomes science fact” seemed to be the message.

The sparkling fantasy image was tarnished by a knot of around ten demonstrators holding placards, one saying NO TO DESIGNER BABIES! Another, LEAVE PLAYING GOD TO GOD! There were no shouts to go with the placards, the demonstrators yawning and lackluster, as if it were too early to be up and about. I wondered if they were there to get on the telly, although media coverage had tailed off in the last few weeks with the TV using library footage now. Maybe they’d turned out because it was the first day in weeks it wasn’t snowing or sleeting or raining.

As I got nearer I heard one demonstrator, a multipierced woman with angrily spiky hair, talking to a journalist.

“…and only the rich will be able to afford the genes to make their children cleverer and more beautiful and more athletic. Only the rich will be able to afford the genes that will stop their children getting cancer or heart disease.”

The journalist was just holding the Dictaphone, looking a little bored, but the spiky-haired protester was undaunted and furiously continued. “They will eventually create a genetic superclass. And there won’t be any chance of intermarrying. Who’s going to marry someone uglier than they are, and weaker, more stupid and prone to illness? After a few generations they will have created two species of people: one gene rich and one gene poor.”

I went up to the spiky-haired demonstrator. “Have you ever met someone with cystic fibrosis? Or muscular dystrophy? Or Huntington’s disease?” I asked.

She glared at me, annoyed I’d interrupted her flow.

“You don’t know what it’s like living with cystic fibrosis, knowing that it’s killing you, that you’re drowning in your own phlegm. You don’t know anything about it at all, do you?”

She moved away from me.

“You’re lucky,” I called after her. “Nature made you gene-rich.”

And then I walked into the building.

I gave my name through a security grill on the door and was buzzed in. I signed my name at reception and presented my passport as I’d been instructed. A camera behind the desk automatically took my photo to make an identity card and then I was allowed through. I’m not sure what they were scanning for, but the machines were far more sophisticated than anything I’d been through at airport security checks. Fifteen of us were then shown into a seminar room, dominated by a large screen, and were welcomed by a young woman called Nancy, our perky “facilitator.”

After an elementary lesson in genetics, Perky Nancy showed us a short film of mice that had been injected as embryos with a jellyfish gene. In the film, the lights went off—and hey presto!—the mice glowed green. There were many oohs and aahs, and I noticed that only one other person, a middle-aged man with a gray ponytail, wasn’t entertained, like me.

Perky Nancy played us the next film, which showed mice in a maze. “And here’s Einstein and his friends,” she enthused. “These little fellows have an extra copy of a gene that codes for memory, making them much cleverer.”

In the film, Einstein and his friends were finding their way around a maze at dazzling speed compared with the meanderings of their dimmer, nongenetically engineered friends.

The man with the gray ponytail spoke up, his voice aggressive. “Does this ‘IQ’ gene get into the germ line?” he asked.

Nancy smiled at the rest of us. “That means, is the gene passed on to their babies?” She turned, still smiling, to Ponytail Man. “Yes. The original mice were given the genetic enhancement nearly ten years ago now. They were these little fellows’ great, great, great—well I’m running out of greats—grandparents. Seriously, though, this IQ gene has been passed on through many generations.”

Ponytail Man’s posture as well as his tone was belligerent. “When will you be testing it on humans? You’ll make a killing then, won’t you?”

Perky Nancy’s expression didn’t flicker. “The law doesn’t allow genetic enhancement in people. Only the treating of disease.”

“But as soon as it’s legal, you’ll be ready and waiting, right?”

“Scientific endeavor can be purely to forward our knowledge, nothing more sinister or commercial than that,” responded Perky Nancy. Maybe she had flashcards for this kind of question.

“You’re floating on the stock market, right?” he asked.

“It’s not my job to talk about the financial aspect of the company.”

“But you have shares? Every employee has shares, right?”

“As I said—”

He interrupted. “So you’d cover up anything that went wrong. Wouldn’t want it to be public?”

Perky Nancy’s tone was sweet but I sensed steel under her linen suit. “I can assure you that we are totally open here. And nothing whatsoever has gone ‘wrong’ as you put it.”

She pressed a button and played us the next film footage, which showed mice in a cage with a researcher helpfully putting in a ruler. It was then that you realized their size—not so much by measuring them against the ruler but against the size of the researcher’s hand. They were enormous.

“We gave these mice a gene to boost muscle growth,” enthused Perky Nancy. “But the gene for that had a surprising effect elsewhere. It made the mice not only much bigger but also meek. We thought we’d get Arnold Schwarzenegger and we ended up with a very muscular Bambi.”

Laughter from the group and again only Ponytail Man and I didn’t join in. As if controlling her own mirth, Perky Nancy continued, “There is a serious point to this experiment, though. It shows us that the same gene can code for two totally different and unrelated things.”

It’s what I’d been worried about with you. I hadn’t been such a fusspot after all.

As Perky Nancy led our group out of the seminar room, I saw a security guard talking to gray Ponytail Man. They were arguing but I couldn’t hear what the argument was about; then Ponytail Man was led firmly away.

We walked in the other direction and were escorted into a large room that had been totally devoted to the CF trial. There were photographs of cured babies and newspaper headlines from all over the world. Perky Nancy galloped us through the beginners’ guide to cystic fibrosis as a huge screen behind her showed a child with CF. I noticed the others in our little party gazing at it, but I looked at Perky Nancy, her cheeks pink, her voice trilling with enthusiasm.

“The story of the cure for cystic fibrosis started in 1989, when an international team of scientists found the defective gene that causes cystic fibrosis. That sounds easy, but remember that in every cell of every human body there are forty-six chromosomes and on each chromosome are thirty thousand genes. Finding that one gene was a fantastic achievement. And the search for a cure was on!”

She made it sound like the opening to a Star Wars movie, and continued with gusto, “Scientists discovered that the defective CF gene was making too much salt and too little water in the cells that line the lungs and the gut, causing sticky mucus to form.”

She turned to the screen, where the child was struggling to breathe, and her voice quavered a little. Maybe it did that every time she showed the film.

“The problem was how to get a healthy gene into a sufferer’s body,” she continued. “The existing method of using a virus was far from ideal. There were risks associated with it and often it wore off too quickly. Then Professor Rosen, backed by Chrom-Med, created an artificial chromosome. It was a new and totally safe way of getting the healthy gene into the body.”

An anxious-faced young man in an Oxford University sweatshirt spoke up. “You’re saying you put an extra chromosome into every cell of the body?”

“Yes,” said Perky Nancy, starry eyed. “In treated patients each cell will have forty-seven, not forty-six, chromosomes. But it’s only a microchromosome and—”

He interrupted her and the group tensed. Was he replacing gray Ponytail Man as the rude member of the group? “Does this extra chromosome get into the germ line?” he asked.

“Yes, it’ll be passed down to future generations.”

“Don’t you find that worrying?”

“Not really, no,” said Perky Nancy, smiling. Her anodyne response seemed to mop up any hostility he might have had. Or maybe I just couldn’t see it anymore because Nancy had dimmed the lights.

On the huge screen a film began, showing the double helix of DNA blown up millions of times. I saw with thirteen other people the two faulty CF genes highlighted. And then, incredibly, I watched the faulty genes being replaced by healthy ones.

The wonder of scientific discovery, real frontiers being pushed back, is an astonishing thing to behold. Like looking through Herschel’s telescope as he discovered a new planet or Columbus’s as he saw the New World. You think I’m exaggerating? I saw the cure for cystic fibrosis, Tess, right there in front of me. I saw how Leo’s death sentence could have been rewritten. He’d be alive now; that’s what I kept thinking as she told us about telomeres and DNA chips and factory cells; he’d be alive now.

As the film moved on to footage of newborn babies, born free of cystic fibrosis, being kissed by grateful mothers and self-consciously emotional fathers, I thought about a boy who grew up, who no longer had Action Man cards for his birthday, who would be taller than I am now.

The film ended and I realized that for a short while I’d forgotten my preoccupation for the last month, or at least temporarily parked it. Then I remembered, of course I remembered, and I was glad that there was no reason for this cure to be implicated with your death or Xavier’s. I wanted the genetic cure for cystic fibrosis to be our New World with no cost or sacrifices or wickedness involved.

I thought the film had ended, but then on the screen Professor Rosen was shown giving a speech. I’d already heard it on the Net and read it printed in the papers but now it resonated in a different way.

“Most people don’t think scientists do their job with passion. If we played instruments or painted pictures or wrote poetry, people would expect it, but scientists—we’re cold, analytical, detached. To most people the word ‘clinical’ means cold and unemotional, but its real meaning is to be involved in medical treatment—to be doing something for good. And we should do that, as artists and musicians and poets do, with energy, commitment and passion.”

Ten minutes later his secretary escorted me from reception, via a bubble lift, to the top floor, where Professor Rosen greeted me. He looked just as he had on the TV and at your funeral, the same caricature wire-rimmed glasses and narrow shoulders and gaucheness, reassuringly unglamorous. I thanked him for coming to your funeral and he nodded, a little curtly I thought. We walked down the corridor together and I broke the silence.

“My brother had cystic fibrosis. I wish you’d been around a few years earlier.”

He half turned away from me and I remembered from the TV interviews how uncomfortable he had been when praised. He changed the subject and I liked him for his modesty.

“So did you find the seminar informative?” he asked.

“Yes. And extraordinary.” I was about to continue but he interrupted me without even being aware that he was doing it.

“I find the mice with high IQ the most disquieting. I was asked to participate in the original trial. A young research fellow at Imperial was looking for the difference between the superbright and the norm or some such nonsense. It was years ago now.”

“But the mice are on Chrom-Med’s film?”

“Yes, the company bought the research, the gene for that matter, for all the good it’s done them. Fortunately, genetic engineering, in humans anyhow, isn’t allowed. Otherwise we’d no doubt have glow-in-the-dark people by now or giants who sing lullabies.”

I thought that the line was borrowed or at least rehearsed. He didn’t seem like a man who could attempt any type of witticism.

“But the cystic fibrosis cure is totally different,” I said.

He stopped walking and turned to me. “Yes. There is no comparison between the genetic cure for cystic fibrosis, which treats a terrible disease, and tinkering with genes for the sake of some kind of genetic enhancement. Or freak show. No comparison whatsoever.”

The vigor of his words was startling and for the first time I realized that he had physicality.

We reached his office and went in.

It was a vast room, glass on three sides, with a panorama across London, in keeping with the rest of the boastful building. His desk, however, was small and shabby and I imagined it being moved with him from student rooms to a variety of bigger offices until it ended up incongruously here. Professor Rosen closed the door behind us. “You had some questions you wanted to ask?”

For a moment I’d forgotten any suspicions and when I remembered, it seemed ridiculous to quiz him over the payments (as I said before, a paltry three hundred pounds when the investment in the trial must have been colossal)—and in the light of what I’d seen it also seemed churlish. But I was no longer constrained by what was appropriate or polite.

“Do you know why women on the trial were paid?” I asked.

He barely reacted. “The PR woman’s e-mail was callously worded, but it is correct. I don’t know who did pay your sister, or anyone else, but I can assure you it wasn’t us or anyone else administering the trial. I have the names and reports of the participating hospitals’ ethics committees for you. So you can see for yourself that no payments are offered or made. It would be totally improper.” He handed me a bundle of documents and continued, “The reality is that if there was any money changing hands, it would be the mothers paying us rather than the other way around. We have parents begging for this treatment.”

There was an awkward silence. My question was answered and we’d barely been in his office three minutes.

“Do you still work for Imperial?” I asked, giving myself a little time to think of more important questions. But I struck a nerve; his body as well as his voice was on the defensive.

“No. I am a full-time employee here. They have better facilities here. They let me out to give lectures.” I heard the bitterness in his voice and wondered what caused it.

“You must be in demand?” I asked, still being polite.

“Yes, very much so. The interest has been quite overwhelming. All the most prestigious universities in Europe have asked me to speak, and in America all eight of the Ivy League universities have invited me to give a keynote address and four of them have offered me honorary professorships. I start my lecture tour in the States tomorrow. It will be a relief to speak for hours at a time to people who understand at least a little of what I am saying rather than in sound bites.”

His words were a genie escaping, revealing I’d got him completely wrong. He did want the limelight, but he wanted it shining on him at lecterns in prestigious universities rather than on television. He did want accolades, but from his peers.

I was sitting a distance away from him but even so he leaned away from me as he spoke, as if the room were cramped. “In the e-mail you sent back you seemed to imply that there may be a link between your sister’s death and my trial.”

I noticed that he’d said “my trial” and remembered that on the TV he’d called it “my chromosome.” I hadn’t grasped before how much he personally identified with the cystic fibrosis trial.

He turned, not looking at me, but at his own half reflection in the glass wall of his office.

“It’s been my life’s work, finding a cure for cystic fibrosis. I’ve literally spent my life, spending everything I have that is precious—time, commitment, energy, even love—on that one thing. I have not done that for anyone to get hurt.”

“What did make you do it?” I asked.

“I want to know that when I die, I have made the world a better place.” He turned to face me and continued. “I believe that my achievement will be seen as a watershed by future generations, leading the way to the time when we can produce a disease-free population—no cystic fibrosis, no Alzheimer’s, no motor-neuron disease, no cancer.” I was taken aback by the fervor in his voice, and he continued, “We will not only wipe them out but ensure that these changes can carry on through the generations. Millions of years of evolution haven’t even cured the common cold let alone the big diseases, but we can and in just a few generations we probably will.”

Why, when he was talking about curing disease, did I find him so disturbing? Maybe because any zealot, whatever his cause, makes us recoil. I remembered his speech when he likened a scientist to a painter or a musician or a writer. I found that correlation disquieting now because instead of notes or words or paints, a genetic scientist has human genes at his disposal. He must have sensed my uneasiness, but misinterpreted the reason for it.

“You think I’m exaggerating, Miss Hemming? My chromosome is in our gene pool. I have achieved in under a lifetime a million years of human development.”

I handed in my temporary ID and left the building. The demonstrators were still there, more vocal now that they’d had some coffee out of their Thermoses. Ponytail Man was with them. I wondered how often he went on the seminar and provoked Perky Nancy. Presumably for PR and legal reasons they couldn’t ban him.

He saw me and came after me.

“Do you know how they measure IQ in those mice?” he asked. “It’s not just the maze.”

I shook my head and started to walk away from him but he followed.

“They are put into a chamber and given electric shocks. When they’re put in again, the ones with genetically enhanced IQ know to be afraid. They measure IQ by fear.”

I walked faster but still he pursued me.

“Or the mice are dropped into a tank of water with a hidden platform. The high-IQ mice learn to find the platform.”

I walked hurriedly toward the tube station, trying to find again my elation at the cystic fibrosis trial, but I was unsettled by Professor Rosen and by the mice. “They measure IQ by fear” becoming indelible in my head even as I tried to erase it.

“I wanted to believe that the CF trial was totally legitimate. I didn’t want it to be associated in any way with Tess’s murder or Xavier’s death. But I was disturbed by my visit.”

“Because of Professor Rosen?” asks Mr. Wright.

“Partly, yes. I had thought he didn’t like fame because he was so uncomfortable on TV. But he was boastful about the lecture tours he’d been asked to give; he made a point of saying they were at the ‘most prestigious’ universities in the world. I knew that I’d completely misjudged him.”

“Were you suspicious of him?”

“I was wary. Before, I’d assumed he’d come to Tess’s funeral, and offered to answer my questions, out of compassion, but I was no longer sure of his reason. And I thought that for most of his life he’d have been seen as the science geek, certainly through school and probably through university. But now he’d become the man of the moment—and, through his chromosome, the future too. I thought that if anything was wrong with his trial he wouldn’t want to jeopardize his newfound status.”

But it was the power of any genetic scientist, not just Professor Rosen, that disturbed me most. As I walked away from the Chrom-Med building, I thought of the Fates: one spinning the thread of human life, one measuring it, one cutting it. I thought of the threads of our DNA, coiling on their double helix, two strands in every cell of our body with our fate coded in them. And I thought that science had never been so intimately connected to what makes us human, what makes us mortal.