"Farmers have always had prize animals. A perfect cow. Imagine taking that cow and producing hundreds. Or maybe front-ending the process — producing thousands in a lab and selecting out the ones you want and maybe changing them here or there by adding or subtracting a gene. And then, when you get the truly perfect one, through cloning you could just keep it going and produce an endless number.
"The key thing is the number. Genetic modification is difficult. You don't know where to insert the gene, and you can't tell where it's going to end up. But if we can culture cells in a dish in the thousands or the millions, we don't have to insert it with precision. We don't even have to know exactly how it works. All we have to do is to be able to locate it. Then we just select only those cells which carry the modification we require. See, when you've got millions, you can modify them all in bulk and look for the ones you need."
"So basically," said Jude, "it's like imitating the conditions for evolution, but doing it all at once, all at the same time."
"Precisely," said Hartman, beaming.
"And you're the one who's doing the choosing, not nature or God or the environment or circumstance."
"Right again."
"But doesn't it ever go wrong?"
Hartman smiled. "Look, I won't pretend there aren't problems. It's a tricky business. Let's face it, you're subjecting that little cell to a lot of poking and prodding. You actually invade it and perform major surgery. You're implanting an alien set of chromosomes — maybe the chromosomes aren't in a resting state, maybe they'll divide out of synch with the embryonic cells. If you're lucky, the embryo will die. And they do — Doctors Wilmut and Campbell produced Dolly, but to get her, there were two hundred and seventy-six embryos that died at various stages."
"Are there abnormalities that live?"
"Of course. You don't hear about those, naturally. There are all kinds of reports and rumors about gigantism."
"Gigantism. Whats that?"
"They simply grow too big. Sometimes too big for the surrogate mother to give birth to. Many of the cattle clones done by the Grenada company in Texas showed this abnormality. We don't know yet what's responsible.
"Look, life's not perfect. Mistakes happen even in nature — especially in nature. There comes a time when you just have to bow down before it. You know your body changes with age. What's that mean on the level of individual cells? They change, too. They reproduce over and over, and little mistakes creep in. Proteins misread or miscopy all those miles of DNA. It's like a Xerox machine that is constantly on the go, where the copies don't just fade but actually drop letters or add letters here and there. After a million copies have been run off, the document isn't nearly as legible.
"So now what happens if we take the nucleus of an old cell and put it inside a new egg? Do we really have a brand-new fertilized egg ready to take on the challenge of life? Or do we have a tired old nucleus inside a young egg? That's a question nobody knows the answer to.
"And you know when we'll know?"
Jude shook his head.
"We'll know if we start getting a lot of strange-looking human beings."
Hartman's tour had come to an end. He sat down at a wooden table near his desk.
Skyler, who had been quiet most of the time, spoke up. "And is it possible, Dr. Hartman, to clone human beings?"
Hartman smiled, the kind of smile that suggested he had been asked that question innumerable times before.
"Let me put it this way. All the prerequisites are in place. In vitro fertilization — by far the most essential — has been done since 1971. The ability to enucleate DNA — getting better and better all the time. Freezing sperm cells and egg cells — we've been doing that for years. So all the machinery's there. If we can do it with lesser mammals — and we have — we can do it with humans. In fact, there's only one barrier."
"What's that?"
"Public opposition. Ethics. A sense a lot of people have that its a violation of nature or what nature intends."
"But if a group came along and didn't feel itself bound by ethical considerations, could it, say, produce a child, clone it, freeze the clone, and then reactivate it years later?"
"Sure. The science is there. You're talking about the merger of two already existing and well-understood procedures — cloning and cryopreservation. In March 1998 a baby was born in Los Angeles from an embryo that had been frozen for seven and a half years. They thought it was a record until they learned that a baby born in Philadelphia had come from an embryo that had been frozen four months longer.
"Of course — for delayed cloning — you'd have to have a compelling reason to do it. I mean, who would want to have a child and then want to produce an exact duplicate years later? There's only one reason I can think of — or at least one acceptable reason."
"And that is?" asked Jude.
"Grief. If you had a child that you loved, and that child died, and the loss was so unbearably painful, you might want to try to re-create him. Of course, that would be hopeless — it ignores all the psychological and other physiological factors that form a personality. And anyway, the scenario presumes that the parent is already thinking about replacing the child before the birth, and even for total pessimists, that's a bit of a stretch."
"You said one acceptable reason," noted Skyler. "What's the unacceptable one?"
"It's too absurd even to talk about. It's the province of sci fi writers, and it could never happen."
"But for the sake of discussion, what is it?"
"Well, it would be to create a bank of spare parts. We were talking about organ transplants earlier. Despite all the advances, we're still in the Dark Ages. We still have to flood the recipient patient with immunosuppression drugs; sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. We set up elaborate computer files to search for that one-in-a-thousand match for bone marrow. We put people on lists waiting for other people to get into fatal accidents. Imagine being able to perform a transplant without fearing that the body's immune system will reject the organ. The organ wouldn't be foreign, because its genetic makeup would be identical to the one it is replacing. It would already rightfully belong to the host. All those wonderful tiny commandos that have been trained to hunt down intruders — the leukocyte antigens and T cells — they'd be disarmed. The body would welcome it with open arms. That's been a dream of surgeons for thirty years, ever since Christiaan Barnard put the heart from a twenty-four-year-old woman who died in a car crash into the chest of fifty-five-year-old Louis Washkansky and gave him an extra eighteen days of life."
Hartman had worked himself up into a speech and seemed a little embarrassed by it. Jude and Skyler remained silent.
The scientist took a piece of paper from a pad on his desk and unclipped a pen from his breast pocket, scribbling something. He handed it to Skyler.
"Let's talk more. Here's my address. Come for dinner tonight. Seven o'clock. Needless to say — informal."
"One final question," said Jude. "Is there a record of transplants? That list you spoke of, is it accessible and could someone go back and look at all the transplants that were done?"
"Certainly," replied Hartman. "The computer's database holds every transplant ever performed in every hospital in the country. If you want, I can gain access for you."
"I would appreciate that."
Tizzie took a taxi to her house, and as it drove along familiar Lake Drive, lined with oaks and green lawns, she felt a nostalgic tug. She knew every tree, every twist in the road. They all retained memories for her, even memories just beyond reach that she nonetheless knew were there. The world of her childhood, so secure and now so distant, never lessened its hold upon her.