Mutation

Victor recommenced his pacing as his excitement grew. “I used genetic engineering to reproduce the protein and isolate the responsible gene. Then, for the brilliant part . . .” He stopped again in front of Marsha. His eyes sparkled. “I took a fertilized Aplasia egg or zygote and after causing a point mutation in its DNA, I inserted the new NGF gene along with a promoter. The result?”

“More ganglionic neurons,” Marsha answered.

“Exactly,” Victor said excitedly. “And, equally as important, the ability to pass the trait on to its offspring.

Now, come back into the main room.” He gave Marsha a hand, and pulled her to her feet.

Dumbly she followed him to a light box, where he displayed some large transparencies of microscopic sections of rat brains. Even without counting, Marsha was able to appreciate that there were many more nerve cells in one photograph than the other. Still speechless, she let him herd her into the animal room itself. Just inside the door he slipped on a pair of heavy leather gloves.

Marsha tried not to breathe. It smelled like a badly run zoo. There were hundreds of cages housing apes, dogs, cats, and rats. They stopped by the rats.

Marsha shuddered at the innumerable pink twitching noses and hairless pink tails.

Victor stopped by a specific cage and unhooked the door.

Reaching in, he pulled out a large rat that responded by biting repeatedly at Victor’s gloved fingers.

“Easy, Charlie!” Victor said. He carried the rat over to a table with a glass top, raised a portion of the glass, and dropped the rat into what appeared to be a miniature maze.

The rat was trapped just in front of the starting gate.

“Watch!” Victor said, raising the gate.

After a moment’s pause, the rat entered the maze. With only a few wrong turns the animal reached the exit and got its reward.

“Quick, huh?” Victor said with a satisfied smile. “This is one of my ‘smart’ rats. They are rats in which I inserted the NGF gene. Now watch this.”

Victor adjusted the apparatus so that the rat was returned to the start position, but in a section that did not have access to the maze. Victor then went back to the cages and got a second rat. He dropped it inside the table so the two rats faced each other through a wire mesh.

After a moment or two he opened the gate and the second rat went through the maze without a single mistake.

“Do you know what you just witnessed?” Victor asked.

Marsha shook her head.

“Rat communication,” Victor said. “I’ve been able to train these rats to explain the maze to each other. It’s incredible.”

“I’m certain it is,” Marsha said with less enthusiasm than Victor.

“I’ve done this ‘neuronal proliferation’ study on hundreds of rats,” Victor said.

Marsha nodded uncertainly.

“I did it on fifty dogs, six cows, and one sheep,” Victor added. “I was afraid to try it on the monkeys. I was afraid of success. I kept seeing that old movie Planet of the Apes play in my mind.” He laughed, and the sound of his laughter echoed hollowly off the animal-room walls.

Marsha didn’t laugh. Instead she shivered. “Exactly what are you telling me?” she asked, although her imagination had already begun to provide disturbing answers.

Victor couldn’t look her in the eye.

“Please!” Marsha cried, almost in tears.

“I’m only trying to give you the background so you’ll understand,” Victor said, knowing that she never would.

“Believe me, I didn’t plan what happened next. I’d just finished the successful trial with the sheep when you started talking of having another child. Remember when we decided to go to Fertility, Inc. ?”

Marsha nodded, tears beginning to roll down her cheeks.

“Well, you gave them a very successful harvest of ova. We got eight.”

Marsha felt herself swaying. She steadied herself, grabbing on to the edge of the maze.

“I personally did the in-vitro fertilization with my sperm,” Victor continued. “You knew that. What I didn’t tell you is that I brought the fertilized eggs back here to the lab.”

Marsha let go of the table and staggered over to one of the benches. She wanted to faint. She sat down heavily. She didn’t think she could stand hearing the rest of Victor’s story. But now that he had begun she realized he was going to tell her whether she liked it or not. He seemed to feel he could minimize the enormity of his sin if he confined himself to a purely scientific description. Could this be the man she married?

“When I got the zygotes back here,” he said, “I chose a nonsense sequence of DNA on chromosome 6 and did a point mutation. Then, with micro-injection techniques and a retro viral vector, I inserted the NGF gene along with several promoters, including one from a bacterial plasmid that coded for resistance to the cephalosporin antibiotic called cephaloclor.”

Victor paused for a moment, but he didn’t look up. “That’s why I insisted that Mary Millman take the cephaloclor from the second to the eighth week of her pregnancy. It was the cephaloclor that kept the gene turned on, producing the nerve growth factor.”