Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution Read online

  “Is it safe to reach through?” Daddy asked the man in the white coat, and when the man in the white coat said that it was, Daddy took her little hand in his and put it between the bars. The piglet didn’t mind being stroked this time, and Chloe didn’t mind stroking it.

  “They’re looking after her very carefully,” Daddy said, “because she’s a very special piglet. All the piglets in here are special. They all have human hearts.”

  “Why?” Chloe asked—not because she particularly wanted to know, but because Daddy was wearing an expression that told her that he expected to be asked.

  “They’re growing hearts for people whose hearts don’t work very well. Your heart doesn’t work very well—that’s why you’re ill so often, and not as strong as other children at school. You need a new heart, but hearts aren’t easy to come by. Sometimes, the doctors can take a heart out of a little boy or girl who’s been killed in an accident, but not all hearts are alike. Sometimes, when a boy or a girl gets someone else’s heart, their body reacts against it. They can take medicine that stops the reaction, but that makes the body much more vulnerable to all sorts of illnesses. The best replacement heart for someone like you is a heart made by your own genes—genes are the things inside you that make you you and not somebody else—and the only way to make one of those is to put some of your genes into a baby pig, long before it’s born. Then the pig grows a heart exactly like your heart, only healthy. This is the piglet that has your heart, Chloe.”

  Chloe took her hand away, and looked at the piglet that had her heart. The piglet looked back. She knew that Daddy wanted her to ask another question, so that he could tell her more, but she didn’t know what to ask. This was the piglet that had her heart. What more was there to say? But there was more, and Daddy obviously wanted to make certain that she heard it all.

  “The piglet has to take medicine to make it grow very quickly,” Daddy said, patiently. “All piglets take that sort of medicine anyway, because farmers want them to grow as quickly as possible so as to produce more meat, but your piglet has to take extra-special medicine, because it has your heart, and it has to be a strong heart. In not much more than a year the piglet has to grow a heart as big and strong as the hearts that boys and girls take eight or nine years to grow. It’s clever of the scientists to be able to do that—though not as clever as being able to make a pig with a human heart.”

  “When will they do the operation?” Chloe asked. She hoped it would be a long time in the future. She didn’t like being in hospital.

  “Next year,” Daddy told her. Chloe was relieved. Next year was a long way away.

  “Will they put my heart into the piglet?” Chloe asked. She knew that the answer was no, but she asked anyway, anxious to reassure her father that she was taking an interest. He liked her to ask questions, even dumb ones—especially dumb ones, it sometimes seemed.

  Daddy put a protective arm around her shoulder. “That wouldn’t be any use, Lovely,” he said. “They have to let the piglet die. But that’s what happens to pigs anyway; they’re killed for their meat as soon as they’re big enough. I want you to understand that, Chloe.”

  She did understand. Pigs were meat or providers of human hearts; one way or another, some of their flesh became human flesh. What she didn’t understand was why Mummy got so tight-lipped about Daddy bringing her to see the piglet that had her heart—or, for that matter, everything else she got tight-lipped about. There was no point asking; it was the sort of question that simply wasn’t dumb enough to get an answer.

  * * * *

  Chloe told her best friend Alice about visiting the piglet that had her heart, and within a matter of hours it was all around the school. At home time some of the children chanted, “Chloe has a pig’s heart! Chloe has a pig’s heart!” It wasn’t that they didn’t understand which way round things were, it was just that they didn’t care enough about accuracy to let it spoil a good chant. A teacher who heard them got annoyed, the way teachers always did when the other children were nasty to Chloe, and reported the matter to her mother, who blamed it on her father.

  “The next thing you know,” Mummy complained, “we’ll have animal rights nuts slashing the car tires.”

  “I want her to understand,” her father said, obstinately. “I want her to know what’s happened to her. This won’t be the last time she has to face that kind of stupid knee-jerk reaction. I want her to be able to confront other people’s superstitious fears and idiotic jokes without getting upset. I want her to be secure in her own mind.”

  “I know all about what you want,” Mummy retorted. “What does Chloe want? That’s what I care about.”

  The one thing Chloe wanted, at that particular moment, was not to be asked what she wanted. She hated it when one or other of her parents asked her what she wanted when she knew that one of them wanted her to say one thing and the other wanted her to say something else. She hated to be forced into picking one of them and disappointing the other. Mostly, she kept quiet, even if that meant they got mad at her instead.

  “She’s an intelligent girl,” Daddy said. “She’s capable of taking it all aboard. She needs to know what’s going on.”

  “She doesn’t need to visit the damn piglet once a fortnight. She doesn’t need to be dragged along and forced to look it in the eye. She doesn’t have to be taken on tours of factory farms and abattoirs to understand where her dinner comes from, so why does she have to be taken to that horrible lab to watch the damn piglet doing its exercises?”

  The damn piglet really did do exercises. Daddy had explained to her that it wasn’t like the sows out in the shed, which would have heart attacks if they over-exerted themselves. Her piglet had to keep fit. Her piglet had to be in tip-top condition, because it had her heart, and had to look after it for her, to make sure that it was a strong and healthy heart when they transplanted it.

  “She’s interested,” Daddy insisted. “Aren’t you, darling? You like going to see the piglet, don’t you?”

  “Like hell she does,” said Mummy. “You’d rather stay home, wouldn’t you? You’d far rather play with your Nintendo, wouldn’t you?”

  Chloe didn’t answer. She concentrated hard on the TV screen, which was displaying a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Tom had just been squashed flat by a steamroller and was struggling to regain his shape.

  “You see, Lovely,” Daddy said, putting his hand on her shoulder and trying to turn her away from the TV, “you’re part of something very important. A lot of people are like those silly kids at school—they let their gut-reactions get the better of them, and they think there’s something creepy about transgenic animals. You’re going to be a kind of walking advertisement for the scientists who are saving your life, and it’s important that you know what’s at stake.”

  “What the hell are you telling her that for?” her mother demanded. “You think she doesn’t feel bad enough having a bad heart without having to be a walking ad for the wonders of modern science? She’s a seven-year-old girl, for Christ’s sake! You can talk to all the effing reporters when the time comes. She doesn’t have to do it.”

  “It’s better if she doesn’t have to be hidden away,” Daddy said. “It’s better if she can speak for herself. If she understands what’s going on, she’ll be able to cope with all the questions, and the prejudices of idiots won’t upset her.”

  It wasn’t easy to figure out who won the argument, but at least they didn’t force her to take sides. By the time they all had to sit down to eat dinner, the row had dwindled away into a frosty silence. Chloe didn’t mind frosty silences; they were generally less taxing than polite conversations. The next day, though, Daddy took her to see the piglet yet again, while Mummy fretted and fumed at home.

  * * * *

  The last time Chloe saw the pig that had her heart it certainly wasn’t a damn piglet any more. It was bigger and heavier than she was, although that was partly because she was even thinner than usual just then. She hadn’t been well, and had missed
a whole week of school. Christmas had come and gone and “next year” had become “this year,” which wasn’t a distant prospect at all.

  The pig that had her heart was lean and lively; it didn’t look at all like the chubby pigs in her picture-books. Its hide was far rougher now, and its once-soft ears were now so bristly that Chloe had begun to understand why people sometimes said that you couldn’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The pig looked as if it ought to have been out of doors, rooting around in a field, but it was still kept indoors, and not in the shed either. It had a run in a windowless basement lit by harsh striplights, where everything was just as clean as it had been in the old lab.

  Chloe wasn’t allowed to touch the pig this time; she just stood at one end of the run and watched it from behind the bars. It galloped up to see her, and she could tell that it really did recognize her. It knew that it had seen her before, that she had visited it regularly since it was very tiny. It didn’t know, of course, that it had her heart, but it knew that there was something between the two of them, that they weren’t just strangers.

  “You don’t have to worry about her, Chloe” the man in the white coat said to her, gently. “She won’t feel a thing. She’ll just go to sleep and never wake up. She’s had a better life than most living creatures—better than most people. You mustn’t be sad for her.”

  If I’m made of all the things I’ve eaten, Chloe thought, as she looked at the mashed cereals and mixed vegetables that were just then being poured into the pig’s trough, then even the bits of me that aren’t made directly from vegetables are made from second-hand vegetables. But what are vegetables made of? Soil and water? I’m mud, really, and my heart’s mud too. All mud, eaten once or eaten twice.

  “It won’t do any harm for her to be a little bit sentimental,” Daddy said to the scientist. “It’s only right that she should know what’ll happen—that her life will only be saved by virtue of the sacrifice of another living creature. Her mother wants to hide it all from her, but I want her to understand, and that’s what Chloe wants too. Every seven-year-old wants to understand everything. I did. I still do.”

  “I don’t want to go into hospital,” Chloe said, although she knew full well that it wouldn’t do any good.

  “I know you don’t, Beauty,” Daddy said. “Nobody ever does. But the doctors have to make you better. The doctors have to put your new heart inside your body, before the old one gives up altogether. We all want you to get better, don’t we?”

  The pig was already tucking into the food that had been put into its trough. It ate greedily, just like a pig was supposed to. Chloe was glad to see that it had a good appetite. After all, it was her heart that was filling the pig with such energy, such enthusiasm. When she got her new heart, that would become her energy, her enthusiasm.

  “I want to play football,” she said contemplatively, “for Queen’s Park Rangers.”

  Daddy and the scientist laughed. “That’s what comes of moving down south for the sake of work,” her father said.

  “It could be worse,” the man in the white coat observed. “She might want to play for Millwall.”

  * * * *

  After the operation she was in hospital for weeks on end. She missed a whole half-term of school, which was good. She knew that when she went back the other kids would be ready and waiting, avid to chant: “Chloe has a pig’s heart! Chloe has a pig’s heart” now that it was true. Except, of course, that it wasn’t really true. She had her own heart, lovingly designed by her own genes, without the flaw that had spoiled the one she had been born with.

  “Soon,” Mummy told her, as the day of her release finally approached, “you’ll be able to go anywhere you like. “You’ll be able to run fast, and climb, and do anything you want.”

  “Except play for Queen’s Park Rangers,” Daddy put in, because he liked private jokes.

  “This is a new beginning,” Mummy said, making a big show out of ignoring him. “This is the real beginning of your whole life.”

  “And you owe it all to science,” Daddy said, “and to the other Chloe.”

  “I do wish you’d forget all that, Mike,” Mummy said, petulantly. “And I do wish you wouldn’t keeping calling the damn pig the other Chloe. What are you trying to do, give the poor kid a complex?”

  “It’s you who’s trying to give her a complex,” Daddy retorted. Chloe hoped that they weren’t going to ask her to decide which one of them was giving her a complex, because she really didn’t know.

  “She’s just a little girl, Mike,” Mummy said. “I’m her mother, for Christ’s sake!”

  “She’s not just a little girl,” Daddy insisted. “She’s our little girl—not to mention a miracle of modern science, and a heroine of the genetic revolution.”

  “I don’t want her to be a scientific miracle and a heroine of the genetic revolution,” Mummy said. “I want her to be a little girl like any other little girl, who doesn’t get made fun of by her schoolmates, and who doesn’t get doorstepped by tabloid journalists, and who doesn’t have to have her head full of morbid fantasies about pigs.”

  “You can’t always get what you want,” Daddy pointed out, “and there’s no way we can armor her against the curiosity of the world—but we can make sure that she doesn’t have any morbid fantasies, and the way we can do that is to make sure she understands exactly what’s happened to her, and how, and why.”

  “The nurse said she had a nightmare only the other day,” Mummy reported, resentfully.

  “All kids have nightmares,” Daddy said, flatly. “Did you have a nightmare, darling? What was it about?”

  “I don’t remember,” Chloe said, truthfully, fearing that the truth might not suffice.

  “It’s okay, Lovely,” Mummy said, putting a reassuring arm around her shoulder. “You’ll be home soon, and everything will be all right, won’t it?”

  “Yes it will,” said Daddy. “Everything.”

  Later, when they had gone off in the car—not fighting exactly, but not really speaking to one another either—Chloe thought about the pig. She knew that Daddy wanted her to think about the pig and Mummy didn’t, but she didn’t feel that she was taking sides because she couldn’t not think about the pig without thinking about it. Anyway, she couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to the rest of the pig now that they’d taken out her heart.

  Presumably, it would all be bacon and sausages by now, and if they’d left a little bit of her behind when they’d cut out the heart, that would be sausages too—and through being sausages, might eventually end up being a little bit of someone else’s heart. There probably wasn’t anyone in London, except vegetarians and girls who wore headscarves and weren’t allowed to show their knees, who couldn’t look at a pig—any pig—and think: there might be a little bit of me in that pig.

  What would happen, she wondered, if one of the girls in the headscarves who weren’t allowed to eat any kind of pig-meat got born with a bad heart? They’d probably have to grow her heart inside a lamb—which was a pity, in a way, given that lambs were so cute. Pigs were more human: smarter, less woolly, not in nursery rhymes.

  Chloe was a little pig, she thought. It had a human heart. But when she ran through the readily-available rhymes for “heart” it seemed better not to carry on.

  Do I really want to be a miracle of modern science? she wondered, and answered, Why the hell not, for Christ’s sake? She liked swearing, although she never did it aloud. She was a good girl, even if she did have a pig’s heart.

  She wondered if Mummy and Daddy were going to get divorced, and if so who would get custody of her. She decided, eventually, that she didn’t really mind, as long as they didn’t make her decide.

  Afterwards, she threw her doll out of the bed, because she was too old for dolls now that she had a new heart. Then she decided that it might be better to play for Millwall than Queen’s Park Rangers, if it would make men in white coats sit up and take notice. Then she thought about the pig again: the other
Chloe; the creature who had died for her sake, like some kind of hero in a TV show; the animal who had grown up far too quickly so that it could make her a new heart.

  When I grow up, she thought, before she went to sleep, I’m going to be a genetic engineer. I’ll keep headless chickens and grow potatoes the size of bungalows, and I’ll have trees that grow hearts and brains instead of apples and pears, and I’ll make my husband have the children and I’ll never never never ask them what they want, unless I want to know.

  THE INVISIBLE WORM

  Rick first noticed the sick rose when he went to lift Steven for his morning feed, but he didn’t pay any particular attention to it because his mind was on other things—mainly Steven’s voice. For one so young, Steven had a lusty pair of lungs, and when he exercised them Rick wasted no time in responding. The sound went through him like a knife.

  Rick sometimes wondered whether everyone might have some built-in, unique and secret sensory key, which, when turned, would plunge him into a private Hell of unparalleled excruciation. If so, he thought, some horribly unkind whim of chance had surely given Steven the uncanny knack of hitting it spot on.

  The silence that fell once he had established the baby in the feeding-nook was a blessed relief, but the relief was—as usual—tinged with guilt. Now, when Rick looked down at the baby, sucking vigorously away at the teat, he was able to feel conventionally loving. It was only when Steven cried.…

  He had not expected that having a baby in the house would be so disturbing, so frequently painful. He knew perfectly well how lucky and how privileged the household was—he and his five co-parents had waited nearly ten years to come through the waiting-list after first submitting their application for a license—and he was sure that he loved Steven as much as any co-father could, but he had never imagined that being carer-of-the-week could be so stressful, so exhausting, and so nerve-wracking.