Knockout Mouse Read Online Free Page A

hybridomas, and monoclonal antibodies. She was smart, articulate, and clearly passionate about her work. After a while I stopped listening and simply enjoyed watching her as she talked and made diagrams in the air. She was a beautiful woman.
    It took me a minute to realize she’d stopped talking. I smiled at her to cover the fact that I’d been admiring her more than attending to what she said. The silence hung between us, a shared moment. One way or another, I wanted to see more of her, even if only as a friend.
    Everyone had finished eating by now. Sheila nudged her leftover salmon, mashed potatoes, and salad with a fork, then started to tell me about how an experimental salmon without the urge to spawn was being created. Its chromosomes were engineered so that it had no desire to swim upstream. Salmon lost a lot of weight on those trips and would stay nice and fat if they didn’t make them. Others were being fattened more directly by splicing a growth hormone into them.
    “You do this, too?” I asked.
    “No, no,” she said quickly. “That’s not
my
work.”
    From down the table, I caught a look from Jenny, which was followed by a smile with an extra little sparkle in it. I knew how to decode these smiles by now. On the surface it said she was thinking of me. The second layer said I shouldn’t be monopolizing Sheila. And the third layer was telling me to cut out theflirting. But in my mind this wasn’t so much about flirtation as about having an intelligent conversation for its own sake, a rarity tonight amidst all the infrared Palm Pilot mating.
    Marion heard the talk of salmon. She looked at me and said, “Did you hear about the company in Syracuse that wants to produce a nonallergenic cat? They’re planning to knock out Fel d 1, the gene linked to dander and saliva.”
    “Do you think animals will start to come with tags, like Beanie Babies?” Wes asked.
    We were catching the attention of some of the other people at the table. “I’m more worried about the ones that
don’t
come with tags,” Fay said.
    “That’s small potatoes—” began Mr. Blue Shirt.
    “Which are also being engineered,” Marion put in.
    “The real question,” he went on, “is what happens when we start using the technology on ourselves.”
    “I’m not so sure—” Sheila began.
    “If it can be done, it will be done,” Blue Shirt declared. “Someone, somewhere, is mapping out their future child right now.”
    Fay gave him a dig. “If I know you, Chad, you’ll just clone yourself. No improvements needed.”
    “I wouldn’t recommend it,” Sheila said. “Most attempts at nuclear transfer end in horror stories. It takes a kind of scientific voodoo to coax the embryonic cells to divide. Look at Dolly the sheep: she’s obese, her telomeres are short, and there are signs she’s aging too fast, possibly because her mother’s DNA was old. The real action in biotech is treatment of disease.”
    “And plant research,” Marion put in.
    “I don’t know anyone who wants to genetically program their child,” Jenny said.
    “Think about it,” said Chad. “If other people start designing
their
kids’ genes, are you going to let
your
kids be at a disadvantage?”
    Jenny wrinkled her nose. “A genetic arms race?”
    “And legs. And brains,” Chad said. “You don’t want to be left behind.”
    “I mean, your kids are your kids,” Jenny said. “You just want them to be happy.”
    “How happy are they going to be if they’re the shortest kid in the class? The ugliest? The dumbest?”
    “I’d rather be short than have short telomeres,” Sheila said. “And what you’re talking about is still more science fiction than science.”
    Marion’s pale eyes were fixed on Chad. “Is that your definition of happiness?” she demanded. “The boy with the most marbles?”
    “Darwin said it, right?” he answered. “Evolution doesn’t care who’s polite and picks up litter. It cares whose genes get passed along.”
    I