CHapter 036

What areyou talking about?" Lynn Kendall said, staring at Dave, who sat quietly on the living room couch.

"This monkey is yourson ?"

"Well, not exactly..."

"Notexactly ?" She paced around the living room. "What the hell doesthat mean, Henry?"

It had been a normal Saturday afternoon. Their teenage daughter, Tracy, was in the backyard, sunbathing and talking on the telephone, and not doing her homework. Her brother, Jamie, was splashing in the wading pool. Lynn had spent the day inside the house, finishing a job on a tight deadline. She'd been working hard on it for the last three days, so she was surprised when she opened the front door and her husband had walked in, leading a chimpanzee by the hand.

"Henry? Is he your son or not?"

"He is, in a way."

"In a way. That's clear. I'm glad you cleared that up." She spun, glared at him. An awful thought occurred to her. "Wait a minute. Wait just a minute. Are you trying to tell me that you had sex with a - "

"No, no," her husband said, holding up his hands. "No, honey. Nothing like that. It was just an experiment."

"Just an experiment. Jesus. An experiment? What kind of experiment, Henry?"

The monkey sat curled up, holding his toes in his hand. Looking up at the two adults.

"Try to keep your voice down," Henry said. "You're upsetting him."

"I'm upsetting him? I'm upsetting him? He's a fucking monkey, Henry!"

"Ape."

"Ape, monkey...Henry, what is he doing here? Why is he in our house?"

"Well...I'm not...Actually, he's come to live with us."

"He's come to live with us. Out of the blue. You have a monkey son and you never knew about it. He just suddenly arrives with you. Great. That makes sense. That makes perfect sense. Anybody can understand that. Why didn't you tell me, Henry? Oh, never mind, let it be a surprise. I'm driving home with my monkey son but I'll tell you about it when I walk in the door. That's great, Henry. I'm glad we had all those therapy sessions about intimacy and communications."

"Lynn, I'm sorry - "

"You're always sorry. Henry: what are you going to do with him? Are you going to take him to the zoo, or what?"

"I don't like the zoo," Dave said, speaking for the first time.

"I didn't ask you," Lynn said. "You keep out of this."

And then she froze.

She turned.

She stared.

"He talks?"

"Yes," Dave said. "Are you my mother?"

Lynn Kendalldidn't actually pass out, but she began to tremble, and when her knees buckled Henry caught her and helped her to sit in her favorite chair, facing the coffee table, next to the couch. Dave didn't move. He just stared with wide eyes. Henry went into the kitchen and got his wife some lemonade, and brought it back to her.

"Here," he said. "Drink this."

"I want a damn martini."

"Honey, those days are over." Lynn was AA.

"I don't know what days are what," she said. She was staring at Dave. "He talks. The monkey talks."

"Ape."

"I'm sorry I upsetted you," Dave said to her.

"Thank you, uh..."

"His name is Dave," Henry said. "He doesn't always get his tenses right."

Dave said, "Sometimes people get upsetted by me. They feel bad."

"Dave," she said. "This is not about you, honey. You seem to be very nice. This is about him." She jerked her thumb toward Henry. "The asshole."

"What is ah-sole?"

"He's probably never heard swearing," Henry said. "You need to watch your language."

"How do you watch language?" Dave said. "It's noises. You can't watch noises."

"I'm very confused," Lynn said, sinking into her chair.

"It's an expression," Henry said. "A figure of speech."

"Oh, I see," Dave said.

There was a silence. His wife sighed. Henry patted her arm.

"Do you have any trees?" Dave said. "I like to climb trees."

At that momentJamie came into the house. "Hey, Mom, I need a towel - " He broke off and stared at the chimp.

"Hello," Dave said.

Jamie blinked, recovered fast. "Hey, neat!" he said. "I'm Jamie."

"My name is Dave. Do you have any trees to climb?"

"Sure! A big one! Come on!"

Jamie headed for the door. Dave looked questioningly at Lynn and Henry.

"Go ahead," Henry said. "It's okay."

Dave leapt off the couch, and scampered to the door, following Jamie.

"How do you know he won't run away?" Lynn said.

"I don't think he will."

"Because he's your son..."

The door banged shut. Outside, they heard their daughter screaming and shrieking, "What is that?"

They heard Jamie say, "He's a chimp, and we're climbing trees."

"Where'd you get him, Jamie?"

"He's Dad's."

"Does he bite?"

They couldn't make out Jamie's answer, but through the window they saw the tree branches swaying and moving. Giggles and laughter from outside.

"What are you going to do with him?" Lynn said.

"I don't know," Henry said.

"Well, he can't stay here."

"I know that."

"I won't have a dog in the house. I certainly won't have an ape."

"I know."

"And besides there's no room for him."

"I know."

"This is really a mess," she said.

He said nothing, just nodded.

"How the hell did this happen, Henry?" she said.

"It's a long story," he said.

"I'm listening."

When thehuman genome was decoded, he explained, scientists discovered that the genome of a chimpanzee was nearly identical to that of a man. "All that separates our two species," he said, "is five hundred genes."

Of course, that number was deceptive, because human beings and sea urchins also shared a lot of genes. In fact, nearly every creature on the planet shared tens of thousands of the same genes. There was a great underlying unity of all life, genetically speaking.

So that created a lot of interest in what had caused the differences in different species. Five hundred genes weren't a lot, yet a great chasm seemed to separate chimps from human beings.

"Many species can crossbreed to produce hybrids - lions and tigers, leopards and jaguars, dolphins and whales, buffalo and cattle, zebras and horses, camels and llamas. Grizzlies and polar bears sometimes mate in the wild, producing grolars. So there was a question of whether chimps and humans could hybridize to make a humanzee. The answer seems to be no."

"Somebody has tried?"

"Many times. Starting back to the 1920s."

But even if hybridization were impossible, Henry explained, one might still insert human genes directly into a chimp embryo to create a transgenic animal. Four years back, when Henry was on sabbatical at the National Institutes of Health, he was studying autism, and he wanted to know which genes might account for the difference in communication abilities between people and apes. "Because chimps can communicate," he said. "They have a range of cries and hand gestures; they can organize themselves into very effective hunting parties to kill small animals. So they have communication, but no language. Like severe autistics. That's what interested me."

"And what did you do?" his wife asked.

In the laboratory, under a microscope, he inserted human genes into a chimpanzee embryo. His own genes.

"Including the genes for speech?" she asked.

"Actually, all of them."

"You inserted all your genes."

"Look, I never expected the experiment to go to term," he said. "I was looking to retrieve a fetus."

"A fetus, not an animal?"

If the transgenic fetus survived eight or nine weeks before it spontaneously aborted, there would be enough differentiation that he could dissect the fetus and advance his understanding of speech in apes.

"You expected the fetus to die?"

"Yes. I was just hoping that it would carry long enough - "

"And then you were going to cut the fetus up?"

"Dissect it, yes."

"Your own genes, your own fetus - you did this in order to have something to dissect?" She was looking at him like he was a monster.

"Lynn, it was an experiment. We do this kind of thing all the - " He broke off. No point going there. "Look," he said, "the genes were close at hand. I didn't have to get anybody's permission to use them. It was an experiment. It wasn't about me."

"It is now," she said.

The questionHenry was trying to answer was fundamental. Chimps and humans had split from a common ancestor six million years ago. And scientists had long ago noticed that chimpanzees most closely resemble human beings at their fetal stage. This suggested that human beings differed from chimps in part because of difference in intrauterine development. Human development could be thought of as having been arrested at the chimp fetal stage. Some scientists felt it was related to the eventual growth of the human brain, which doubled in the first year after birth. But Henry's interest was in speech, and for speech to occur, the vocal cords had to move down the throat from the mouth, creating a voice box. That happened in humans, but not in chimps. The entire developmental sequence was immensely complicated.

Henry hoped to harvest a transgenic fetus, and from that to gain some knowledge of what drove the change in human development that made speech possible. At least, that was his original experimental plan.

"Why didn't you remove the fetus as you intended?" she asked him.

Because that summer, several chimps contracted viral encephalitis, and the healthy chimps had to be moved away for quarantine. They were taken to different labs around the East Coast. "I never heard anything about the embryo I implanted. I just assumed that the female had spontaneously aborted in a quarantine facility somewhere, and the fetal material was discarded. I couldn't inquire too closely..."

"Because what you did was illegal."

"Well. That's a strong word. I assumed the experiment had failed, and it was over."

"Guess not."

"No," he said. "I guess not."

What happened was that the female gave birth to a full-term infant, and the two were returned to Bethesda. The infant chimp appeared to be normal in every respect. Its skin was somewhat pale, especially around the mouth, where there was no hair. But chimps varied widely in the amount of pigmentation they showed. No one thought anything of it.

As the infant grew, it appeared less normal. The face, which was originally flat, did not bulge outward with age. The facial features remained rather infantile. Still, nobody thought to question the baby's appearance - until they discovered on a routine blood exam that the infant tested negative for the Gc sialic acid enzyme. Since all apes carry this enzyme, the test was obviously wrong, and repeated. It again came back negative. The infant chimp did not have the enzyme.

"Absence of that enzyme is a human trait," Henry said. "Sialic acid is a kind of sugar. No humans have the Gc form of sialic acid. All apes have it."

"But this infant didn't."

"Right. So they did a DNA panel, and quickly realized that the infant didn't have the usual 1.5 percent difference in genes from a human being. It had many fewer differences. And they started to put it all together."

"And tested the chimp's DNA against everybody who had worked in the lab."

"Yes."

"And found he matched your DNA."

"Yes. Bellarmino's office sent me a sample a few weeks ago. I guess to give me a heads-up."

"What'd you do?"

"Took it to a friend for analysis."

"Your friend in Long Beach?"

"Yes."

"And Bellarmino?"

"He just doesn't want to be responsible, when word gets out." He shook his head. "I was driving home, and I was just west of Chicago when I got a call from this guy Rovak, at the animal lab. And he says, you're on your own with this one, pal. That's their attitude. My problem, not theirs."

Lynn frowned."Why isn't this a major discovery? Shouldn't this make you famous around the world? You've created the first transgenic ape."

"The problem," Henry said, "is that I can be censured for it, or even put in jail. Because I didn't have permission from the committees that oversee primate research. Because the NIH now forbids transgenic work on any animal other than rats. Because all the anti-GM whackos and Frankenfood nuts will be up in arms over this. Because the NIH doesn't want any involvement in this and will deny any knowledge of it."

"So you can't tell anyone where Dave came from? That's a problem, Henry, because you'll never keep him a secret."

"I know," he said miserably.

"Tracy's on the phone right now, telling all her friends about the cute little ape in her backyard."

"Yes..."

"Her girlfriends will be over here in a few minutes. How are you going to explain Dave to them? Because after the girls will come the reporters." Lynn glanced at her watch. "In one, two hours, max. What'll you say?"

"I don't know. Maybe...I'll say the work was done in another country. In China. Or in South Korea. And they sent him here."

"And what will Dave say, when the reporters talk to him?"

"I'll ask him not to talk to them."

"Reporters won't leave this alone, Henry. They'll be camped outside the house with long lenses; they'll be circling in helicopters overhead. They'll be on the next plane to China or Korea to talk to the person who did this. And when they don't find that person...then what?"

She stared at him, then walked to the door. She looked into the backyard, where Dave was playing with Jamie. The two of them yelling and swinging through the trees. She was silent for a moment. Then she said, "You know, his skin really is quite pale."

"I know."

"His face is flat, almost human. What would he look like with a haircut?"

And so was bornGandler-Kreukheim syndrome, a rare genetic mutation causing short stature, excessive body hair, and facial deformities that yielded a rather ape-like appearance. The syndrome was so rare, it had only been documented four times in the last century. First, in an aristocratic Hungarian family in Budapest in 1923. Two children were born with the syndrome, described in the medical literature by an Austrian physician, Dr. Emil Kreukheim. The second appearance occurred in an Inuit child born in northern Alaska in 1944. A third child, a girl, was born in S?o Paulo in 1957, but she died of infection a few weeks after birth. A fourth child, in Bruges, Belgium, in 1988, was briefly seen by media but subsequently vanished. His whereabouts were now unknown.

"I like this," Lynn said. She was typing on her portable. "What's the name of that hairy syndrome? Excessive familial hairiness?"

"Hypertrichosis," Henry said.

"Right." She kept typing. "So Gandler-Kreukheim is related...to hypertrichosis. Actually...congenital hypertrichosis langinosa. And there've only been fifty cases reported in the last four hundred years."

"Are you writing that, or reading that?"

"Both." She sat back. "Okay," she said, "that's all I need for now. You better go tell Dave."

"Tell him what?"

"That he's human. He probably thinks he is, anyway."

"Okay." As Henry walked to the door, he said, "You really think this will work?"

"I know it will," Lynn said. "California has laws against invading the privacy of special children. Many of these kids have serious deformities. They've got enough challenges growing up and going to school without the added burden of media exposure. Big fines if the media do it. They won't."

"Maybe," he said.

"It's the best we can do for now," she said. She was typing again.

He paused at the door. "If Dave is a human being," he said, "we can't very well send him to a circus."

"Oh no," Lynn said. "No, no. Dave lives with us. He's part of our family now - thanks to you. We have no choice."

Henry went outside. Tracy and her friends were standing beneath the tree, pointing into the branches. "Look at the monkey! Look at him!"

"No," Henry said to them. "He's not a monkey. And please don't embarrass him. Dave suffers from a rare genetic syndrome..." And he explained it to them, as they listened wide-eyed.

Jamie hada trundle bed that he used when friends slept over. Lynn pulled it out, and Dave slept on it, alongside Jamie. His last words were "It's very soft," and almost immediately he was asleep, while Lynn ran her hands soothingly through his hair. Jamie said, "This is so neat, Mom. It's like having a brother."

"It is, isn't it," she said.

She turned out the light and closed the door. When she looked back in on them later, she found that Dave had twisted his sheets into a circle around him, making a kind of nest in the middle of the bed.

"No," Tracy said,standing in the kitchen, hands on hips. "No, he cannot live in our house. How could you do this to me, Dad?"

"Do what?"

"You know what the other kids are going to say. He's a monkey that looks like a person, Dad. And he sounds like you with a stuffy nose." She was near tears. "He's related to you, isn't he? He has your genes."

"Now, Tracy..."

"I amso embarrassed." She started to sob. "I had a chance to be a freshman cheerleader."

"Tracy," he said, "I'm sure you will - "

"This was my year, Dad!"

"It's still your year."

"Not if I have a monkey in my house!"

She went to the refrigerator for a Coke, came back, still sobbing. That was when her mother walked in. "He's not a monkey," Lynn said firmly. "He is an unfortunate young boy who suffers from a serious disease."

"Oh, sure, Mom."

"Go look it up yourself. Google it."

"I will!" Still sobbing, she walked over to the computer. Henry glanced at Lynn, then moved to look over his daughter's shoulder.

Hypertrichosis Variant Disorder Reported 1923 (Hungary)

Gandler-Kreukheim Syndromeon Monday

[email protected]

/* */

:05pm Doubtless the hirsuitism is secondary to QT/TD. The Hungarian cases showed no induration, according to 1923...

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"I had no idea," Tracy said, staring at the screen. "There have only been four or five cases in all of history. That poor kid!"

"He's very special," Henry said. "I hope you will treat him better now." He put his hand on Tracy's shoulder and glanced back at his wife. "All this in a couple of hours?"

"I've been busy," she said.

CHapter 037

There werefifty reporters in the conference room of Shanghai's Hua Ting Hotel, sitting at row after row of green felt�Ccovered tables. The TV cameras were all at the back of the room, and sitting on the floor up front were the cameramen, with their bulky telephoto lenses.

Strobes flashed as Professor Shen Zhihong, head of the Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, in Shanghai, stepped up to the microphones. Wearing a black suit, Shen was a distinguished-looking man, and his English was excellent. Before becoming the head of IBCB, he had spent ten years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a professor of cell biology at MIT.

"I do not know whether I am telling you good news or bad news," he said. "But I suspect it may be disappointing news. Nevertheless, I will set certain rumors finally to rest."

For some reason, he explained, rumors of unethical research in China began to circulate after the 12th East Asia Joint Symposium on Biomedical Research at Shaoxing City, in Zhejiang Province. "I have no idea why," Shen said. "The conference was quite ordinary, and technical in nature." However, at the next conference, in Seoul, reporters from Taiwan and Tokyo were asking pointed questions.

"I was therefore advised by Byeong Jae Lee, the head of molecular biology at Seoul National University, to address this matter directly. He has some experience with the power of rumors."

There were knowing chuckles in the audience. Shen was referring, of course, to the worldwide scandal that had erupted around the eminent Korean geneticist Hwang Woo-Suk.

"Therefore, I shall come directly to the point," he said. "For many years there have been rumors that Chinese scientists were attempting to create a hybrid of human and chimpanzee. According to the story, back in 1967, a surgeon named Ji Yongxiang fertilized a female chimpanzee with human sperm. The chimp was in the third month of pregnancy when outraged citizens stormed his lab and ended the experiment. The chimpanzee later died, but researchers at the Chinese Academy of Science supposedly said they would continue the research."

Shen paused. "That is the first story. It is entirely untrue. No chimpanzee was ever impregnated by Dr. Yongxiang or anyone else in China. Nor has a chimpanzee been impregnated anywhere in the world. If it had happened, you would know about it.

"Then, in 1980, a new story circulated that Italian researchers had seen human-chimp embryos in a Beijing laboratory. I heard this story when I was a professor at MIT. I asked to meet the Italian researchers in question. They could never be found. They were always the friend of a friend."

Shen waited while strobes flashed again. The cameramen crawling around at his feet were annoying. After a moment, he continued. "Next, a few years ago, was the story that a Mongolian prostitute gave birth to a baby with the features of a chimpanzee. This chimp-man was said to look like a human being, but was very hairy, with large hands and feet. The chimp-man drank whiskey and spoke in sentences. According to the story, this chimp is now at the Chinese Space Agency headquarters in Chao Yang District. He can sometimes be seen at the windows, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigar. Supposedly he will be sent to the moon because it is too dangerous to send a human.

"This story, too, is false. All the stories are false. I know these stories are tantalizing, or amusing. But they are not true. Why they should be located in China, I am not sure. Especially since the country with the least regulation of genetic experiments is the United States. You can do almost anything there. It was there that a gibbon was successfully mated with a siamang - primates that are genetically more distant than a human and chimp. Several live births resulted. This happened at Georgia State University. Almost thirty years ago."

He then opened the floor to questions. According to the transcript:

QUESTION:Dr. Shen, is the U.S. working on a chimp hybrid?

DR. SHEN:I have no reason to think so. I am merely observing that the U.S. has the fewest rules.

QUESTION:Is it possible to fertilize a chimpanzee with human sperm?

DR. SHEN:I would say no. That has been tried for nearly a century. Going back to the 1920s, when Stalin ordered the most famous animal breeder in Russia to do it, to make a new race of soldiers for him. His name was Ivanov, and he failed, and was thrown in jail. A few years later, Hitler's scientists tried it, and also failed. Today we know that the genomes of humans and chimps are very close, but the uterine conditions are considerably different. So, I would say no.

QUESTION:Could it be done with genetic engineering?

DR. SHEN:That is difficult to say. It would be extremely difficult from a technical standpoint. From an ethical standpoint, I would say it is impossible.

QUESTION:But an American scientist already applied to patent a human hybrid.

DR. SHEN:Professor Stuart Newman of New York was refused a patent on a part-human hybrid. But he did not make a hybrid. Dr. Newman said he applied for the patent to draw attention to the ethical issues involved. The ethical issues remain unresolved.

QUESTION:Dr. Shen, do you think a hybrid will eventually be created?

DR. SHEN:I called this press conference to end speculation, not to increase it. But if you ask my personal opinion, I think, yes - it will eventually be done.