Reborn, page 16
It’s your 21st birthday. I’m going to spend the next few days writing this letter to you. It’s a letter I pray you never get to read.
But if you have this in your hands, it means that something has gone dreadfully wrong.
I’m sorry about that.
You were never supposed to learn about yourself. You were supposed to lead a normal, happy, productive life, and then maybe—maybe—after I was long gone and after you had died a natural death, what you are about to learn would be made public.
But if you are indeed reading this, it means I’m dead and so is Derr, and that all my plans have gone awry.
That’s why I’m writing this. To set the record straight. In the locked-away journals you will find the same story unfolding on a day-to-day basis in far greater detail but with little or no perspective. (Back then, if I’d had the perspective I have now, I can’t imagine that I would have gone so far.) This letter will give you the whole story in a nutshell.
What you are about to read will strain your credulity to the breaking point. If you do not choose to believe it, that is fine with me. Take these journals and this letter and burn them now without reading any further. Your secret will be safe. But since I know you better than anyone, I’m sure you will never settle for that. I know you will search and dig and chase and harry until you have all the answers.
That, after all, is just what I would do.
It started for me in 1939.
I’m sure the government had been mulling the idea for a few years before that. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be uneasy about Hitler’s saber rattling during the Thirties and his endless harangues about a Thousand Year Reich led by a purebred Aryan Master Race. He was upsetting to a lot of people in this country, myself included. The topic of eugenics (a term that has fallen out of usage these days, but which refers to improvement of the human race through selective breeding) was much on my mind then and, I imagine, the subject of not a few conversations at State Department cocktail parties.
Somewhere along the way, the idea of researching the possibility of breeding a perfect or, at the very least, superior American soldier began to brew. (Most likely the appearance of that comic book hero Superman started the ball rolling.) It probably would have remained nothing more than a brew if I hadn’t written a letter to President Roosevelt on the subject in the summer of 1939, and if Hitler had stayed within his own borders.
I don’t want to toot my own horn too much here, Jim, but I was quite a fellow in my heyday. I was born in 1901, so that meant I was not yet forty at the time, but I’d already made a fortune (and this was in the Great Depression, mind you) off my patented diagnostic procedures for commercial labs. I also had caused quite a stir among the biologists of the time with my papers on genetic manipulation through selective breeding and my private experiments on the in vitro fertilization of primate ova.
Oh, I was a cocky bastard back then. And why not? The world was my oyster. I’d never been poor, but by hard work and intuition I’d made myself independently wealthy while other people all around me were falling into financial ruin. It was a time when one man’s mind could arm itself with all (and I do mean all) the available knowledge in a field like genetics and forge across the frontiers into virgin territory.
I had money, fame, and notoriety, and I lived the life of the rich bachelor to the hilt. So when I became concerned enough about Hitler cleaning Germany’s genetic house (so to speak), eugenics on a national scale, I didn’t contact any intermediaries. I wrote directly to the President. I told him that America could probably develop a genetically superior soldier without pogroms and detention camps. All it took was sufficient funds, commitment, and the right man to head the project: Roderick C. Hanley, Ph.D.
Little did I know that Albert Einstein was simultaneously writing a similar letter to Roosevelt regarding the development of an atom bomb.
As I said above, it all would have come to naught if Hitler had behaved. But his attack on Poland in September of that year spurred Roosevelt into initiating two secret research projects. The atomic project was code named “Manhattan” and given over to Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, and Bohr. The eugenics project was assigned to yours truly and a very bright young M.D. named Edward Derr. Our project was called “Genesis.”
I did not receive much in the way of funding but that didn’t matter. When the government appropriations fell short, I supplemented them with my own funds. I wasn’t in this for the money. I had more than I could spend. I was in it for the doing.
It is so very important to me that you understand that part of my persona, Jim. This was new ground, virgin territory, terra incognita, like Roald Amundsen leaving the first human footprints in the snow at the South Pole. I wanted to be first. Some might call it the pioneer spirit, some might call it monomania. Call it what you will, I wanted to do what no man had done before.
Once I get started on a project, there is no stopping me. The Genesis Project was no exception. I even infected Derr with my mania. We worked like automatons, sometimes going days without sleep, weeks without stopping. The government wasn’t pushing us. Pearl Harbor was still two years away. We had no time limit. We created our own pressure.
You see, in a way, we were trying to reinvent the wheel. Early on we looked at natural selection, which is the way Nature came up with the fittest species for an ecological niche, and tried to transpose that onto a fighting man. We quickly came up with theories and possible solutions to the problem of breeding the supersoldier, all of which would take generations to prove.
So we discarded them.
I was dissatisfied with the very idea of breeding, anyway. At root no doubt in that dissatisfaction was my impatient nature. I wanted results now, not generations hence. But even more so, the capriciousness of genetic mixing seemed an unscalable barrier.
Let me give you a few basics.
Each human cell is diploid, which means it has 46 chromosomes. The combination and arrangement of genes on these chromosomes makes up the genotype, which in turn determines the phenotype, the physical expression of those genes; that is, the bodily characteristics of each individual person: sex, skin color, body type, even personality to some extent. If the presence of one gene was all that was required to make a supersoldier, there would be no problem—eugenic breeding would give us a high success rate.
Unfortunately, that is not the case. A supersoldier phenotype can only result from a highly specific and extraordinarily complex genotype providing such characteristics as a large-frame skeleton, strong musculature, agile limbs, quick reflexes, high threshold of pain, an obedient but aggressive personality, and so on.
Here’s where the whole breeding approach falls apart. You see, we mammals reproduce by joining a female gamete (an ovum) with a male gamete (a spermatozoan). Each gamete is haploid, meaning it has only 23 chromosomes (half the normal complement). When they join together, they form a brand-new 46-chromosome (diploid) person. The stumbling block for us would-be breeders is that when a diploid cell breaks up into two haploid gametes, we have no way of controlling which genes go into which gamete. The process is random. So anything is possible. This is a wonderful means of providing the human race with nearly endless variety within the parameters of our species, thereby allowing us to adapt to various environments and situations. But it is pure hell to someone trying to produce the same genotype and phenotype over and over.
So, to give you an example, let’s take Attila the Hun and mate him with Joan of Arc. We could get a strong, brave, ferocious, idealistic supersoldier. Or we could get a 98-pound anemic accountant. Attila and Joan, no matter how strong and brave and aggressive they each may be, could have recessive anemic accountant genes hiding on their chromosomes. If we join haploid gametes from each that happen to be rich in recessive anemic accountant genes, we will get an anemic accountant. The pairing of any two random gametes from each could result in anything between the two extremes. The odds can be skewed in your favor by rigorous investigations of the family trees, but it’s still a crapshoot. And since humans don’t breed like mice or rabbits, it would take lots of luck and many generations to breed a supersoldier army.
What was needed was a way to move a desirable genotype intact (the word intact cannot be overemphasized here) from generation to generation. In other words, we had to find a way of creating identical twins (or triplets or quints, or what have you) a generation removed from the original.
We needed to produce a series of beings genetically identical to their parent. (Note the singular, please.)
Clones, if you will.
We had to learn how to clone a human being.
Now, when you remove yourself from the fray and sit back and consider it without emotion, that is a pretty frightening concept. But Derr and I were in the thick of the fray. We were filled with the passion and fervor of discovery. Nothing frightened us. Questions of ethics or responsibility were far from our minds.
The only question that mattered was: How?
A tissue culture was out. A human body is a complex system of many different tissues. We could not culture out individual organs and patch them together like a modern Frankenstein. What we needed was a way to induce a human ovary to form an egg with a nucleus that was diploid instead of haploid. The result would be cloning by parthenogenesis. Of course, only females would result, but it would be a start.
Then a chance remark by Derr set us on the right track. He said, “Too bad we can’t just get hold of some ova and plop the genotype we want into them.”
It was one of those rare moments of shared epiphany. You look at each other with wide eyes, then leap up and jump around and begin shouting ideas back and forth like a couple of madmen. That was Derr and I.
Looking back now, I think that perhaps we truly were mad.
But it was a glorious madness. I can’t describe the excitement we felt. And even now, I wouldn’t trade those times for anything. We shared a feeling of masterfulness. I’m not sure there is such a word, but if it doesn’t exist, it should. We felt that we were on the verge of something epochal, that just beyond our questing fingertips lay the secret of mastering Creation.
And it was just the two of us. That was the most enthralling part of it. Only Derr and I had the Big Picture. We had technicians for the scut work, of course, but the duties of each were narrowly circumscribed. My three-floor town house was partially converted into two labs. Some worked in the third-floor lab, others worked in the basement lab. Only we knew where the sum of all the scut work was headed. The whole would truly be greater than the sum of its parts.
We started small. We looked for an aquatic, oviparous reptile with good-sized eggs. We settled for an amphibian. That was Derr’s idea. He’d trained in Europe where frogs are frequently used for research. We obtained a supply of green frogs and some special pure white albino frogs. We were ready to begin.
After much trial and error, we perfected a microscopic technique of removing the haploid nucleus from the egg of a green frog and replacing it with a diploid nucleus removed from a body cell of a white frog. All the genetic information from the albino frog now resided in the egg cell from the green. The egg cell, in a sense, had been fertilized. After many failures and botch-ups, we eventually got it right. Soon we were awash in white tadpoles.
This was ground breaking work that would have set the scientific community (and no doubt the religious and philosophical communities as well) on its ear. Think of it: We were reproducing without recourse to the sexual process. This was a mammoth achievement!
But we could not publish. Everything we were doing in Project Genesis was classified top secret. In a very real sense, the government owned our work. I won’t say it made no difference to us. It most certainly did. But we felt we could wait. We could not publish now, but someday we would. At the moment, we were, quite frankly, much too busy to even consider wasting the time it would take to document our work for publication.
After perfecting our microtechnique, we moved on to mammals. I won’t bore you with the details of each species we tried—it’s all recounted on a day-by-day basis in the gray journals—but suffice it to say that after a seemingly endless run of daily grinding work, we felt we were ready to tackle the human ovum.
Our first problem, naturally, was where to get the raw material. One does not simply send out to a laboratory supply house and order a gross of human ova. We were entering a very sensitive area. We would have had to tread softly even if we were on our own, but with the extra burden of security and oversight from the government, we felt hamstrung.
I then came up with the bright idea of letting the government help us out. I told our contact in the War Department that we needed human ovaries. Colonel Laughlin was one of the few in the entire government who knew of the existence of Project Genesis. He only paused a moment, then said, “How many?”
It wasn’t long before we began receiving regular shipments of human ovaries in iced saline solution. Some were cancerous, but many were merely cystic and provided us with a small supply of viable normal ova. These we nurtured in a nutrient solution while we practiced our microtechniques.
We came to learn that the human ovum would not tolerate too much manipulation. The double trauma of removing the original nucleus and inserting another was apparently more than the cell membrane could stand. We ruptured one test ovum after another. So we devised a method of using ultraviolet light to inactivate the original genetic material within the ovum. We could then leave the old haploid nucleus where it was and insert the new nucleus right next to it in the cytoplasm.
Finally it came time to find the human diploid nuclei to transplant into the ova. This was going to be a problem. Along the way, as Derr and I progressed through a number of mammals toward human tissue, we had learned that we could not use just any nucleus from any cell in a mammal’s body. Once a mammalian cell becomes fully differentiated (i.e., it becomes a functioning part of the skin or the liver or any other organ) its nucleus loses its capacity to regenerate an entire organism. We had to go to the wellspring of the gamete, the diploid cell that divides into two haploid gametes: the primary spermatocyte. And to obtain those, we would have to burrow into a healthy, functioning human testicle.
I volunteered myself.
Call it part of the madness that was upon us. Call it pragmatism, as well. Colonel Laughlin sent us what testicular specimens he could, but none of them were suitable. Undamaged, undiseased testicles were difficult to come by.
Besides, I had a number of reasons for wanting my own genotype thrust into the ovum. The first might be called ego. I admit that without apology. This whole project was my idea. I wanted to see my work result in a new generation of Roderick Hanleys. The second was more practical: I had to be certain of the race of the donor genotype. Do not rear up on your egalitarian steed at this. I had my reasons and soon you will understand them.
Through Colonel Laughlin we arranged for an army urologist to do a wedge resection on my left testicle under local anesthesia. (He tied off an annoying varicocele while he was there, so it was not a totally frivolous procedure from the surgeon’s viewpoint.) Derr took the section and culled out the primary spermatocytes. With these living and thriving in their nutrient bath, we were ready to begin the next phase.
It was time to find an incubator—a woman who would host the manipulated ovum and bear the resultant child.
Derr and I had decided on a number of characteristics: She had to be young, healthy, and single, with a clockwork menstrual cycle. And she had to be Negro. As I alluded above, this final criterion was not prompted by a racist bias. It was based on solid, scientific reasoning. Our plan was to insert a diploid nucleus from one of my primary spermatocytes into a human ovum and, in turn, insert that ovum into the uterus of a human female. We had to be sure that the resultant child (if all went as hoped) had actually arisen from the manipulated cell.
My genotype is lily white. My parents came from the British Isles late in the last century and I doubt very much that anyone in my family tree had ever even seen a Negro, much less had sexual relations with one. Therefore if, after nine months, our host mother gave birth to a male who exhibited the slightest hint of Negroid features, we could be quite sure that the child did not carry my genotype. (A female child would obviously not be ours, either.)
Although not exactly parallel, we were doing on human terms what we had done with the frogs when we started: inserting the genotype from an albino into an egg from a green. Just as a white hatchling was proof of our success with the frogs, a lily-white infant boy from a Negro womb would confirm our success with a human genotype. (Yes, I’m sure you can come up with a very rare exception, but we had to be satisfied with this level of control.)
Once we had proven we could do it, we would report our success to the government. The War Department could then begin its search for the man who would provide the genotype for the American supersoldier.
Finding the woman: That was left to me. And with good reason. Once Project Genesis started, I lived a virtually celibate life. There was no room in my life for sex, only the project, the project. Ah, but before that, I was quite the ladies’ man, the bon vivant, the Man About Town. I had many friends, high and low, who knew that no matter where or when they threw a party, Rod Hanley could be counted on to appear. I was known in the poshest nightspots and the sleaziest dives. And I knew men who could supply women who would do just about anything for a price.
That is how we began our relationship with the amazing Jasmine Cordeau. I don’t have any photographs of her, but if you could see her, you’d know what I mean. She was a stunning Negress. Her skin was as black as the night and her figure was something every red-blooded male dreams of. Fresh from the bayous outside New Orleans, she migrated to New York and became a popular ecdysiast—stripteaser seems much too common a term for what she did on the stages of the uptown afterhours clubs I once frequented. But as the Great Depression steadily deepened despite two terms of grandiose promises from FDR, she had to turn to prostitution to make ends meet.
