The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [123]
“Pull yourself together, Morgan,” Lisa said, surprised by her own coldness. “Anyone would think you were still under torture. Just tell me the truth, from the beginning. I don’t know anything, remember—and like poor little Stella, I still can’t figure out why even a misogynistic bastard like you would want to keep a longevity treatment quiet just because it only works on women.”
Morgan actually contrived to laugh at that. “If that’s all you’ve figured out,” he said, “I can understand why you’re so pissed.”
“So tell me all of it,” Lisa said impatiently.
“Okay,” he said, settling back onto the pillow. “Here goes—again. It started in 1999, three years before I met you. It was locked up tight in my skull before you ever clapped eyes on me, and it would have taken a lot to break the seal, so don’t be too hard on yourself for not being able to. The production of transgenic animals was in its infancy then—even sheep could make headlines. Almost all successful transformation was done mechanically, using tiny hypodermics to inject new DNA into eggs held still by suction on the end of a micropipette. It was ludicrously inefficient, and everybody knew it was just a stopgap, that some kind of vector would soon be devised that would make the whole business cleaner and sweeter. Viruses were the hot candidates—nature’s very own genetic engineers. The first mass transformations of eggs stripped from bovine wombs in the slaughterhouse had just been carried out with retroviruses, so everybody knew that it was possible, but we needed viruses that were better equipped for the job than anything nature had. Nature’s viruses have their own agenda, and a talent for turning nasty. Everybody with an atom of foresight knew in 1999 that it was only a matter of time before artificial viruses could be developed that would specialize in our agendas, but nobody knew for how long … and that was only half the problem.
“It was difficult in those days to build up self-sustaining populations of transgenic animals. Cloning technology was in its infancy, and experiments with sheep, cattle, and pigs were limited by the long life cycles of the animals. In 1999, the vast majority of transgenic strains were mice, simply because mice have such a short breeding cycle. They were the only livestock we had that was prolific enough to allow us to use the bacterial engineer’s favorite tactic—transform a few and kill the rest. Plant engineers were still shooting new DNA into leaves from guns, selecting out the few dozen successfully transformed cells from the thousands that were destroyed or unaffected with herbicide, then cloning away like crazy—but you can’t regenerate a whole animal from a handful of cells, and even if you grow a transgenic animal from a transformed egg, you still need another exactly like it to mate it with before you can start a dynasty. Sex—the root of all the world’s frustrations—was the animal engineer’s great stumbling block.
“Mice were a lot more convenient to work with in ’99 than anything bigger, but they were far from perfect. The process still took too much time, and it was all very hit-and-miss—but when I read about the mass transformation of bovine ova by retroviruses, I figured it was a method that could be taken to its logical extreme.”
He paused, but Lisa wasn’t about to play guessing games now that the tale was underway. She contented herself with a mere prompt. “Which was?”
“Well, I figured that if you could transform eggs stripped from a slaughterhouse organ, you ought to be able to transform them in situ—in the ovaries of a living animal. At first I figured that the best kind of living animal to use was a fetus—because eggs, unlike sperm, aren’t produced continuously throughout an animal’s lifetime. By the time a female animal is born, she’s already lost most of the egg cells she had when her tissues first differentiated, and she keeps on losing them before and after she reaches puberty. Not many animals survive to menopause,