"Joseph Delaney - Brainchild" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Joseph)

brings that on himself and it's going to get worse.
"These three are natural causes. However, there's also a fourth, artificial
cause: manipulation, what we've started calling genetic engineering. Man
now has the capability to tear down and rebuild individual genes; to
rearrange their constituent fractions in new configurations to do different
things than nature intended; to add and remove things from them. In
other words, to selectively change the genetic plans and control evolution.
"That was Dr. Schoonover's objective." He paused.
"Go on, Dr. Blatchley. Explain what he did."
"He was seeking ways to detect and either alter or eliminate damaged
areas of genetic coding. This is not easy. There are thousands, perhaps
millions of variables, all affecting one another. It takes time and hard work
to find out which gene or genes are responsible for any given
characteristic, and longer still to identify the fractions within it which give
it the power to do what it does. Finally, the mechanical, or chemical,
process makes it complete, and the result is, hopefully, a gene that will do
what we wish it to do."
He looked at Monte, who simply watched him. Then he continued.
"So you see, the process is a long one. It means taking one step at a time
up the evolutionary ladder until we finally get to man. The usual starting
point is microorganisms, because of their rapid propagation; then
sometimes insects, for the same reason; and then on to lower orders of
better-organized life forms. Until we get to rats, guinea pigs, and rabbits,
the generations are fairly short and results come fast. But the trouble with
working with the lower forms is their remoteness from the human line,
which causes the results to be valid only in generalities. You have to get
much closer before you can work on human subjects. Fortunately, man
has relatives in this world, beginning with monkeys in the very remote
past and ending with the great apes, who split off the hominid line
relatively recently. The closer the relationship, the more identity there is in
the genetic code and the more similarity there is in physiological behavior.
This makes them extremely useful as experimental animals. They're
subject to many of the same diseases that men are, because their nearness
to humanity makes them compatible with the disease-producing
organism, too.
"But more important, their skeletal and neurological systems vary least
from man's and in many respects the genetic information is substantially
the same as man's. That's why Dr. Schoonover used apes, specifically
chimpanzees, in his experiments."
"Was Adam the only altered ape?"
"No. There were six."
"What happened to the others?"
"Well, early in the experiment the technique was relatively crude. There
were failures."
"What sort of failures were there, Doctor?"
"Basically they were physically or mentally defective, or both, to the
extent that they needed life-supporting devices. There was a set of
Siamese twins joined at the neck, for instance. Gradually, however, we
learned what we set out to learn and the results got better."
"Were these animals destroyed in the experiment?"