"Greg Egan - Distress (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

technicalities, but their general attitude seemed to be that any freely chosen treatment which
helped safeguard an individual's health-and which posed no threat to the public at large-was
ethically unimpeachable. They had a point, at least from the biohazard angle; working with neo-DNA
meant there was no risk of accidental recombination. Even if they'd flushed all their failed
experiments straight into the nearest river, no natural bacterium could have taken up the genes
and made use of them.
Implementing Landers' vision of the perfect survivalist family was going to take more than R&D,
though. Making heritable changes in any human gene was currently illegal in the US (and most other
places)-apart from a list of a few dozen 'authorized repairs' for eliminating diseases like


file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Egan/Egan,%20Greg%20-%20Distress.txt (10 of 157) [1/23/03 12:28:37 PM]
 file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Egan/Egan,%20Greg%20-%20Distress.txt

muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis. Legislation could always be revoked, of course-although
Landers' own top biotech attorney insisted that changing the base pairs-and even translating a few
genes to accommodate that
22
change-wouldn't actually violate the anti-eugenics spirit of the existing law. It wouldn't alter
the external characteristics of the children (height, build, pigmentation). It wouldn't influence
their IQ, or personality. When I'd raised the question of their presumed sterility (barring
incest), he'd taken the interesting position that it would hardly be Ned Landers' fault if other
people's children were sterile with respect to his own. There were no infertile people, after all-
only infertile couples.
An expert in the field at Columbia University said all of this was bullshit: substituting whole
chromosomes, whatever the phenotypic effects, would simply be illegal. Another expert, at the
University of Washington, was less certain. If I'd had the time, I could probably have collected a
hundred sound-bites of eminent jurists expressing every conceivable shade of opinion on the
subject.
I'd spoken to a number of Landers' critics, including Jane Summers, a freelance biotech consultant
based in San Francisco, and a prominent member of Molecular Biologists for Social Responsibility.
Six months earlier (writing in the semi-public MBSR netzine, which my knowledge miner always
scrutinized diligently), she'd claimed to have evidence that several thousand wealthy people, in
the US and elsewhere, were having their DNA translated, cell type by cell type. Landers, she'd
said, was merely the only one to have gone public-to act as a kind of decoy: a lone eccentric,
defusing the issue, making it seem like one man's ridiculous (yet almost Quixotic) fantasy. If the
research had been exposed in the media with no specific person associated with it, paranoia would
have reigned: there would have been no limit to the possible membership of the nameless elite who
planned to divorce themselves from the biosphere. But since it was all out in the open, and all
down to harmless Ned Landers, there was really nothing to fear.
The theory made a certain amount of sense-but Summers' evidence hadn't been forthcoming. She'd
reluctantly put me in touch with an 'industry source' who'd supposedly been involved in gene
translation work for an entirely different employer-but the 'source' had denied everything.
Pressed for other leads, Summers had become evasive. Either she'd never had anything substantial
or she'd made a deal with another journalist to keep the competition away. It was frustrating, but
in the end 1 hadn't had the time or resources to pursue the story independently. If there really
was a cabal of genetic separatists, I'd just have to read the exclusive in the Washington Post
like everyone else.
23
I closed with a medley of other commentators-bioethicists, geneticists, sociologists-mostly