"Sean McMullen - Pacing the Nightmare" - читать интересную книгу автора (McMullen Sean)

The conversation continued to meander pointlessly until Melissa said that she had to telephone her
parents, then left. Corric had regained his confidence. He attacked.
"You would not be here unless you suspected that my early IVF work was responsible for Melissa's
condition," he snapped. "Out with it, what are you accusing me of?" I attacked too.
 "You must agree that Melissa could be a very effective soldier: she's strong, fast and light, and has
amazing reflexes. She could be an excellent pilot, a deadly commando, anything. Was she part of some
military project?"
"Mr Carter, I-- are you suggesting that I performed genetic manipulations on a human zygote?"
"I am asking if anything out of the ordinary happened-- "
"Do you know just how vast the human genome is? Even today, with the mapping project complete,
we know little more than the sites specific to a few dozen disorders. If I'd been able to engineer a
super-warrior like Melissa back in the early 1990's I would have been shouting it from the rooftops.
Human embryos are not like bacteria, they are delicate and complex, very difficult to work on. All right,
so it's 2012, not 1992, and we can engineer children to be a bit taller and to be resistant to a few
diseases, but that's all. The ancient Chinese had toy gunpowder rockets, but it does not follow that they
could have sent astronauts to the moon. It's the same with genetics today. Bioengineered warriors are a
long way off in the future."
It was like sparring with someone who did a lot of kiais, and knew many fancy moves. You just had to
keep calm and aim at the openings that inevitably appeared.
"You did a lot of work on Huntington's disease," I began. "It involved Chromosome 4-- "
"You seem to know a lot about me."
"That I do. Chromosome 4 was also thought to contain the gene for senescence, and in the early
Nineties some researchers suggested that it was the key to a delay or even a cure for ageing. Did you do
any experiments involving an immortality treatment?"
"No, no, no! I wouldn't have known the gene for senescence if it had jumped out of my breakfast and
bitten me on the testicles! Do I make myself clear?"
It was all fast jabs and light blocks, both of us too evenly matched to do any real damage. He finally
asked me to leave. How could he have known that I was sitting there, insulting and antagonising him
merely to give my brother time to do a cybernetic smash and grab on his database.
"Was it difficult?" I asked Melissa when I met her outside.
"A challenge, but not difficult. I phoned your brother as soon as I was outside and gave him Corric's
ID, password and a description of how he had moved around his database."
***


As Corric had typed in passwords, database commands and file names, Melissa had accelerated her
brain's scan rate to the limits of even her own remarkable powers. To her, his fingers moved with
painstaking, deliberate care over his keyboard. She had memorised every key that he had struck.
The results from our raid on Corric's data and records were inconclusive. There was evidence that he
had been doing experiments on the DNA of embryos, but not that he was doing genetic manipulation for
any specific traits. He worked exclusively with the so-called junk DNA in rats, introducing a selective
catalyst through the cell wall on a folic acid carrier to delete specific but unimportant nucleotides. This left
his mark on all the rat's cells, yet it was outwardly normal. He was experimenting with a technique, he
was not engineering specific traits.
Had Corric experimented with human embryos? If so, he might have done far more than he had
realised. Had he introduced a catalyst into a human zygote, meaning to delete a dozen junk nucleotides as
a test? In 1992 the knowledge of genome chemistry was more limited than his technique. Perhaps he had
unknowingly sheared a much larger number of nucleotides, turning on dozens of genetic characteristics.
Whatever the case, he evidently decided that the genetic catalysis technique was unreliable, and he began
work on the molecular probe that later brought him fame.