"Sean McMullen - The Blondefire Genome" - читать интересную книгу автора (McMullen Sean)

The Blondefire Genome
by Sean McMullen
This story copyright 1994 by Sean McMullen. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use. All
other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

Megan walked home from school. She knew the bus would be full of kids talking about the Blondefire
television special from the night before. Walking let her escape from hearing how well Jackie Cassall had
danced and sung, and how great the local all-blonde girl group had been. Nobody had been watching the
science program Quantum. Not her science teacher, or her maths teacher, not a single student in the
entire school. Megan had been on Quantum.
Blondefire's latest hit was second on the Australian charts, ninth in Britain and fourteenth in the USA.
They were going to make a series of video clips. The five girls who made up the group went to Megan's
school, and everyone in the school was proud of them. Everyone except Megan.
Nobody who knew Megan had seen her appear on Quantum as for seven whole minutes she
described her experiments with growing plants in a centrifuge at three times normal gravity. She had no
tape of it. Her older brother, Alex, had cleared her timer setting on the family VCR to record the
Blondefire special. Her mother had been on night shift at the medical laboratory and had missed the
show. Her father was in England doing contract work.
Megan had told nobody beforehand: her television appearance was meant to be a surprise. Just as
well, she thought. They probably would have watched Blondefire anyway.
She arrived home and looked into her sunroom-greenhouse, staring at the spinning wheel of
transparent plastic that induced three times the Earth's gravity for the plants inside.
"They don't even know you exist, but one day your seeds will fly into space," she told the plants. She
walked upstairs to her attic laboratory and there, with the door locked behind her she finally broke down
and sobbed with frustration and disappointment.
Megan's interest in genetics had begun a year earlier, when her father had sent her a DNA kit for
schools as a birthday present. She had used the reagents and instruments to extract DNA from the cells
of plants, cut it up with enzymes, and then examined the pieces using electrophoresis. Soon she hit on the
idea of growing wheat in a homemade centrifuge under high gravity and looking for genetic changes in
each generation. With Alex's help, she had built a centrifuge: a tube of industrial plastic, fifteen
centimetres in diameter, taped to a bicycle wheel rim and spun by an electric motor. It had spun almost
continuously for months while several generations of wheat grew. Megan had painted the NASA logo on
the outer rim. It was her ticket to space.
The DNA-ram, a version of the type invented at Cornell University in 1983, was all her own work. A
starter's pistol was clamped into one of two tubes welded into an old pressure cooker, and a
hand-operated vacuum pump was connected to the other tube. When the pistol fired its blank, the blast
was diverted into a pressure tube to shoot a hollow plastic cylinder down another tube until it hit a plate
with a tiny hole at the centre. A mixture of powdered tungsten and DNA sprayed through the hole and
into the evacuated pressure cooker, which contained a dish of ryegrass stem cells. It was a rough,
random process, but some of the DNA was rammed into the cells on the tungsten particles, and their
genetic makeup was altered forever.
Experimental work helped to ease Megan's pain at the way her appearance on national television the
night before had been ignored. She had extracted DNA from wattle leaves some days earlier using an
ethanol precipitation method and now she mixed the raw DNA with a pinch of tungsten powder.
Preparing the target ryegrass stem cells took time, as did pumping air out of the pressure cooker with the
hand pump.
Three hours passed as if they had been moments. Megan heard Alex come in and immediately start
playing the video of the Blondefire special. She raised her hands to her ears, then forced them down