Sister полностью

He barely reacted. “The PR woman’s e-mail was callously worded, but it is correct. I don’t know who did pay your sister, or anyone else, but I can assure you it wasn’t us or anyone else administering the trial. I have the names and reports of the participating hospitals’ ethics committees for you. So you can see for yourself that no payments are offered or made. It would be totally improper.” He handed me a bundle of documents and continued, “The reality is that if there was any money changing hands, it would be the mothers paying us rather than the other way around. We have parents begging for this treatment.”

There was an awkward silence. My question was answered and we’d barely been in his office three minutes.

“Do you still work for Imperial?” I asked, giving myself a little time to think of more important questions. But I struck a nerve; his body as well as his voice was on the defensive.

“No. I am a full-time employee here. They have better facilities here. They let me out to give lectures.” I heard the bitterness in his voice and wondered what caused it.

“You must be in demand?” I asked, still being polite.

“Yes, very much so. The interest has been quite overwhelming. All the most prestigious universities in Europe have asked me to speak, and in America all eight of the Ivy League universities have invited me to give a keynote address and four of them have offered me honorary professorships. I start my lecture tour in the States tomorrow. It will be a relief to speak for hours at a time to people who understand at least a little of what I am saying rather than in sound bites.”

His words were a genie escaping, revealing I’d got him completely wrong. He did want the limelight, but he wanted it shining on him at lecterns in prestigious universities rather than on television. He did want accolades, but from his peers.

I was sitting a distance away from him but even so he leaned away from me as he spoke, as if the room were cramped. “In the e-mail you sent back you seemed to imply that there may be a link between your sister’s death and my trial.”

I noticed that he’d said “my trial” and remembered that on the TV he’d called it “my chromosome.” I hadn’t grasped before how much he personally identified with the cystic fibrosis trial.

He turned, not looking at me, but at his own half reflection in the glass wall of his office.

“It’s been my life’s work, finding a cure for cystic fibrosis. I’ve literally spent my life, spending everything I have that is precious—time, commitment, energy, even love—on that one thing. I have not done that for anyone to get hurt.”

“What did make you do it?” I asked.

“I want to know that when I die, I have made the world a better place.” He turned to face me and continued. “I believe that my achievement will be seen as a watershed by future generations, leading the way to the time when we can produce a disease-free population—no cystic fibrosis, no Alzheimer’s, no motor-neuron disease, no cancer.” I was taken aback by the fervor in his voice, and he continued, “We will not only wipe them out but ensure that these changes can carry on through the generations. Millions of years of evolution haven’t even cured the common cold let alone the big diseases, but we can and in just a few generations we probably will.”

Why, when he was talking about curing disease, did I find him so disturbing? Maybe because any zealot, whatever his cause, makes us recoil. I remembered his speech when he likened a scientist to a painter or a musician or a writer. I found that correlation disquieting now because instead of notes or words or paints, a genetic scientist has human genes at his disposal. He must have sensed my uneasiness, but misinterpreted the reason for it.

“You think I’m exaggerating, Miss Hemming? My chromosome is in our gene pool. I have achieved in under a lifetime a million years of human development.”

I handed in my temporary ID and left the building. The demonstrators were still there, more vocal now that they’d had some coffee out of their Thermoses. Ponytail Man was with them. I wondered how often he went on the seminar and provoked Perky Nancy. Presumably for PR and legal reasons they couldn’t ban him.

He saw me and came after me.

“Do you know how they measure IQ in those mice?” he asked. “It’s not just the maze.”

I shook my head and started to walk away from him but he followed.

“They are put into a chamber and given electric shocks. When they’re put in again, the ones with genetically enhanced IQ know to be afraid. They measure IQ by fear.”

I walked faster but still he pursued me.

“Or the mice are dropped into a tank of water with a hidden platform. The high-IQ mice learn to find the platform.”

I walked hurriedly toward the tube station, trying to find again my elation at the cystic fibrosis trial, but I was unsettled by Professor Rosen and by the mice. “They measure IQ by fear” becoming indelible in my head even as I tried to erase it.