 every two
hundred or so people in the general population has such genetic
disorders, this is surprising indeed. Kevin is starting to feel
quite paranoid but he also realizes that mental
deterioration is part of his disease process. Is what he's
beginning to suspect true? Or has his Huntington's progressed
farther than he'd thought is he starting to lose his mind?
Kevin appears in court as an expert witness on genetics in Ingrid
Lagerkvist's wrongful-life suit. He finds the entire trial
distasteful, but especially the attitude of Ingrid's lawyer that
Erik, the baby with Down syndrome, is nothing but a hideous
burden, incapable of real human feeling.
Kevin goes back to see Melinda Proctor, the widow of Bryan
Proctor. Did Bryan have any medical problems, he asks? Yes, she
says: he had bad kidneys, and was on the waiting list for a
transplant.
Amanda is rather hairy for a child. Old Ian Damrosch has been
making a pest of himself, constantly asking after the girl, and
insisting on periodic tests of her blood, hearing, and so on.
Kevin and Molly, who just want to be left alone with their
daughter, come to resent Damrosch's intrusions, even though they
suppose he does have some claim, being the girl's biological
father.
Kevin makes another breakthrough in his frameshift research: the
DNA in mitochondria (which is not part of chromosomes, and is
inherited solely from the mother) provides a checksum for random
frameshift mutations. [Mitochondria are small organelles within
cells that contain their own DNA DNA that is unrelated to
normal heredity. A checksum is a simple mathematical procedure
for verifying the integrity of a lengthy string of data
such as the genetic information coded in chromosomes.]
If a frameshift occurs by accident (due to a random addition or
loss of a base pair), the checksum sees to it that the DNA in the
female's egg cells is corrected, so that the error in coding
won't be passed on to the next generation. Only if the
frameshift is invoked during RNA transcription of "junk" DNA does
it get passed on to the egg cells.
Kevin is shocked by the implications of all this. Cells, he's
discovered, have a built-in mechanism to correct for random
frameshifts, but still allow certain special frameshifts to be
passed on. It's almost as if those mutations had been waiting to
be activated as if the characteristics they coded for had
been pre-programmed into the DNA.
The jury makes its decision in the Lagerkvist wrongful-life suit:
Ingrid is awarded 3.4 million dollars because her doctor failed
to advise her that she was carrying a defective fetus. Kevin is
deeply ambivalent over the outcome, but Ingrid is overjoyed
and there is no doubt that the money will make young
Erik's life a lot easier.
Amanda continues to grow up, but she still can't speak, even
though she seems to be a bright child. Indeed, Molly, who can
read Amanda's mind, is sure she's not retarded. Molly and Kevin
are very concerned about this and arrange for special testing.
X-rays reveal the cause of Amanda's muteness: her hyoid bone
(the anchor for the speech-related muscles of the jaw, larynx,
and tongue) is located too far up in her throat.
Amanda seems to love both her parents very much, but Kevin
surprises himself by discovering that he's jealous of the
closeness between telepathic Molly and mute Amanda. Still,
Amanda is being taught sign-language, so she can communicate with
people other than her telepathic mother. Kevin is also learning
sign language to better communicate with his daughter she
can clearly hear spoken words, but doesn't respond to them well.
Damrosch is making more and more demands from Kevin and Molly
about Amanda. In the guise of concern over her inability to
speak, he keeps insisting on additional tests and tissue samples.
Molly, in doing a computer search of literature related to hyoid
bone disorders, comes across a reference to "Moshe," a
Neanderthal fossil from Mount Carmel in Israel, found in 1986
the only specimen in which the hyoid bone was intact. But
key to resolving the long-running controversy over whether
Neanderthals could speak is the location of the hyoid within the
throat, something impossible to determine from the fossil.
In a flash, Molly realizes that the unthinkable may have been
done: rather than fertilizing one of her eggs with his own
sperm, Damrosch may have instead implanted some of the recovered
Neanderthal DNA into Molly's egg.
Molly shares this suspicion with Kevin. He's appalled at first,
but soon realizes that, even if it's true, it doesn't diminish
his love for Amanda. Still, he finally begins to agree that
Damrosch might indeed be Ivan, leader of The Fourth Reich. After
all, performing bizarre experiments on living human beings was
standard procedure for Nazi scientists. Given that, getting the
Neanderthal DNA may have been a blessing in disguise: better
that than DNA from a Nazi war criminal.
Kevin uses his staff keys to sneak into Damrosch's lab late at
night. He steals a tiny sample of the precious Neanderthal DNA
to do genetic tests. There's no doubt: Damrosch completely
replaced the genetic material in Molly's egg. Amanda is a clone
of a Neanderthal woman who lived 60,000 years ago.
Molly and Kevin confront Damrosch. Arrogant to the end, Damrosch
admits using Neanderthal DNA, but contends he has done nothing
wrong the Tardivels wanted a baby, and Damrosch helped
them get one. Damrosch says Neanderthal DNA differs from modern
human DNA by much less than one percent. He'd been able to
determine in advance of the cloning that the baby would look
passably like a child that might have been produced through a
union of Molly's and Damrosch's DNA, at least in the gross
details of skin color, hair color, and eye color and shape (and
here, echoing the novel's opening, Damrosch points out that
fortunately he himself has brown eyes, since Molly's are blue,
but he knew in advance that Amanda's would be brown).
Kevin, convinced now that Damrosch must be Ivan, wants to turn
him over to Rosenberg but he can't without revealing the
truth about his beloved daughter Amanda, which, for Amanda's
sake, he wants to keep secret. Still, he and Molly vow that they
will find a way to get Damrosch to leave their daughter alone.
They'll be damned if she's used as an object of study.
Even so, Kevin finds himself fascinated by what Damrosch has done
and now he can get unlimited Neanderthal DNA samples
painlessly from Amanda herself. He checks to see how the
cytosine methylation states within her "junk DNA" compare with
those of modern humans. They're similar, but not the same.
Kevin, intrigued, heads out to the zoo in San Francisco to get
DNA samples from a variety of primates.
That night, as usual, Kevin tries to chat with his daughter using
sign language. But, heart-wrenchingly, his Huntington's disease
is worsening, and he's losing the fine motor control needed to
sign properly.
Kevin discovers a distinct pattern in the drifting of cytosine
methylation in primates: by comparing the DNA of species that
emerged successively earlier in evolutionary time, it appears
that the cytosine methylation encodes a kind of counter that
increments very slowly on the order of tens of thousands
of years. It's almost as if the frameshift mutations and
the evolutionary changes they cause were timed to occur
throughout the ages.
Kevin comes home early. Molly has been in Amanda's room doing
something with the child Kevin can't tell what but
she seems surprised by his arrival, and acts as though nothing
had been going on. Although there's no ominous overtone to this,
Kevin quips that he doesn't have to be able to read minds to know
that Molly and Amanda are up to something...
Kevin reflects on the impact his frameshift model will have on
evolutionary theory. Standard evolution is periodically assailed
because of the lack of fossil evidence for missing links
intermediate stages halfway between one species and the next. To
explain this away, Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould has pushed a model
of "punctuated equilibrium," in which environmental upheavals
destabilize populations, and allow the offspring of only a
handful of individuals with a mutant characteristic to rapidly
become the new dominant form. But Gould's theory has a big hole
in it: it requires all members of the new species to be
descended from a very few members of the previous species
meaning the entire new species arises from a very tiny gene pool.
But tiny gene pools are recipes for disaster, as the inbreeding
of royal families proves. However, with timed frameshifts
occurring almost simultaneously in millions of members of a
species, new species could arise safely without the dangerous
narrowing of the gene pool.
The timed-frameshift proposal also