"I was therefore advised by Byeong Jae Lee, the head of molecular biology at Seoul National University, to address this matter directly. He has some experience with the power of rumors."
There were knowing chuckles in the audience. Shen was referring, of course, to the worldwide scandal that had erupted around the eminent Korean geneticist Hwang Woo-Suk.
"Therefore, I shall come directly to the point," he said. "For many years there have been rumors that Chinese scientists were attempting to create a hybrid of human and chimpanzee. According to the story, back in 1967, a surgeon named Ji Yongxiang fertilized a female chimpanzee with human sperm. The chimp was in the third month of pregnancy when outraged citizens stormed his lab and ended the experiment. The chimpanzee later died, but researchers at the Chinese Academy of Science supposedly said they would continue the research."
Shen paused. "That is the first story. It is entirely untrue. No chimpanzee was ever impregnated by Dr. Yongxiang or anyone else in China. Nor has a chimpanzee been impregnated anywhere in the world. If it had happened, you would know about it.
"Then, in 1980, a new story circulated that Italian researchers had seen human-chimp embryos in a Beijing laboratory. I heard this story when I was a professor at MIT. I asked to meet the Italian researchers in question. They could never be found. They were always the friend of a friend."
Shen waited while strobes flashed again. The cameramen crawling around at his feet were annoying. After a moment, he continued. "Next, a few years ago, was the story that a Mongolian prostitute gave birth to a baby with the features of a chimpanzee. This chimp-man was said to look like a human being, but was very hairy, with large hands and feet. The chimp-man drank whiskey and spoke in sentences. According to the story, this chimp is now at the Chinese Space Agency headquarters in Chao Yang District. He can sometimes be seen at the windows, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigar. Supposedly he will be sent to the moon because it is too dangerous to send a human.
"This story, too, is false. All the stories are false. I know these stories are tantalizing, or amusing. But they are not true. Why they should be located in China, I am not sure. Especially since the country with the least regulation of genetic experiments is the United States. You can do almost anything there. It was there that a gibbon was successfully mated with a siamang - primates that are genetically more distant than a human and chimp. Several live births resulted. This happened at Georgia State University. Almost thirty years ago."
He then opened the floor to questions. According to the transcript:
QUESTION:Dr. Shen, is the U.S. working on a chimp hybrid?
DR. SHEN:I have no reason to think so. I am merely observing that the U.S. has the fewest rules.
QUESTION:Is it possible to fertilize a chimpanzee with human sperm?
DR. SHEN:I would say no. That has been tried for nearly a century. Going back to the 1920s, when Stalin ordered the most famous animal breeder in Russia to do it, to make a new race of soldiers for him. His name was Ivanov, and he failed, and was thrown in jail. A few years later, Hitler's scientists tried it, and also failed. Today we know that the genomes of humans and chimps are very close, but the uterine conditions are considerably different. So, I would say no.
QUESTION:Could it be done with genetic engineering?
DR. SHEN:That is difficult to say. It would be extremely difficult from a technical standpoint. From an ethical standpoint, I would say it is impossible.
QUESTION:But an American scientist already applied to patent a human hybrid.
DR. SHEN:Professor Stuart Newman of New York was refused a patent on a part-human hybrid. But he did not make a hybrid. Dr. Newman said he applied for the patent to draw attention to the ethical issues involved. The ethical issues remain unresolved.
QUESTION:Dr. Shen, do you think a hybrid will eventually be created?
DR. SHEN:I called this press conference to end speculation, not to increase it. But if you ask my personal opinion, I think, yes - it will eventually be done.
Chapter 38-42
CHapter 038
The memoryhaunted Mark Sanger - the image burned in his mind of that poor animal, stranded on the beach at night in Costa Rica, helpless as the jaguar pounced, bit off her head, and proceeded to eat the flesh while her legs still kicked feebly. And all with the sound of crunching bones. The bones of her head.
Mark Sanger had not expected to see anything so horrific. He had come to the beach at Tortuguero to witness the giant leatherback turtles crawling out of the ocean to lay their eggs in the sand. As a biologist, he knew this was a great migration the planet had witnessed for countless eons. The female turtles were engaged in one of the great demonstrations of maternal caring, crawling high onto the beach, depositing their eggs deep in the ground, covering them with exhausted flippers, then carefully sweeping the sand clean, obliterating any trace of the eggs beneath. It was a slow, gentle ceremony, directed by genes that survived from millennia past.
Then came the jaguar, a black streak in the night. And suddenly last summer everything changed for Mark Sanger. The brutality of the attack, its speed and viciousness, shocked him profoundly. It confirmed his suspicion that the natural world had gone badly wrong. Everything that mankind was doing on the planet had upset the delicate balance of nature. The pollution, the rampant industrialization, the loss of habitat - when animals were squeezed and cornered, they behaved viciously, in a desperate effort to survive.
That was the explanation for the ghastly attack he had witnessed. The natural world was in collapse. He mentioned this to the very handsome naturalist Ramon Valdez, who had accompanied him. Valdez shook his head. "No, Se?or Sanger, this is always the way it has been since my father and grandfather, and grandfather before. They always spoke of the jaguar attacks in the night. It is part of the cycle of life."