Insistence of Vision (6 page)

Junk DNA. Of course that never made any sense! It takes valuable energy and resources to build each ladder-like spiral strand of phosphates, sugars and methylated nucleic bases. Darwin would have quickly rewarded individuals who pared it all down. Just enough to do the task at hand, and little more. Redundancy is blessed, but efficiency is divine.

Eventually, we found out that much of the “junk” was actually quite important. Sequences that served a vital function, regulating
when
a gene would turn on to make its protein, and when it should stop. Regulation turned out to take up heaps of DNA. And much of the rest appeared to be recent infestations from viruses – a creepy thing to think about, but of no interest to me.

For a while, some folks thought we had the answer to the “junk DNA problem.”

Only, vast stretches remained mysterious. Void of any known purpose, they didn’t seem to do anything at all. And they were much too big to be just punctuation or spacers or structural elements. The
junk theory
came back as colleagues called those big, mystery patches meaningless relics...

... till George Stimson and I made our announcement.

Fish are fish are funny folk,

They never laugh and never joke.

When mating, there is no romance,

Just a throng, a whirling dance.

Then commence...

...the winnowings –

Ten billion sperm, ten million eggs,

Produce a hundred thousand larvae,

Hundreds survive, become fish,

For maybe two to start it over.

CBC - The Q:
Welcome back, I’m Sandra Oh and this is the Q, coming to you live and in 4-D from the Great Plains Theater in Winnipeg. We’ll get back to tonight’s fantastic noppop group,
The Floss Eaters
– yes, let it out for them! Only now let’s all calm down and welcome onstage our special guests. Give a warm welcome to Manitoba’s brightest science stars – Beverly Wang and George Stimson.

Professor George Stimson:
Thank you Sandra.

Professor Beverly Wang:
Yes, it’s good to be on your lively show. My, that last song was... Can-Do Invigo-Rating.

Sandra:
Ha ha! Totally with-it. You’ve won the crowd over, Madame Professor. It’s not grampa’s rock’n’roll, eh? Now hush you folks in the seats. We only have Bev and Geo for a few minutes before they must go back to changing our world. So let me start with Beverly, on behalf of folks here and in our audience around the globe. We’ve all been amazed by the success you both sparked in re-growing individual organs and body parts, giving hope to millions. Is it true that you’ve also done it
yourselves?

BW:
Yes, I have a new kidney and liver, grown in a vat from my own cells. I was offered regular transplants – they found a match. But it seemed more honest and true to use our methods myself. As one of the first volunteers. So far, the new parts have taken hold perfectly.

Sandra:
And you, George?

GS:
My own grafts were less ambitious... mostly to deal with widespread arthritis. Joint and tendons. Reinforcement and replacement.

Sandra:
How’d that go?

GS:
Shall I juggle for you?

Sandra
Hey now, doc, those water bottles are... wow! That’s some talent. Let’s hear it for Circus Stimson!

GS:
Well, I used to show off in college... it’s been years... oops!

Sandra:
No sweat, we’ll clean it up. That’s an impressive demonstration of restored youth and zest! Still, we’re always wondering on the Q...
what’s next?
What’s beyond grow-your-own-organs? I have to tell you we hear rumors that you’ve got something even bigger brewing. Called the
Caterpillar Cure?

GS:
Well now, Sandra, that’s not a name we use. It arose when we described taking a deathly ill test subject and wrapping or encasing the whole body in a protective layer –

Sandra:
A cocoon!

GS:
Hm, well yes. In a sense. We then trigger processes that have long lain dormant in the mammalian tool kit. We’ve become quite adept at extrapolating and filling in lost or missing elements. Whereupon we give the body every chance to repair or regrow or even replace its own component parts without surgical intervention, in a way that’s wholly... or mostly... natural.

Sandra:
Wow... I mean, wow! I haven’t heard applause that wild from a live audience since we had both Anvil and Triumph on the show, playing together in Ottawa. Settle down folks. Professor Wang, may I ask how you feel about the way pop culture is interpreting some of this? A cluster of quickie-horror pollywood flicks have suggested that this
awakening of long-dormant traits
might go awry in spectacular ways. Have you seen any of these cable-fables?

BW:
Just one, Sandra. At a lab party, some of our students played
It’s Reborn!
for laughs. We all found it hilarious.

Sandra:
So we
won’t
be seeing all sorts of ancient throwbacks coming out of these cocoons? No bodies repairing and restoring themselves back into, say, Neanderthals? Or dinosaurs? Or gross slime?

BW:
Not any Neanderthals or dinosaurs, I promise. And there’s a reason. Because all of us, from you and me down to a newborn baby, are in our final, adult form.

Sandra:
Babies... are adults?

BW:
This may take a minute. You see, all animal life originally passed through
multiple phases,
and it is
still
true for a majority of complex species, like insects, arthropods and most fish.

Mating
adults
make embryos or eggs. Eggs create the
larval stage,
in vast numbers, whose job it is to eat and grow. A small fraction of larvae survive to transform again – as when insects
pupate
, for example a caterpillar’s cocoon – turning at last into the
imago
or adult form, whose primary job is to complete the cycle. You know... with sex.

Sandra:
Clearly a favorite word for some of you out there. Settle down. So Dr. Stimson, what does this –

BW:
But some life orders have abandoned the old process. For birds, reptiles and especially placental mammals, all the early phases seem to have been compacted down into the early embryonic period. It all takes place within the egg or the mother’s womb. Though incomplete and neotenous, our human infants are born already in the
adult
stage. And hence when a patient undergoes recuperative chrysalis –

GS:
– none of them ever comes out with ancient traits like bony eye-ridges or tails or swinging from lamp posts. At least, none so far!

Sandra:
So far? You mean there’s still hope! I was sort of hankering for a nice tail.

GS:
If it ever proves possible Sandra, I promise you’ll be the first one we’ll tell.

Tadpole swishes tail

Breathes water, while preparing

Brand new lungs and legs

Lab Notes: George Stimson - 8/8/2030

I was annoyed with Beverly. We had been asked to keep things light, not wonkish, for the CBC broadcast. She gets so pedantic and lectury.

And yet, her ad hoc little rant about
stages of life
kept prodding at me, afterward. Of course I already knew all that – about embryo-larva-pupa-adult metamorphosis. It’s basic high school bio. Still, the notion would not let go of me. And I wondered.

We’ve accomplished “miracles” by uncovering traits, tools and processes that have lain dormant in the human genome for a hundred million years, ever since mammals abandoned organ replacement for a quick and agile lifestyle. By learning tricks to fill in the lost portions of code and re-start the processes of organ regrowth, Beverly and I have guaranteed ourselves lasting fame. And the techniques helped save both our lives, staving off our own health problems for the time being, letting us enjoy our renown for a little while.

That may satisfy her, but I’ve always been kind of an insatiable bastard. And I can’t help wondering.

Despite all our progress, we’ve only explained another five percent or so of the mystery DNA. Even after filling in methods of organ regrowth, lost since the Triassic, there remains another whole layer of enigmatic chemistry. Huge stretches of genetic code that are both still unknown and clearly even older than a mere hundred million years!

Oh, it’s pretty clear by now that the bulk of it
is
somehow related to organ regrowth, but in some way that I still don’t understand.

It’s infuriating! I’ve been plotting codes, cataloguing and interpolating most of the likely missing pieces. Without these lost switches, the dormant genes have languished, unused for ages. Till now I have only dared experiment with the switches one at a time, in petri dishes, never in whole animals. And never
all at once.
Not without a theory to explain what they’re for.

Only now, there’s a theory. A good one, I’m sure of it! Beverly’s blather about
life phases
made me realize just how far back this new layer of code really goes.

Extrapolate the decay rates and one thing is clear from drift-clock measurements. This second layer of mystery genes goes back not
one
hundred million years...

...but almost
three
hundred million! All the way to the early Permian Period, when amphibians were mostly pushed aside by the ancestors of reptiles, birds, dinosaurs and mammals. All of whom
gave up
the multi-stage style of living. Skipping the larval and pupa phases and spending all their lives as adults.

It’s astonishing. Can the second layer of dormant DNA really come to us from that far back?

It appears to! Which demands the next question. Once you set aside regulatory genes and those donated by viruses, and the ones Beverly and I discovered for regrowth...

...could the remainder be DNA that our lineage used, way back when pre-mammal ancestors
did
pass through a “larval” stage?

If so, what would a “larval mammal” look like?

My best guess? Look at a frog! Amphibians are the order closest to us that still pass through metamorphosis. The larval tadpole lives one kind of life underwater, then transforms into a frog. But there are frogs and toads who abandoned the first, aquatic phase, dealing with the transformation as we do... inside the embryo....

This is amazing. It all fits! I had prepared retroviruses with the replacement codons weeks ago, but had been holding back, because there was no pattern, no logic. Only now I see it!

I’ve prepared a dozen chrysalis units and Dorothy Aguelles is prepping a rat for each one. I’ll handle the injections myself. It may take a hundred iterations, but they will all be meticulously recorded.

I feel almost reckless with excitement. Is that a side effect of my earlier treatments? Or am I giddy from impressing all those young people with my juggling? Or is it the scientific prospect before me, standing on the verge of discovering something fantastic?

Like, perhaps, the true fountain of youth.

Fat n’ glossy – lucky eater

Many-legged – big survivor

Hunger changes – now compelling

Pick a stem and – hang there eager

Twist and writhe while – glossy sticky

Strands emerge from – surprise places

Nature makes you – spin the strands round

Nature makes you – weave a garment

Tube to transform – into raiment

Into what you – were born meant-for

Lab Notes: George Stimson - 10/12/30

I had that dream again, even more intense than before – of being swaddled in some dark, closed place, drowning. But only part of me was terrified! An unimportant part, fading into insignificance. Palliated and balanced by a rising sense of eagerness.

A growing, tense
desire
for a return to the womb. For a
new
womb.

I awoke in sticky sweat. A sheen that took scrubbing to remove, leaving skin that seemed baby-tender. Soft.

This time I gave in to my suspicions and, upon arriving at the lab, I drew some blood to test.

It’s in me.

The latest retrovirus. The one with our most up-to-date cocktail of missing-DNA insertions.

And there are symptoms other than weird dreams. A strange prickling of the skin. A rising sense of exhilaration, almost eagerness, for something barely, vaguely perceived.

And my cancer was gone. The blood lymphoma. The slow prostate tumor. Both of them simply gone!

Or else... I looked closer. The cancers were still there... just no longer wild, voracious, uncooperative. Instead, they were jostling into structured positions with respect to one another –
differentiating.

I hurried over to the latest batch of rat-cocoons, heart pounding. Yesterday they had seemed okay, raising our hopes. After thirty-three trials in which critters failed and died in varied gruesome ways, because of mistakes in my collection of extrapolated intron-switches,
this
set was doing fine! Still swaddled inside their protective encasements, they were showing signs of incredibly youthful tone and vigor, along with chromosomal re-methylization...

At last. At last, it dawned on me.

I know what’s really happening!

ᚖ

Beverly, when you read this, I may no longer be the George Stimson whom you knew.

I was right to follow your hunch about metamorphic
life phases
. But you and I both had one aspect all wrong.

Completely backward, in fact.