Читать книгу Masterminds: Genius, DNA, and the Quest to Rewrite Life - David Duncan Ewing - Страница 8

There’s a natural fear of the unknown. On the

other hand, I think it’s uninteresting to live in

a society where one is so afraid of the unknown

that you won’t try new things.

—Douglas Melton

Harvard embryologist

Why did Prometheus do it? Myths about this god who gave fire to mortals against the express wishes of Zeus never explain his motive. But I’m going to make a guess. He had mortal children who were cold and tired of eating berries and gnawing on raw meat. And father Prometheus, who sat around Olympus with other gods warming his hands with glowing embers on cold nights, felt guilty. And that’s how we got fire.

Prometheus paid dearly. Zeus punished him for breaking a command to keep fire in Olympus by chaining him to a rocky crag, where his liver was eaten every morning by an eagle, only to grow back by the next morning, so the screeching bird could tear it out again.

The Harvard embryologist Doug Melton, fifty-one years old, makes no secret of his motive for pushing hard to develop a modern-day equivalent of fire—embryonic stem cells. These are special cells produced in the first days after an egg is fertilized that will develop into a heart, brain, skeleton, or any other part of the body of an organism. Melton wants to use stem cells to save his own children, fourteen-year-old Sam and eighteen-year-old Emma. They suffer from type I diabetes, which he hopes can be treated by understanding how stem cells grow into special cells called islets in the pancreas that normally produce insulin in a healthy person but shut down and stop functioning in a diabetic.

By extension, the cherub-faced Melton, with floppy, short, graying hair and round-rimmed glasses, hopes to save us all if he is successful in learning from stem cells how to cure his children, to spare them the organ failure, blindness, heart disease that eventually afflict many diabetics. If stem cells work as treatments, his work could be used to heal other illnesses, a list of maladies that afflict hundreds of millions of people around the world. That is, if Melton is allowed to continue his work by certain lawmakers in Washington, D.C., who today collectively play the role of Zeus.