Читать книгу Elefant - Jamie Bulloch - Страница 13

Reflected on the wet asphalt of the car park were a few vehicles and some lit-up windows in an office block that had formerly been a wire factory. The lights still on were coming from the Gentecsa offices on the second floor.

Roux and two assistants were standing around a stainless-steel table, bent over Miss Playmate, as one of the assistants had christened the laboratory rat.

The rat was called Miss Playmate because she was naked. She was a neutered nude rat adapted to the requirements of the elephant tissue, a laboratory rat missing her thyroid gland to prevent her from creating T lymphocytes, the cells responsible for rejecting implants. This meant that Roux could implant the tiny section from the outer layer of the ovary without the foreign tissue being rejected.

Miss Playmate was anaesthetised and lay beneath the blazing surgical light, all four legs splayed apart and fastened with rubber bands. An incision had been made in her abdominal wall and Roux was working internally with a scalpel and pincers. One of the assistants held the wound open with tiny retractors, while the other passed him the instruments he barked for and dabbed, at ever decreasing intervals, the sweat dripping from his trimmed eyebrows between the surgical cap and mask.

The aim of the operation was to implant into Miss Playmate a piece of the Sri Lankan baby elephant’s ovary with thousands of egg cells not yet capable of fertilisation. The cells would mature inside the rat’s womb and after six months Roux would be able to genetically modify them.

He’d done this operation often enough, as testified by the tree shrews, rhesus monkeys and rabbits glowing green, blue and red in the darkened rooms along the corridor. But this was his first elephant egg cell. And – if everything went according to plan – the elephant he was going to create with it wouldn’t just glow in the dark: the creature’s skin would be an intense pink even in daylight.

This was Roux’s great discovery, known only to his colleagues and, more recently, a silent partner – unfortunately. He’d managed to introduce into the egg cells a combination of luciferins and mandrill pigment!

Luciferins are the compounds that make fireflies glow, for example. And mandrill pigment is the compound that produces the colours in the face and backside of the mandrill. Roux had used the red of the nose.

The most beautiful result of these experiments was Rosie, a ‘skinny pig’, a hairless guinea pig. Roux had injected both genes into the egg cell, which he then fertilised and implanted into the womb of a normal guinea pig.

After two months the surrogate mother gave birth to two pink guinea pigs. One was dead, but the second, Rosie, looked as if she were made from marzipan and glowed in the dark like a moving neon sign.

And without needing any light of a particular wavelength to be shone at it, dear Nobel Prize committee! Rosie didn’t merely reflect, like the laboratory animals of Professor Dr Richard Gebstein.

Gebstein had been Roux’s employer. He was the manager and owner of a genetic engineering laboratory that, among other things, undertook research into gene marking, which often involved the use of fluorescent proteins or enzymes. Roux came to Gebstein straight after he’d finished his PhD and worked for him for almost ten years as an underpaid researcher.

During this time he managed – partly by chance, partly intentionally – to generate a faintly fluorescent green rat, but made the big mistake of showing it to his boss. Delighted by this result, Gebstein gave Roux a not particularly generous pay rise and freed him up to undertake further research into his discovery, on condition that he didn’t disclose it to anybody.

Roux worked day and night on his secret project, and in less than a year succeeded in repeating his experiment. His boss duly feted him, but only a few weeks after this triumph there was a spanner in the works. It began with a trifling argument, when Roux was caught by Gebstein eating his lunch – a sandwich, as always – in the laboratory. Eating in a genetic engineering laboratory with this level of security was an infringement of the regulations, but Gebstein had never commented on it before, except for the odd ‘Bon appétit!’ On this occasion, however, he snapped at Roux, and Roux snapped back.

It was the beginning of a rift that soon led to his sacking. And when Roux read Gebstein’s publication on the interim findings of his experiments, which didn’t mention Roux once by name, it confirmed his suspicion that his dismissal had been carefully orchestrated.

The publication caused a sensation in the scientific and journalistic world and was even cited in research by Roger Tsien, Martin Chalfie and Osamu Shimomura, who’d been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of fluorescent green proteins and their application. Roux felt great Schadenfreude at the fact that Gebstein’s name was absent from the statement issued by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences explaining their decision.

Roux had been out for revenge ever since. He’d set up his own genetic engineering laboratory with a single objective: to compete with and outdo Gebstein’s. For years now this thought had given him the strength and energy to work through the night, genuflect before bank employees and keep inventing new ways to see off the competition.

The scientific success of his firm had become increasingly incidental and the commercial success ever more vital.

His project had the potential to make a double breakthrough, bringing financial reward and scientific acclaim. If he succeeded in creating patentable animals that didn’t just glow in the dark but also were spectacularly colourful in daylight, he would be made in every sense.

When Roux couldn’t get to sleep in his short nights, he’d imagine Gebstein’s face – his neat white beard, blow-dried white hair, feathery white eyebrows, gold rimless glasses, the entire face designed to look erudite – making him the takeover bid that would be so huge he wouldn’t be able to refuse.