Perfect People Read Online Free PDF Page B

conceded, ‘You have a point, I hadn’t seen it that way.’
    She pressed her hands together partly for warmth and partly from nerves. ‘Now,’ she said to the geneticist, ‘the next group we come to does interest me – us. John and I read up all the literature you gave us on this last night. All the genes relating to the body’s energy levels?’
    John said, ‘You’re able to enhance oxygen conversion efficiency, and to modify the metabolic pattern? What this means, if we’re understanding it correctly, is that our son would be able to convert more energy from less food than normal people, and go longer on this food?’
    ‘Essentially, yes,’ Dettore said. ‘Better maximization of the nutrients, more efficient conversion of starches, sugars, proteins, better storage and release mechanisms, more elegant insulin controls but without any additional appetite.’
    Naomi nodded. ‘These are good things – they’re going to mean he stays in shape easily and he won’t have weight problems.’ She was silent for a moment and then she said, ‘I’m comfortable about these in a way that I’m not about tampering with his sleep patterns.’
    John leaned forward and poured himself some more coffee from the metal pot on the table, grinning. ‘You sleep too much, darling.’
    ‘Rubbish! I need my sleep.’
    ‘Exactly my point. If you’re not woken, you can easily sleep nine hours, even ten. Dr Dettore is right in one sense – it wastes so much of your life.’
    ‘I like my sleep!’
    ‘And if your genes were programmed so that you only needed two hours, darling, you’d like those hours of sleep just as much.’
    ‘I don’t think so.’ Then she looked away, out of the window. There was a container ship in the distance, sitting high on the horizon, looking so elevated it might have been mounted on a plinth. ‘You have to understand where I’m coming from in my own mind in all of this, Dr – er – Leo. I just want my child to be free of any risk of the disease that killed our son. It’s great that you can also eliminate the other bad genes John and I are carrying, for prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, depression, diabetes. I want to give our child advantages in life, sure, what parent wouldn’t, but I don’t want him to be too different from other human beings, do you understand that? I don’t want him to be a freak.’
    Dettore sat upright, folded his arms and rocked back and forward a few times, like a big child himself. ‘Naomi, I hear what you’re saying. You want your kid to be just a regular guy with corners of talent and occasional brilliance, right?’
    ‘I – I suppose, yes. Exactly.’
    ‘I’d go along with that, except there is one thing you have to take into account. You have to compare a model of the world today, with a model of what the world will be like when your son becomes an adult. You’re twenty-eight years old, and the world is not substantially different to when you were a little girl. But, in twenty-eight years’ time?’ He opened his arms expansively. ‘I’m telling you that in twenty-eight years’ time the world will be different. There will be a genetic underclass that will create a divide bigger than you can imagine. You compare the knowledge, skills, advantages you have right now over some poor young woman your age brought up in the Third World, working on a paddy field in China, or maybe in the bush in Angola.’
    Dettore stood up, went over to his desk and tapped his computer keyboard for some moments. A map of the world appeared on the large wall screen opposite them. There were some pink blotches, but mostly the countries were in white.
    ‘There are seven billion people in the world. Do you know how many of them can read or write?’ He looked at John, then Naomi.
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t.’
    ‘If I tell you that twenty-three per cent of adults in the United States, the most technologically advanced nation in the world, are illiterate, does that give