The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume One Read Online Free PDF Page B

pipettes were stacked neatly in open shelves above the counters, while a shining steel stool gave Kaur someplace to rest her legs while she inspected the embryos. A traditional Indian raga played softly in the background, soothing her nerves over the course of a long day’s work.
    [26] Despite her fatigue, the thirtyish scientist felt an undeniable sense of accomplishment. The two dozen embryos arrayed upon the counter, each one no more than a few millimeters long and each suspended in a sterile dish containing an artificial growth medium of her own invention, were the end of a long and meticulous process of elimination and experimentation, expressly designed to create human embryos genetically superior to those created through the random genetic shuffling of ordinary reproduction.
    The process had begun by inducing superovulation in all of the project’s female volunteers, including herself. The large and diverse assortment of eggs yielded by this procedure had then been inseminated artificially and allowed to incubate at a temperature of precisely thirty-seven degrees centigrade, i.e. body temperature. Following fertilization, the eggs had been carefully examined for a wide variety of genetic defects or abnormalities, with all unsuitable eggs immediately terminated and disposed of. Kaur prided herself on developing, with the aid of her colleagues, selection criteria far more stringent than those employed by simple biology. To improve on Nature, after all, it was necessary to be harsher and more ruthless than Nature, so that only the most promising genetic combinations would survive.
    The result of this early screening, however, merely guaranteed offspring free of certain inherited defects. A laudable outcome, to be sure, but one that fell far below the ultimate ambitions of the project. It was not enough to simply produce outstanding examples of conventional humanity; the Chrysalis Project aspired to create a new breed of man and woman, markedly superior to any who had existed before. To do so required adding new information and instructions to the genetic blueprint encoded in each egg’s DNA.
    The conventional wisdom of the time held that modern science was still decades away from performing such procedures with any hope of success, but, here at Chrysalis, the combined brilliance of Kaur and her associates, free from governmental interference and the timidity of the general public, had already taken the art and science of genetic engineering much further than the outside world could possibly [27] imag ine. Someday, she reflected, the world will be astounded to discover all that we have been able to accomplish here.
    Take, for example, the unprecedented way they had learned to clone multiple copies of each surviving egg, thus increasing the odds of successful hybridization later on. Conventional science maintained that a fertilized egg could only be cloned twice before expiring, yet Kaur herself had developed a technique for producing dozens of identical copies of a single egg. That was the key, she recalled; invariably, applied genetics involved a certain degree of trial and error, heredity being fundamentally a matter of probabilities. But by generating so many ideal eggs to work with, the chances of achieving the desired genetic result increased dramatically—especially when the biological geniuses of the project knew exactly what modifications they wanted to make to the standard human genome.
    Fragments of specialized DNA, built from scratch from the appropriate amino acids, then multiplied by polymerase chain reactions, were spliced into bacterial plasmids, which acted as vectors to transmit the recombinant genes to the nucleus of the egg itself. Not every plasmid-borne gene successfully infiltrated the egg’s DNA, let alone at precisely the right spot in the sequence of codons, but that’s what all those multiple copies were for. Enough hybridized eggs made it through the secondary screening process to provide a