Authors: Claire Rayner
There was a silence in the big carpeted room with its heavy polished desk and tasteful reproductions of Van Gogh on its lemon-colored walls, as Matron, still looking slightly ruffled, and Kegan, a ludicrously hopeful expression on his face, stared at Briant’s bent head as he stood rocking gently on his heels.
“That is an aspect that had not occurred to me,” Briant said, and the angry color that had blotched his narrow cheeks receded. “You may well indeed be right. And of course there are the individual philanthropists. There are a number of men only too anxious to buy themselves a knighthood who might be most attracted to a project that catches the public sympathy.”
He produced one of his rare smiles and came back to his chair. “I am a practical man, Kegan. A scientist. When you produce an argument that makes practical sense, then of course I’m prepared to listen. Had you said this first, instead of producing emotional gush about the hospital’s welfare, we could have saved a good deal of time. So, what precisely do you want to do? I’ll cooperate as far as I can, on the understanding of course that I remain in control—full control—of anything to do with my project. I want no pompous official tours of my unit, you understand? And there will be no access to either the infant or the mother. That must be quite clear at the outset.”
“Of course,” Kegan said and reached for the intercom on his desk. “Matron, do sit down and be comfortable. I’ll send for some coffee and we can plan this. Miss Bassett, coffee for three, if you please.” He snapped off the machine and settled back in his chair as Matron with a soft rustle of starch rearranged herself in hers.
“I suggest an immediate preliminary press release. I’ll write it if you wish, Dr. Briant, and you can vet it. Then a press conference. In the board room. You can appoint one of your own people to act as press liaison officer after that, or I’ll lay on someone for the job. That’s up to you.”
Briant frowned sharply. “You expect more press interest even after the conference? If so, what’s the point of having the conference at all? If we’re still to be bombarded by these people—”
“There may be some follow-up interest, that’s all,” Kegan said soothingly. “But it shouldn’t last more than a week or so. The press
conference will satisfy the newspaper people to start with, but there are the weekly and monthly magazines, foreign press agencies, television people, and so on. We need a plan for them. As I said, I’ve had some experience. Ah, coffee. Thank you, Miss Bassett. Now, Dr. Briant, suppose we plan the conference for—say tomorrow at ten? That will satisfy the evening papers. Otherwise they’ll go on nagging today.”
Briant nodded, resigned. “Ten o’clock. I must be away by eleven at the latest, though. We do the daily rundown tests then, and I must be there. There are one or two feeding problems with the infant, and I can’t delegate until they’re ironed out.”
“By all means,” Kegan said. “Ten it is. Now I can at least get the pressure off a little. Excuse me.”
He clicked the intercom again and said, “Miss Bassett, all calls regarding the Briant project are to be switched to me from here on in. Tell switchboard, will you? And we’d better clear all Maternity calls through here as well. I’ll get Matron to handle them”—he looked up at her, and she nodded—“and tell all press callers that a press conference will be held here in the board room at ten A.M. tomorrow.”
It had been raining heavily since dawn, water sluicing the gutters of the courtyard, creating rainbows of the patches of oil on the tarmac of the consultants’ car park. The people filling the board room steamed gently as they sat huddled together on the rows of chairs arranged neatly in front of the big desk. Sitting in a heavily carved chair to the right of it, George Briant took a sardonic pleasure in the manifest discomfort of the men and women in front of him who moved uneasily in their damp coats and tried to find dry patches on their laps on which to rest their notebooks.
Serve them right, he thought vindictively and then, irritated at his own childishness, turned his head to look at the other people arranged alongside him, the desk’s shining expanse of polished wood reflecting their faces as twisted white blobs.
Immediately beside him Kegan was fussing with sheets of paper, arranging and rearranging them into neat aligned squares. He had taken a lot of trouble with his appearance this morning, Briant
noticed, his heavy gray hair carefully slicked across his head, his knitted red tie carefully arranged against the collar of his pink shirt. Vain idiot, Briant thought, suddenly conscious of the obvious age of his own gray suit and the shabbiness of his faded blue shirt.
It never failed to anger him—the clearly apparent greater affluence of hospital administrators as compared to his own lack of money. He knew beyond any shadow of doubt that his own contribution to the hospital was worth infinitely more than that of a hundred Kegans. He genuinely had little concern with making money for its own sake, but he could not fail to be infected by Marjorie’s martyred attitude to their shortage of cash, and he resented being reminded of it by Kegan’s sleekness.
But this was no time to be thinking about Marjorie again and her nagging about their poverty; the morning would be complicated enough, God knew, without allowing Marjorie to invade his mind. So he looked at Matron, tight-faced and armored in starch, at Miss Guttner sitting lumpishly beyond her, her glasses shining blankly as they picked up the overhead light that filled the room with a necessary illumination against the heaviness of the sky pressing grayly against the windows. Dismal woman, Briant thought and dismissed her too from his mind, turning his head again to look at the people in front of him.
Considering the amount of pressure they had been exerting, there should, Briant felt, be a different atmosphere about them. They should seem eager, anxiously expectant, but they merely sat waiting, apparently more concerned with their private conversations than with the people they had come to hear. Even Michael Bridges, the
Echo
man (Kegan had leaned over to Briant and pointed him out as soon as he came in), sat sprawled in seeming boredom in his chair at the end of the front row.
I’ll have to watch him, Briant thought. He had made a point of reading some of his articles last night, and the man knew what he was writing about. He spoke Briant’s own language.
And suddenly Briant felt better. These people were professionals, like himself. They had a job to do and did it well. Briant might despise the job, despise the way they presented facts to the gawping idiot public, but he could recognize ability when he saw it. And
these people had it; their very casualness, their absence of wide-eyed eagerness showed that.
Beside him, Kegan moved, stood up and coughed self-importantly. “I think we can commence, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. He coughed again and spoke a little more loudly. “Your time is as precious as ours. And Dr. Briant”#x2014;he bowed slightly in Briant’s general direction—“must leave at eleven sharp. Now…” He took a deep breath, coughed yet again, and picked up one of the sheets of paper before him.
“Dr. Briant wishes me to make clear at the outset that he is not entirely happy that this matter should have become a subject of public discussion. He would point out that scientific projects need a great deal of time to come to fruition, and premature publication of, er, data can damage progress. What appear to be facts at an early stage may well be disproved before the work is completed. However, since some information about his project seems to have leaked out, Dr. Briant has kindly consented to give some of his valuable time to an explanation of the work he is doing.”
Kegan looked up from the paper he had been reading and looked a little hopefully at the faces in front of him. “It would be… well, interesting to know just how you came to hear about the infant’s birth, and why you felt this birth was… well, interesting. We, er, we’re naturally concerned to know whether there are, er, people working here who have a direct contact with the newspaper that first reported the child’s birth and linked it with Dr. Briant’s work.”
He was looking directly at Bridges, but Bridges looked imperturbably back, and after a few moments of heavy silence Kegan coughed and returned to the paper in his hand.
“Dr. Briant proposes to read a short account of his project to you and will then be available for questioning. In order to cooperate with you fully, we have prepared copies of his statement and some brief notes about Dr. Briant himself, which we trust will be of assistance to you.”
Again he looked up from the paper and smiled conciliatingly at his audience. “To be quite honest, ladies and gentlemen, we hope that by offering you all the assistance we can that you will respond
by being sympathetic to our, er, request for—shall we say, unsensational coverage? As I said, premature, er, excitement about new scientific facts can damage progress.”
Again they sat and looked silently back at him, and again he coughed and turned his head and said a little gruffly, “Dr. George Briant,” and sat down.
Briant put his hand in his inside jacket pocket and pulled out the folded sheet of paper that carried his statement, and, a little startled at the sudden wave of apprehension that swept over him, he stood up.
Immediately, the cameramen who had been standing at the sides of the rows of chairs moved, and the flash of lights and the clicks of their equipment bewildered him slightly. He stood blinking against the effect of the lights on his eyes and felt the apprehension disappear under a new wave of feeling—anger. They had made him both look and feel foolish, and that was infuriating.
But he was glad of it. He knew that he always operated at full efficiency when driven by anger; from now on, he was suddenly sure, he was in control of this bloody conference. “This is my statement,” he said dryly and bent his head to read.
“As a biologist, my main interest has for some years been human genetics, the study of the way in which various characteristics are passed from parent to offspring. Much investigation has been made by myself and others into the patterns of physical inheritance: body build, eye and hair color, and so on. We know a good deal now about the way in which the genes act.”
He looked up and stared at his audience with the slightly accusing look he used for classes of students. “I had better recapitulate for you. Human body cells contain chromosomes, forty-six in each cell. And each chromosome carries some fifty thousand genes, which are the structures that carry inheritance information from parent to offspring. I trust that is quite clear?” Without waiting for a response, he returned to the paper in his hand.
“The research results of the people who defined the structure of DNA—deoxyribonucleic acid—and others working in related fields suggested to me that it might be possible to identify specific ge-
netic details in a newly fertilized human egg cell, since DNA is the substance of which genes are made. Since there are some fifty thousand genes in each chromosome, you can imagine the difficulty inherent in recognizing differences in such microscopic structures. I cannot possibly explain to a lay audience the techniques I used to study these genes—although I can tell you they involved the use of a type of radio microscope, and considerable extremely complex computer work—the programming alone involved almost a year’s work. Anyway, in the course of these preliminary studies I succeeded in identifying certain exceedingly small but specific bodies in genes. Those of you who have read my papers in
Nature
may know that these are now known as Briant Bodies, and fall into four distinct groups, which I have labeled Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. Briant Bodies Alpha and Beta carry physical characteristics including hair, skin and eye color, and body build. Briant Bodies Gamma and Delta—the most interesting in my estimation—carry certain personality traits, including intelligence, aggression, equanimity and emotional stress tolerance.
“In other words, it became technically possible for me, some three years ago, to make certain accurate predictions about a human individual by studying the structure of a newly fertilized female reproductive cell, in conjunction with detailed investigation of the adults who produced the ovum and the spermatozoon that fertilized it.”
“Dr. Briant?”
Briant looked up, frowning at the interruption. Michael Bridges was still sprawled in his chair, but his face was alert. “Could you clarify that point, please?” he said. “You are saying that if it were possible to remove a fertilized egg cell from a woman after she had conceived, you could examine it and say what the resulting child would be like?”
“Precisely.”
“But what’s the point of that?” The man sitting next to Bridges leaned forward. “I mean, if you remove the cells, then they can’t develop into a baby, can they? You’ve done an abortion.”
“If you can contain your impatience,” Briant said dryly, “these
points will be explained. You will have ample time for questions when I have completed the reading of this statement.”
He returned to his paper. “We also now have a technique that makes it possible to control the production of female ova—egg cells. If we give a woman controlled quantities of a substance called human gonadotrophin, we can make her produce ova to order, as it were. Researchers working with this substance set about trying to remove a fertilized ovum from a woman during the few days that elapse between actual conception and the implantation of the cell into the uterus—where it must be to develop into an infant—and then replacing it. They succeeded, thus making it possible for me to make predictions which could afterwards be verified.
“Now, as a biologist, I have long been somewhat suspicious of the assumptions about human behavior and motivation made by psychologists and sociologists. These, er, workers”—his voice took on a faint sneer as he said the word—“these workers suggest that most human behavior is learned, that we are controlled in our actions not by our inheritance but by what happens to us after birth. They feel nurture is of infinitely greater importance than nature. As I say, I doubt these assumptions, and some interesting studies have confirmed my doubts. For example, babies born carrying a particular extra chromosome are mongols, individuals with well-recognized facial characteristics, lowered intelligence, and an affectionate disposition. Also, it has been noted that men who carry another extra chromosome—in this case a Y chromosome, which is the one that determines maleness—are unusually tall and display aggressive antisocial behavior. In other words, these men are born criminals.