The next day, at the Parn Institute in Russell Square, Dr Malik Wood was given a message by his excited assistant. ‘The boss called. He’s in town and wants to see you tonight. Drinks at the Connaught. Six thirty.’
Malik Wood had studied genetics as an undergraduate in England, but a colleague at the Ivy League university where he was finishing his doctorate had lured him into the world of human embryology. He was soon being invited to lecture in establishments so far away he sometimes had to check where they were on the map. The Samson Inoué Centre of Human Embryology in Dhaka was followed by a semester in the Zohar Research Institute at the University of Montreal. He had then become professor of reproductive and molecular genetics at a new research faculty attached to UC Berkeley.
Helping people to have babies was a good use of anyone’s time. But these days he no longer found himself at the leading edge of research – he who had once been tipped for academic glory and had been offered posts at Cambridge and Princeton. He ought to have more money and some hard-hitting initials to follow his name. At a party following a lecture at the Royal Institution, a zoologist whispered bad news through fumes of wine and sausage roll: the position he most coveted had gone to Therese Williams.
‘But she’s hopeless!’ said Wood. ‘I read some of her papers. They were like undergraduate essays.’
‘I know. But people like her.’
Then there came a job offer: as director of the Parn Institute in London. The Parn had money from its thirty-five-year-old founder, Lukas Parn, an entrepreneur who – almost before his voice had broken, it seemed – had made a dozen fortunes from wave power and biotech. Parn had been born and educated in Australia, where his parents had immigrated from Vietnam and the Czech Republic (he had taken a version of his mother’s surname); his company was based in America, but he lived most of the time in Berlin. His latest interest was in anthropology. If AI had raised questions about the ability of electronic circuitry to replicate human thought, then the next question, naturally, was what made human beings such paragons. Or as Parn had put it: ‘How come sapiens is so sapient?’
Dr Wood had a young team under him in Russell Square, where his time was divided between the laboratory and the office; but at the age of forty-two he was peering into the future with a troubled gaze. Human genomics was a fast-moving train that was about to leave him at the station. And then they elected Therese Williams a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Wood arrived at the Connaught four minutes late, to give his employer time to settle. He went through to the bar, which had recently been redecorated in the style of what might have been a Turkish country house.
Lukas Parn sat back among the drapes, like a pasha in his new command.
‘What’ll you have?’
When people first met Parn, they imagined he’d talk in the geek idiolect of Cupertino and San Jose; they were surprised when he came across more like a Queensland sheep farmer. Wood had met him often enough to know it was a screen that he would lower when he felt comfortable.
‘Just a glass of white wine, please,’ Wood said. ‘Thanks. How was your flight? Have you come from Berlin?’
Parn leant forward and his face caught the light. His skin was smooth, his hair an even teabag brown. Was there a touch of mascara?
‘Know much about evolution, Woody?’
‘I’m a biologist.’
‘Know how the eye evolved?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘Incrementally.’
Parn puffed out his cheeks and sat back on the crimson plush. ‘I want to do an experiment,’ he said. ‘I want to prove something.’
‘That’s not normally how exper—’
‘One thing I’ve learned from the AI business. The human species is fucking exceptional.’
‘Which human species?’
‘There’s only one.’
‘Only one surviving, yes.’
‘Which in itself makes us pretty special.’
‘Unusual, certainly. Even gorillas have—’
‘Do you think we’ll ever find another human species?’
‘How many more do you want? You’re up to speed with the one they found in France?’
‘Homo gastronomicus? Yes.’ Lukas Parn sipped on his cola. ‘There’s a lot of crap being talked about how clever all these other human species were. But only we have real cognition. You can’t manufacture that. Not even in AI. I spent two point six billion US trying. And you can’t pretend some erectus knew what he was doing.’
Putting his white sneakers up on the ottoman, he said, ‘Think about it. Think about how slowly, how cautiously natural selection works. My neck, by chance mutation, grew a quarter inch longer than yours, so I could reach the last berries. My retina curved one millimetre more, so I could sense how the light was directed. It took millions of years. So when we toddled out of Africa, quite recently, up through Israel, Syria, Turkey, Bulgaria … Christ, you’d think they’d sue the fucking travel agent … Anyway, this little band of African Sapiens adventurers … Tough little buggers.’
‘Certainly.’
‘And what did we need in order to be more successful than our competitors in Europe? The wild boar and the aurochs and the odd hairy hominin. Weapons? Tools? Muscle? But we’re saying that in a few minutes we were building cathedrals.’
‘A few minutes?’
‘In evolutionary terms, yes. Some tens of thousands of years. Not many. The way I see it, our species is hard to explain in Darwinian terms.’
‘But Darwin allowed for saltations,’ said Wood. ‘Long periods of stability. Plateaux. Then sudden leaps. Punctuated equilibrium.’
‘This was more than a leap, mate. From lithics to laptops in the blink of an eye.’
‘Can I get you gentlemen some more drinks?’ said a waitress.
‘Yes, I’ll have another Diet Pepsi. Not Coke: Pepsi. Malik?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
The waitress disappeared.
‘Now then, Malik. They tell me you’re feeling a bit pissed off. Neglected. Is that right?’
Dr Wood blew out his cheeks and exhaled slowly. ‘It’s a good job. And I have a great staff.’
‘But your research. The glory days are behind you, aren’t they?’
‘The institute’s still at the cutting edge in half a dozen fields.’
‘I know. I fund it. But you yourself.’
‘Well … Sometimes I feel a little restless.’
‘Good. Restless is excellent. I have a proposition.’ Parn leant forward and put his hand on Malik Wood’s knee.
‘Oh yes?’
Parn sat back again. ‘Did you know I fund a palaeoanthropology research programme? It’s attached to the University of London. They do top genetic work. Looking at old bones. Sequencing the genome of Homo vannesiensis. That kind of thing. I know people there. In the labs. I have access.’
‘I bet.’
‘You know all that work they did in Leipzig a few years back. The Max Planck people. Putting together genomes from scraps of forty-thousand-year-old bone. Brilliant stuff. But those PCR machines they used, they’re pretty old now. We have better kit.’
‘And?’
Lukas Parn’s voice had lost all trace of the Outback. ‘I’m interested in hybrids. What they can tell us about ourselves. How we got to be the way we are. The inexplicable leap. The “saltation”, as you call it.’
‘My God. You’re not a creationist, are you? You’re not going to try to prove that Homo sapiens was put together all in one go by God?’
‘No.’ Parn laughed. ‘No, I’m not a creationist. But I’m an exceptionalist. I believe that the superiority of Homo sapiens hasn’t yet been explained.’
‘You’re saying Darwin was wrong?’
‘Sure. He was wrong about a lot of things. Women. Genetics.’
‘But by the standards of what was known at the time, he—’
‘Exactly. “The time” was 1850-something. Getting on for two hundred years ago. Anyway, it’s not about a Victorian with a beard. It’s about genetics, a word unknown to Darwin.’
‘How am I involved in this?’
‘Your lab. Your touch.’
Dr Wood drank some wine. ‘I’ll need to know more.’
‘You will. In due course. But can I take it that you would be interested in having your salary increased. And a one-off bonus of, let’s say, five times salary on successful completion?’
‘It depends on what I need to do.’
‘Something well within your capabilities. I want you to make a substitution in the course of our new IVF research partnership with the NHS.’
‘A substitution?’
‘A simple switch. One guy’s sperm for another. Before it hits the egg.’
‘That’s ethically—’
‘Extremely important is what it is,’ said Parn. ‘From a scientific point of view. We’re looking at a human hybrid.’
Wood took a swig of his wine. ‘But there’d be a massive legal claim if it—’
‘If it came to a civil case for breach of contract, I’d bear the damages. I’ve taken advice from the best here in London. They say there’s a remote possibility of a criminal action, but it would be very hard to prove. So most likely they’d offer a “deferred prosecution agreement”.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You plead guilty, pay a large fine and promise to be a good boy. After a fixed period of good behaviour you’re deemed to have wiped the slate clean.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Fraud trials were too expensive and too complex for a jury to follow. So they developed this compromise.’
‘Suppose we all had to pay fines?’
‘Don’t worry. I’d have you covered. But it won’t get that far. Plus, you know how often these mistakes happen.’
‘Mistakes, yes, but not deliberate switches.’
‘The child would be of incredible scientific interest. And there’d be further rewards for you personally in terms of acclaim.’
‘I can’t see me being the first author of the paper in Science or Nature. Not if there’s a switch.’
‘As things stand now, maybe not. But by the time we’re ready to publish, when the kid’s eighteen, who knows what the landscape will look like. It won’t necessarily all depend on dusty old journals. There’ll be other ways of making sure you get the credit you deserve.’
Malik Wood thought of Therese Williams, FRS.
‘Go on,’ he said.