Killer Chromosomes

Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy

For Sally Newmark-a gracious person, a beautiful woman, and the finest aunt in the whole world

CHAPTER ONE

They were afraid.

It was so small they couldn't see it with their naked eyes. It had yet to do them any harm. The nonscientists among them weren't even sure exactly what it did.

But 200 families from the greater Boston area, from as far away as Duxbury and even southern New Hampshire, pushed their way that rainy summer afternoon into the dirt and cement courtyard of the Boston Graduate School of Biological Sciences to protest against its manufacture.

"No. Not manufacture," explained an architect to one of the mothers. "They change it around but they don't make it new. Nobody can."

"Whatever," yelled the mother. "Stop them."

She knew what they were doing here at BGSBS was bad. They were making monsters that no one could stop. Horrible things like diseases no one could cure, or mutations that would come into your bedroom and put their hairy hands all over you and lick you all over and do things to you. Maybe rape you. And then you would have that horror in your body.

Like the devil copulating with Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby, except here it could be real. They were so small, these things that could do the horrors, that they could enter your body without your even knowing it. Go right through your skin. You might not even have a blemish but you'd be dead.

And your babies would suffer worse. She liked the way one speaker had put it the night before at the pre-rally rally.

"I'm not going to tell you horror stories. I am not going to drag out some Bela Lugosi image out here in front of you. I am not going to use some scare tactics like telling you a mad scientist is laughing insanely over some bubbling test tube that is going to burn you all to death. I am simply going to give you a scientific fact: life, as you know it, is probably already over. You are probably already too late. We are not going to be doomed. We are doomed."