Tasmanian devil by Alexis Rockman
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and Mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
Cormac McCarthy. Final paragraph of The Road.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road ends on a hopeful note. The sweet small boy has been taken in by a family of good people. In the first chapter a series of massive nuclear blasts had destroyed the whole world and, it’s inferred, most animal and plant life and most humans. What is honourable in humankind has survived though and there is a sense of some kind of renewal. But the cryptic final paragraph reveals that the world cannot be remade and can never again be a paradise. I first read the novel when it was newly published and I didn’t give much thought to what the world might have been like in the moments before the blasts. Then Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize, along with environmental scientists from the United Nations, made me reconsider the notion of war. We’re already seeing small wars breaking out over food and water. In the last few days news stories about cloning and genetic manipulations, along with reading Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, have made me wonder if the natural world, in The Road, had already been destroyed beyond recognition before those fateful nuclear blasts.
The coffee wars were over the new Happicuppa bean developed by a HelthWyzer subsidiary. Until then the individual coffee beans on each bush had ripened at different times and needed to be hand-picked processed and shipped in small quantities, but the Happicuppa coffee bush was designed so that ll of its beans would ripen simultaneously, and coffee could be grown on huge plantations and harvested with machines. This threw the small growers out of business and reduced both them and their labourers to starvation-level poverty. The resistance movement was global. Riots broke out, crops were burned, Happicuppa cafes were looted, Happicuppa personnel were car-bombed or kidnapped or shot by snipers or beaten to death by mobs; and, on the other side, peasants were massacred by the army.
Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake.
Oryx and Crake is also strangely hopeful in the way that The Road is. Humankind has been destroyed through an act of biological terrorism, but a set of humanoid creatures that had been bred without artistic and religious impulses, begins to create images and develop a sense of the divine as they seek to understand their world. But the natural world had already been perverted and societies torn apart by genetic manipulations of plants and animals before all the humans died.
They had lunch at one of the five-star Rejoov restaurants, on an air-conditioned pseudo balcony overlooking the main Compound organic-botanics greenhouse. Crake had the kanga-lamb, a new Australian splice that combined the placid character and high protein yield of the sheep with the kangaroo’s resistance to disease and the absence of methane-producing ozone-destroying flatulence. Jimmy ordered the raisin stuffed capon – real free-range capon, real sun-dried raisins, Crake assured him. Jimmy was so used to Chickie Nobs by now, to their bland tofu-like consistency and their inoffensive flavour, that the Capon tasted quite wild.
Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake.
At Christmas I read Margaret Mittelbach and David Crewdson’s Carnivorous Nights, their account of a trip made to Tasmania in search of the Tasmanian Tiger and the myths that had grown up around it. They were accompanied by Alexis Rockman, who did the illustrations for the book. At the beginning of the trip they visited scientists at the Australian Museum in Sydney who were working on a project to clone a Tasmanian Tiger from an embryo stored there. It sounded crazy, straight out of Jurassic Park. Crewdson and Mittelbach imagined “…a zoo of now extinct animals: dodos, passenger pigeons, woolly mammoths.”
The Farm by Alexis Rockman
They recalled Alexis Rockman’s painting The Farm, which has farm animals gradually being altered into forms more friendly to the food industry. “Would a future Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger) be ‘fixed’ along those lines?” they wondered. ”It had already been suggested that the tiger clones be made bigger and fiercer so that they could be released on the Australian mainland and compete with dingoes. Would cloning scientists create a super thylacine, immune to disease and with bulletproof skin? What about making them smaller and more docile? Then they could be sold in a late-twenty-first-century pet shop. They could probably even be made to glow in the dark.” And now it’s been done. While I was buying coffee early on Tuesday morning I saw reports on the morning news programmes that a thylacine gene has been successfully transferred to a mouse.
It will not really be a Tasmanian tiger, alive again decades after it became extinct. However, it could have all the markings. Scientists, who achieved a world first by extracting a cartilage gene from the extinct thylacine and successfully inserting it into a mouse embryo, are already thinking about their next steps. Now they have proven it can be done, the project’s leader, Andrew Pask, from the University of Melbourne’s zoology department, said they may try to transplant genes that gave the animal its dog-like features, or its distinctly patterned skin, into a mouse….Transplanting certain dinosaur genes into living animals should finally reveal what their skin looked like, or resolve the debate about whether they were cold or warm-blooded. Transplanting genes from the fossils of Neanderthal man could provide clues to human evolution.
Richard Macey. Sydney Morning Herald. 19th May, 2008
This week the Tasmanian Devil was put on the endangered species list. The devils’ playful habit of biting each other on the face has caused the spread of facial tumours. I’ve read about experiments that are being done with the genetic material of the only Tasmanian devil on the Australian mainland, in captivity, that’s developed antibodies to the tumours. A Sydney Morning Herald story reported that “Cedric, the first devil known to have an immune response to DFTD had remained disease-free almost five months after being injected with DFTD cells. If he remains healthy at the end of the incubation period – late next month – this will suggest that devils that share his genetic make-up are either resistant to DFTD or capable of responding to a vaccine.” Genetic manipulations for medical and cosmetic reasons, motivated by business gains, is at the dark heart of Oryx and Crake. In Wired magazine I learned about medical innovations that are not pursued because they won’t have wide commercial applications are called ‘orphan drugs’. One of these orphan drugs may possibly help treat Ted Kennedy’s malignant brain tumour, the writer suggested.
Kennedy’s best option may be an experimental drug made from giant yellow Israeli scorpion venom. It is produced by TransMolecular Inc. and has advanced into Phase II clinical trials for the treatment of gliomas, the type of tumor that will probably kill him. The medication, TM-601, is a peptide, a short protein which has a remarkable ability to stick to some types of cancer cells while avoiding normal ones. Attach it to some radioactive iodine and the molecule becomes a smart weapon — killing cancer cells while leaving their healthy neighbors unscathed. In an ongoing clinical trial, the drug will be intracavitary administered, which means it will be squirted straight into the patients’ brains.
Wired Magazine
In Oryx and Crake the research by drug companies looks at creating genetically perfect children, while copies of them were being created to keep on farms to supply spare organs for the principal children in a family, if needed. This is something that’s being debated now. Olivia Judson’s column in the New York Times, a few days ago, wrote about a “complex and controversial” piece of legislation making its way through British parliament:
One of the provisions of the bill permits the creation of “saviour siblings” – children created via in vitro fertilization (I.V.F.) to ensure their tissues will match those of a sick older brother or sister, in order that the new child could provide, say, a bone marrow transplant. (Conceiving a child the old-fashioned way doesn’t guarantee a tissue match.) Another is a reduction of the legal time-limit on abortion, which up to now has been 24 weeks. A third provision – and the most controversial of all – permits the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos, or “cybrids,” for medical research. On Monday, in the first stage of passing the legislation, members of the House of Commons voted in favour.
Filed under: Cormac McCarthy, Tasmanian devil, Thylacine, clones , Alexis Rockman, clones, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Tasmanian devil, Thylacine
