By Carol Van Sturm
“Possessing the Neanderthal genome raises the possibility of bringing Neanderthals back to life. Dr. George Church, a leading genome researcher at the Harvard Medical School, said Thursday that a Neanderthal could be brought to life with present technology for about $30 million.”*
A few old-timers still remember the days when a single complete sentence was enough to cost a journalist’s job. The rest of us might recall the mid-century blowback, when an epidemic confusion of nouns with verbs was linked conclusively to atrophy of the amygdala and other judgment/discernment areas of the brain. A scramble to re-institute grammatical speech and writing in popular culture ensued, hindered by the dearth of teachers able to distinguish “text” from “write.”
One of the most effective programs in that era turned out to be a simple game show called “Storytelling 101.” Contestants were required to answer the question of the week with a story from their own experience or imagination; the only rule was that every sentence had to be grammatically correct. For the first few seasons, winners were few and far between, but as the show caught on, contestants boned up on their English and the audience became more and more savvy.
The popularity of “Storytelling 101,” I believe, was due primarily to the clever use of questions designed to expose the more embarrassing or ludicrous elements of human nature. The most popular question of all turned out to be “What is the dumbest thing you’ve ever done?” Contestants never seemed to run out of appalling, ridiculous or heartbreaking anecdotes about themselves. Today, long after the need for the program has faded, reruns continue to attract new audiences, who may wonder at contestants’ grammatical heroics, but recognize immediately the follies and fallacies of human nature. In that vein, the editors have collected here some favorite winners from the show.
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30-Million-Dollar Baby
My name is Rawley and if you want my age any closer than between two-score and three-score, you are out of luck.
The dumbest thing I ever did was to volunteer in a science experiment. It wasn’t called a science experiment, which probably sounded too low-grade. No, they called it research. Whatever it was called, it was a mistake, and I made the biggest, dumbest mistake of all.
Here’s what happened. I was in my early twenties and had no money for college. In those days, believe it or not, you had to pay to go to a college or university, and people would spend the rest of their lives trying to pay off the loans they took out to get a degree in economics or accounting. I did not like owing money to anyone, so I would waitress days and pole-dance nights for one term, to make enough for the next term. Then I saw this ad in the student paper, asking for volunteers in a long-term research project. The money offered was enough to pay for my entire university fees through grad school. If that was too good to be true, I thought I’d be able to tell. I was wrong.
At first the job seemed simple and straightforward enough. Five young women were chosen to test a new method of artificial insemination. Or so we were told. Along with four other girls, I fit their criteria and was chosen. We had to sign a lengthy contract agreeing to carry any resulting pregnancy to term, to forego any heterosexual activities for the duration of the contract, to breast-feed the infant for six months, and then to give it up forever, never to make contact again. In return for this, we would receive free housing, meals, recreation and medical care for the entire term of the pregnancy and breast-feeding period, as well as three large payments: first upon signing the contract, second upon giving birth, and third upon surrendering the baby forever. Pregnancies that failed or miscarried were to be recompensed at two-thirds the total.
I thought it over and figured I could sacrifice a couple of years for that fat fee. I assumed the babies would be adopted by loving families, and since I’d never been pregnant it might even be interesting. It was, at first. The other girls were good company, and we all enjoyed our new-found security and wealth. In no time at all, it seemed, three of us were pregnant and two had miscarried and been paid off. It was about that time I began to have misgivings. I was four or five weeks along and the doctors put my mood down to morning sickness, but I knew better. A third girl miscarried and then got in touch, telling us a rumor she had heard in the lab after going back to classes.
The rumor seemed too weird to be true, but there was enough detail in it to raise questions. By being nosy and pumping gossipy staff, we remaining diehards were able to confirm that the experiment we were in had nothing to do with artificial insemination technology. It was, in fact, an attempt to reproduce a Neanderthal person by replacing human DNA with reconstructed Neanderthal DNA and implanting it in our unsuspecting wombs. The project budget was 30 million dollars, and the scientists heading it figured to become world famous as well as rich.
Neither Tina – my remaining pregnant subject – nor I felt comfortable with this, though we couldn’t say exactly why. Tina herself was greatly relieved when she began bleeding and miscarried, happy to leave with her fat check in hand. The cottage they’d rented for us seemed vacant and gloomy after she left. With no one to talk things out with, I brooded. That’s when I learned what a broody hen goes through.
From the web and the library I read everything I could find about Neanderthals, and was not comforted. They were a different species from humans and our own DNA contained no remnant of theirs; they’d gone extinct 30,000 years ago and no one knew what they were like, whether they’d had language or songs, what kind of society they had. The thought of this unknown, alien creature growing inside me was distinctly unsettling; the idea of it sucking my breasts even worse. With no one to talk to, I became a bit morbid about the whole thing.
I was two months pregnant when the breakthrough happened. I don’t know what else to call it. Every day I was supposed to walk at least two miles as part of the health regimen for the pregnancy, and one day for variety I walked a bit farther to the arboretum and new aquarium the city had just built. In the main exhibit, a large circular tank with glass panels on the submerged walls, a young whale of some once-extinct species swam incessantly in disconsolate circles. At the glass panels and on walkways above the tank, crowds gathered, pointing and staring, asking inane questions of the keepers.
“What does he eat?”
“Does he bite?”
“Can I give him a sandwich?”
“Does he ever sleep?”
“Make him stop for a picture.”
I stood with the crowd, watching the whale and wishing illogically that he would stare back, would notice me, make eye contact. Every day that week I came back, hating that poor whale but unable to stay away. On the last day, a Sunday, the crowds were so dense I never came close enough to see the whale. I sat on a bench among pagoda trees in the arboretum to rest, and suddenly, without conscious thought, I saw the same crowds jostling and staring with prurient zeal at my baby in a glass display case – first as infant, then toddler, then naked teenager, perpetually on exhibit, perpetually alone in a world vacant of all comfort or companionship or love or fun or adventure.
I never went back to the cottage. Late that afternoon I checked into a clinic in a distant city and aborted a grateful 30-million-dollar exhibit. I say grateful because in my dreams she turns to me, half smiling, and fades into peaceful extinction once more. A few days later the young whale died, of loneliness I think. All funding for the Neanderthal revival project dried up after my escape, and so far as I know the project is long forgotten. I certainly hope so. It was a mistake I would hate to see any young woman repeat.
- * Nicholas Wade, “Scientists say they reconstructed a Neanderthal genome,” Friday, February 13, 2009, International Herald Tribune.