An essay by Dr. Darren Hinton, as provided by Stuart Webb
Art by Luke Spooner
Extract From The Very-Modern Prometheus By Dr. Darren Hinton.
When I was a student and first started to study genetic engineering, I used to get teased a lot. The never-ending parade of Jurassic Park sequels didn’t help, of course; every time the ninth or tenth film was released my family would join in with a chorus of “So that’s what you get up to, is it?” and “You were so busy wondering if you could do a thing, you never stopped to ask if you should!” style misquotes when I asked someone to pass the salt at Christmas dinner.
I grew to loathe Jeff Goldblum.
Of course, my fellow students were much more sophisticated. “Hey Frankenstein!” they’d shout whenever I or my colleagues walked in and out of the GE building. You could tell the English students because they’d qualify it with “Hey Dr. Frankenstein!”, though I don’t believe for a second any of them had read the bloody book. They were too busy being more successful with girls as parties with their second-hand poetry.
I grew to hate English students as well.
The point is, everyone, and I mean everyone, who hears you’re working in genetic engineering assumes you’re involved in some crazy shit. Building supermen. Creating monsters. Cloning Marilyn Monroe and/or Hitler.
I often thought we should place Hitler’s brain in Marilyn Monroe’s body to kill two birds with one stone.
But it was never about that. I mean, sure, you hear stories about government projects. And we’ve had more than one world leader over the last few decades who could have been the result of a botched Hitler cloning. But for me and the people I worked with, it was all about helping people in small ways. Improving quality of life.
I mean sure, it was about improving the quality of life of those who could afford it, but this was expensive, ground-breaking stuff. I devoted my career to helping people missing limbs get replacements–entirely authentic to their bodies replacements.
And we’re not talking “Super” limbs here. It was an eye for an eye, an arm for an arm and so on. Straight cloned and grafted substitutes for what they’d lost. There should have been no way any of it could have gone wrong.
I guess we underestimated humanity’s ability to fuck things up.
