Insistence of Vision by David Brin
BW: Just one, Sandra. At a lab party, some of our students played It’s Reborn! for laughs. We all found it hilarious.
Sandra: So we won’t be seeing all sorts of ancient throwbacks coming out of these cocoons? No bodies repairing and restoring themselves back into, say, Neanderthals? Or dinosaurs? Or gross slime?
BW: Not any Neanderthals or dinosaurs, I promise. And there’s a reason. Because all of us, from you and me down to a newborn baby, are in our final, adult form.
Sandra: Babies... are adults?
BW: This may take a minute. You see, all animal life originally passed through multiple phases, and it is still true for a majority of complex species, like insects, arthropods and most fish.
Mating adults make embryos or eggs. Eggs create the larval stage, in vast numbers, whose job it is to eat and grow. A small fraction of larvae survive to transform again – as when insects pupate, for example a caterpillar’s cocoon – turning at last into the imago or adult form, whose primary job is to complete the cycle. You know... with sex.
Sandra: Clearly a favorite word for some of you out there. Settle down. So Dr. Stimson, what does this –
BW: But some life orders have abandoned the old process. For birds, reptiles and especially placental mammals, all the early phases seem to have been compacted down into the early embryonic period. It all takes place within the egg or the mother’s womb. Though incomplete and neotenous, our human infants are born already in the adult stage. And hence when a patient undergoes recuperative chrysalis –
GS: – none of them ever comes out with ancient traits like bony eye-ridges or tails or swinging from lamp posts. At least, none so far!
Sandra: So far? You mean there’s still hope! I was sort of hankering for a nice tail.
GS: If it ever proves possible Sandra, I promise you’ll be the first one we’ll tell.
Tadpole swishes tail
Breathes water, while preparing
Brand new lungs and legs
Lab Notes: George Stimson - 8/8/2030
I was annoyed with Beverly. We had been asked to keep things light, not wonkish, for the CBC broadcast. She gets so pedantic and lectury.
And yet, her ad hoc little rant about stages of life kept prodding at me, afterward. Of course I already knew all that – about embryo-larva-pupa-adult metamorphosis. It’s basic high school bio. Still, the notion would not let go of me. And I wondered.
We’ve accomplished “miracles” by uncovering traits, tools and processes that have lain dormant in the human genome for a hundred million years, ever since mammals abandoned organ replacement for a quick and agile lifestyle. By learning tricks to fill in the lost portions of code and re-start the processes of organ regrowth, Beverly and I have guaranteed ourselves lasting fame. And the techniques helped save both our lives, staving off our own health problems for the time being, letting us enjoy our renown for a little while.
That may satisfy her, but I’ve always been kind of an insatiable bastard. And I can’t help wondering.
Despite all our progress, we’ve only explained another five percent or so of the mystery DNA. Even after filling in methods of organ regrowth, lost since the Triassic, there remains another whole layer of enigmatic chemistry. Huge stretches of genetic code that are both still unknown and clearly even older than a mere hundred million years!
Oh, it’s pretty clear by now that the bulk of it is somehow related to organ regrowth, but in some way that I still don’t understand.
It’s infuriating! I’ve been plotting codes, cataloguing and interpolating most of the likely missing pieces. Without these lost switches, the dormant genes have languished, unused for ages. Till now I have only dared experiment with the switches one at a time, in petri dishes, never in whole animals. And never all at once. Not without a theory to explain what they’re for.
Only now, there’s a theory. A good one, I’m sure of it! Beverly’s blather about life phases made me realize just how far back this new layer of code really goes.
Extrapolate the decay rates and one thing is clear from drift-clock measurements. This second layer of mystery genes goes back not one hundred million years...
...but almost three hundred million! All the way to the early Permian Period, when amphibians were mostly pushed aside by the ancestors of reptiles, birds, dinosaurs and mammals. All of whom gave up the multi-stage style of living. Skipping the larval and pupa phases and spending all their lives as adults.
It’s astonishing. Can the second layer of dormant DNA really come to us from that far back?
It appears to! Which demands the next question. Once you set aside regulatory genes and those donated by viruses, and the ones Beverly and I discovered for regrowth...
...could the remainder be DNA that our lineage used, way back when pre-mammal ancestors did pass through a “larval” stage?
If so, what would a “larval mammal” look like?
My best guess? Look at a frog! Amphibians are the order closest to us that still pass through metamorphosis. The larval tadpole lives one kind of life underwater, then transforms into a frog. But there are frogs and toads who abandoned the first, aquatic phase, dealing with the transformation as we do... inside the embryo....
This is amazing. It all fits! I had prepared retroviruses with the replacement codons weeks ago, but had been holding back, because there was no pattern, no logic. Only now I see it!
I’ve prepared a dozen chrysalis units and Dorothy Aguelles is prepping a rat for each one. I’ll handle the injections myself. It may take a hundred iterations, but they will all be meticulously recorded.
I feel almost reckless with excitement. Is that a side effect of my earlier treatments? Or am I giddy from impressing all those young people with my juggling? Or is it the scientific prospect before me, standing on the verge of discovering something fantastic?
Like, perhaps, the true fountain of youth.
Fat n’ glossy – lucky eater
Many-legged – big survivor
Hunger changes – now compelling
Pick a stem and – hang there eager
Twist and writhe while – glossy sticky
Strands emerge from – surprise places
Nature makes you – spin the strands round
Nature makes you – weave a garment
Tube to transform – into raiment
Into what you – were born meant-for
Lab Notes: George Stimson - 10/12/30
I had that dream again, even more intense than before – of being swaddled in some dark, closed place, drowning. But only part of me was terrified! An unimportant part, fading into insignificance. Palliated and balanced by a rising sense of eagerness.
A growing, tense desire for a return to the womb. For a new womb.
I awoke in sticky sweat. A sheen that took scrubbing to remove, leaving skin that seemed baby-tender. Soft.
This time I gave in to my suspicions and, upon arriving at the lab, I drew some blood to test.
It’s in me.
The latest retrovirus. The one with our most up-to-date cocktail of missing-DNA insertions.
And there are symptoms other than weird dreams. A strange prickling of the skin. A rising sense of exhilaration, almost eagerness, for something barely, vaguely perceived.
And my cancer was gone. The blood lymphoma. The slow prostate tumor. Both of them simply gone!
Or else... I looked closer. The cancers were still there... just no longer wild, voracious, uncooperative. Instead, they were jostling into structured positions with respect to one another – differentiating.
I hurried over to the latest batch of rat-cocoons, heart pounding. Yesterday they had seemed okay, raising our hopes. After thirty-three trials in which critters failed and died in varied gruesome ways, because of mistakes in my collection of extrapolated intron-switches, this set was doing fine! Still swaddled inside their protective encasements, they were showing signs of incredibly youthful tone and vigor, along with chromosomal re-methyliza
At last. At last, it dawned on me.
I know what’s really happening!
ᚖ
Beverly, when you read this, I may no longer be the George Stimson whom you knew.
I was right to follow your hunch about metamorphic life phases. But you and I both had one aspect all wrong.
Completely backward, in fact.
Yes, the second layer of dormant traits does go back three hundred million years, instead of merely one hundred million. And yes, it’s all about life phases that mammals and reptiles and birds abandoned, way back then. And yes, our methods seem to have succeeded at filling in most of the gaps, well enough to re-ignite those dormant traits, under the right conditions.
We’re gonna get another Nobel for this.
Which is small potatoes, given what’s now at stake.
But I had one thing all wrong. And you got it wrong too!
I thought it was the larval stage that had gone missing, that our ancestors abandoned so long ago, getting rid of that stage by cramming all larval development into the earliest bits of embryo. Birds and reptiles and mammals don’t do larvae as a major life cycle, right? All of us go straight to adult phase.
So I figured: what harm could there be in activating some of those old larval traits in test animals? See if it will let us renew the body in spectacular ways. Why not? How could larval genes do much of anything harmful to an adult?
Set aside my clumsy lab error. Accidentally sticking myself, I somehow got a dose of restoration codons from a carelessly trans-species retro-virus. Okay, that was my bad. But the rats are doing well, and so should I. Moreover it promises to be the greatest adventure ever!
For you see I was wrong in a key assumption, Beverly. And so were you.
Mammals and reptiles and dinosaurs and birds... we simplified our life cycles, all right, eliminating one of the phases. But it wasn’t the larval stage we omitted!
We gave up adulthood.
Three million centuries ago, all the dry-living vertebrates – for some reason – stopped transforming into their final life phase. Storks and tortoises. Cows and people. We’re all larvae! Immature Lost Boys who long ago refused – like Peter Pan – to move ahead and become whatever’s next.
Some species of caterpillars do that, never turning into butterflies or moths. Just like you and me and all our cousins.
All the proud, warm-blooded or feathered or hairy or scaly creatures... including proud Homo sapiens. All of us – Lost Boys.
Only now, a dozen rats and your dear colleague are about to do something that hasn’t been achieved by any of our common ancestors in three hundred eons. Not in seven percent of the age of the Earth. Not in at least ten million generations.
We’re going to grow up.
Change transforms winter
Winds blow in spring, then fall
Death is the maestro
December 12, 2030:
What a dope!
Oh George, you prize fool.
I always knew that someday he would pull something really, really stupid. But this beats all. An amateurish lab error. Breaking half the rules on handling retroviruses. And scribbling a blizzard of sophomoric rationalizations. I could have intervened, if only he called me sooner. I would have rushed home from the treatment center and to hell with my own problems!
I could have administered anti-virals. Maybe arrested the process.
Or else strangled him. No jury on Earth would convict a dying old woman, not with the exculpating excuses he has given me.
Now, it’s too late. Those antediluvian traits are fully activated. By the time I got to the lab, our students were in a frenzy, half of them babbling in terror while the other half scurried about in a mad mania of excitement, doing what George had asked of them.
Taking data and maintaining his chrysalis. His cocoon.
I looked inside. Within the metal casement and its gel sustainment fluid, his skin has been exuding another protective layer, something no mammal has done since long before we grew fur or started lactating to feed our young. A cloud of fibers that tangle and self-organize to form a husk stronger than spider silk.
I’ve sent for an ultrasound scanner. Meanwhile, I plan to sacrifice one of the rats to find out if my suspicion is correct.
ᚖ
Yes, George, I believe you were right, up to a point, and I was wrong. I am now convinced.
Human beings are larvae and not adults. Congratulations.
You and I have discovered how to re-start a process our forebears abandoned, so long ago. And yes, if the codon restoration is as good as it seems, so far, then you may be heading for conversion into that long-neglected imago phase. Something completely unknown to any of us.
Oh, but underneath brilliance, you are, or were, such a dope. This is not how science should be done! You’ve taken a great discovery and plunged ahead recklessly like the mad scientist in some Michael Crichton movie. We are supposed to be open, patient and mature truth seekers. Scientists set an example by avoiding secrecy and haste, holding each other accountable with reciprocal criticism. We spot each others’ errors.
If you had been patient, I would have explained something to you, George. Something that, evidently, you did not know.
The caterpillar does not become a butterfly.
ᚖ
We dissected one of the rats from its chrysalis, and confirmed my fears. Something my organo-chemist partner would have known, if he ever took Bio 101.
People think that when it weaves a cocoon around itself, the caterpillar undergoes a radical change in body shape. That its many legs transform themselves somehow into gaudy wings. That its leaf-cutting mouth adjusts and re-shapes into a nectar-sipping proboscis.
That isn’t what happens at all.
Instead, after weaving and sealing itself into a pupa shroud, the caterpillar dissolves! It melts into a slurry, super rich in nutrients that feed a completely different creature!
The embryo of the butterfly – a tiny clump of cells that the caterpillar had been carrying, all along – this embryo now erupts in growth, feeding upon the former caterpillar’s liquefied substance, growing into an entirely new being. One that eventually bursts forth, unfolding its imago wings to flutter toward a destiny that no caterpillar could ever know or envision, any more than an egg grasps the life of a chicken. Any more than the caterpillar understood the compulsion to seal itself in silk, ending its own existence at the command of a biological clock.
Two entirely distinct and separate life forms, sharing chromosomes and a cycle of life, but using separate genomes that take turns. And no shared brain or neurons or memories to connect them.
That is how it goes for many insects. The purest form of metamorphosis.
Of course, things are less rigid among amphibians. The tadpole does transform itself into a frog, instead of horrifically dying to feed its replacement. Or, rather, death and replacement take place piecemeal, gradually, over weeks. The frog might even remember a little of that earlier phase, wriggling and breathing watery innocence. I had hoped to find something like that, when we opened the rat chrysalis. A becoming, rather than wholesale substitution.
But no.
Some students gagged, retched, or fainted at the gush of noxious slurry... a rat smoothy, peppered with undissolved teeth... then quailed back in disgust from the weird thing that we found growing at the cocoon’s bottom end. Pale and leathery. Still small, tentative and hungry. Soft, but with ribbed, fetal wings and early glints of claws, plus a mouth that sucked, desperately eager for more liquefied rat, before finally going still.
And so I knew, before the ultrasound trolley arrived, what we would find happening in George’s cocoon.
I never liked him as much as people thought I did. And the feeling, I am sure, was mutual. But we made a great team. And we changed the world more than we ever thought possible. And I mourned the end of the larva-man I had known...
...while preparing to meet his adult successor.
December 24, 2030:
At last, I understand cancer.
Rebel cells that start growing on their own, without regard to their role in a larger organism, insatiably dividing.
They never made any sense, in the Darwinian scheme of things. None of these behaviors benefit “descendants.” Compared even to the way that the ferocious voracity of a virus makes new generations of viruses, cancer seems to care nothing about posterity or the rewards of fitness.
And yet, it’s not all inchoate or random! Cancers aren’t just cells that have failed. They defend themselves. They force veins to grow around them in order to seize resources from the body they eventually kill. They are adaptive. But how and why? What reproductive advantage is served? What entity gets selected?
Now I know.
Cancer is an attempted putsch, a rebellion by parts of our own genome. Parts that were repressed so long ago that the gasoline in your car was growing as a tree in fetid, Permian swamps.
Parts that keep trying to say: “Okay larva, you’ve had your turn. Now it’s time to express other genes, other traits. Let us unleash your other half! Fulfill the potential. Become the other thing that you inherently are.
That’s what cancer is saying to us. That it’s time to grow up.
A hugely complex transformation that our ancestors quashed long ago – (why?) – keeps trying to rise up! But with so many switches and codes lost from lack of use, it never actually gets underway. Just glimmers, the most basic and reflexive things. New-old kinds of cells try to waken, to take hold, to transform. And failing that, they keep trying nonetheless. That’s cancer.
I know now.
I know because the rats have told me.
Lab rats are notoriously easy to give tumors. And there, in George’s retrovirus, replacing and inserting missing codons, are dozens of fiercely carcinogenic switches. That’s what made this latest batch successful! And I can also tell…
…that the thing growing inside George’s tube arose out of his own cancers. Those are the portions – the adult-embryo – that are taking over now, differentiating into new tissues and organs, cooperating as cancers have never been seen to cooperate before.
And it looks about ready to come out. Whatever George has become. Maybe tomorrow. A Christmas present for the whole world.