Page 1309 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

"With only one lung, it takes twice as many cigarettes to get the same nicotine. Therefore I have had to increase my smoking, not cut down. This should be obvious, but then, you do not think like a scientist, you think like a woman of faith. You think like an obedient person. When you find out something is bad, you don't do it."
"Your research was into genetic limitations on human intelligence."
"Was it?"
"Because it's in that area that you are always cited. Of course, these papers were never *about* that exact subject, or they too would have been classified. But the titles of the articles mentioned in the footnotes -- the ones you never wrote, since you never published anything -- are all tied to that area."
"It is so easy in a career to find oneself in a rut."
"So I want to ask you a hypothetical question."
"My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind."
"Suppose someone were to break the law and attempt to alter the human genome, specifically to enhance intelligence."
"Then someone would be in serious danger of being caught and punished."
"Suppose that, using the best available research, he found certain genes that he could alter in an embryo that would enhance the intelligence of the person when he was born."
"Embryo! Are you testing me? Such changes can only happen in the egg. A single cell."
"And suppose a child was born with these alterations in place. The child was born and he grew up enough for his great intelligence to be noticed."
"I assume you are not speaking of your own child."
"I'm speaking of no child at all. A hypothetical child. How would someone recognize that this child had been genetically altered? Without actually examining the genes."
Anton shrugged. "What does it matter if you examine the genes? They will be normal." "Even though you altered them?"
"It is such a little change. Hypothetically speaking."
"Within the normal range of variation?"