Page 29 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Archaeontogeny

the monetary shortfall out of his own pocket. The episode also cost
him credibility: Cutter’s Folly became a topic of academic derision.
But it did not reduce his appeal as a lecturer, and no disciplinary
action was even contemplated.
Nor had it dimmed his enthusiasm for genetic research and
theorization. It took him years to get out of debt, and during that
dark period he continued to generate ideas difficult to prove or
disprove without vast investments of scarce funds nobody connected
with academic grants would ever consider giving him. It had been
recently discovered, for instance, that aging at the cellular level was
caused to large extent by telomeres. Those repeated nucleic acid units
at the ends of DNA protected the chromosome from degradation by
providing a redundant buffer at the time of cell division and
replication. Owing to the loss of the last bits of ACGT molecular
coding at some point in that recurring process during the life of an
organism, the cell effectively had a lifespan built into it. The
professor’s answer to this was simple: develop telomere protection,
along the lines of other man-made proteins with only one possible
interaction in the organism, like a lock and key. It would ensure the
accurate duplication of a cell each and every time, effectively
conferring upon it a sort of immortality. He called this completely
hypothetical molecule “xeroxin.” Its design could be engineered
entirely on a computer prior to any testing in vitro. But he found
himself effectively blackballed from consideration for any project
linking his name to microchips, despite getting some talented
graduate students in microbiology to add their names to his proposal.
That was a disaster for him. Without computer resources he could
not carry out any of his grandiose schemes. His idea for software,
tentatively named SOLOMON, to determine paternity between
identical twin candidates, also went nowhere. The same cold shoulder
was turned to his idea of introducing genes into mammals from
bacteria able to metabolize high levels of environmental toxins,
ultimately to develop Homo immunens for the coming hostile
biosphere. His colleagues urged him to return to a more traditional
view of anthropology and its uses. He almost did, and that was where
I came in: he couldn’t raise a dime for his latest and greatest research

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