Page 82 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Hitler’s Ghost

reasonable period of time. That, in turn, can only be done on
supercomputers, machines whose usage rates run into hundreds of
thousands of dollars for just a few hours. Ludwig, in essence, by
issuing a press release, was trawling for an institution with deep
enough pockets to sponsor his brainchild, Genoptima. What he
caught was hell.
In all fairness, his proposal differed only in degree from the
natural phenomenon of mate selection, as modified in prior decades
by scientific advances—primarily in the prevention of heritable
diseases via unintentionally combined recessive genes—and in the
selection of registered in vitro chromosomal contributors. According
to Ludwig, nothing in principle prevented anyone from finding the
best possible fit in the world for his or her own reproduction (unless
a clone was desired) except the limitations of computational power,
and he had developed the optimization software to demolish that
obstacle. Once implemented, it would dynamically reprocess all the
known DNA of humanity’s teeming billions against the latest
information concerning dangerous or desirable genes and come up
with a list of names and addresses of the best matches in the world.
The prospective parent wouldn’t have to marry that person—or even
ever meet: a tiny cell swab sufficed.
Genoptima, as presented in the media and imperfectly
understood, outraged religious groups, racial purity nationalists and
social welfare organizations already struggling with the burgeoning
population of unwanted children. Obviously only the wealthy would
be able to avail themselves of this service. It started looking and
sounding like eugenics—but anyone aware of trends in private sector
medical insurance knew that this was already happening in a negative
way: always looking for ways to deny coverage, these companies were
very active in genetic screening. But Roy Ludwig was a good
lightning rod for public wrath. Someone pointed out that most of the
already-extant DNA typing had been done in criminal cases, creating
a virtual seed bank of suspected murderers and their known victims.
Finally, a letter to an academic journal pointed out that a population
from which all recessive genes were weeded out would be left
vulnerable to environmental changes by the decline in variability;
further, that rat research had demonstrated that the type to which
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