Page 91 - Just Deserts

PIVOT

exponentially since the nineteen-forties. The human race has boxed
itself in; nowhere to go without coming up against these chemicals,
and progress—technological and economic—depends on producing
ever more of them. You getting all that?”
“Uh, yes. Great problem confronting us, eh?”
“Right. And don’t think the gigantic chemical companies are
unaware of it! That’s why they’ve supported my research, taking a
gamble on an unknown academic scientist. But I digress: the next
thing you must consider is the old rule that ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny. That is, in the embryonic development of every organism,
it passes through successive stages of its own evolutionary history.
For a primate, that means transformation through proto-aquatic and
amphibian characteristics to increasingly higher mammalian features.
Again, this is known to every child in school. You with me?”
Fuller nodded, his pen dancing across the page. Kingswater,
warming to his topic, shed his jacket.
“Okay. Now to the present: thanks to advances in microbiology,
we are able today to study and manipulate individual genes. As yet
this has been a rather tentative revolution; people are needlessly
frightened of ‘tampering with nature.’ Of course, nature is not a fixed
set of conditions, on any level—but the man in the street has his own
illusion of the immutable cycles of reproduction, of the weather and
the seasons. Nothing further from the truth: everything is in flux.
Bah! Where was I? Ah, the theory and its applications. The great
insight I had was putting together the wide range of resistance to
toxins and antigens throughout the animal kingdom with the
phenomenon of palingenesis—the embryonic stages—and
contemporary technology for gene research and alteration. The
result: PIVOT. Brilliant, eh?”
“Uh, yes, I can see that,” uttered Phil Fuller respectfully. “But
could you be a bit more specific? Some examples of this theory in
action would make it more concrete to our readers.”
The professor pouted, mashing mustache hairs into beard. “Man,
isn’t it obvious? No? All right. I’ll take it one step at a time. Suppose
there is a certain chemical in the environment: say, dioxin, for
instance, which is known to have harmful effects on human beings.
You may argue that it should never have been released into the
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