“Welcome, Dr. Vanderhorne,” Jane said, walking in big strides towards the pair.
“I’m Doctor Ingram, the director of this lab,” she said while she gave the girl a firm handshake. It felt like she was trying to get a grip on a water balloon.
“I’m Dora,” the girl replied. “Nice to meet you uh....Ma’am.” That stung. Jane liked to think that she still warranted “Ms.” She didn’t even call her own mother Ma’am.
“I’m delighted to be able to give you a tour of our facilities,” Jane continued.
“Yes,” Vanderhorne continued. “Doctor Ingram’s entire lab is current devoted to cutting edge pharmaceutical research for your father.” He emphasized the next few words to Jane. “One hundred percent.”
“Come on,” Jane said. “I’ll show you up.” When Vanderhorne turned to follow, she added, “No need for you to join us Walter. I know you’re a busy man and are already quite familiar with the lab.”
“Oh, no problem,” Vanderhorne said. “I like to stay current with all the research being done on the university’s dime. Plus I promised Dora’s father that I’d take good care of his daughter.”
“No biggie. I take care of myself just fine,” Dora said. “I only see my dad like once a month. He just leaves me his credit cards, and I’m good to go.”
Vanderhorne looked unsure.
“Seriously, the credit limit’s so high, I could probably fund your whole university off it,” she added.
Vanderhorne started to turn away. “Well, if Dora’s okay with it...”
“Yes! Just us girls now. Shoo!”
Jane almost didn’t believe it, but Dora actually then gave Walter a quick pat on the butt as he walked out the door. She had to stifle a laugh as she led Dora up the elevator to her lab.
“Come on then,” Jane said, gesturing for Dora to follow her. “Let me give you a quick tutorial on genetic engineering.” Jane walked into the conference room and gestured for Dora to sit. The conference room had a glass ceiling which allowed natural light into the room. There was a small garden of vegetables and herbs along one wall. Dora jumped up onto the conference room table and sat cross-legged in the middle.
“Humans have been doing genetic engineering for centuries,” Jane said, settling into her standard presentation. “Until recently, this was all done indirectly through breeding and grafting. The basic premise is that you should be able to get a superior plant by combining two plants with different advantageous traits. For instance, early plant breeders took a high-yield, mildew susceptible pea, cross-pollinated it with a low-yield, mildew-resistant pea, and were able to get a high-yield, mildew resistant pea. This process of breeding for better plants is used for all major food crops.” Jane couldn’t tell if Dora was paying attention. Her head kept snapping back and forth as if she was listening to music. “Does that make sense?” she probed.
“Oh yeah,” Dora replied. “My grandmother is really into gardening, so I know all the breeding and grafting stuff. We didn’t have a lot of room in our house when I was young, so she grafted orange tree branches onto a dwarf tree’s rootstalk. It’s pretty awesome how you can literally sew together two plants all Frankenstein like.”
“It is,” Jane agreed. “Those basic principles of grafting and combining traits are the same principles used in modern bioengineering. Right now for instance, we are taking the DNA from jellyfish that makes them glow and adding it to plant DNA to create glowing plants. Follow me into the lab, and I’ll show you some of the experiments we’re running now.”
“The first step in the process is called isolation.” They were now sitting at one of the lab benches in the main section of the lab. “We need to first separate the gene that creates the glowing protein from the rest of the jellyfish DNA.” Jane held up a test tube for Dora to see. “This is a test tube full of jellyfish DNA. It used to be very difficult to separate out jellyfish DNA, but now we just get it from Amazon.com.”
Dora didn’t laugh at the attempted joke. She probably had servants go out and buy her stuff. Online shopping was for poor people. Jane sighed but then continued, “Actually we get it from a lab in Japan which specializes in DNA extraction. What we then need to do with the DNA is separate it into its individual genes. We use a special enzyme that cuts the DNA strands into little pieces. You’ve studied genes in school right?” she asked.
“My tutor has prepared me well,” assured Dora. “But don’t people have like 20,000 genes or something? How do you know which ones are the ones that make jellyfish glow?” she asked.
“That’s an excellent question,” Jane remarked. “Luckily, jellyfish have significantly fewer genes than humans have. There have also been a lot of studies on jellyfish, so we know what gene we’re looking for. Of course, trying to separate out the right gene is still difficult. That’s step two: screening.”
“You see, the cutting process isn’t exact,” explained Jane. “After the process we have maybe twenty of these genes floating around, and we don’t know which one is the right one. It’s hard to work with single genes, so first we make some copies.”
“We introduce some bacteria plasmids that that absorb each of the individual genes. Then each plasmid infects a single bacteria cell. You take each of those cells and grow a culture of clones. This way we have a culture of bacteria that hosts each gene, like this.” Jane held up a single petri dish with a brown dot of bacteria growing on it.
“Now, since we know what gene we’re looking for, we then use a special probe made from DNA that will stick to the specific gene we’re looking for. What do you think this probe looks like?” Jane asked.
“Hmmm.” Dora’s eyes glazed over as she thought about the problem. Dora was clearly smarter than she appeared. “It must be the mirror image of the gene you want. Each gene is composed of A, T, G, and C bases. The bases come in pairs though. So A pairs with T, and G pairs with C. If the gene you’re looking for is AAGC, then you’ll use a TTCG probe to find it.”
“That’s exactly right,” Jane said. “So now that you have the gene you want, you need to introduce it into your host organism. In our case, we use soybean cells. This is where our main research is focused.”
“The introduction of foreign DNA into a host organism can be tricky. We’re currently using agrobacteria, a type of bacteria that can directly infect certain plant cells and inject their DNA into the plants. Unfortunately, this only works on a few types of plants.” Jane walked over to one of the large environmental chambers.
“We have been developing special agrobacteria that we believe will be able to do this final step, the transfer of the genes, more efficiently and reliably. We do this by incubating the plant cells in a solution with the agrobacteria at a high temperature and in different ambient environments. In this case, the glowing gene which infected these agrobacteria in step one is now transferred to the soybean plant. As a result, we should get glowing soybeans.”
But we didn’t get glowing soybeans. The thought kept bouncing around in her skull. The soybeans glowed when they used other strains of agrobacteria, but something was different about this last one, something important.
After the tour was over, Jane walked Dora back to the lobby of the building. She couldn’t help noticing that Dora looked troubled. “What’s wrong?” Jane asked.
Dora considered the question carefully before answering. “Well, I’m just surprised at how...limited this all sounds,” Dora replied.
Jane agreed wholeheartedly, but she wanted to hear Dora’s thoughts on the matter. “What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s certainly cool, but at the end of the day, you’re still just making Frankenplants not Superplants,” she said. “You’re just copying and pasting plants.” She paused, trying to find the right words. “It sounds like genetic engineering is just finding existing genes and patching them together. Can’t we make anything truly new? Can’t we make new genes?”
“Everything comes from something else,” Jane replied. “Nothing?
??s truly new.” But the same thought had haunted the last three years of her life. To truly change the world, they would need to do a lot more than make plants glow. She often dreamed about being able to design new traits and the genes that create them. But in fact, new genes, as Dora put it, are hard to come by. When bacteria reproduce, they clone all their genes. When humans reproduce, they get one gene from the mother and one gene from the father to form a pair. One in each pair dominates, but the other one is still there. There is no creation of new genes, just a mixing of existing genes.
“How about mutation?” Dora asked. “Like in X-men.”
Jane sighed. In nature, sometimes the genetic material gets replicated incorrectly. These mutations are a favorite subject of superhero comics. Mutations are rare in real life, but they do create new genes and new traits. In fact, that’s how evolution works, and it’s responsible for the great variety of traits organisms have on this planet. But evolution takes millions of years as it’s dependent on pure chance to create useful traits. Dora had hit on an important point. To be able to create mutation, to control it, to harness it...that would revolutionize genetic engineering.
Darwin penned his famous theory on Natural Selection after studying the unique animals that had developed on the remote islands of the Galapagos. The isolation of the islands allowed Darwin to explore how random mutation could, over time, allow species to evolve to better suit a specific environment. Jane silently wondered if there were any truly isolated places left in this world, if she would one day find her own Galapagos.
But to Dora, Jane simply said, “I’m not Dr. Xavier, and there is no such thing as mutagen X. But there is so much more for us to learn, and genetic engineering is just in its infancy. This is how we do genetic engineering now.” She gave a small shrug with her shoulders. “Who knows what the future will bring?”
************
Back in her office, Jane looked at the stack of grant proposals still on her desk. She should probably finish those up, but she was intrigued by Bryce Kandari’s talk and wanted to finish it. She found it amazing that Ashton had watched, and possibly understood, such an academic lecture. The grants could wait, but clearly, the video, whose play button kept pulsing, could not.
“But all that is just prologue,” Kandari continued. “If we accept video games as a possible tool, as a positive influence, where else can we go from there?” Bryce gave a dazzling smile. “I’ll show you.”
A video played on the screen behind Bryce. A single point of light blinked and then exploded throwing pinpoints of light out in all directions. The camera zoomed in, revealing stars and planets hurtling through space. A solar system formed. An asteroid flew by and smashed into one of the planets. The surface of the planet started changing. It turned red, then blue. The camera zoomed in further to discover continents, cities, and then people.
“This is my new project: Creation,” Bryce said proudly. “You don’t just live in this world, you create it. You can design a solar system, a planet, continents, weather systems... Or you can live in worlds other people have already designed. What happens in the Creation universe isn’t just dependent on a computer, it is dependent on the interactions of millions of players. In fact, Creation cannot exist on just one computer. One computer isn’t powerful enough. Creation lives on a network, composed of all active computers and infinitely scalable. This is not a video game but rather the most complex distributed simulation engine ever created.” Bryce winked at the camera. “And it will revolutionize how we think about learning and education.”
Bryce started pacing across the stage. “Let’s go back to our discussion on learning. The human brain is wired to learn. When we are born, we know nothing. As a newborn, we are completely helpless.” On the screen: a crying baby swaddled in a pink blanket. “But very quickly we learn about the world. We learn about objects. We learn how to control our bodies, how to crawl, grab, stand, and even talk. As every parent knows, it is fascinating how fast a child develops and a joy to see how much they enjoy learning.” The baby on the screen had now turned into a toddler, running forward with a tennis ball held high in his outstretched arm. “And all this we do through experience. There are no books, no curriculum, no schools.”
“Fast forward ten years.” A picture of a middle school classroom with rows of desks stretching off into the distance filled the screen. The kids looked bored. “Formal education now takes up the majority of our free time. But we don’t seem all that excited about learning anymore. Our experiential learning has been replaced with an abstract curriculum. We must ask ourselves, why?”
Now the screen showed a mosaic of old cultures: African villages, old towns, and Irish hamlets. “Hundreds of years ago, education was skill-based. Learning to read and write and do mathematics were of critical importance as they still are now. But over the years, we started adding more subjects: art, history, literature... What is the goal of these subjects? There is a belief that learning about these subject matters helps you understand more about the human civilization in some fashion, but it is hard to quantify.”
“You see, at some point experiential learning fails because we are trying to learn about something larger than ourselves. The formal curriculum of schools tries to teach us about how human civilizations work, how societies work. They do this by focusing on the past and taking a smattering of examples. But this is imperfect. We study certain writers, certain wars, and certain artists, but not others. Why? Because that’s what we studied the year before, and the year before that.”
“Along the way, something has been lost. Our education has become abstract, losing relevance and becoming a chore rather than a blessing.” Bryce stopped pacing to make his point. “Our education system fails our students.”
“There is a better way. Creation gives people a chance to experience the larger world. Here, players create governments, societies, art, architecture, and cultures. These are not lessons based on history but lessons based on possibilities. They are actual simulations of what a society, a world, and a universe can be. In this accelerated environment, players interact with other players. Virtual societies are created. Virtual wars are fought. How are these lessons any less important than the ones we learn in history? But for chance, Napoleon could have conquered Europe. The czars could still rule Russia. The Chinese could have colonized America. All these realities could be explored, and each could teach our youth valuable lessons. All this can be done in Creation.”
Bryce was certainly more passionate and charismatic than she had imagined a video game developer would be. She could see why Ashton admired him. Of course, the words that came out of his mouth were complete nonsense. There was no way she was going to have her kid learn virtual information from a virtual classroom. Was she being old fashioned or selfish to believe that kids should focus more on the natural sciences and understanding the world we live in and less on the artificially constructed and seemingly arbitrary rules of computer programming?
At this point, the camera panned to the audience. Reporters clamored to ask questions. Somehow, one was given a microphone, and the questions began.
“Are you saying that children shouldn’t go to school anymore?” someone asked.
Kandari replied smoothly, “I’m merely saying that perhaps the current educational system is an antiquated solution. As a society we should be striving for the most relevant form of education for our children instead of relying on obsolete mechanisms.”
“The teachers’ union has started a boycott on your games,” another reporter began. “There’s even a movement to put a legal restriction on the size of these virtual worlds. Advocates of these new laws say that your virtual worlds teach children to be isolated from the real world. Is all this technology killing our humanity?”
“That’s a big charge there,” Kandari replied, chuckling. “I’m killing humanity? Our simulations allow children to experience and learn about the real world in a safe and accelerated environment.”
Another reporter cried out, “But you make all the rules in Creation. Children just learn how your world works, not how the real world works. Isn’t that too much power for one individual to wield?”
Kandari didn’t seem bothered by the question at all. “It is true that we have created some basic rules. Those rules are based on well-established and uncontroversial scientific principles. They are things like gravity and mathematics. We have no ideologies. The forming of societies and the winning of wars, all that is created by the players. We just provide a framework. The system itself will learn over time and provide better simulations.”
Another reporter quickly followed up. “But if your simulations are so good, why don’t you just simulate historical events? This could be a good tool for children to learn traditional subjects.”
“Sure we could do that,” Bryce replied. “But would they learn more or less from that? You can only learn so much by looking at what you already have. You can mix and match history all you want, but you still get only what you started with. The excitement of Creation is that you can surpass history and learn from new experiences. Every world that players create will be different. Every society, every culture will be different. It is from these differences that we will truly learn.”
Jane stopped the video. Differences. That’s what’s been hiding in the back of her mind all day. We learn from differences.
She stepped quickly out to the main lab and called out to Mai-lin. “Do we have the new batch of soybean cells yet?”
“The incubation is done,” she replied. “But it’s too early for the cells to have produced enough protein to create the glowing effect.”
“That’s fine,” Jane said dismissively. “I just want to look at the DNA.”
“No problem. I took samples of all the cells already and scanned them into the computer.” Mai-lin started typing at the workstation. “The computer didn’t find any matches for the glow gene. It’s too early to make a definite conclusion, but just by looking at the variation, it looks like the glow gene failed to integrate.”