(A proposal for a Sci-Fi novel based on an actual family quandary.)
Dorothy Jeanette Martin’s youngest son, Kurt, and his wife, Preston, have produced two offspring, Jackson and Daisy, the youngest of her cherished passel of grandbabies. In 2043 they are all grown up and living in a strange new world where cloning and DNA manipulation is legal and culturally embraced. They are both accomplished scientists, and psychologically healthy since they had exemplary parenting by Kurt and Preston. Kurt, a talented artist/craftsman, a true autodidact, has somehow managed to keep his inner child alive and well, which accounts for both the survival of his creative genius as well as his ability to play and to be a happiness instilling father. On the distaff side, he put Preston, the family scholar, through graduate school for her PhD. Preston’s natural maternal ability is enhanced by her studies in psychology and sociology. Their marriage has balanced each other’s strengths and negated the other’s weaknesses. They are a power couple who have engendered their offspring the way families should be raised. If every match had been so successful, marriage would not have been abolished.
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In 2043, marriage is no longer part of the human social contract. Reproduction is state sanctioned and stringently controlled. Sperm typically do not swim well due to estrogen poisoning up and down the food chain. Women may bear children but only subject to genetic testing, scientific, and even political approval. Children are now raised by certified parenting professionals and relate to biological parents as if they were Aunties and Uncles. Bruno Bettelheim and his Israeli commune experiments have seized the day, and oedipal neuroticism is passé.
Both young adults have attracted global attention with their excellence in their chosen fields, Daisy as an evolutionary geneticist, and Jackson as a research neurologist with a specialty emphasis on cloning. The two siblings put their educated heads together and hatch a wild bird of an idea. They decide to grant their beloved Grandmother, Dorothy, her fondest wish. Daisy is licensed to bear two offspring, assuming she can identify a sperm donor who is an appropriate genetic complement and can obtain a license to so breed.
They are both aware of their father Kurt’s curious heredity. His maternal Grandfather carried an odd mutation that the family has affectionately dubbed the “Kelsey Martin Gene.” As Kelsey’s first and eldest child, Dorothy was believed to have carried it intact, expressing it bravely but imperfectly due to the cultural poisoning its expression attracted to her being a woman innovator. Her life was a crazy-quilt of disastrous decisions made and suffered, along with surprising triumphs achieved as one of the first women to stage a frontal assault on the male bastion of military/industrial aerospace. Daisy and Jackson were familiar with the memoir she wrote before she died, her way of reaching out to her family with the love she cherished for them one and all. She wanted them to understand that they must not fear the KM gene but must learn to use it wisely. Her greatest dread was that her progeny might feel cursed, rather than blessed, by their genetic inheritance.
Her small cedar chest is still secreted in her Diplomat safe that Kurt has safeguarded since she died. Several times during her generous life-span Dorothy grew her hair long and lovely but occasionally wacked it off, storing the twisted hanks in case she might someday need a wig or extension. The cedar chest protected it from environmental degradation and hungry insects.
Daisy and Jackson created a plan that might advance their careers and enhance family legacy. They loved their eccentric Grandmother and saw a way to give her a second chance. Daisy determined to clone Grandma from her cedar protected DNA and to have the resulting live embryo implanted into her own uterus. The resulting child would be raised by twenty-first century professionals rather than well-meaning, intelligent but uneducated, ambitious but tragically flawed rural Texans. Jackson and Daisy would follow the cloned child’s growth, analyze, and compare her gene expression with that of her biological progenitor. The comparison would be sure to open up new vistas to the understanding of nature vs nurture. An incidental benefit would be continuation of Dorothy’s mitochondrial DNA which is now extinct since her daughter Melanie died carrying the only copy. Best of all, it could fulfill their Grandmother’s wish that her family line might at long last see itself as whole and beautiful.
That uses up one of Daisy’s allocation of offspring. Daisy and her state sanctioned sperm donor would also bear a natural daughter complements of an egg from her own ovary, a child who will with CRISPR intervention be verified to also carry the KM gene. Daisy’s natural girl-child would be raised on an equally professional footing as a sister to Dorothy’s clone. The healthy socialization of sisterhood would eliminate the isolation that Dorothy had suffered, being raised as an only child and spared the sort of trauma detailed in horrific clips lifted from her memoir. In this improved iteration Dorothy and her genome would choose and enjoy all the education desired in this reincarnation and be allowed to fulfill that promise in any career she could ever dream of.
The book will alternate between segments from the memoir, author voice-overs that weave the story, and chapters voiced by Daisy and Jackson that would flesh out the technical aspects of the endeavor and paint a picture of a future world of bio-innovation and benevolent cyborgs. The final result will be for Dorothy, long after death, to earn the forgiveness and appreciation she craved, and for her heirs to finally be at peace with their heredity. Even while she is still very much alive, reading and writing with her Monday Morning Writer’s Group, she will be savoring the possibilities of this wild hare of an idea even as she types and types and types…