Editors' Preface: Genomics in Literature, Visual Arts, and Culture

Ira Levin's 1976 thriller, The Boys from Brazil, chronicles a Nazi hunter's discovery of a strange plot. As he struggles to make sense of a series of bizarre murders across the Western hemisphere, he presents his conundrum to audiences who have invited him to speak about his work, and he fortuitously catches the attention of a German student who is at once intrigued by the puzzle and eager to offer his aid to the protagonist's cause. Together, they discover that the notorious Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele is living in Brazil, where, having developed a process for cloning a human being, he is engaged in a scheme to create the environment that will most likely produce his fürher's duplicate.

Central to this discovery is a lesson in cutting-edge science when the student's mentor, a famous German biologist, explains the dynamics of "mononuclear reproduction," or cloning. The reader learns with the protagonist how

the nucleus of an egg cell is destroyed, leaving the body of the cell unharmed. This is done by radiation and is, of course, microsurgery of the most sophisticated order. Into the enucleated egg cell is put the nucleus of a body cell of the organism to be reproduced—the nucleus of a body cell, not a sex cell. We now have exactly what we had at this point in natural reproduction: an egg cell with 46 chromosomes in its nucleus; a fertilized egg cell which, in a nutrient solution, proceeds to duplicate and divide. When it reaches the 16—or 32-cell stage—this takes 4 or 5 days—it can be implanted in the uterus of its 'mother'; who isn't its mother at all, biologically speaking. She supplied an egg cell, and now she's supplying a proper environment for the embryo's growth, but she's given it nothing of her own genetic environment. The child, when it's born, has neither father nor mother, only a donor—the giver of the nucleus—of whom it's an exact duplicate. Its chromosomes and genes are identical to the donor's. Instead of a new and unique individual, we have an existing one repeated.¹

The passage illustrates how scientific information circulates through mainstream media and popular culture to become meaningful in social contexts.

Despite its sophistication—unexpected in a science fiction/horror novel from the 1970s—Levin's scientific explanation is misleading. "The child," we are told, is "an exact duplicate" rather than "a new and unique individual." But a cloned individual is not an exact duplicate of the donor. The woman who carries the fetus in fact imparts some of her genetic material in the form of mitochondrial DNA so that, genetically as well as environmentally, the child differs from the donor. Since the cell is DNA's first environment and the cytoplasm plays a major role in development, the gestator's enucleated egg shapes the embryo in manifold ways. A cloned individual in fact diverges more from its donor than an identical twin does from its sibling, as numerous researchers have pointed out, but the science is subordinated to the uncanniness of the "exact duplicate," which is certainly the prevailing depiction in popular culture.

The cloned child in Levin's passage is deprived of its humanity as well as its uniqueness in the scientist's explanation that it "has neither father nor mother, only a donor." The description is again technically inaccurate—the cloned child shares the genetic parents of the donor—but it is significant for what it reveals about the anxieties that accompany the idea of cloning in the general population. The alleged lack of parents underscores the role of the laboratory in the creation of the cloned child, a well-rehearsed scenario of horror fiction that hearkens back to the prototypical unholy creation, Frankenstein's monster. Mary Shelley's unfortunate creature lives on not only in its numerous retellings, but also in a profound suspicion that characteristically accompanies new reproductive technologies of any kind. Worldwide debate surrounding the first "test tube baby," Louise Brown...