Samantha DeMatoWednesday, May 9, 2007

Senior Project Creative Writing

“The perfect clone”

Julie was her name; she was one of the first to be cloned. It was several years before laws had allowed for this process to take place. Finally, when the process known as Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer was enabled among humans, thousands had petitioned for no such thing to happen.

It all started in the year 2014, when her mother was at the very young age of 24. She had begun to think of what would happen if a single human being were to be cloned. The thought of it came to her while meditating on a decorative, Indian style rug, which her great grandma had given to her for her twenty-first birthday. She was sitting down in the center of her well-lit cabin in the Adirondack Mountains, in Northern New York. Once done meditating for that evening, she dimmed the lights in her spacious living room, grabbed a light brown, overly-stuffed messenger’s bag, got in her Silver 2007 Hybrid, and drove off to the lab in which she had an occupation at.

Putting her right eye up to the scanning device used to authorize employees to enter the building, she entered the building. Automatically, everything turned on like it had done for as long as her memory would allow her to recall information about the location in which she was employed. Walking over to the counter in which the perfectly set-microscopes had been placed, she had noticed something, there was already one on and it had been vandalized. Bending over to grab the vandalized equipment, she heard a loud crash, coming from one of the walk-in freezer rooms. Quickly, she turned away from where the broken microscope had lay just minutes before. Grabbing a large pipette filled with a harmless, clear tranquilizing liquid, she slowly drew closer to the place in which the noise originated. As she drew closer, she tried to block out all thoughts of fear and concentrated one the matter at hand, but all attempts of this failed. Approaching the freezer, finally able to distinguish what had made the noise, was a large steel box of human umbilical cords. Suddenly, the lights went out. There was a shadow belonging to a person who had appeared to be hurt, over on the floor next to where Ruby was standing. Fumbling to find a flashlight, she thought of a better idea and placed her hand on the fingerprint scanner to illuminate the room. Suddenly, the harmed person stood up, also carrying a large pipette. “Who are you? I demand you answer!”

The person who had appeared to be hurt spoke, drawing closer to Ruby to get the silhouette of the person standing in front of him in focus. “I am sorry, I did not quite recognize you, Dr. Kuro-n, I did not realize that it was you. It’s me, Dr. Aiutante!”

“Are you hurt?” asked Ruby.

Dr. Aiutante replied with, “Yes, but it’s nothing that a small drop of healing gel won’t fix.”

Ruby, handed her co-worker the tube of healing gel, and they proceeded down the long corridor.

Once she returned to where she was before the power went out. She took two strands of her beautiful light brown hair and a swab of her skin cells, prepared a slide and put it under one of the compound microscopes. Filling a test tube with a solution that extracts Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA), from all organic materials, she place one the strands of her own hair in the test tube, putting the other one in a test tube filled with water. She knew that DNA is not found in hair, so she filed another test tube with the same liquid as the one with the first strand of hair, and set-up a “control group” for a few of her skin cells too. Making observations from what had been taking place, she took a new sterilized pipette out of an unopened package of unused pipettes, and prepared four more slides, each slide containing something the corresponding test tube. The first slide had a part of a strand of hair on it. The slide labeled “two” had the “control group” from the hair sample. “Three” had part of the Ruby’s DNA found from her some of her skin cells in test tube “three”. “Four” contained drops from the skin-cell “control group”. She studied these intensely for hours at a time, until her eyes nearly bled. Finally, she took out another clean pipette, still with her eyes “glued” to the microscope, to see if anything else was going to happen, and removed the part of the strand of DNA that she had been carefully studying for hours on end. Ruby, reached for the little glass jar labeled:

“WARNING: CAUSTIC CHEMICALS!!!! KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN, PETS AND OTHER ANIMALS! FOR LAB USE ONLY, DO NOT STORE IN TEMPERATURES BELOW 32° CELSIUS.”

She put a few drops of it under the microscope on a slide, and put a few more drops of it a clean test tube with the strand of DNA, in which she wanted to “cut”. After taking apart the DNA, she placed it an empty stem cell, and froze the rest. Seeing that this would indeed work she took another one of her own skin cells, and stripped it of everything but the nucleus, she took an empty egg cell out of the freezer. Combining the two, she made one of the first human clones. She called this new being, Julie, her daughter. For, she was the perfect clone. Unfortunately, Ruby could never have any kids of her own, because she had never found a man that had liked her enough to marry her. So Ruby and Julie lived together in the cabin in the Adirondack Mountains. When they traveled, to distant places, they always found themselves coming back to a well-light warm log cabin in the peaceful serine that was the Adirondacks. The furthest back that Julie could remember of one these trips was the trip that they took to River City, Iowa. She always felt so uncomfortable whenever they went there. The people were so unwelcoming to them. However, there was one time were they were not so mean; it was the time when Ruby bought a Time Share there. During one summer, approximately the month of July, Ruby, and Julie traveled down there, on a business trip to see why all of the corn crops were dying. When the townspeople heard the news that they were there to help, immediately people rushed over and put their arms around each other, and hovered over this one little shriveled up plant and started singing. One of them handed the local farmer and his wife were handed shirts, and bread, and the basic needs to live. After that everyone including Julie and Ruby were invited to a picnic. They returned to their daily life in the Mountains.

Unfortunately, Ruby was killed three months after Julie’s eighteenth birthday. The cause of Julies’ mothers’ death had been unknown, until one very bright aspiring scientist, working with a team of detectives found that Ruby was frozen to death in a freezer room, in a laboratory in Northern New York. After being put on trial and being found guilty, by the Fulton City Court, Dr. Aiutante was arrested.

References:

for Translations into other languages

Storyline about the stubborn city of River City, Iowa provided by Meredith Wilson’s, The Music Man.