Four Legs Good

By Robert Linhardt

Some scientific experiments, such as Einstein's Gedankenexperiment, cannot be carried out in the real world, others like the one in this story, should not be carried out in the real world. A flawed set of scientific experiments performed in 2024 causes a breakdown in the barrier between humans and a neighboring species. These experiments rely on the Nobel Prize winning molecular biology technique known as CRISPR, surgical intervention, and the use of artificial intelligence. The science described is believed to be accurate, the outcome is purely speculative fiction and to the author's knowledge such a study has never been performed. The story's epilogue examines the impact of the project' on society over the subsequent 50 years. The book is written both for the general reader, without a deep understanding of science, and as a moral lesson for scientists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350942156

Book preview

Chapter 1. Our Story Begins

A small university town like many others, located just off Interstate 80 and nearly in the middle of the country, Iowa City had a population of 75,000 in the 2020’s and over a third of these residents were students. Iowa City, the home of the University of Iowa Hawkeyes and the original state capital, was a liberal island in a conservative sea. Located in Eastern Iowa in flyover country, it was a three-hour drive on the interstate from the Chicago O’Hare airport. The rolling Iowa farmland, cut from the prairies by the sodbuster settlers, displayed the strength of American agriculture with its endless green fields of corn and soybeans. Most of these crops were not destined for direct human consumption but rather to feed the hogs held in the gigantic, odorous lots located in the western part of the state.

The rectangular state of Iowa was carved from the Midwest territory’s latitude and longitude lines in support of white America’s manifest destiny. As a result, the native Ioway tribe was largely removed beginning in the mid-19th century and replaced by westward-bound Catholic, Methodist, and Lutheran refugees from Germany and Scandinavia. Taking advantage of government land grants these settlers constructed dugouts, log cabins, and finally small houses and began to farm their newly acquired land. These immigrants survived the underpopulated, treeless landscape and Iowa’s unforgiving climate of hot humid summers, cold dry winters, and strong prairie winds. Over time, towns and small cities scattered throughout the state coalesced to support these family farms. To this day, many Iowans, originating from these first white settlers, still tenaciously attempt to hold their rights to these lands in perpetuity.

Nearly a half century before our story begins, when the state was looking for a new slogan, it came down to two choices, a State of Minds and a Place to Grow, reflecting the shaky alliance between educators and farmers. Iowa, a rural state—and now a Place to Grow—was quickly being covered in factory farms, had little poverty, with nearly every adult having a high school education and some even a university degree. A great consolidation of family farms had taken place as the factory farms took over in the last half of the 20th century. Some of the farmers running the remaining small farms eked out a living by selling specialty crops, like organic produce, to local markets or sold off their land acre-by-acre to developers, generating just enough income for the farmers to survive. There were few other options for these dispossessed farmers, except to take early retirement or to open a shop in one of the small rural towns dotting the Iowa landscape.

Like the fictional community of Lake Wobegon in Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, Iowans claimed that all their children were above average. But as the state entered the new millennium, its educational system had begun to fall behind the rest of the country and university graduates exited the state in droves for the better opportunities offered in the urban centers of other states. The Iowa population aged and declined, the university’s rankings dropped, rural poverty and drug abuse rose, and the tentative alliance between educators and farmers became strained. Iowa’s aging white population welcomed few immigrants to counteract its decline. The farmers took control of the state and as their independent, libertarian traits became dominant, the state motto was changed to the more defiant Freedom to flourish.

The University of Iowa Medical Center serviced the state’s three million residents while retaining its strong reputation in rural health care and a few selected areas of health science research. Iowa’s other large university, Iowa State, a land grant institution on the western side of the state, instead focused its research on agriculture and veterinary medicine. The state had begun to think of ways to connect both of its premier universities and their strengths in agriculture and medicine with other lucrative enterprises to improve its faltering economy.

Just north of Iowa City, in Cedar Rapids, corn was being converted to alcohol in large million-gallon fermenters for use as the renewable fuel component of gasohol. Just south, in Ottumwa, amino acids were being prepared through biotechnology to improve feed quality, and hog lots in the west were collecting methane for use as fuel. With these and other measures the shaky truce was maintained between the state’s educational and agricultural industries.

The new millennium also brought major advances in biotechnology, connecting agricultural products to medicine. It was in this realm that Iowa science could still compete with the science being done at major East and West Coast universities. Recombinant protein-based therapeutics were also now being prepared in large-scale and inexpensively in plants and animals. This offered added value to these otherwise low-cost agricultural commodities, a very appealing economic prospect for the struggling Iowa farmers. Thus, it was not surprising that the University of Iowa would parlay its strengths in agricultural and medical research in an attempt to maintain its reputation.

Our story begins in the ‘farm and gown’ town of Iowa City where a new research project was being considered by a young University of Iowa professor, Carl Meyer. He had envisioned engineering a new breed of Iowa hog to provide all the organs required to meet the country’s transplantation needs. The success of this research would build his and the university’s renown, address a critical health issue, and benefit Iowa farmers financially. A hog currently worth a thousand dollars for its meat would instead bring tens of thousands of dollars more on the medical market for its kidneys, lungs, heart, and liver, otherwise worthless offal.

Chapter 2. Professor Meyer and Family

Carl Meyer was a child of the late 1980’s. His two sets of grandparents had been born in Eastern Europe and had emigrated with only the clothes on their backs to New York City in the mid-twentieth century, one family during the Hungarian uprising and the other during the Prague Spring. Carl’s father and mother were raised as a secular Jew and a Catholic, respectively. Both of Carl’s parents, first generation Americans, were achievers, becoming engineers and working hard at various companies up and down the East Coast, before moving back to New York City to retire.

Carl followed in his parent’s footsteps. He was born in New York City, grew up in smaller East Coast cities and returned to New York City to attend Columbia before moving to Harvard for his graduate studies and postdoctoral work. All of his education was in the best departments of Ivy League schools. Carl was agnostic, highly motivated, and scientifically brilliant.

Carl met his wife Julie in Cambridge where he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, and she was an undergraduate engineering student in the co-terminal bachelor’s and Master of Science program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). By the time they had both completed their studies they had fallen in love and were subsequently married at Julie’s parents’ home in Chicago.

Julie, five years younger than Carl, had grown up in downtown Chicago. Her family had been in the U.S. for many generations and had started several very successful businesses. Julie, an only child like Carl, came of age during a period in which Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education was being strongly promoted for girls and she attended Chicago’s best STEM prep school. She had grown up around computers and had learned coding as her second language at summer camp at the University of Chicago. Confident of her skills and achievements she only applied to a single university, MIT, and received early admission. Julie’s confidence extended into her personal life. She knew her own mind and her parents were not surprised that, when only 22-years-old, she announced her engagement to Carl.

Both Carl and Julie had extremely strong résumés and could have found great positions anywhere, but Julie was newly pregnant, so they decided to relocate to the Midwest to be close to her parents. While waiting for their move, Julie gave birth to a baby girl who she and Carl named Brooklyn. Carl joined the University of Iowa faculty and Julie began working as a founding employee of a small university-based startup company developing computer-aided educational resources for the disabled.

This was the first time that Carl and Julie would live and work in what they considered to be a small town. They had always enjoyed living in big cities as they were able to walk or take a bus or subway everywhere. The couple were both somewhat high-strung and simply not well-suited for a daily, stressful suburban commute and they were thrilled to continue to be able to walk to work. Unlike most of the new faculty joining the university, they decided to live downtown, just off the university’s campus. They put a down payment on a brick house built in the 1920’s that fronted on the street and had a small backyard.

Downtown had not grown much over the past 50 years since there was no empty space available for expansion and the Midwest had not yet learned the East Coast tactic of vertical growth. All the growth in Iowa City had come from the edges outward in the form of characterless, suburban tract houses occupying newly abandoned farmland. Iowa City also had begun to merge with adjacent small towns, like Coralville. The Coralville Strip, with its chain restaurants and giant box stores on both sides of U.S. Route 6, extended northwestward from its border with Iowa City to the Coral Ridge Mall. One day this sprawl might extend all the way to Cedar Rapids spawning a rural Midwestern version of car-centric Los Angeles.

Fortunately, the Meyer family had everything they needed in their downtown neighborhood and were the rare single car family. It was here that Carl, Julie, and their daughter Brooklyn would spend their next 20 years. There is a certain comfort in living in an old house at the seemingly unchanging center of a small town. During stressful times they could take solace in their home and its surroundings.

Carl’s career progressed rapidly. He was a research superstar and within five years he was promoted and tenured. Carl ran a large, well-funded lab populated with many of the best students and scientists in the state. He supervised a research group consisting of both postdoctoral scientists and graduate students and his group was known for its energetic, innovative, and multidisciplinary research in medicine.

Carl was a 35-year-old man of average build with short dark hair, clean-shaven, and sporting a year-long tan. All the members of his team were in their 20’s, except for his wife Julie, who had just turned 30. The scientists in the group were all energetic and highly motivated to publish impactful scientific papers and build their research reputations.

Carl was in his academic prime as it is well known that a scientist’s most important work is typically accomplished before the age of 40. His group had several on-going projects, but with his promotion he had been given more laboratory space to allow him to expand his research group. For a research-intensive professor, this was an opportunity that had to be quickly seized. Moreover, with his daughter about to start school he would be relieved of some of his co-parenting duties and would now have additional time to focus on his research.

Carl needed to make a concerted effort to establish a new research direction from which he could build an international reputation.