“The ancestors are out there…you have to believe me.”
From acclaimed author Scott Sigler New York Times bestselling creator of Infected and Contagious–comes a tale of genetic experimentation’s worst nightmare come true.
Every five minutes, a transplant candidate dies while waiting for a heart, a liver, a kidney. Imagine a technology that could provide those life-saving transplant organs for a nominal fee … and imagine what a company would do to get a monopoly on that technology.
On a remote island in the Canadian Arctic, PJ Colding leads a group of geneticists who have discovered this holy grail of medicine. By reverse-engineering the genomes of thousands of mammals, Colding’s team has dialled the evolutionary clock to re-create humankind’s common ancestor. The method? Illegal. The result? A computer-engineered living creature, an animal whose organs can be implanted in any person, and with no chance of transplant…
The use of animal cells, tissues, or organs for humans is being investigated as an alternative to allotransplantation and as therapy for a broad range of disease states including diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and neurologic pain control. The risk of transmitting novel infections with these tissues, xenozoonoses, has led to much debate. It is well recognized that infections are a hazard with the use of all biologic agents. In addition, infections from human donors remain a major cause of morbidity and mortality after allotransplantation.
Xenozoonoses and the xenotransplant recipient
This book was fantastic! The only issue I had was that once I saw Tim Feely’s name, I started thinking – is this before the Contagion series or after? Did alien pathogens infect the stratosphere yet or was this yet to come? I thought that maybe if Tim Feely died, I would know for sure it was after, not before, so I secretly rooted for the death of a main character.
On the bright side, there are plenty of them. All well-rounded, a few psychotic, several truly mad scientist types.
The 1918 epidemic killed fifty million people. World population was just two billion people back then. Now it’s almost seven billion. Same kill-rate today, you’re looking at seventy million dead. No planes back then, General. There weren’t even highways yet. Now you can fly anywhere in the world in less than a day, and people do, all the time.”
I had to remind myself, this is not the Contagion series! It did have some commonalities but the bulk of the story revolves around humans playing God and inventing a truly scary creature, born of the desire to create something from nothing and a human’s own self-destruction code. This is how the Ancestor came to be.
Danté nodded. “We will create an animal similar to the mammalian ancestor. Since the ancestor would be engineered from the DNA up, we can ensure the resulting animal will not carry any naturally occurring viruses that could adapt to infect people.
“Cataloging and working with this computerized biological data is a science called bioinformatics. The Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics sequenced the entire human genetic code, right down to every last nucleotide, but humans were only the start. Scientists have sequenced thousands of mammals, storing the digital analysis in public databases like Gen-Bank. These genomes, combined with animals we sequenced ourselves, give Genada the complete genetic code of almost every mammal on the planet.”
“I do not understand,” the shipping magnate said. “You have genomes of modern animals, but not of this ancestor?”
“Genetic mutation is the basis of evolution,” Danté said. “But not all genes mutate at the same rate. As species branch out from a common ancestor, some genes mutate faster, some don’t mutate at all. By using a molecular clock, so to speak, we can gauge which sequences have changed, and by comparing that gene to the same gene of another mammal, we can tell which sequence is older, closer to the original ancestor’s genetic code.”
I do not recommend this book if you are pregnant or trying to read something light! It deals with heavy topics like In-Vitro implantation, cows used as testing material and let’s just say 300-pound fetuses clawing their way out to the world…
The cow lay on its right side, legs pointed toward the front of the plane. Blood seeped from the cow’s ruptured stomach: a ragged, glistening tear ran from the udder almost to the sternum. A small, bloody, clawed foot hung from the tear, flopping limply in time with the cow’s twitches. The fetuses. The predator fetuses. Holy shit … it hadn’t seemed real until this second. If the cows gave birth, were the fetuses dangerous? No, even if they happened to be born at this very moment, they were still just babies.
Yeah, that’s an image which will be seared in my brain for a long time.
Back to the main story: a small company deals with the desire to take over organ transplant market for humans by providing an animal-lab-grown alternative. To do so, they sequence a genome of a creature which will not have many viruses and could be accepted by a human host. Unfortunately, in his desire to achieve the results faster, Dr. Rudolf shorts the meds of his fellow Chinese genetic biologist, Dr. Jian, driving her in a schizophrenic mania, one where she feels most creative. Unfortunately, the lack of meds interferes with Jian’s own thinking and she adds more creature DNA to the cocktail and she even thinks of using her own eggs for implantation, even when human trials were forbidden.
The government gets wind of this secret research and they do what every government wants to: they send a cease and desist and even better: they block all company funds and request all the research data gathered so far to be given to the DoD. The bigshots then take their top doctors (after a mole tries to blow the whole thing up) to a remote island (Black Manitou) where they can continue their experiments.
Dr. Jian, finally figuring out what was actually going to come out of the pregnant cows, attempts to send a request to the authorities but she gets shot and killed before managing to expose their location.
Tim Feely, doctor Rhubarb, Sara and the rest of her crew are told to evacuate prior to a storm coming in – but there are other things at play. Last minute Sara finds explosives on the plane after taking off and has to do a crash landing back on the island. doctor Rhinoplasty, the idiot that he is, releases the very pregnant cow specimens into the wild as he doesn’t want his research to burn with the plane.
It takes the baddies a day and a half to figure out that the plane hasn’t blown up as expected and there are survivors and even less time for the hatchlings to start decimating the (already sparse) human population on the small island. The creatures themselves are a thing of nightmare – feeding on their unborn twins, clawing at their cow mother’s uterus, always hungry, always searching.
Redness clung to fur: white with black spots. The heavy, triangular head looked almost as large as the rest of the body. A strange growth stuck out of the back of the skull, like a single antelope horn but parallel to the stubby body. The growth wasn’t bone, though; it looked flexible. Skin ran from the growth down to the bloody creature’s back.
What makes things worse, they hunt like wolves. Pack animals, they communicate and plan attacks.
WHEN HE HEARD the big doors slam open, Magnus peeked out from behind the altar’s thick crucifix. Through the shimmering heat haze and the growing smoke cloud, he saw a dozen nightmares trot into the church—muscles thick like lions on steroids, massive heads with jaws wider and longer than a crocodile’s, strange yellow dorsal sail fins flipping up and down in twitching anticipation.
All in all, the book is a very good thriller but does leave a few unanswered questions:
- Did the military ever come back to the island?
- The creatures had mated among each other and started feeding on squirrels. Would they run out of food? The island wasn’t very big to begin with. And they can be cannibalistic in nature as they fed on their fallen brothers before.
- Did Sara and Colding attend therapy together to figure out why their attachment style was so linked to danger?
Just kidding. The book is good. And the writing is sometimes very expressive – like
Dull gray-black clouds the color of sour chocolate milk filled the sky, steadily increasing in size and number, choking out the light.
I don’t think I ever had sour chocolate milk, but I assume the colour would be off.
Pain rolled through his head. A swarm of black bees filled his vision, threatening to take him into darkness.
Nothing better than pain bees! But good visual!
All in all, would thoroughly recommend just for the gore and bloody messes and brutal deaths. Perfect for this year’s Halloween reads.
One Book a Week (Julia Reads Books) 