DNA

Tuesday Tiny Tale – White Feather

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Sam was looking forward to a peaceful Friday evening after a busy week at the lab. The house was quiet, Jill was bound to be in the garden as it was her day off and the weather fine.

The back door was open and Jill jumped up from a flower bed and rushed up to the patio to greet him.

‘What’s the excitement, have you found a rare butterfly?’

‘Mother’s been!’

Sam was taken aback. His mother-in-law had died three weeks ago, peacefully, in her 98th year. He thought Jill was coping well.

‘Jill, what do you mean?’

‘I found a white feather.’

‘You surely didn’t believe all that stuff your mother used to talk about?’

‘You didn’t believe, I kept an open mind. Mum said she would send a sign if she could.’

‘A feather left by some moth eaten pigeon…’

‘A perfect pure white feather floated down just as I was tidying round that shrub Mother gave us. At least let me show you.’

Jill moved across to the kitchen door, reached in for the lop sided jug her mother had made at U3A pottery class and pulled out a very large snowy white feather.

‘Okay, not a pigeon but a handsome swan. Did you see any flying overhead?’

‘No, we’re miles from any river.’

‘Well, all sorts of things get blown in the wind. If she wanted to send a message why not something useful or tangible.’

 ‘I imagine its not easy being dead, especially if you’re new at it. Besides, there must be rules, otherwise we would all be inundated with messages from the other side.’

‘Jill, we don’t get messages from the dead because they are no more. It’s the Twenty First Century, we’ve grown out of all that stuff.’

‘You scientists don’t know everything, I felt so peaceful out there in the garden, knowing Mother was happy.’

‘That’s your serotonin kicking in. A sunny day in the garden always makes you happy and you were also thinking about your mother. I’m a physicalist what you see is what there is, that’s it. Your mother is still with you, but in your memories.’

‘We can both see this feather, how do you explain that?’

‘Your guardian angel flew over, ha, ha, dropped in to help with the weeding.’

‘Why don’t you test its DNA in your lab?’

‘I will, might even contribute to our current bird studies. Right, I’m going up to check my emails before dinner.’

Sam looked out of his office window at the patchwork of little back gardens below. He told himself he was appreciating the colourful display Jill had created in their back garden, not looking for swans or angels. He noticed something new in next door’s garden, a large colourful playhouse. The new young couple had only just moved in and already Jill had discovered they were expecting their first baby, a bit early to be buying expensive Wendy houses… then he noticed movement on the overgrown lawn. Chickens, so that must be a modern state of the art hen house, hopefully fox proof. Shouldn’t be any trouble unless there was a cockerel to wake them up. At that moment there was a fluttering amongst the drab brown and speckled hens as a proud rooster strutted out. A dashing snow white rooster with a scarlet cockscomb. Sam dashed downstairs to tell Jill the mystery was solved.

Jill was excited to see the new livestock, but held the long straight flat feather aloft triumphantly.

‘This did not come from a rooster, magnificent as his curling tail feathers are.’

Sam arrived at the lab early on Monday morning; frivolous use of the facilities was frowned upon and he did not fancy telling the others he was checking for angel DNA. But the quicker he could identify the feather as belonging to a swan or an albino peacock the better.

The results made no sense, the feather was apparently freshly shed, clean and undamaged so the results could not be corrupted.  The DNA looked like none he had ever seen before, certainly not belonging to any bird. If anything it was closer to homo sapiens, yet different, not to mention the fact that there were forty six pairs of chromosomes. He had already started from scratch again and achieved exactly the same results. Far more study would be needed to venture any theory as to what sort of creature this feather came from. He could be holding unique scientific information, but how could he tell his colleagues, what should he tell Jill?

Lauren’s Tale

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What if I had stayed? I felt guilty just having that thought after what I have put my family through. I feel no guilt about my brief stay in 2099, that was beyond my control and I would never have chosen to leave my home and family to venture into the unknown future.

As I sat down for another attempt at writing my official report I felt a surprising emotional pull to those few weeks in that very different world. The memories were coming back to me more vividly as the weeks passed and the initial shock and trauma began to wear off. The quiet life in our ‘safe house’, a magnificent country mansion, was making my real life in a 2023 London suburb ever more remote.

The clear skies, wonderfully fresh air and sheer abundance of nature were what many urbanites dream of, though probably not the primitive, dangerous life of The Hunters in 2099. I couldn’t help yearning a little for the comforting scent of roasting spits and the simple life they led, completely at one with their environment, the only life they knew.

I wanted to explain this in my report, I had not typed a single word yet. By 2099 London and presumably the rest of planet Earth, had returned to nature and yet it was not as it should be. Human interference in every part of life for more than a century had resulted in nature recreating itself into a form that terrified the Bunker People, who cowered in the remains of subterranean London.

My status as the mythical Lauren of London meant that I was protected from the dangers that lay outside The Hunter’s large camp. I had persuaded them once to let me go out with the women, children and old men gathering wild fruits. That wasn’t sexist, there were women hunters as well, the tough ones, though every woman was pretty tough. I surmised that anyone with a family predisposition to poor health had not survived the catastrophic breakdown of society. Truly survival of the fittest, these hunters had survived against the odds, plunged back into a prehistoric life without the generations of folk lore to guide them.

The computer screen remained blank and I could hear my boys fighting just outside the library window, I wondered where their father was. I hadn’t got my old life back yet, but after much negotiating my family had been allowed to come and stay here during the school holidays. My poor husband was subject to counselling and scrutiny, sworn to secrecy and his phone confiscated, but the last thing he wanted was to talk to the press after they had treated him as a murder suspect when I was missing. The staff here had persuaded him to listen properly to what I had to say, but he was not totally convinced. He promised to support me if I wanted to admit I was a part of some terrible hoax.

Our sons believed me. When you are five and seven everything in the world is new and amazing. For youngsters obsessed with dinosaurs and fantasy in films and books, it was easy to believe their mother had been transported to the future and back again. They were mainly interested in the strange creatures that grazed and hunted over the grasslands and woods that had spread out from natural parklands and gardens. Amazing creatures have always inhabited the earth and even in our own time if you met an elephant for the first time you would be terrified. Now add in the selective breeding that had gone on for centuries and the more recent legal and illegal tampering with DNA; even a non-scientist like me could guess what had gone wrong when infrastructure broke down and animals made a bid for freedom from farms, zoos, safari parks and laboratories.

The hunters could not understand this evolution, they just knew what to hunt for food and which creatures to escape from and scare off with their burning torches and thunderous drums.

My sons suddenly came rushing up to the desk.

‘Mummy, Mummy tell us about the wild cat again and the giant bison and the huge ram that ran you all over and why did you have to go and lose your phone so you couldn’t take any pictures?’

‘A tabby cat bigger than a lion, with teeth like a sabre toothed tiger attacked me. The hunter on a strong stallion rescued me and we galloped safely away, but I dropped my handbag…’

That was as close as I could get to describing the most terrifying moment of my life, I did not want to give them nightmares, but during the day they lapped up the stories.

‘And what happened when you were picking fruit?’

‘We all stayed close together, the hunters on horseback circled around us all the time with their flaming torches and loud drums, the fierce camp guard dogs warned them as soon as they caught a scent of dangerous animals, even before they came into sight. The dogs started barking in a frenzy and suddenly a ram bigger than a bull came charging towards us. He was not interested in attacking people, he had just seen another ram trying to round up his sheep, like we saw on that farm visit, but these sheep were as big as cows.’

‘What did the ram look like Mummy?’

‘He had curling horns as large as roller coasters and he wanted to attack the other ram, we just happened to be in the way. We crowded together, the fruit gatherers knew what to do and pulled me with them down into a dip, hiding in a prickly thicket. The hunters circled us out of the way and the ram thundered past, trampling a dog and knocking a hunter off his horse.’

‘Was the hunter okay?’

 ‘Yes’ I lied, shuddering at the memory.

‘Why didn’t they kill the ram?’

‘The spears they had found in the ruins of the Tower of London would never penetrate his mega thick fleece.’

I wasn’t sure where the hunters got their weapons from, passed down from their fathers they said, so this seemed a likely explanation. As I looked at the mixture of fear and delight on the boys faces I was so thankful I had survived to come back to them. No, I would not have wanted to stay.

Do you kNow who you Are?

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If someone wanted to make a clone of you they could; people are already getting their dead dogs cloned, claims have been made that humans have been cloned. Most people have had a blood test of some sort, many of us have parted with gallons of blood to the NHS at blood donor sessions. If a blood sample was secreted away to the establishment of a mad or bad scientist they could be making clones of you at this very moment, supplying childless couples perhaps, it’s unlikely you would recognise your baby self in a pram. Or perhaps your hapless clone is being reared in a laboratory at this very moment for experimentation purposes, would your clone inherit your memory, is our DNA who we really are?

Recently I thought it would be fun to have a go at one of those on line tests, AncestryDNA. It involved spending money and quite a wait and how would we know the results were genuine? This particular test did not involve tracing your mitochondrial DNA back to Neanderthal man; it merely shows you what percentage of people in areas of the world share your DNA and is totally biased towards the Americas and Europe, because the system works on the basis of the data they have already collected. Did I believe the results? Yes; my husband’s results were neatly divided in half as we expected, although his born and bred Scottish half was classified as Ireland, a look at the map clarified that Ireland also covers Scotland and Wales.

I was hoping for something exotic, but was disappointed, I blame my parents; it seems I was neither mysteriously adopted nor are there any skeletons in our family cupboard. However I am only 14% Great Britain, so my gut instinct to voted Remain in the Eurpean Union Referendum was correct, I am 77% Europe West. The other 9% grey area of ‘low confidence region’ with some European Jewish, Irish, north west Russian and a dash of Iberian does add a bit of seasoning to the mix.

We have not so far delved into tracing family trees, finding out who shares similar DNA, but I did agree to accept a message from a name I’d never heard of and was astonished when one set of grandparents’ names came up. The granddaughter of my grandmother’s brother had traced me! I had never met this great uncle because he and his wife emigrated to Canada before they had their children. Perhaps my grandmother vaguely mentioned her older brother, but I now know for certain I have lots of Canadian relatives.

But does our DNA really matter? Only an adopted person who has never been able to trace a single blood relative can answer that question. We are all individuals who have to make what we can of our lot in life; the adopted person might be moved to have a large family of their own, or perhaps they will be forever genetically unique.

Depending on your religious beliefs  you might subscribe to the wardrobe theory; the true individual a soul waiting to be popped in to any available baby body until the return to heaven or reincarnation, or perhaps you think our whole personality and memories are passed on through our genes.

DNA remains a delightful mystery for lay people and a source of inspiration for writers. My novel ‘Brief Encounters of the Third Kind’ explores what happens when the DNA of ordinary people is tampered with.