Richard J. Ronayne

Novella

Phenix Publishing Ltd

Nation-X Project

Dozens of my stories are currently being illustrated for release by Phenix Publishing Ltd for their Nation-X project, a multi-year project for 4-8000 word educational novellas.

This series was designed for young adults and high schoolers across Chinese and American schools, harnessing anthropomorphism to help digest mature, dark or joyful topics, whilst reflecting life, and exploring real social issues in an exciting and educational way.

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In Vivo
By Richard Joseph Ronayne

CHAPTER 1: Inception/Conception
“I’m sorry, Doudna. I wish I could be there for you, but I want to have children,” Doudna Felis’ fiancé explained to her. “You must understand, it’s hard to find another Siberian Lynx, there’s not that many of us.”
He turned away, leaving her alone on the cold pavement, as the sleet came down around her. She remained here a while, until her anguished cries became muffled sobs. Passers-by looked at the strange lady crying on the floor in the terrible weather, but not one of them offered her any hint of help of empathy.
She was alone, in a world full of people. Or so she thought, until she remembered who she was and what her work was. She was a molecular biologist, who, with her lab partner Emmanuelle Paniscus, a Bonobo Ape, had invented a genetic engineering technique by which the genomes of living organisms could be modified, called CRISPR-Cas9.
CRISPR is an acronym for “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats,” a family of DNA sequences found in the genomes of prokaryotic organisms such as bacteria and archaea, derived from DNA fragments of bacteriophages that had previously infected the prokaryote. They are used to detect and destroy DNA from similar bacteriophages during subsequent infections. 
Cas9 stands for “CRISPR associated protein 9,” which is a one hundred and sixty-nine kilodalton protein which plays a vital role in the immunological defense of certain bacteria against DNA viruses and plasmids.
Lately, they had been experimenting with Ribonucleic acid, called RNA, which is a polymeric molecule essential in various biological roles in coding, decoding, regulation, and expression of genes. Specifically, she was using Guide RNAs, “gRNA,” which are a piece of RNAs that function as guides for RNA- or DNA-targeting enzymes. Very often these enzymes will delete, insert, or otherwise alter the targeted RNA or DNA. They occur naturally, serving important functions, but can also be designed to be used for targeted editing. Which was all she could think about right now. 
“What is it, Doudna?” Emmanuelle asked at work the next day, noticing Doudna’s unusually sheepish behavior.
Doudna looked up and down the hallway outside Emmanuelle’s lab to make sure nobody was about to interrupt their very private conversation before closing the door behind her. “I need your help, Emmanuelle.”
“What is it?”
“He left me,” she started, holding up a finger to stop Emmanuelle from reacting too quickly. “He left me, because I cannot give him a child.”
Emmanuelle’s instinct was to jump up out of her chair and console her friend who must be grieving such a terrible loss, but she saw that Doudna had more to say. In fact, she knew Doudna so well, she could tell that she had already calculated what she had to do to achieve her goal, and her sheepishness suggested it involved something that Emmanuelle wasn’t going to agree with. “You don’t want me to console you, though you know that I want to, you’re here for something else, aren’t you?”
“Yes. My eggs are genetically deficient, I want your help to retrieve them, so I can fix them with CRISPR-Cas9. Will you help me?” she asked, only looking up from the floor as she finished her question.
Emmanuelle stared intensely at her friend for a moment before speaking. “I know you don’t mean germline engineering, Doudna. I know you wouldn’t ask me to criminalize myself and have a hand in potentially destroying civilization as we know it because you were tempted to make more alterations to your eggs in a heritable way,” she stared again watching for a reaction from Doudna. “No, you must mean simple somatic genetic modification on yourself, consisting of altering somatic cells, which are all cells in the body that are not involved in reproduction. The advantage being that though somatic gene therapy does change the genome of the targeted cells, these cells are not within the germline, so the alterations are not heritable and cannot be passed on to the next generation. Right?”
“I just want to fix the irregularity so I can conceive a child, but I cannot do it without you Emmanuelle, please, help me? I have no intention of abusing our work and modifying anything else,” Doudna pleaded, lying.
 
CHAPTER 2: The Red Room
Several years had passed now, as Doudna and Emmanuelle were nominated for a prestigious scientific award for their work on CRISPR-Cas9. As both sat in the conference hall, surrounded by the world’s greatest minds, the winner was about to be announced.
“And the third nomination involves the powerful new gene editing technology known as CRISPR. While gene editing itself is not new, CRISPR offers scientists a method that is much faster, cheaper, and more accurate,” the special guest speaker, Miles Keys, said through the microphone on stage. “It is my honor, as the Minister of Science and Technology, to announce this year’s Global Science Prize winner,” he said, opening the envelope in his hand. “And I am pleased to announce that it is Doudna Felis and Emmanuelle Paniscus for the invention of the CRISPR gene editing technology!”
They both cheered, hugging each other. The work was the real prize, but it was nice to have your work recognized. The two made their way to the stage where they received their awards, while Miles encouraged them to say a few words.
Doudna spoke first. “Thank you! CRISPR is so much more efficient and accurate than older gene-editing technology because it uses each cell’s immune system to target and splice out parts of its DNA and replace them with new genetic code. CRISPR is already dramatically expanding the realm of what is possible in the field of genetic engineering. Nation-X has approved the first trials on people using CRISPR, in this case to strengthen the cancer-fighting properties of the immune systems of patients suffering from melanoma and other deadly cancers. CRISPR’s power and versatility have opened up new and wide-ranging possibilities across biology and medicine.”
“The potential of CRISPR seems almost limitless in it’s potential to provide treatments for today’s most terrifying illnesses, such as the incurable Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s diseases,” Emmanuelle chimed in, before she pushed Doudna forward to send the message to the scientific community that they had agreed upon beforehand.
Doudna hesitatingly stepped forward to speak. “An intriguing possibility involves making genetic changes at the embryonic stage, also known as germline editing. When combined with researchers’ growing understanding of the genetic links to various diseases, CRISPR could conceivably help eliminate a host of maladies in people before they are born. To alter the gene lines in an embryo’s eight or sixteen cell stage to eliminate the gene for diseases such as Tay-Sachs. For those of you that do not know, Tay-Sachs disease is a genetic disorder that results in the destruction of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. The most common form is infantile Tay–Sachs disease which becomes apparent around three to six months of age, with the baby losing the ability to turn over, sit, or crawl,” she said, pausing to continue the agreed statement, that she personally did not agree with. “You might think we are ethically obliged to cure such a horrible disease now that we have the power to do so, but that change will occur in each of the resulting person’s trillions of cells, and most importantly, in the cells of all of their descendants also. We cannot afford to make such god like changes to our species, and, as the inventors of this new and terrifying technology, we urge the scientific community to hold off editing embryos for now, because we do not yet know enough to safely make changes that can be passed down to future generations. The ramifications of doing so, could create far worse terrors than Tay–Sachs disease.”
The audience gave a standing ovation, as they agreed that they were the deserved winners, and they had the strength to warn the world not to misuse what they had created.
After making their way back to their seats, Doudna noticed on her phone that her house alarm had been triggered. She checked the external and internal cameras, before suddenly leaving Emmanuelle to enjoy the party by herself.
She ran to her car and frantically sped off home through the darkness. She parked up quickly at the house, before carefully approaching the front door, where the door had been smashed open, hanging off the hinges at an angle. She peered inside to see that the hallway was in disarray, as the tables were broken with their holdings spread out across the hallway floor.
The lights were not working, but she quickly realized why, as the walls were littered with holes that had been punched into them by something extremely strong, interrupting the cables that ran through them. 
She walked through the dining room, which was also destroyed. Feathers still floated around the room, as the cushions had been ripped in half. She noticed a large hole in the wall where something had run straight through into the kitchen.
She peered around the corner to see inside, where all the cupboard doors had not just been opened, but ripped off, left lying on the floor as small footprints were left in the milk and cereal coated surface, which led upstairs.
She tiptoed to the bottom of the stairs and listened out keenly. She thought she heard giggling for a moment, as she crept up slowly step by step. She stopped suddenly when she saw blood at the top of the stairs.
She held her hand over her mouth to cover her gasp of shock, as her heartbeat rang through her skull. She sat on the stairway for a moment in disbelief, before finding her courage to press on upwards.
She could see now, peeking across the landing, that the blood led to the spare bedroom, but the footprints led to the third room. Reaching the top of the staircase, she listened out to the silence. Not hearing anything now, she followed the blood into the bedroom.
The smell was terrible, and she quickly regretted her decision to shine her phone’s light onto the horrifying scene that was before her. Body pieces lay scattered across the room, some mushed into unobvious misshapen piles of meat and bones.
The room was red. Doudna fell to her knees, crying in horror. She found recognizable tatters of clothing on the floor, but she already knew who had died so horribly here. She also knew who had killed them.
“Mom?” the child’s voice called from directly behind Doudna.
She froze in fear for a moment, before nodding to herself, accepting the situation. “Yes, Rufus, it’s me. We better get you cleaned up, and then we’re going to have to have another talk about your temper.”


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