Scan McMullen - The Blondefire Genome

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The Blondefire Genome

by Sean McMullen

other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

Megan walked home from school. She knew the bus would be full of kids talking about the Blondefire

television special from the night before. Walking let her escape from hearing how well Jackie Cassall had

danced and sung, and how great the local all-blonde girl group had been. Nobody had been watching the

science program Quantum. Not her science teacher, or her maths teacher, not a single student in the

entire school. Megan had been on Quantum.

Blondefire's latest hit was second on the Australian charts, ninth in Britain and fourteenth in the USA.

They were going to make a series of video clips. The five girls who made up the group went to Megan's

school, and everyone in the school was proud of them. Everyone except Megan.

Nobody who knew Megan had seen her appear on Quantum as for seven whole minutes she

described her experiments with growing plants in a centrifuge at three times normal gravity. She had no

tape of it. Her older brother, Alex, had cleared her timer setting on the family VCR to record the

Blondefire special. Her mother had been on night shift at the medical laboratory and had missed the

show. Her father was in England doing contract work.

Megan had told nobody beforehand: her television appearance was meant to be a surprise. Just as

well, she thought. They probably would have watched Blondefire anyway.

She arrived home and looked into her sunroom-greenhouse, staring at the spinning wheel of

transparent plastic that induced three times the Earth's gravity for the plants inside.

"They don't even know you exist, but one day your seeds will fly into space," she told the plants. She

walked upstairs to her attic laboratory and there, with the door locked behind her she finally broke down

and sobbed with frustration and disappointment.

Megan's interest in genetics had begun a year earlier, when her father had sent her a DNA kit for

schools as a birthday present. She had used the reagents and instruments to extract DNA from the cells

of plants, cut it up with enzymes, and then examined the pieces using electrophoresis. Soon she hit on the

idea of growing wheat in a homemade centrifuge under high gravity and looking for genetic changes in

each generation. With Alex's help, she had built a centrifuge: a tube of industrial plastic, fifteen

centimetres in diameter, taped to a bicycle wheel rim and spun by an electric motor. It had spun almost

continuously for months while several generations of wheat grew. Megan had painted the NASA logo on

the outer rim. It was her ticket to space.

The DNA-ram, a version of the type invented at Cornell University in 1983, was all her own work. A

starter's pistol was clamped into one of two tubes welded into an old pressure cooker, and a

hand-operated vacuum pump was connected to the other tube. When the pistol fired its blank, the blast

was diverted into a pressure tube to shoot a hollow plastic cylinder down another tube until it hit a plate

with a tiny hole at the centre. A mixture of powdered tungsten and DNA sprayed through the hole and

into the evacuated pressure cooker, which contained a dish of ryegrass stem cells. It was a rough,

random process, but some of the DNA was rammed into the cells on the tungsten particles, and their

genetic makeup was altered forever.

Experimental work helped to ease Megan's pain at the way her appearance on national television the

night before had been ignored. She had extracted DNA from wattle leaves some days earlier using an

ethanol precipitation method and now she mixed the raw DNA with a pinch of tungsten powder.

Preparing the target ryegrass stem cells took time, as did pumping air out of the pressure cooker with the

hand pump.

Three hours passed as if they had been moments. Megan heard Alex come in and immediately start

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