Chapter 3

January 2007

The hard-core watch started in earnest three weeks after the eggs had been laid. In the preceding weeks, Ross had finalized his selection of six graduate assistants, and with their input, started writing up and detailing the experimental protocols they would use, once the experimental birds were suitably mature, to see if the presence of the "smart gene" would express itself in the hypothesized fashion. That is, they wanted to see if they could produce birds that learned more, learned faster, and retained more of what they learned. He also had enlisted one of the assistants, a second-year student who already had his master's degree in Physiological Psychology, to get a head start on drafting an article describing their process of creating the transgenic birds. It could go to a relevant scientific journal, but he'd hold it until after the birds had hatched and had been DNA-tested to ascertain if the procedures had been successful or not.

To the annoyance of the lab technicians who were there all the time, though frequently busy with other tasks, Ross had several of the research assistants check on the incubator several times a day. Totally digitally controlled and fully automatic, the incubator held the temperature to 99.3 degrees, at 42 percent humidity. The eggs were sitting on a series of stainless steel rollers that turned them every 5 hours.

On Day 25, Ross and one of the research assistants were observing the eggs, having timed their visit to coincide with a rotation sequence.

"There." Ross pointed to the first egg as it slowly turned on the roller. "You see how it's slightly out of round?"

"Uh-huh," muttered the first-year Ph.D. student, a chunky young lady of 25 who had finished top in her class at a Midwestern university. She peered into the glass door of the incubator alongside Ross.

"That's the first egg that was laid; it's starting to draw down."

"Okay," she responded. "I can see that it's flattening slightly ... what does that mean?"

"The air space in the egg is enlarging. We've got about three days before it hatches." Ross straightened up and looked around the room. "Alan..." he called to a technician restocking a supply cabinet with freshly sterilized instruments. "Is the hatcher ready?"

"It's in place," Alan answered without turning around. "We've just got to turn it on. It'll take about an hour, I think, to come up and stabilize at the proper humidity. Are you ready to go?"

Essentially an incubator without the rollers, the hatcher held the eggs at a higher humidity, to aid the chicks in their struggle to free themselves of the shell.

"Yeah. No rush, but let's get it ready to go. I'll move this first guy in later today, then we can expect to move at least one egg a day for the next week."

He turned to his assistant. "Exciting, isn't it?"

"It is. We're going to have little Frankenbirds. I hope they're okay ... do you think they're going to look normal?"

Ross shrugged. "They've bred probably thousands of generations of Doogie mice without any known adverse effects. You can't tell them apart from regular lab mice but for a DNA profile. They should be okay..."

Three days later, the first, tiny external pip mark appeared on an egg. Ross watched the chick's progress nervously, with dental tools handy, ready to step in and assist if necessary. Under more natural circumstances, the chick's mother would be available to help, although even mothers weren't always dependable in that regard.

"This could take some time," Ross observed, to an assistant, this one a male with a Harvard MS degree in biophysics. "We should give it a full 24 hours before panicking, but I hate to leave it alone overnight without anyone monitoring its progress. We should just play it by ear, I guess." The egg had stopped moving, the chick apparently resting after its initial effort, just as Ross had been told to expect.

"Have you done this before?" the assistant asked. "Bred birds, I mean."

"Nope. I read up on it and checked with the vet. She said to leave them alone and call her for a consultation if we think there's a problem. We should be okay here, I guess. It's not like birds have never been born without me watching..."

The assistant chuckled as he scribbled a notation about the chick's progress in a log.

"Let's get some coffee," Ross suggested. "This is going to end up being more stressful on me than it is on the chicks..."

One complication-free week later, the six experimental and six control birds were all hatched and in good voice, chirping loudly, frequently, and in unison for food. As Ross knew, hand-feeding newborn chicks is a tricky proposition; experienced breeders always let the parents feed their chick for the first two or three weeks before the baby was removed from the nest and hand-fed. Since that wasn't an option for Ross, he had to be sure the team charged with the chicks' well being was up to speed, skill-wise.

During the preceding weeks, all the graduate assistants, and Ross himself, had spent time at local pet stores and breeders mastering the intricacies of hand-feeding baby birds. Their training included mixing the formula for proper temperature and consistency, locating and filling the birds' crops with the correct amount of formula, selecting the right-sized syringes as the birds grew, and correctly supporting the tiny, vulnerable creatures during feedings in their first weeks.

Ross had reminded everyone that newly hatched African Greys were little more than bizarre-looking bundles of white, fluffy down with oversized beaks. And, indeed, in the first weeks, their necks were not yet strong enough to support their heads--they needed to be gently rolled on their backs to be fed. By the third week, they had sprouted a secondary layer of denser, gray down, and were able to hold up their heads on their own. Their eyes were starting to open, too.

Once all of their eyes were open, the decision was made to move them from the lab into the bird room, so they could see and hear their own kind. The room was a madhouse. With white tile floor and walls and no windows, the place echoed like crazy, not a desirable feature in a space that was home to small flock of loud, excitable parrots. Formally used to breed white lab mice, rats, Rhesus monkeys, and other animals, the room now housed 12 adult African Greys, six breeding pairs, the egg and sperm donors for both the transgenic and control birds.

Each pair had a 4'x4'x6' stainless steel cage. Ross and his colleagues had installed full-spectrum florescent lighting, which was healthier for the birds; the existing heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system circulated plenty of fresh air, and was equipped with an integral high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filtration system, a must with a roomful of African Greys, who gave off a kind of natural feather powder or "dust." The room also had drains in the tile floor (a handy feature when monkeys had been in residence). It was an efficient, physically healthy and easy-to-clean environment, but also, Ross felt, a soulless one--he didn't want his birds living there any longer than they had to.

The rapidly growing chicks were kept in two large plastic tubs on a table, surrounded by the screeching, whistling, chattering adults. They had the six normal, control birds in one tub, the transgenic birds in the other. Each spent the day flopping around on a comfortable bed of wood shavings and resting snugly under a warm towel and heat lamp.

When they were between 18 and 25 days old, each chick was fitted with a size-14 leg band etched with a series of numbers. Ross recorded the numbers, identifying each chick as either transgenic or control. That list would remain a closely guarded secret--the planned experiments needed to be blind, meaning that the researchers involved in training and testing the parrots could have no knowledge about which was which.

The birds were hand-fed three times daily until they were eight weeks old. At that point, with their feathers starting to fill in, feedings were decreased in frequency but increased in amount until they were all weaned between ten and 11 weeks. Blood samples were also taken from the transgenic chicks. Initial tests for sexing showed that they'd bred a split team: three males, three hens. Ross' team spent another anxiety filled week before more comprehensive DNA tests confirmed the presence of the human NR2B gene in all the experimental birds.

With that hurdle cleared, the scientists removed the table and brooder tubs and squeezed three more large cages into the room for the chicks. Still a bit clumsy and unsteady on a perch, the youngsters now appeared, except for their telltale brown eyes, identical to adults in their overall size and feathers. Ross personally moved each of them into their new, albeit temporary homes, purposefully mixing the transgenic birds and their normal siblings. The identifying numbers on their leg bands, information that he kept under lock and key, were the only way anyone would be able to tell them apart from that point on.

Well... that's done... Ross thought. The technically challenging part of the protocol was complete and apparently successful. Since Greys rarely talked before one year of age, there was plenty of time before he needed to get ramped up for the second phase of the study. He decided to treat himself to some Chinese food for dinner.

"Ugh." He stepped back from the curb as a passing bus blasted him with hot, sooty, diesel exhaust. Snow in NYC might be romantic at the Rockefeller Center skating rink underneath the giant Christmas tree, or when a guy was gazing at the idyllic, animated window displays of Fifth Avenue department stores, but everywhere else it was a sloppy, slushy, pain-in-the-ass mess. He plodded back up to the curb and made a second, this time successful, attempt at crossing a still heavily trafficked, post-rush hour York Avenue.

Ross sloshed up the north side of 65th Street towards 1st Avenue. The block was entirely residential, with generally nondescript six-story apartment buildings lining both sides. The sidewalks were busy, though certainly not by midtown standards, with scores of individuals darting home from work, to or from a class, or, like Professor Ross, looking for something to eat.

He was feeling pretty good about things. This latest success, the creation of transgenic parrots, was just the most recent high point in a short career dotted with high points. As a Ph.D. candidate, he had done groundbreaking work on the evolutionary role of intelligence--attempting to answer, at the genetic level, basic questions--like how primates developed such a high a level of intelligence, while, say, tree frogs, had not. If intelligence held such great evolutionary advantages, how come tree frogs and hamsters didn't develop 140 IQ's? In some respects, the answer was self-evident--for a 140 IQ the physics of anatomy demanded a three-pound brain, something that could be a distinct disadvantage to an otherwise two-ounce tree frog.

Ross pursued the overarching hypothesis that animal life had all of the intelligence that any form needed to compete effectively in its respective ecosystem, and no more.

So how did nature modulate that necessary intelligence? What were the biological underpinnings that determined why a parrot was smarter than a tree frog, but not as smart as Homo sapiens? How did a creature's genetic blueprint redraw itself in order to express the necessary level of intelligence to allow that creature an effectively competitive position within its ecosystem?

Ross wanted to know. His research had already shown that the NR2B gene had considerable influence on the biomechanics of that question. His new line of inquiry would test the limits of genetic involvement, utilizing creatures that had already demonstrated the ability to master, at least on an elementary level, associative speech.

Ross stepped aside and allowed a determined looking nurse to barrel past him. New York Presbyterian Hospital was right around the corner--just across the street from the university--and whatever she was doing tonight was likely to be more important to somebody than anything he had planned. It was starting to flurry again. It looked like they had gotten about an inch earlier in the day, and that was on top of the six inches they'd been hit with a week before. But the sidewalks on 65th were well-sanded and salted, melting the snow as soon as it hit the ground, leaving a sole-sucking, sloppy slurry for Ross to splash through.

I wonder what those little birds are thinking? Ross mulled. He wore only a lined, cotton windbreaker and a pullover sweater, but the walk to the restaurant was a short one, and the dreary conditions made it seem colder than it actually was.

Even as a child, Ross had always wondered what was going on in animal's heads. He had been one of those kids with a new pet every summer--turtles, horned toads, tadpoles and the resultant frogs, green anoles, garter snakes, hamsters, tropical fish, cats, the requisite dog and, until it sadly flew out of his bedroom window, a friendly green-and-yellow parakeet.

He'd wanted to be a vet for as long as he could remember. It was an ambition that had lasted all through his childhood right up through the summer before his sophomore year in college, when he'd interned as a veterinary assistant for the summer months. It was there he realized that 99.9 percent of a vet's day was filled with routine vaccinations for cats and dogs, neutering procedures for the same, weight loss advice for bored, inactive house pets, and the occasional flea or parasite treatment. Maybe an unusual skin rash if it were an exciting day.

That dream may have faded, but his childlike curiosity about animals never did. As his studies progressed, he became more and more intrigued by the mysterious biological underpinnings of behavior, both learned and instinctive. It was that endless wonder and curiosity that drove him to his place in the scientific community; hard work and years of schooling were just the vehicles that got him there.

At the corner of 1st and 65th he was forced to leap a four-foot puddle from the curb into the street; he managed to do so with only his trailing heel clipping the water, thoroughly soaking the bottom of his pant leg with dirty, icy brine. The Chinese restaurant was just across the street, with only one more flooded gutter between him and his nice, hot wonton soup and broccoli with chicken.

"Doctor Ross?"

Ross had barely secured his footing after his hop to the curb, when he was startled by the voice, seemingly out of nowhere, calling his name. He turned to face a short man, his face barely visible beneath a snow-encrusted wool pullover hat and a scarf covering his chin and mouth.

"Do I know you?" Ross asked.

"Dr. Ross, I'm Jerry Richter, New York Post," he replied holding out his hand. Ross shook it, more out of polite reflex than any friendly intention. "I've left three messages on your voice mail over the past few weeks but I haven't heard back from you; maybe I just missed your call ... I was hoping to have a word with you."

"Uh, yeah, I've been busy. You should really just contact the university's public affairs people. They should be able to help you out." Ross retreated from the curbside to the sidewalk, closer to the storefronts. The annoying little man followed, stamping the snow and slush from his boots as he walked.

"Is it true, Dr. Ross, that you've successfully implanted a human intelligence gene into parrots? Doesn't that make them some kind of human clone? Is that legal?"

"Aren't you the guy that wrote that stem-cell article?"

"I've been instructed that for my penance I have to answer 'yes' to that question for the next five years."

"Look, there's nothing secret or unethical about the research we're doing. But all ongoing university research is considered proprietary until the decision to publish has been made. Once we're in print I'll be happy to sit with you and answer any and all questions you may have about the study. Until then I'm afraid 'no comment' is the best you're going to get from me."

"Lucky for me not everyone over at the university feels so bound by the regulations. I don't mean to be overly melodramatic about this, professor, but the story's going to get written with you or without you. I'm just giving you your shot of getting your two cents in."

Ross reached for the door of the Chinese restaurant. "No comment is the best I can do." He opened the door and retreated into its warmth and bustle, wondering where the reporter was getting his information, and how much of a problem this might become.