Heredity (2003)
By Jenny Davidson
Cloning; Genetic engineering; Heredity; Nature/nurture
Elizabeth Mann decides to give birth to 18th-century criminal Jonathan Wild’s clone.
Elizabeth Mann moves to London to avoid conflict with her father over her lifestyle and career choices. While there, she works on a travel guide, an occupation that takes her to the Hunterian Collection of the British Museum. Hunter, an 18th-century doctor, arranged his museum to highlight the constant adaptation and change in species, and one of his exhibits is the skeleton of notorious criminal Jonathan Wild. While at the museum, Elizabeth runs into her father’s former pupil, fertility specialist Gideon Streetcar, with whom she begins an affair. When Gideon acquires the memoirs of Jonathan Wild’s second wife, Elizabeth develops a quasi-erotic obsession for the criminal. She approaches Gideon with a proposition: she wants him to replace the genetic material in her eggs with Jonathan Wild’s DNA . Gideon agrees, but only so long as he can perform IVF with two eggs fertilized by his semen in addition to the cloned egg. Elizabeth collects samples from Wild’s skeleton, and they proceed to harvest his DNA. Elizabeth successfully becomes pregnant, but with Gideon’s child: in her obsession with conceiving a 21st-century Jonathan Wild, she overlooks the limitations of cloning technology. Disappointed that she has conceived Gideon’s child, she resigns herself to returning to America, where she will attend medical school just as her father wished although on her own terms.
A large part of Elizabeth’s investment in the cloning process is that she could give birth to a child with none of her DNA – and presumably, none of the burdens that genes entail. The pull of heredity as an overwhelming force is a recurring theme throughout the novel: in spite of her self-destructive behaviors and attempts at rebellion, she exhibits the interest in medicine and critical mind that make her father a superb doctor. Gideon, too, reenacts the mistakes of his father’s past: he criticizes his father for his philandering, but quickly immerses himself in a relationship with Elizabeth. The repeating of previous generations’ mistakes could be a product of nurture rather than nature, as both Elizabeth and Gideon might have learned, rather than inherited their behaviors. Elizabeth learns that Gideon’s father might have been the family doctor, which would indicate that “medicine chose him”; this would support both the “nature” quality of his career choice as well as the effect of “nurture” on his behavioral patterns. Another issue that Elizabeth contemplates is the ethics of cloning individuals. In a theoretical conversation with Scottish geneticist Ian Wilmut, Elizabeth imagines that he would advocate cloning for medical purposes only. While Elizabeth does not support the creation of clones to replace or supplement existing children, she also does not recognize the moral ambiguities of cloning without obtaining permission from the tissue’s owner. Elizabeth’s theft of Wild’s genetic material seems egregious, considering his fear of posthumously losing right to his body and being dissected. If DNA of the deceased can become public province, then what prevents the cloning of other famous – or infamous – figures?
Evaluation: At times, this novel is more concerned with Elizabeth’s sexual escapades than any genetic technologies, and the two seem unrelated even when Elizabeth considers having her lover implant the clone. In the end, the novel seems pointless in that the cloning technology is a failure and an afterthought, and Elizabeth has gained no insight into her self-destructive behaviors.
– Natalie Champ