The answer lies in the ease with which they delve into the various scientific fields to turn them into an exciting adventure; the way they bring them closer to the public; the credibility of their arguments, and the intuition they displayed, anticipating what would later become a reality. The novelist introduces the lay reader to subjects such as genetic cloning, excavation techniques in archeology combined with treasure hunting, the pioneering use of electricity, or such fashionable issues as the acquisition of consciousness and intelligence in computers.
Now, it is not easy to find a good story genuinely catapulted by science; a story that forces you to turn page after page without raising your head. This is what good writers achieve, unlike those who try to hide the weakness of their arguments and take advantage of the slightest opportunity to launch informative speeches and dissertations for unintended readers. In this selection – like all of them, subjective – one runs the risk of leaving novels that seem indispensable to others. Choosing always involves risks.
Of the very current matter of thecloningYgenetic manipulationA classic was already written more than 30 years ago:Children of Brazil, published by the American writer and playwright Ira Levin in 1976. The villain of the story is Dr. Josef Mengele (1911-1979), a ruthless Nazi who conducted experiments on children, especially twins, at Auschwitz. Now he hides in Brazil, dresses in white and has around him a legion of mercenaries and assistants whom he involves in a “sacred mission” while eating with them in a Japanese restaurant: they must assassinate 94 people of about 65 years in various parts of Europe and America. The targets are the parents of as many clones of Adolf Hitler scattered throughout various countries. Mengele thus tries to recreate the childhood experiences of the führer, whose father died at precisely that age.
The sinister doctor, Levin tells us, is ten years ahead of a technique known as mononuclear orcloning: “The nucleus of an egg cell is destroyed, leaving the cell body intact (…). Inside the enucleated cell, the nucleus of a cell body taken from the organism to be reproduced is placed: the nucleus of a cell somatic, not sexual. “
A new Hitler threatens to take over the world
The fertilized egg cell, with 46 chromosomes, “placed in a nutrient solution, proceeds to duplicate and divide. When it reaches the 16 or 32-cell stage, which takes four or five days, it can be implanted in the mother’s uterus. .. The end result is an embryo that has no father and mother, but only a donor, of which it is an exact genetic duplicate “. It is the almost exact description of the technique that the Scottish scientist Ian Wilmut used to father the famous Dolly the sheep in 1996, a mammal created from a non-reproductive cell – in this case, taken from the mammary gland.
Another fascinating aspect ofChildren of Brazilit is his emphasis that genes are not everything, but that environment also matters. So much so that it constitutes the dramatic framework of the story, in which the cazanazi Yakov Lieberman tries to prevent a clone Hitler from indoctrinating the world. Without the role of the environment in the genes there would be no novel, no action, no drama, just a mere laboratory experiment. A ten for a novel.
The other great title ofgenetic fictionit is, of course,Jurassic Park(1990), by the recently deceased Michael Crichton. It is a disguised tribute to classics such asThe lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle, where dinosaurs survived on top of the tepuis, high plateaus that rose hundreds of millions of years ago mainly in the territory of present-day Venezuela. In Crichton’s novel, the great reptiles come to life in the darkest and most disturbing corner of scientific advancement. Although the clonal recreation of a person is closer in time than that of an extinct animal, it is very remarkable how the problem of rescuing prehistoric DNA is solved: it comes from the blood locked in the guts of an insect trapped in amber.
Next: Fact-Based Gene Hacking
It’s true that scientists have extracted DNA from mosquitoes encased in fossil resin dating back at least 35 million years, and that Oregon State University entomologist George Poinar obtained tiny extracts from a 125 million-year-old beetle, but no it has been obtained from the blood sucked by insects. In addition, Dominican amber – and in general, that of Central America – which is the source of the novel, is no more than 35 million years old. However, scientists use in fiction an enzyme that makesphotocopiesof DNA, called polymerase chain reaction -PCR, according to its acronym in English-, to obtain millions of copies of the deteriorated -and ex-reptilian genetic material. It is a real technique that was essential to sequence human or mouse genomes. In his latest work, Next, Crichton addressed the legal and ethical issue of gene patents. It was based on the true story of an American who lost a historic judgment: he suffered from cancer and spleen cells were removed without his consent to patent a new drug.
The physics of time travel has also spurred the imaginations of many storytellers. Perhaps the most popular contemporary novel that has made us see theory in practice isContact(1985), fromCarl Sagan, made into a movie by Robert Zemeckis. It addresses, on the one hand, the world of radio telescopes in search of intelligent signals, and on the other, the way in which Dr. Eleanor Arroway embarks towards a star called Vega, which is only about 26 light years away.
The author of the “fluid Garcia” was ahead of HG Wells
“Sagan asked his friend the physicist Kip Thorne to provide him with some method to travel through time,” explains Manuel Moreno, professor of Physics at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Thorne began to think about the problem as his ex-wife drove down the freeway. Because Arroway – played in the film by Jodie Foster – could not use a black hole due to its enormous gravity, he turned to an exotic concept: wormholes, which were postulated by Austrian physicist Ludwig Flamm shortly after Einstein published his general relativity theory. And he wrote the equations sitting in the back seat.
In theory, these are shortcuts in space-time. According to Thorne, one that was only a kilometer long could link Earth and Vega. The round trip of Arroway and his four companions lasts at least a day – or is his feeling – while the components of the project report an absence of the machine of only 20 minutes, which illustrates the relativity of time. In the film, 18:00 on the Arroway clock is half a second to outside observers, a more dramatic than scientific turn.
A clear precursor to these trips isThe time machine, by HG Wells, published in 1895. However, the first novel in Western literature that raises it is titledThe anachronópete, and was written by a Spanish diplomat, Enrique Gaspar, in 1881. This device consisted of a cast iron box, which works by electricity, and which prevents its travelers from rejuvenating if they travel to the past thanks to the “Garcia fluid”. Its creator, Sindulfo García, a doctor in Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences, presents it at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1878. “It is a kind of spaceship that rises into the atmosphere and reverses the Earth’s rotational movement at a supersonic speed, “says Nil Santiáñez, professor of Spanish Studies at the University of St. Louis, in the US Absurd, but funny.
In the story, time is the atmosphere that surrounds us and runs in the opposite direction to the rotation of our planet, so the contraption, to unfold it, must go from west to east. The work places the protagonist, his niece and a group of friends in different chapters of history: the battle of Tetouan, in 1860, the surrender of Granada, in 1492, imperial China of the year 220, the destruction of Pompeii and the times of Noah.
When they wrote their works, neither Wells nor Gaspar could know – unless they had traveled into the future – that in 1905 Einstein would raise his special theory of relativity, which leaves time in a bad place because it loses its condition of absolute. Later I would postulate general relativity, where the gravity exerted by a body is essentially a dent in the space-time fabric. They are scenarios where the theoretical possibility of trips to the past or the future arises.
A bundle of tachyons to send a message to the past
InCronopaisaje(1980), by astrophysicist Gregory Benford, suggests a curious way to do it: sending tachyons, theoretical particles that travel at least at the speed of light. In 1998, scientists from the University of Cambridge sent a beam to 1963 to warn of the danger posed by the use of certain chemicals that have put the Earth under minimum. How? This excerpt from the conversation between Renfrew, the physicist who wants to do the experiment, and Peterson, a politician, reveals it to us:
-Since 1963, the Earth has continued to rotate around the Sun, while the Sun itself has continued to rotate around the center of the galaxy, and so on. Add all of this up and you find that 1963 is a long way off.
-In relation to what?
-Well, relative to the center of mass of the local group of galaxies, of course. Remember that the local group is also in motion in relation to the set of references provided by the microwave background radiation and …
-Look, put aside all that jargon, will you? Are you talking about 1963 somewhere in heaven?
-Exactly. We sent a beam of tachyons to hit that spot. We sweep the volume of space occupied by the Earth at that particular moment.
20,000 leagues in a submarine already invented
It does not seem that such fantasies will come true in the near future, contrary to what some plots of the best cultivators of scientific anticipation point out. Without a doubt, the great teacher in this specialty isJulio Verne. In20,000 leagues of underwater travel(1869) offers rich scientific descriptions of marine fauna, although he enriches it with the occasional dramatization. Thus, Verne’s giant octopus, which did not exceed eight meters in length, weighed more than 22 tons, so its tentacles would have to have been made of iron. Ten of these appendages are described in the novel, corresponding to a squid, not an octopod. Undoubtedly, in Verne’s time there were stories circulating about finds of giant squid; the legend of the Kraken is very old. On the other hand, the famous Nautilus, Manuel Moreno tells us, was not an invention of the French writer, since in 1858 the inventor from Girona, Narciso Monturiol, had already developed the first motor submarine. However, the fundamental thing is that Verne “brings the novelty of electrical energy, which moves the machine,” says Moreno. “We are in the second third of the 19th century, and the applications of electromagnetic phenomena, well described from a theoretical point of view, were not yet known.” Indeed, James Clerk Maxwell had summarized the essence of electromagnetism in four fundamental equations in 1864. Another interesting feature of20,000 leaguesit is the use of diving suits and airguns at sea, which anticipates the use of air regulators in modern diving.
“Jules Verne has been given the paternity of many things that not even he invented,” says Moreno. “What happens is that he was very aware of scientific advances.” From him we can make a long list of recommendations, such asJourney to the Center of the Earth, where, fantasies aside, lessons in paleontology and geology are given; orFrom the Earth to the moon, fiction in which the protagonists reach our satellite aboard a howitzer fired from Cape Town, Florida. Interestingly, it was close to the site of today’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, a location chosen to take advantage of the additional rotational momentum of the Earth.
Lack of funds to investigate, novel affair
Finally, there are not many scientific thrillers that suggest an archaeological background, despite the Indiana Jones fashion – whose arguments, by the way, always lean towards pseudo-archeology, like the one that appears in the books by Erik Von Daniken-. InThe Sacred City, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child outline the existence of a mythical city full of Anasazi Indian treasures. The spectacular action is combined with a phenomenal description of the essence of an archaeologist’s work, the methodical sorting of clay pieces – which can be long and boring – and the way expeditions are carried out. The protagonist, Nora Kelly, later appears in other novels by the prolific Preston and Child. In one of them, he asks for extra money from the director of the Museum of Natural History in New York, where he works, to date some vessels and be able to advance his research. Your request is denied: lack of budget is a fairly everyday problem for the ordinary scientist, but also a good excuse for action to move forward.
Luis Miguel Ariza
