Living Proof, стр. 7
But even within their own party, the battle was stacked. Some conservatives felt that the DEP was sucking tax dollars away from its sister division of the state health agency: the Department of Embryo-Fetal Protection. This department, which operated out of the same building, monitored all pregnant women in order to protect unborn babies until their birth. Upon learning she was pregnant, a woman was required to register with the DEFP, where she was assigned a caseworker. The caseworker scheduled regular visits throughout the pregnancy to assess whether the woman was taking her vitamins, exercising regularly, and going to all doctor appointments. This important measure of oversight had helped to prevent countless illegal abortions, premature births, and malnourished babies. Fines for not cooperating were steep, and if the fetus was found to be harmed as a result of improper prenatal care, the mother could be charged with manslaughter.
With so many pregnant women to monitor, and relatively few fertility clinics, some conservatives were arguing that the DEP should be drastically downsized; damaged embryos were hardly ever discovered these days, so why maintain such stringent oversight? Besides, how many scientists today even remembered how to research stem cells, so what was the point of destroying embryos? But Dopp knew that it was crucial to maintain oversight of fertility doctors, many of whom didn’t even believe an extrauterine embryo was a person. So Dopp knew it was up to him to prove that threats to EUEs still existed—thus keeping their department afloat.
“We have two whole months,” Trent said, trying to sound positive.
Dopp looked around the table gravely. “Only two months.”
“I don’t get it,” Jed piped up. “Any conservatives in Albany with a brain should be fighting for us tooth and nail. It’s obvious that EUEs will always need our oversight. Why should a shutdown change anyone’s mind?”
Dopp sighed. “Up in Albany, they don’t operate on principles. They’re pragmatists. So we need to show them that our department is still necessary. One big shutdown could mean a difference of millions of dollars in our budget next year. And—” He paused. “—lots of jobs.”
Trent couldn’t help feeling some pity for them all; fear was the new receptionist that greeted them every morning, a reminder of the outside world’s power to obstruct their mission.
“Back in the old days,” Banks growled, “I never would have believed it would come to this.”
“How was it then?” Jed asked quietly.
“It’s not over,” Dopp snapped. “Far from it.”
With a look of nostalgia, Banks explained that the department used to do shutdowns every few months, and regularly busted scientists who had smuggled embryos into their labs.
“But we haven’t found a stolen embryo for five years,” Banks said. “Sometimes I give tickets for missing or damaged embryos, take away medical licenses, things like that. But nothing sensational.”
Trent remembered the last isolated shutdown two years ago—an elderly doctor had been destroying embryos for no reason other than to spite the department.
Trent looked at his boss. “So where do we go from here?”
“We need to catch her in action, whatever she’s doing with all those embryos,” Dopp said. “Yes, they’re all stocked at the end of the month, but where are they before that?”
“Are you saying she could be cloning and replacing them?” Trent asked, astonished. Harvesting embryos on the sly—to cover up their mass destruction—was nearly unprecedented. It was akin to genocide, the twenty-first-century equivalent of Hitler’s ovens.
Dopp half shrugged, lifting his eyebrows. “The technology is still out there, and we can’t tell the difference between an original embryo and a clone. But the logistics would be very complex. She’d need biochemists who remember how to do it, not to mention instruments, a private lab space, money, and bottom line: a lot of embryos. It would be a major conspiracy. I didn’t think people would have the gall to try that anymore, but who knows.”
“You mean—running secret labs to get embryonic stem cells?” Jed asked, his voice pitching on the last words.
Dopp blinked. “Yes.”
“But only adult stem cells are viable,” Jed cried. “Embryonic stem cells never helped anyone even when they were legal!”
Trent shook his head in sympathetic frustration. Adult stem cells, as he had learned from his job training, were undifferentiated cells—blanks—found in specialized tissues such as heart or muscle. These blank cells, which were used regularly in bone marrow transplants, could grow into the type of specialized cells found in the tissue of origin and possibly other types, though adult stem cells were harder to find and extract than the embryonic type, which were blank cells found in five-day-old human embryos. Those could give rise to any cell in the body, making their therapeutic potential unlimited. And they were easy to obtain—but that meant killing an unborn child. Before the embryo rights movement put a legal end to the barbarism, not one sick or paralyzed person benefited from embryonic stem cells.
“I never understood how people could claim those cells would help anyone,” Jed said, “without any proof of it at all.”
Trent nodded, though he wondered about his colleague’s choice of the word proof. A vision of the infamous stem cell heart popped into his mind—the first human organ that had been created purely out of embryonic stem cells more than twenty years prior, when the research was still a dangerous open highway. He wondered, had that been proof of something beyond depravity?
Dopp’s mouth was one steely line. “Criminals can find ways to justify anything. This situation must be looked into.”
“How?” Trent asked. “We need proof.”
“Secrecy breeds the need for secrecy,” Dopp replied. “Trent, I’m impressed by your digging.”
Trent smiled modestly. Finally, he thought. Window office, here I come.
“How would you like to do some undercover fieldwork?” Dopp asked with a friendly smile.
Trent stared. “What?”
“This whole case was your idea, so you should follow it