The Gnome Genome Project

The man in a black three-piece suit harried into the small office and quickly sat down on the office couch. "Okay, so you did it, right?"

"Wooo partner," said the man in the lab coat behind the desk. "How about a Hello or Good Morning." The man behind the desk laughed. "We haven’t seen each other in a while, Dr. Feldsmith. A little personal concern and compassion is always good for upper management to display."

"Oh, screw that, did you do it?" Dr. Feldsmith looked intently at Dr. Goodman who sat quietly drumming his fingers on the cluttered desktop. "Okay, Okay, Hello, Good Morning, How’s the wife and kid?"

"Better, but I want to . . ."

"You did it didn’t you? You called me. That’s why you’re being so coy. You bastard, you know the University of Tokyo has almost a herd of cloned Wooly Mammoths now. We need a response. I heard they were starting on a Mastodon, for Christ sake!" Dr. Feldsmith stood up. "I gotta tell the Brass we finally have a response."

"Wait, wait . . ." Dr. Goodman waved for him to sit down. "I need to tell you the whole story. It’s better than you can imagine."

Dr. Feldsmith looked down at his wristwatch. "Make it fast and I can announce it at the morning departmental conference."

"Okay, sit then . . . you know we wanted to do a unique but interesting animal, not just another big lumbering plant forager. Still, it needed to be some, now extinct, species from the Northern hemisphere that had been abundant; to have a better chance of finding frozen soft tissue."

Dr. Feldsmith nodded impatiently. "I know this."

Dr. Goodman just smiled, as the professor he was, he preceded confidently. "There was a dwarf bear with a very wide-spread distribution, roaming from the Americas to Northern Europe."

"A Dwarf Bear, oh, Christ!"

"Wait for the complete report." Dr. Goodman held his left hand out palm first, as a Stop signal then smiled knowingly. "It went extinct between 8,000 to 11,000 years ago. Plenty of skeletons available . . . they are odd though in that they definitely stood up right, skulls rotated forward, opposable thumbs, oh well there’s a lot more, but anyway. Well, . . ..

"Extinct Dwarf Dancing Bear? Great. Whatever. I gotta go." Dr. Feldman put his hands down to his sides to lift himself off the couch.

"Stop it, it gets better." Dr. Goodman smiled. "Okay, so you know we need a close relative, living in this time, to use the cellular components to hold and process the nucleus and its DNA coded information. We thus sequenced the DNA of the fossil. Using the teeth from a number of skulls, we got good DNA recovery and finally sequenced the entire genome for the creature. It turned out not to be a bear, at all, but a close relative of the raccoon."

"Oh, much better," Dr. Feldsmith nodded his head in an exaggerated manner. "A Dancing Raccoon!" Dr. Feldsmith was losing his smile. "Double Great."

"There had been recovery, at five peripheral glacier sites, of frozen soft tissue and skeletal remains of these beasts. This was two years ago." Dr. Goodman walked over to the office door. "Ruth could you, please?" He turned back to Dr. Feldsmith. "Using standard protocols we were able to recover these ancient but viable nuclei and implant them into enucleated raccoon cells."

"It worked, I hope." Dr. Feldsmith shook his head slowly and looked at his watch.

"You’ll see in a moment." Dr. Goodman pointed at the open door. "The clone matured very rapidly. In two years it was an adult. Here he is now."