Conflict is, of course the backbone of fiction, so I’m always on the lookout for new sources of it. Recently I was reading “The Code Breaker” by Walter Isaacson, the biography of Jennifer Doudna, one of the key players in the discovery of CRISPR, the biological tool by which we gained the ability to edit DNA, the very blueprint of life itself.
He brings out a very good picture of a complex process, very human beings patiently exploring the unknown, looking for something they weren’t sure existed but would be pretty darned cool if it did. Cooperation and competition, the lure of millions to be made commercializing this new discovery, bitter disputes over who made what discovery when.
Science, we should remember, is a human endeavour, and knowledge comes from the cross pollination of work in multiple fields.
As I have pointed out elsewhere in this blog, knowledge itself is not power. The application of knowledge is what changes the world. Hahn’s experiments with nuclear fission in 1938 were laboratory curiosity. The Trinity test in 1945 changed the world.
Many times in the history of science and technology lines have been drawn, prominently marked “Do Not Cross!”
An early example is the Ancient Greek physiologist Galen, whose textbook on human anatomy was the revered and universally taught standard until the Renaissance. That line was marked “Do Not Cross!” in letters of fire.
Finally, however, a man dared to cross that line. Physician Andreas Vesalius took on himself the job of fact checking Galen. He was a professor at the University of Padua, who, heresy of heresies, considered hands-on direct observation to be the only reliable resource.
It didn’t take long for him to uncover Galen’s dirty little secret. He had never done a dissection of a human body. In Ancient Rome it was utterly illegal and taboo besides. He had done his dissections on animals and passed off the results as human, assuming they would be the same. You know what happens when you assume.
Vesalius was the kind of guy to step over the line in style. He went on to publish his master work, “De Humani Corporis Fabrica”, (The Fabric of the Human Body), in seven volumes with 237 illustrations by an artist or artists who were students of the great Titian. We don’t know exactly who, since they didn’t sign their work. Maybe they saw the shit storm coming. He also did a public dissection of the body of the notorious felon Jakob Karrer von Gebweiler. One of his fans was a criminal court judge. Justice was stricter and more summary in those days.
He was hounded by his enemies the rest of his life, with accusations of sacrilege, vivisection, and anything else they could think of.
The capstone was the the solemn pronouncement from one of his old professors that the human body had changed since Galen’s day.
He died on his way to Jerusalem for a pilgrimage, so broke a philanthropist had to pay for his funeral.
That was the Renaissance, though. Surely in this enlightened present day … the same thing could happen.
Isaacson records how the workers in the field of gene editing drew the germline. It was all right to do research on how to edit genes. Multiple labs competed to do it first. It was all right to use this new tool to create better vaccines against diseases such as COVID-19. Treating genetic diseases such as sickle cell anemia, well, close to the line, but, grudgingly okay.
The modification of genes in an inheritable human genome was greeted with shock, horror, and an absolute prohibition. Shock! Horror! Designer babies! Gene tailored basketball players! Genetic diseases removed from the genome!
And, of course, there was someone to cross the line. In this case, it was a young Chinese professor who removed a gene for vulnerability to AIDS from the in vitro embryo of a couple who had given their well-informed consent to the procedure.
Isaacson describes him as young, naive and retiring. He clearly did not know what happens when you cross the line. He expected academic acclaim for a real and historic accomplishment. Instead he got the shit storm. His colleagues, the media and everyone else ganged up on him.
The literary takeaway here is that this is a dandy source of conflict. Draw a line, make sure the reader understands that this line Must Not Be Crossed!, then have your hero cross it, whether wittingly or unknowingly.
The shit storm commences, and your hero(s) find out that they’ve made a lot of powerful enemies and that people they thought were friends, aren’t.
I did just that in my current project, a military science fiction novel. The corrupt and ossified Terran Federation still manages to rigorously enforce the Restriction of Dangerous Technologies Act, which absolutely prohibits a laundry list of technologies on pain of a long stretch in the notorious Luna Correctional prison.
When an Admiral with his back to the wall decides to cross that line, he makes a lot of powerful enemies. Of course, he also has friends, as in the officers and crews of Fifth Fleet, who have followed him to Hell and back.
There you go. A good source of conflict.
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