This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov 30, 2011 - What does it mean to be human? The question has stimulated discussion and analysis for centuries, but the possibilities that modern technology brings has made it more pressing than ever.
Enter Lucy.
The central figure of a novel by St. Louis native Laurence Gonzales, she is half-human, half-bonobo, the result of an experiment performed by her scientist father at a primitive compound in Congo.
When her father is killed, Lucy is rescued by Jenny Lowe, a fellow primatologist, who brings her home to Chicago. Lucy appears to be an attractive teenaged girl -- cute, bright, a champion wrestler but unaware of modern society because she has lived in the jungle all her life. But Jenny senses that Lucy is somehow different, and it doesn't take long for her to figure out the secret.
Then, in the tradition of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and any number of novels by Michael Crichton, "Lucy" follows an almost inevitable path of what can go wrong when science goes further than society is ready to follow.
But in many ways, the conflict that Gonzales portrays differs from the earlier tales. Here, it is not so much the scientists that are pictured as evil as it is the people who cannot tolerate what science has done. The question becomes: Should scientists do whatever they are able to do? And how will the rest of us respond?
One of the characters puts it this way:
"If history is any guide, (Lucy's) worst nightmare is going to be some completely innocuous-seeming bureaucrat who can't think and always goes by the rule book."
Gonzales was born in St. Louis and left at the age of 5 when his professor father took a job in Houston. But he returned for frequent visits and has what he calls "pretty deep roots in St. Louis." He will be in St. Louis Sunday at 4 p.m. to discuss "Lucy" at Left Bank Books in the Central West End.
How would you summarize "Lucy"? What is it really about?
Gonzales: It's really a coming-of-age novel about a girl. That's the underlying structure of the story. But it takes the Frankenstein idea and kind of turns it on its head. In the case of Lucy, you have a scientist who is overreaching, but the result of his experiment is something that is very appealing. The girl herself has turned out so well, it creates a dissonance. You can't just say that he's a monster. You have to take that into account.
This forces people to look at problems we're really facing right now in science.
Is what Lucy's father did scientifically possible now? If not yet, how far away is it?
Gonzales: I didn't know about this until the book was finished, but about the time it was coming out, Arizona passed a law making it a felony to create a Lucy, a human-animal hybrid. It never occurred to me that people were thinking along those lines. Several other states have also done this. What I'm talking about has become close enough to scientific reality that people are becoming afraid of it already.
If you can cast your mind back to what was going on in microchips in the early '70s, as soon as microchips became cheaply available, kids started putting together computers. Who would have thought at that time that the clunky little Apples would lead to iPods and other things? I think that's where we are with biotechnology right now. There's a kit you can buy for $235 that allows you to put together sequences of DNA that are available from a library at MIT, and they're free, and you can create microorganisms.
Anything that can be done will be done, whether it should be done or not. The history of science and technology tells us that any time something becomes possible, someone is going to try it. A lot of scientists have looked into the idea of animal-human hybrids and thought about it. There is a natural curiosity about it for lots of reasons -- if you could create an animal that could talk, for example. But most scientists will tell you there is no point in it. Why would anybody do it, unless you are talking about growing a hybrid human to harvest organs for transplants, which I think most people would agree is unethical. There is an intellectual fascination there, but most people would stop short of actually doing it.
What would happen if a Lucy were to surface in American society today? What tensions would it bring?
Gonzales: What I had in mind was to highlight the idea of intolerance in society, the idea that we don't like people who aren't like us. Hutus kill Tutsis, and so forth. So the book is really about intolerance, and part of intolerance is asking what is it like to be human. The Aryan Brotherhood, for example, doesn't think black people are human, so it's OK to kill them. That's pretty radical. But intolerance is a big theme in the book.
I don't think I attempt to define what it means to be human. But one of the characters says something like if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. Lucy gives a convincing enough demonstration that she is human enough, and she should be left alone.
One of the more fascinating parts of the book is the Stream, the method that animals use to communicate among themselves, and the analogy you draw between that and technology like Facebook and YouTube that teens use to communicate.
Gonzales: The Stream is real. I fictionalized it a bit, exaggerated it a bit, but it's a real thing. All animals communicate. We just tend to ignore it. Lucy takes it a step further in her ability to communicate that way. Then she comes into this modern culture and sees this other kind of stream too, this electronic stream. I think in many ways, we do use our electronics the way that animals use the Stream.
You write both fiction and non-fiction. How was this experience different from your non-fiction books on survival and other topics?
Gonzales: It's a completely different approach to writing. When I'm doing non-fiction, I'm doing a lot more research. I did a lot of research for "Lucy," but I had already done a lot of it for previous non-fiction books of mine.
With non-fiction, you have to keep closer track of the information. In fiction, you can get the general idea, then write what you think might happen. It's a lot more fun to write fiction, but it's also harder, because you have to imagine everything. You have to make it up. It's two jobs instead of one.
Have you been pleased with the reaction to the book? How do you sell a book like this without giving away its plot secrets too soon?
Gonzales: If I were to just hand you the manuscript, you wouldn't know until Jenny reads the father's notebooks that Lucy is a hybrid. But we struggled with how to market the book, with what we should say on the dust jacket, because people will have to know what it's about. I think you can certainly enjoy the book even though you know that is coming. Basically it's the set-up part of the book.
Ultimately I pay attention to what people are saying to me, and I've gotten extremely passionate responses to the book. People are not just saying I liked the book, they say I loved the book, I stayed up all night reading it, from eighth graders to an 89-year-old woman and everywhere in between. That is gratifying to me, because I hoped it would have a wide appeal.
You have talked about seeing bonobos in a facility in Milwaukee where they care for the animals and do research. Did writing "Lucy" change your thinking about animals in captivity? About animals in general? Did you become a vegetarian?
Gonzales: I have always had a dim view of animals in captivity. It's very sad. But getting to know the bonobos really put a finer point on it because they are so close to humans and so intelligent and the things they do are so startling. You actually get to know them if you are in as close a contact with them as I was. It's really sad that they're in there, but Congo, where bonobos live, is becoming an increasingly hostile environment. It's a difficult problem. The humans are in the way. It's unfortunate.
I have tried to raise money to improve the facility in Milwaukee. What the animals really need is more room and a more complex environment than they have now. They're in cages, and there are a lot of them. It's crowded. But you couldn't take them and put them back in Congo. They wouldn't survive.
The experience hasn't made me a vegetarian, though I don't really eat much meat anyway. But getting into Lucy's head and going through all of this research and writing really did change me. When I was in my 20s, I would go to Michigan and go bird hunting. I wouldn't do that now. But I did have turkey for Thanksgiving.