Vampire Domestication: Taming Yesterday’s Nightmares for a Better Tomorrow

Начало книги

This is Donnie Maass, a nine-year-old high-functioning autistic savante from New York; very limited social skills, but he could calculate six-digit prime numbers in his head. If you recognize the name, you’ll know that this picture was taken before he was subjected to experimental therapy in which a tweaked retrovirus rewrote certain critical genes linked to his condition. Basically, we hoped to cure his autism by rewriting his code at the molecular level.

This is Donnie Maass eight weeks after the onset of gene therapy. This discoloration is not anemia; Donnie’s blood volume had actually increased by seven percent—but he had begun to redistribute the blood volume away from the peripheral tissues and sequester it deep in the core, for reasons that were (at that time) unknown. And while this bloodless complexion is Donnie’s most obvious physical symptom, there were others, including

marked recession of the gum-line, and increased reflectivity of the retina, reminiscent of the tapetum lucidum found in the eyes of cats and other nocturnal predators. We also noticed behavioral changes—Donnie exhibited increased activity levels during nighttime and began sleeping during the day, and during sleep his metabolic rate fell to about half of what it should have been.

Читать дальше →