Double Helix by Nancy Werlin Synopsis

Werlin's Double Helix is a fiction novel about Eli Samuels, an 18 year-old who works at Wyatt Transgenics for Dr. Quincy Wyatt. Eli is well over 6 Feet and healthy, has a girlfriend named Vivian, Johnathan, his father that has different views on Eli's choices, and a mother who has Huntington's Disease. At first, Eli enjoys his job working for Dr. Quincy Wyatts, encoding DNA of bunnies and not having to think of college, but his father has heard of Quincy Wyatts, and urges Eli to stop working for him. When Eli asks his dad his reason of disliking Quincy, his father does not answer. Meanwhile, Eli is mad at his father for hiding a letter from Quincy Wyatts years ago, containing the results of a person that doesn't have Huntinton's Disease, but Eli is worried about himself, and he knows that he is at risk for having HD also. While trying to catch an escaping bunny, he finds an elevator behind a door that was labeled Utility Room, and the elevator includes an extra level of the basement, not seen in the usual elevators. He's not able to open it, and so he leaves it.

Later, he meets Kayla Matheson, a perfect, athletic, flawless girl, who also knows Quincy Wyatts, and she is adopted. After meeting Kayla, Eli doesn't really care much for the date he was supposed to meet Vivian at. Meanwhile, his mother gets worse and worse, and she dies. During the funeral, Eli's father sees Kayla, and stomps out of the funeral in anger. While Eli and his father look through his mother's belongings, they begin to bond and understand each other. Eli goes through her old pictures, and finds a picture of his 17 year old mother, and she looks just like Kayla, with a few changes here and there. Eli's father explains that twenty years ago, Quincy Wyatts took a few eggs of his mother and looked for the successful ones that did not have Huntington's Disease, and Eli was the one. Kayla, however, was the one that had Huntington's Disease, and therefore, was the unsuccessful one, but given to another family. This was his father's reason for hating Quincy Wyatt. Soon after, Eli gets a flashback of his normal state mother and his father getting a call from Wyatt Transgenics years ago, and that they called saying their son did not have HD. He pieces this with the crumpled letter sent years ago that he thought his father was hiding from him, the letter wasn't his father's, it was his, and since they already had the call, the letter was ignored.

Kayla and Eli both go down to the extra basement level, and see Quincy's work. In the basement, there were three dors. One door lead to an apartment like place, with toys, beds, televesions, etc. Quincy had shown this to Kayla before, and this was the room that Eli's other "siblings" go down in to be tested while it seems like as if they're just playing. Quincy had tested Kayla and Eli without them knowing before also. The other door was an office, just like Quincy's office in the main building, with two computers, Eli looked through them to find his and Kayla's data and found their DNAs. Indeed, Eli's Dna showed trhat he did not have HD, and that Kayla's did. They took the data for evidence. The thrid door led to a lad with Quincy's work. In a freezer, there were frozen eggs, all from Eli's mother. To Kayla and Eli, this was not fair, Quincy was using them for his experiments, something that Johnathan didn't want. They destroy Quincy's lab and got him arrested. The Wyatt Transgenics is no longer of Wyatt's, but Quincy has gone out of prison, and continued his work out of the country, where his work was not illegal. The novel takes us to a future Eli, maybe a year later, where Eli goes to school with Dr. Fukuyama, who explained that years ago she discuseed with her colleages of ways to engineer genes to prevent Down Syndrome. Then, a person with Down Syndrome came up and asked what was so wrong with them that they needed to be rid of? From then on, Dr. Fukuyama felt that genetic engineering is not always the best.

Double Helix relates to the science concept of making zygotes in vitro and placing it back in the mother, like how Quincy Wyatt did that to Eli's parents twenty years before Eli's birth, seeing which eggs would survive and which did not successfully go through. Another concept was looking at DNA to see which genes the baby has, just like how Wyatt looked through Eli and Kayla to see if they had Huntington's disease. Today, we have that technology, to look at DNA and even foresee it, to make babies in lab. The novel also involves how scientists experiment with animals first, before using them on humans, like how Eli worked with bunnies, encoding their dna, and changing them, making others more favorable than others.

Double Helix is a fiction novel, but the scenarios portrayed through it are possible today. Huntington's Disease and making zygotes in vitro have been done for women who have problems with carrying a baby. Also, we can look at a person's DNA and tell which genes they received. I also believe that you can see into zygotes' DNAs. Actually, in the future, we could even choose which genes we want our babies to have, but not today. I believe the scenarios portrayed in this novel are likely to happen even when it's fiction. Werlin's point through this story is not the entertain her readers with this suspense, but to show the kind of future we might face, in about ten or twenty years, maybe all this would become reality. Kids would grow up unusually attractive and athletic with the strongest immune system, or with the smart brain and green eyes and supermodel tall, not nowing that they were genetically altered in a lab.

If the scenarios became reality, just how Quincy took Eli's mother's eggs and experimented with them, we would have unknown siblings all over the world, while our potential siblings were destroyed because they did not reach the qualifications. Our society would become obsessed with perfection, choosing the zygote with 'better genes' and they would grow up more 'endowed' than others, causing a split in society between those with perfections, and those with imperfections. Society would be unfair, with those who are genetically altered and those who are born naturally. Those genetically altered would be the ones with tons of money, and the natural ones would be the ones who don't have the money to be genetically altered in the first place. While the natural ones struggle and must work harder to learn their piano lessons and become a professional, there will be a guy who was bornwith six fingers on each hand and is born to play more notes on the piano. The world would be full of chaos, with people thinking it's unfair, more rules to make it fair, or maybe unfair, and more segregation. Dr. Fukuyama's story really shows what would happen if we moved towards that way of life, just altering our DNA to be perfect, getting rid of problems and imperfections, and although we might think we're helping others to achieve high goals, we're not allowing the imperfections to come through to learn from them. If we don't allow problems to show themselves, how are we going to identify them and find solutions to them? Our persepctive of "perfection" will then change to a perfection that might not be possibly reahed, and while a disease is out of sight and is rid of, that disease will fight its way to get stronger to get into us, and then the solution will be harder to find. Genetic engineering may seem to be great at first when it comes into our society, but its consequencnes will be hard to deal with.