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Meatheads
Watkins shifted in his seat and Smitty was looking up at the ceiling as I finished reading the marketing output the sales boys had brought to me. Slick glossy brochures with neat diagrams of double heli and pictures of beautiful people in white coats pretending to be scientists. Watkins and Smitty were anything but beautiful people, in fact I was quite glad that their laboratory was in the basement, however this seperation may well have been the cause of the current misunderstanding.
"So, how did this happen?" I asked. Smitty opened his lips but kept his teeth together, sucking in air between them, before looking over at Watkins. Watkins said nothing so Smitty started.
"We saw a gap... in the market. And the all-staff e-mails are always saying how we're an innovative company that strives towards the advancement of mankind in all endeavors and never stands in the face of progress when destiny calls..."
A blurb I had written after observing several 22-45 year old mixed sex focus groups.
"... so we added a new base nucleic acid to DNA."
Watkins, being Smitty's superior realised that Smitty was about to lose me and leapt in.
"You see Sir, our DNA is composed of nucleotides, which in turn are made from sugars and bases. There are four bases; Adenine, Guanine, Thymine and Cytosine; they're heterocyclic compounds called purines, and pyrimidines. We just... created a new one."
I had to admit that despite being the owner of a biogenetics research company my grasp of the actual concept was vague. I was a money man, good with people, capable leader and excellent manager, at least so my recent personality consultant had concluded. All the same I was having some trouble already.
"So there are four building blocks to life and you've gone and made a new one. Like LEGO."
"No Sir, not like LEGO, the building blocks analogy is really just for idiots. Imagine instead a kitchen with every spice, condiement and ingredient you can think of but you can only use four different types of meat to cook with. We've just brought a whole new kind of meat to the kitchen."
Just what I needed was another Frankenstein Foods public relations disaster. Half my staff quit the last time we tried to market some new genetically modified food and we were boycotted by every major supermarket chain in the UK.
"It was fairly simple to block the telomere degredation using enhanced green algae sequencers and we discovered that palindromic hairpin loops created themselves without any involvement from us, the Bydenine took care of it naturally."
The what?
"You created a new building block to life and you gave it an unsexy name that we can't trademark?" I sat aghast in my chair, hands clutching the edge of the desk.
Wiggins leant forwards and removed something from his pocket.
"Sir, I think you're not really going to give a shit about that when you see what we've created..."
Jan.17.2007