G.M.O. Lecture No. 1 by Anonymous

Dr. J.A Karl began the first in his series of lectures on unexpected side-effects of recombinant D.N.A. as applied to gene therapy:

Ladies and Gentlemen, I think you’ll consider the case of a single male subject, whom I shall refer to as “Nemo” to protect his privacy, to be particularly intriguing.

Nemo agreed to subject himself to an experimental pre-treatment that we proposed, to make humans resistant to certain kinds of venoms. We spliced D.N.A. from Amphiprion ocellaris, the common clownfish, onto his chromosomes. As many of you will know, the clownfish is resistant to the stings of sea anemones.

Nemo was making surprisingly little money as personal assistant to the C.E.O. of a very successful company that I shall not name here. What you need to know about this company to understand the biology of this case is that the C.E.O. was a woman and that all of Ryan’s co-workers at headquarters were single men. 

Nemo reported that the C.E.O., whom I shall refer to as “Cora”, refused to hire any women to work at Head Office and refused to hire married men.

She kept her staff working and bothered at all hours so that they didn’t even have time to date.

For Nemo, though, the job came with benefits.

He reported a strong sexual attraction to Cora who used Nemo for her own gratification - often right in her office.

Whenever she went on any kind of a trip (business or otherwise), she shamelessly insisted that Nemo accompany her. Being the female C.E.O.’s favourite kept Nemo happy to stay in the . . . position . . . but he still felt the need to seek the modest remuneration that our lab provided him as a test subject.

Suddenly though, Cora got snatched away to another executive position elsewhere, leaving the company with the difficulty of replacing her. Because he was really the only person in the company who had been close to Cora and who understood how she had managed the company, Nemo went from personal assistant and boy-toy of the C.E.O. to being the C.E.O. himself . . . or herself.

Without Cora around, things calmed down at H.O. for a while. All the men had time to eat properly and take care of themselves. That’s when Nemo began to develop female anatomy and behaviour. He became so feminine that she made one of his former co-workers her new lover - which this man was only too keen to accept since Nemo was now a very attractive woman.

It seems that we had inadvertently spliced onto Nemo’s D.N.A. the clownfish gene for protandrous hermaphroditism. Nemo was given the ability to turn female when in the absence of women. And, once he transformed, he behaved just like Cora had -- like a domineering female clownfish.