[This message has been edited by Clove (edited December 18, 2009).]
I'd have a hard time believing in genetic manipulation in 1984. Unless it's the conventional kind, selective breeding.
Maybe somebody made an early breakthrough that didn't get reported *because* of the events in the book...the characters who knew how wind up dead or gone and the experiment notes were mangled in the course of it...
[This message has been edited by Clove (edited December 18, 2009).]
No idea "works" on its own merit. Mona Lisa isn't a good/famous/wonderful picture because its a period portriat of a woman. But its all the above because of how Davinci achieved his idea.
process process process should be the writer's mantra
But one must take care that the government has some compelling reason to go along with not asking questions---and sticking with it through the course of the story.
And justifying why China (if the character in question is indeed Chinese) isn't doing it then and there, why the rest of the world hasn't heard or figured it out, and explaining what they may be doing in the here and now.
Besides, with any scientific technique or breakthrough or discovery, if one man did it, another can figure out how to do it, too. (I saw a recent report claiming that it would take Iran ten years to make a nuclear bomb. What bothered me about the claim is that it took the United States about five years---without knowing for sure that it could be done.)
Why 1984? Do you need something to have been done to your protagonist before they were born?
If for some reason you need the character to explore some kind of plot behind the manipulation, then it will have to be something dead simple and a one-in-a-million shot in the dark. By simple I'm talking about basically controlled selective breeding (in other words, all the characteristics are already possessed by a couple of individuals of the same species and the level of manipulation isn't much more than making sure that the zygote ends up with everything you want and nothing you didn't). By one-in-a-million I mean that it was just a fluke that it worked. If you specify both, I won't twitch too much.
For the record...the first use of the term "genetic engineering" comes up in a scientific paper in 1949 and was first used in a science fiction story in 1951 ("Dragon's Island," Jack Williamson.) And the discovery of the *structure* of DNA was announced in 1953...the actual discovery of DNA happened sometime in the 1920s, I believe...
quote:
To give you some perspective, I remember those days.
You and me both, Spaceman. *sigh* My first computer was an 8088. The salesman told me, "This baby has a 40 meg hard drive. You'll NEVER need anything bigger."
The first test tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978 as I recall.
I remember that year fairly well. Tina Turner was on top of things with "What's Love Got To Do With It," and Sting was still singing with The Police. And Cyndi Lauper and Annie Lennox were teaching us that Hair Color Just Gotta be Fun.
1884, death of George Mendel, the "Father of Genetics"
1928, Frederick Griffith does a scientific study on mice enabling others to point to DNA as the molecule of inheritance.
1942, Oswald Avery identifies deoxyribonucleic acid molecules as the inheritance molecule.
1951, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins crystallize DNA and successfully obtain an x-ray pattern of DNA.
1953, based on Franklin and Wilkins' work, James Watson and Francis Crick create a model of the DNA double helix.
Looks to me that by 1984, research on DNA was well underway. It doesn't take much digging to figure out what is plausible and what isn't.
From your time frame, it sounds a lot like we're talking about manipulation of a human zygote here. We're still messing around with simple cloning, and a few of the "advances" turn out to have been pretty much outright faked. Science is only now developing the interactome, a way to allow us to relate genes to specific characteristics in a predictive model. Current methods of introducing novel genes are still short of manipulating the nuclear DNA, we work with RNA plasmids delivered to the cytoplasm, or even with relatively massive doses of hormones.
So, actual DNA manipulation is still technically beyond the reach of current technology. There are theoretical propositions for how to edit the nuclear DNA and produce a viable cell, but most of the practical methods available are remarkably crude. Someone mentioned electophoresis in another thread on the topic of DNA. It's...something you could basically do in your kitchen. X-ray crystallography couldn't be done in your kitchen, but it's even less apt for studying the unique structure of a specific gene. Current methods of strand synthesis are just as crude.
Now, breeding for specific traits only takes dozens or hundreds of generations as long as you're not trying to make a new species (nobody really knows how long that takes). So if we were talking about mice here...but I don't think we are.