They all ended up being shipped back to the United States, which took immediate jurisdiction, and a fierce legal battle ensued for many years over ownership of them and the legal rights, if any, that they had.They all ended up being shipped back to the United States, which took immediate jurisdiction, and a fierce legal battle ensued for many years over ownership of them and the legal rights, if any, that they had. Other countries wanted them. Scientists wanted to study or dissect them. a few, narrow-minded individuals thought that they should be destroyed, or made slaves. but after being in the custody of researchers for a while, it soon became apparen that these young 'animal-kids' were at LEAST as intelligent as fully human children of a similar physiological age, and were much stronger in most cases. they were soon learning to read, write, spell, even create things as good as, or in some instances, BETTER than a human could do. It was soon decided that, given the gentle behavior they showed, so unlike the animals some of them resembled, and their great intelligence and learning ability, that they should be given the full rights and priviledges of any fully-human citizen, and that anything less would be cruel and inhuman. That was the start, nearly 14 years ago. Many of the Professor's 'children' it was found, reached full Adult body maturity in as little as 7 or 8 years, longer than it would take a 'pure' animal to do but shorter than the time it takes a human. Wether they would have a full human lifetime would not be known for many years, but one Doctor gave most of them possible life spans reaching into the late 50's, AT LEAST. It appeared that Russell had managed to create most of his 'family' by microscopically combining living DNA code from two different species, and then growing the embryo in tanklike artificial wombs and also using other, pure animal species as surrogate mothers. Since the DNA (and RNA) of any species is simply molecular code, it can be extracted from the cell of one kind and parts of it 'spliced' into the living egg cell of another species, without any danger or fear of rejection. In fact, the egg cell not only accepts the strange code as part of itself, but actually thinks it has been fertilized when this splicing has been done and begins to grow! Russell had apparently used human eggs he had obtained. The male cells did not necessarially have to be sperm, all Russell needed was the genetic code contained within any living cell from an animal's body. |