Sounds very SI..................

Gerard is welcomed into Lynn's home. After he mimics telephone dial tones Lynn contacts Gail, and he is reunited with her. Press commentators praise the household as a trend-setting inter-species transgenic family, and Henry is honored by some scientific organisations, while religious and social conservatives condemn the family in lurid terms.

In other plot threads:

• BioGen researcher Josh Winkler's drug-addicted brother accidentally exposes himself to a "maturity" gene that the company is developing for the control of irresponsible and addictive behavior. After Adam reforms within a few days, their mother pressures Josh to administer the gene to friends and relatives who also behave irresponsibly. By the end of the book all of his rat and human subjects die of accelerated old age.
• The staff at a hospital provide samples from corpses for use by unscrupulous relatives in lawsuits, sell corpses' bones for medical uses, and desperately destroy records and samples to cover their tracks.
• Henry Kendall's boss Dr. Robert Bellarmino, a mediocre scientist but skillful manipulator, is also a lay preacher and slants his comments to journalists, schoolchildren and politicians according to whether his audience has religious or pro-science inclinations. He is ultimately shot by Brad Gordon at an amusement park. Ironically, Bellarmino was only at the park to look for people who may have the gene for recklessness, and Gordon was only there to bolster the evidence for his lawyer's case that he has the gene.
• An orangutan in Sumatra becomes famous for its comments, often obscene, in Dutch and French. An adventurer overdoses the orangutan with tranquillizer while trying to capture it, and has to give it mouth to mouth resuscitation. As a result, the orangutan dies from a respiratory infection, and an expert who dissects its corpse finds that its throat is very human-like but concludes from the shape of its skull that its brain is pure orangutan.
• An avant garde artist uses genetic modification to change the appearance of animals, while another self-named "artist/biologist" is falsely accused of modifying turtles so that females laying eggs are less vulnerable to predators because the turtles' genetically engineered bioluminescence attracts tourists. An advertising agency proposes to make genetically engineered animals and plants carry advertisements, and claims that this would be a very effective conservation strategy.
• Billionaire "Jack" Watson becomes the victim of an extremely aggressive form of genetic cancer, and is very nearly unable to receive treatment due to others' patents on the relevant genes, giving Watson "a taste of his own medicine". He eventually procures experimental treatment, which fails to save his life.
• In a meeting, several prominent US Senators begin discussing various issues related to genetic modification, and realize that the science is outpacing the United State's ability to introduce laws dealing with it.

The book also features news report boxes, many about the genetics of blondes and of Neanderthals. These two themes combine into reports that Neanderthals were the first blondes, were more intelligent than Cro-Magnon humans and interbred with Cro-Magnons out of pity; and that "cavemen preferred blondes". At one point three successive reports feature a scientist's press release that Neanderthals had a gene that made them both behaviorally conservative and ecologically conservationist, an environmentalist's claim that modern humans need to learn from the Neanderthals lest they too become extinct, and a business columnist's interpretation that over-caution caused the Neanderthals' extinction.

In an appendix the author argues against patents on naturally-occurring genes, against corporate ownership of individuals' cell lines, and in favor of legislation to abolish these.