Chen Fan didn’t pull this idea from nowhere. During the short period of time when he attended class dutifully, he had heard Professor Wang lecture on cell cloning. With modern cloning techniques, human organs could be easily cloned in the bodies of animals. In the 90s, a laboratory in an American University had successfully cloned a human ear onto a rat, causing a global uproar.
Strictly speaking, the technique for cloning was not complicated. What’s complicated was the enucleation and transportation of the cells. Cells could only be seen clearly under an electron microscope that could magnify a few thousand times. One could imagine how difficult it would be to cut them. However, cloning was becoming very easy with new technology, and was now no more challenging than grafting. Besides, Chen Fan’s was thinking of the simplest form of cloning. This method, in professional terms, was known as the Heterologous Cloning Technique.
So what was the Heterologous Cloning Technique? Simply put, it was like plant grafting, except in animals. It was like transplanting a pig’s hoof onto a sheep. Technically, you could do it with just a knife and a ball of thread, but the hoof would die when the sheep’s body rejected it. The difficult thing was getting the pig foot to survive.
Humans could do it all the time now. Heart, liver, stomach, lung, kidney… other than the head, everything else could be transplanted. Unfortunately, allograft rejection was a problem. People who had undergone organ transplant usually have to rely on anti-rejection medication to ensure their bodies didn’t reject the foreign organs.
It would be like if you obtained a gaming account but did not know the password. If you were good at hacking, you could sneak into the server and get the password, or even change it to anything you like. An amazing hacker could create a new account and change the characters however he wanted, even creating some new monster. Chen Fan felt like he was going mad with the possibilities.
Suppressing his excitement, he patiently destroyed the rest of the growths in the spine, leaving only the four nodes at the sixteenth and thirty-second section of the spine for grafting on the four legs. The dead material was like soil without water. With a little pressure, it turned into a heap of powder. Chen Fan was not overly concerned about the powder, because both humans and animals could get rid of waste in their bodies. Within a few days, the stuff would be broken down by the white blood cells, then excreted through sweat glands or the gastrointestinal tract. It would be faster through the urinary tract.
After killing the extra material, Chen Fan shifted his thoughts back to his own body. He dashed out from the house and hailed a cab.
"Hi, please send me to the bird and flower market!" Zhongyun City’s bird and flower market was quite large, and many small retailers from neighboring counties got their goods there. After reaching the market, Chen Fan casually strolled around the pet shops before finally choosing one that sold more exotic items.
"Sir, do you have lizards?" Chen Fan shouted to the owner serving customers.
"Yes, yes, which species do you want?" The owner was in his forties and looked as thin as a stick.
"I want the biggest one that you have, at least ten meters long!"
"What, you want a crocodile?" The shop owner was shocked by Chen Fan’s demand. "The biggest lizard we have here is an iguana from the Brazilian rainforest, but it can only grow to two meters at the most!
"Only two meters!" Chen Fan was disappointed, "Alright, give me that one!"
"Sure, let me get one out to show you!" The Brazilian lizards cost a lot more than the bunnies he’d been selling all day, so he hurried to the back to help this new customer.
"Hey handsome, why are you buying such a big lizard?" A young woman around eighteen asked curiously.
"To eat it of course!" Chen Fan licked his lips and said with dark humor, "Recently I had a lizard at an insect restaurant at Jianxing Street, and whoa, the taste was simply amazing! So now I’m bringing a bigger one over to get the chef there to cook it!" Some nicely dressed young girls at the side looked at one another and said in unison, "Ewww…"
"It’s here!" After a short while, the owner carried a long green iguana out from the storeroom. It seemed to have shrunk, though, and was only 1.8 meters long at the most. "It big enough?" The iguana was very docile and the owner carried it like a child in his arms. It did not have any reaction to its surroundings other than curiously sticking its tongue out.
"Ah!" The few young girls screamed at the sight of the iguana and hid in their companion’s arms.
"Hmm…" Chen Fan carefully sized up the iguana. He walked around it before holding his chin and shaking his head, "It’s still a little too small!"
"This was already the biggest one I have here. This thing doesn’t sell well and eats a lot, so I didn’t bring in too many."
"I’ll get it, how much?" The pet iguana was very quiet. Even when Chen Fan pinched its claws, it only stuck out its tongue in protest. It never really moved.
"Eight hundred RMB." The owner stroked the iguana’s back, "There are many foreigners who keep this type of iguana. It’s very docile and can survive with only food!" After taking out the required eight red notes, Chen Fan requested the owner put a dog leash on the lizard’s neck to prevent it from running away. Chen Fan could carry the iguana in his arms like the shop owner did, but the sixty to seventy kilos was a little too much for Chen Fan.
"Oh one more thing, will this fella bite when in danger?!"
"You have a dog at home? Then it’s best to not put them together. The dog might kill the iguana!"
"No!" Chen Fan responded with a wide grin. He took out his left hand and rubbed it against the iguana’s neck.