17 The Least of These and self-organizing and active in the conceived human being. But of course the morality of freezing very young people was also at issue. Always more Lejeune said, in his testimony, that freezing an embryo was the slowing-down of time, not totally, but to a great degree; it was to limit as far as possible the interactions among its molecules. That sheds a stark light on what we are doing to these human beings. When one of the lawyers asked him about the ethics of such freezing, Lejeune replied in words that are hard to gainsay. “I think,” he said, “that love is the contrary of chilly. Love is warmth, and needs good temperature.” Love is the contrary of chilly. The warmth of the mother’s womb is not what Lejeune called “the fridge,” the stainless steel canister. Lejeune’s daughter Clara, in Life is a Blessing: A Biography of Jérôme Lejeune, dwells lovingly upon the man she called Papa, his humility, his care for his patients, and his good humor. She says that when she was a little girl she didn’t even know that her father was a famous scientist. But why should he make a fuss about that? Why he traveled all over the world, she couldn’t say, but she knew why he brought back presents from everywhere: a
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