Mitchell Genetics

Mitchell Genetics was founded in 1944 with seed money provided by Silas Silver IX to his attending physician, Walter Mitchell. Having just disowned his two children, Silver, a widower, was looking for someone or something to which he could donate the remains of his family’s fortune. Upon his death, Silver left everything he owned to Mitchell (except for his family’s ancestral home on Cape Cod, which he’d grown to believe was cursed, and which he therefore believed his children deserved).

With Silver’s money in hand, Mitchell immediately joined the effort to manufacture and supply doses of penicillin to aid in the American effort to end and win World War II. Beyond that, his copies of recipes found in the journal of one of Silver’s late wives (Ada Coffin) proved to be the other major foundation upon which the corporation’s good fortunes were built.

In the Earth-668 iteration of reality, Mitchell eventually transitioned its business into the genetic modification of soldiers for militaries in the United States and elsewhere. They did this with bits of DNA extracted from a piece of The Shroud of Turin held privately by the family of Jeremy Bassett for centuries. Several of their failed “experiments” later united to form the paramilitary organization Blood Red, whose sole purpose was to rid the world of what they perceived to be Mitchell’s “evil.”

This work led to the company’s most ambitious project to date: cloning Jesus Christ from the Shroud. When they succeeded, the world fell to its knees to worship the so-called Second Coming (sometimes derogatorily referred to as Jesus 2.0). And at that point, Mitchell was able to operate completely above the law in their effort to remake the world as they saw fit.

Of course, hubris is very much thing—even in the Clarkwoods Literary Universe. And it was Mitchell’s hubris which led to the end of the world as they (and everyone else) knew it. And no one felt fine. In 2030, their plan to “rid the world of sin” backfired with the creation of a “sin monster,” an incredible sacrifice by an ordinary citizen, and the actions of very determined landlady to change the past.