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I'm looking for the name of an author and an old sci-fi book about a genius test tube baby born to a scientist. He that becomes so smart but lacks empathy and is a killer. He also starts making doubles of himself in a lab and starts making synthetic cocaine. Later he plots to kill his mother and father after they find out he's supplying cartels.

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  • see OP confirmation comment below
    – Otis
    Nov 15, 2019 at 5:54

1 Answer 1

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Probably Robin Cook's Mutation, also the answer to Novel where a genius child secretly makes clones of himself

(emphasis mine)

Victor Frank, and his wife Marsha, are unable to have a second child due to Marsha's infertility. They turn to surrogacy as an alternate method of conception. Victor, an obstetrician-gynaecologist and owner of the biochemical company Chimera Inc., injects the egg implanted in his wife with an agent called Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) into chromosome six, which causes the baby to grow more neurons than usual, as a result making them super intelligent. Their son, VJ, is born a genius. He is able to talk in six months and read in thirteen.

....

Victor then goes looking for VJ, who spends a lot of time at the lab, and sees him head under an old clock tower on the Chimera campus. Victor follows him, and is knocked out by a guard. When he wakes up he is in a laboratory built by VJ, where he has solved many of the biochemical problems Victor had been trying to solve. Victor is amazed by his son's genius, and rushes to show Marsha. Marsha reacts differently and is worried about VJ, especially about the part of the lab he didn't show them. Victor and Marsha come back the next day and insist on VJ showing them the rest of the lab. In one room, VJ is growing fetuses, the five eggs from Marsha that had not been implanted, in artificial wombs. VJ tells them that there is no fifth fetus because of a failed implantation attempt in the artificial womb, and also reveals that he has altered the babies to make them mentally retarded, so they won't be more intelligent than him. After this, he reveals that he killed the other two children who had been injected with NGF for the same reason, so he would be the only super genius. Not only did he kill the two children, he also used a method he had created for injecting cancer into someone to kill David, Janice, and a teacher who was prying into his life.

VJ then leads his horrified parents into another room, where he has tanks full of E. coli genetically altered to produce cocaine, which he sold to Colombian drug dealers to finance his lab....

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  • Thanks that was it...man you just answered my question Genius u are...
    – Alex R
    Nov 15, 2019 at 4:56
  • :) We've closed it as a Duplicate, but that's not a censure on you. It's bookkeeping. As I said, you can still accept it by clicking on the checkmark. I read the book as a kid. Don't remember what attached me to it, but it was definitely educational.
    – FuzzyBoots
    Nov 15, 2019 at 12:01

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