Maggie used her key to let them in. The foyer had been swept but a fine layer of dust had resettled, and they left a print with each footfall.
“We’re on the third floor,” she said, leading the way to the stairs.
On the third floor she pushed open a couple of doors and they entered a large laboratory. There was a strong smell of fresh paint. Daylight flooded in from a row of large windows, supplemented by fluorescent panels in the ceiling. The left-hand wall was occupied by glass-fronted cabinets and a fume hood. A bench ran the length of the room under the windows and three shorter benches projected from it across the width of the room. All the benches were topped with white laminate and the under bench cupboards and drawer fronts were dark green. Everything was brand new; one or two of the cupboards still had labels attached.
Pieter went over to take a closer look at the taps set into the bench tops.
“Hot and cold mains water, distilled water, gas, and compressed air,” he said. “Are all the services working?”
“Yes, everything’s connected here and on the floor above. They still need to decorate and install lab furniture on the bottom two floors but there’s nothing going on there at the moment.”
She walked on, pointing to a recessed area containing a granite table set on solid brick supports. “Weighing room, for a microbalance and maybe a top pan balance.” They went inside a small annex at the far end of the room. “Glassware washing and autoclave,” she said.
He nodded. “It is well equipped.”
“Still, there must be a lot of things you need that aren’t here.”
“Oh yes. I have brought a list with me. I see already fridges, freezers, incubators, centrifuges, and water baths. I will cross these off. I do not see any reagents on the shelves.”
“I only ordered standard buffers for calibrating the pH meters. I left it up to you guys to say what you needed.”
“I have a print-out of the list we use for safety purposes. I’m afraid there are several sheets.”
“Give them to me. We have people who’ll take care of it.”
“Glassware? Sterile plastic ware?”
“Just list whatever you need.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Within reason?”
She smiled. “Reason doesn’t enter into it, Pieter. If you need it, we’ll get it.”
He smiled in return. “Very good. Of course much depends on what we are going to do here. All I know, it is to tackle the business of the white smogs, but it is not clear how we can help with that.”
Maggie indicated some lab stools and they sat down at a bench. She had thought carefully about what she was going to say, not only to Pieter but also to the others when they arrived. “The white smogs are a serious problem, Pieter. The death toll in Baltimore was fifteen hundred; in Pittsburgh it was more than seven hundred. The smog didn’t last as long in Cleveland but it was still responsible for nearly a thousand deaths. The hospitals were overwhelmed – some long-term patients had to be sent home to free up beds. In total, nearly thirty thousand people were hospitalized.”
“This I heard. It was in the news. What is the cause?”
“The smog develops when ammonia combines with acid gases from traffic and industry. We asked you to join us because the ammonia is coming from local blooms of cyanobacteria.”
His eyebrows shot up. “These cyanobacteria are producing ammonia?”
“Yes. And our job is to find a way of stopping them.”
“I see.” He tipped his head to one side. “Some cyanobacteria fix nitrogen. But to produce ammonia in such quantity…”
“I’ve been assuming it started with a mutation. It crossed my mind that it could be an existing species that somehow got transported to a more favourable environment. What do you think?”
He shook his head. “I do not know of any species that behaves in this way – it must be a mutation. How far has it spread?”
“The smog in Cleveland suggests that these cyanobacteria have already reached the Great Lakes. That’s bad: it means a number of other large cities could be at risk: cities like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Toronto. I’ve done some rough calculations, based on city centre populations. If the casualties occur at a similar rate to, say, Pittsburgh, we could expect at least twenty thousand deaths and as many as two hundred thousand hospital admissions. Add in cities up the St. Lawrence and you could increase those figures by fifty per cent. Those figures are unacceptable. Someone has to prevent it all from happening. The US Administration has given the job to us.”
“I see.” Pieter nodded slowly. “And what about London? There was a smog there also.”
Maggie thought quickly. “Ah, yes, well, London may be different. There’s a big concentration of this stuff north-east of Bermuda. A freak wind could have brought a pocket of ammonia in from there.”
“Bermuda? The Sargasso Sea?”
“Yes.”
“I was there a while ago. We took some samples.”
Maggie’s pulse quickened. “When was this, Pieter?”
“Oh, perhaps five or six years ago.”
Maggie thought about it. That was before the problem arose, but it could serve as a good baseline for comparison.
“Do you still have some samples?”
“I don’t think so. But we made a record of the organisms and their relative abundance. This may be useful. Which species is carrying the mutation?”
“It’s not just one species, Pieter. Here, let me show you.”
She crossed to a refrigerator and brought out one of her culture dishes.
“I’ve been working in one of the other labs but I put this in here on my way over to your hotel. It’s a smear of organisms taken from that area off Bermuda. I grew them on an indicator gel. There are several different species in there, but you see the red rings around each colony? They’re all producing ammonia.”
He frowned. “The mutation is being shared by horizontal gene transfer?”
“Exactly. It’s probably being passed on by a plasmid.”
She replaced the dish and they returned to the stools.
“So,” he said. “How do you plan to deal with this?”
She took a deep breath. “The idea is to design a plasmid of our own, something that would switch off the ammonia production. We introduce it inside some normal cyanobacteria and they go wherever the rogue organisms have gone.”
He was silent for several moments. Then he nodded. “So, you have a problem.” She gave him a puzzled smile. “The rogue organisms, as you call them, are very well established,” he said. “They will out-compete anything you put with them. Yes, that is a problem.” He got up. “Shall we look at the other labs on this floor?” He made for the door.
For the moment she was unable to move. It seemed like alarm bells had gone off all over her body.
Of course, he was right. How could she not have considered this? There’s no way her plan could work.
She managed to follow him, but suddenly she felt like she was moving in a daze.
The next lab was similar in design but a good deal smaller.
“We do not need a big lab,” he said. “This one is very fine for us.”
“Oh good. Well, we must get back, mustn’t we? I’ll come for those lists tomorrow, shall I? Perhaps we could meet for lunch at the hotel.”
“Yes, okay. By then I will have them for you.”
Terry sat in his office at the NSF, thinking. He had been speaking to a former colleague from the UK, Dr. John Gilchrist, who had just arrived. John was a first-class climate scientist and an expert in climate modelling. He would be a real asset when it came to tracking atmospheric movements.
The sampling flights had started and were already bringing back data on ammonia concentrations at high altitudes. Terry had also sifted through data collected from balloons. The balloons sampled the air from the moment of release and transmitted information as they soared skywards. The data from some of those releases suggested that ammonia was accumulating
at lower altitudes.
Up to now it had been assumed that white smogs developed when weather systems stirred the atmosphere, gathering up clouds of ammonia in the process and sending them down tens of thousands of feet to ground level. That could still be true, but smogs would become a lot more frequent if ammonia was already present low in the atmosphere. The data he had was sparse and he was wondering how to supplement it.
Then he thought about wildlife. People suffered when the white smogs rolled into cities; the deaths in Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Cleveland illustrated that well enough. But fish and birds and wild animals would suffer, too, and huge numbers of them lived well away from heavily populated areas, in places where white smogs would never develop.
He contacted the US Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center and several conservation movements, requesting copies of their reports and asking to be placed on their email list for updates.
Knowing Maggie’s sensitivity when it came to animals he decided to say nothing about it to her when he returned to their hotel that afternoon. As it happened, her concerns were very much elsewhere.
She paced around Terry’s room.
“He saw it straight away, Terry! I’m just an amateur among professionals. I feel terrible. I misled all those people about how we could solve the problem. The President’s set up the group we always wanted and spent all that money and now look.” She ran the fingers of both hands repeatedly through her hair. “We already know it won’t work and we haven’t even started!”
He guided her to a sofa and sat her down. “Now don’t be so hard on yourself, Maggie. There were some pretty bright people in that room and this didn’t occur to any of them either. I certainly didn’t think of it.”
“But I’m supposed to be the expert! I feel so stupid! What on earth am I going to do?”
“Come on, Maggie. You’re upset, and it’s been a long day, and neither of us is thinking very clearly at the moment. We’re too close to the problem right now; we need to take a longer perspective. Talk me through it again. What Pieter said was that the rogue organisms are too well established; they’ll out-compete any organism we try to put with them?”
“Yes,”she said, in a small voice.
“All right, let’s think about it. There’s nothing wrong with the basic idea, is there? All you need is something to level the playing field, load the dice in favour of your organism.” He fell silent, thinking hard, but aware of Maggie’s eyes on him. “Can you make your organism more robust in some way? Have it grow more quickly than the other one, divide faster, something like that?”
She shook her head. “We have to use an existing organism, and it’ll be subject to all the normal limitations. The rogue organisms are there in heavy numbers. They’ll consume all the nutrients around and our organism will just starve.”
He nodded. “Well, what about growing up your organism in huge quantities first?”
“You mean in a bioreactor of some sort?”
“Yes.”
Again she shook her head. “It’s the scale of the thing, Terry. The whole idea was to put in a small amount here and there and let it spread by itself. If we have to put in an overwhelming quantity everywhere we go the problem gets out of hand. You’ve got the whole of the Atlantic Ocean to treat, all the rivers, the Great Lakes – it’s beyond us.”
He took a deep breath. “All right, let’s look at it the other way round. Is there something we can do to put the rogue organisms at a disadvantage?” He rubbed his jaw and spoke, almost to himself. “We’ve ruled out algicides. They don’t get diseases like we do…”
Her eyes widened and she jumped to her feet. “That’s it! You’ve got it!”
He frowned and looked up at her. “What…?”
“We’ll give them a disease, we’ll use a bacteriophage!”
“A which-what?”
“A bacteriophage. People usually call them phages. They’re very tiny – you can only see them under an electron microscope. They infect bacteria, a bit like germs infect us. Then they multiply inside the bacteria and the bacteria die and that releases a lot more phages, which can go on to infect other bacteria. It’s just like an epidemic.” She leaped up, took his face in her hands and gave him a brief, hard kiss on the lips. “Thanks, Terry.”
He blushed and looked at her in bewilderment. “But I didn’t – “
“Yes you did. I should have more confidence in myself. This is great. I need to think it through.”
And she opened the communicating door and disappeared into her room. Terry put his hand up and touched his lips lightly as she left.
CHAPTER 22
Ulrich Lunsdorfer arrived later that day. He came with an experienced postdoc, Jos Wentink, and a technician.
Next to arrive, from New York, was Matt Oakley, then Silvia Mussini flew in from California, with a postgraduate student, Sara Tennant. Maggie briefed each of them in the same way she’d done for Pieter, allotted lab space, and made a note of everything they needed.
She tracked down Pieter that evening, who was having dinner in the hotel.
“Do you know anything about bacteriophages, Pieter?”
“Phages? A little. Why?”
“I was thinking that when we introduce the organism with our plasmid we could introduce a phage at the same time, something that targeted the rogue organisms. Then they wouldn’t out-compete ours.”
He put down his knife and fork and stared into the distance. Then he came back to her and nodded slowly. “It is an interesting idea. But you know the Russians have been working on phages for years. They are looking for something different to antibiotics to fight bacteria. To find a phage that attacks only your ammonia organisms would be like, well to look for the needle…”
“In a haystack,” Maggie finished for him. “Yes, I know. But I was thinking about doing it the other way round. We introduce our new organism together with a phage that’s lethal to all organisms of this kind. Of course we’d make sure our own organism is resistant to the phage. Then wherever they’re in competition our organism will have a selective advantage.”
He frowned. “Maggie, there are hundreds of different phages in the oceans. Why do you think any bacteria survive?”
She blinked. “I suppose they reach some sort of balance. A bit like foxes and rabbits.”
“Yes, this perhaps, but there is something else. Bacteria have a defence against phages. It is in effect a genetic memory. It gives them a sort of immunity against phages they have seen in the past.”
“All right, we’ll look for a bacteriophage they haven’t encountered before.”
“It would not last. They would acquire resistance.”
“Yes, but by then it would be too late. The phage will go in together with our own organism. By the time the rogues develop resistance our guys would have swapped plasmids into them and turned off ammonia production.”
Maggie watched him anxiously. Then he nodded and smiled as he picked up his knife and fork again. “Yes, it is a neat solution. I can do some searches, but really you need a phage expert on this.”
“Any suggestions? I can recruit other experts to the group. Who’s the best in the field?”
“Well, Sergei Kolesnikov is the world authority, of course. Jose-Luis Guerrero is good, too, but Kolesnikov is best. Also you should have an expert on interference pathways in bacteria – this is the mechanism for resistance. I like very much the work from Rajiv Gupta’s group. Rajiv is a nice guy. I met him at a conference in Delhi.”
Maggie fumbled in her handbag and brought out a small notebook and a ballpoint. “Kolesnikov is where, Pieter?”
“Moscow. Russian Academy of Sciences. At least I think he is still there.”
“And Gupta?”
“Calcutta University.”
“Excellent, Pieter. Thanks very much.”
Over the next few days the research progressed rapidly. The molecular biologists were setting up in the larger of the two labs, while the cyanobacteria exp
erts made their preparations in the smaller one. At the moment there was no need to expand into the labs on the floor above.
Maggie spent nearly all her time ordering more lab supplies and coordinating the installation of equipment. There was a confident bustle about the group, and she was anxious not to hold them up. She made a habit of joining them in the hotel for lunch, when they continued to discuss strategy and she made notes of anything that was lacking. The incubators in the small lab were already full of culture flasks, as Pieter and his colleagues tried to establish the best conditions for growing on the Bermuda sample. The sequencing equipment was on its way, and Maggie had already ordered a range of DNA standards for Matt’s group so that they could check that everything was working properly as soon as it was in place.
Terry found that Maggie’s high spirits were rubbing off on him. The latest flights had gone out and they’d be coming back with the next set of atmospheric sampling data in a couple of days. Meanwhile he was analyzing another batch of balloon measurements.
Some wildlife updates came in and his mood became more subdued. There were disturbing reports of rafts of dead fish washed up on beaches in the Canary Islands and Cape Verde.
Then the spreadsheets from the atmospheric sampling flights arrived. He looked at them straight away, printed out the key information, and arranged all the charts on the desk in front of him. Once again every chart showed a rising curve for the level of ammonia. None of the curves showed any evidence of flattening off, in fact ammonia was increasing even more rapidly than before.
Strictly speaking, atmospheric science wasn’t his forte. All the same he’d expected some mixing to have occurred by now. He planned to go over it again with John later that day.
“You should have seen them at lunch today!” said Maggie, as she and Terry were having dinner that evening. “They’re totally focused on the problem – they talk about nothing else. A lot of it’s over my head – stuff about genes and transacting factors I’ve never heard of. Of course Matt and Silvia are more familiar with mammalian genomes but Pieter puts them right from time to time. They want to recruit someone else: Alain Laroche. He’s a Professor at the Institut Pasteur in Paris and he can help when it comes to synthesizing our plasmid. I’ll invite him; it makes a lot of sense for the team to include top biochemists like Laroche.” She pushed her dish aside. “Sergei hasn’t arrived yet. Any news on him?”
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