Greetings were brief, a drink appeared and soon she was immersed in the conversation. Two hours later and still talking, the group moved to the hotel restaurant. They ate while they talked and when the restaurant closed they returned to the bar to continue their discussion – including, to Helen’s amusement, the science behind the food contamination affecting the troops in Iraq.
Josh and his group in Atlanta had coordinated the PFGE work on the outbreak. ‘We eliminated sabotage as soon as the same contamination showed up in salad packs delivered to trainees on bivouac in Texas.’
‘Same contractor do the salad packs?’ Sam asked.
‘You got it.’
PFGE, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, a type of bacterial fingerprinting in which bacteria isolated in vastly different places could be shown to originate from the same source, had brought about a revolution in tracing techniques. And while tracking did not prevent outbreaks, PFGE had been extraordinarily effective in confining the damage. It also connected the scientists on a very regular basis: these days they counted one another as friends.
It was two o’clock when they called it a night. Helen could not say what she had eaten, she certainly could not describe the hotel decor, but the science was memorable and a fitting prelude to the coming days. She slept a deep and dreamless sleep.
The next day after breakfast, she and the other scientists, together with two minders, piled into a minibus. They were heading west to Aiken, South Carolina, a small city not far from the Georgia border. Here they would meet up with twenty-five more of their colleagues for the four-day meeting. The bus was brimming with conversation as it wended its way through the peach state’s capital city, past Peachtree Plaza, along Peachtree Boulevard, over Peachtree Creek.
‘What are all these peaches?’ Jeanne from Belgium asked.
‘Peaches have greater appeal than diseases,’ Josh said in his languid throaty accent. And when Jeanne still looked perplexed he continued. ‘Georgia is known both for its peaches and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – the CDC. But Ebola Plaza and Bubonic Boulevard wouldn’t pull the tourists.’
As soon as they were out on the freeway one of the minders called for their attention. ‘At Aiken you’ll be staying at a boutique conference centre.’ Her drawl reconfigured the French ‘boutique’ into the deep south’s ‘bo-wa-teek’. ‘You’ll find many excellent walking tracks nearby.’
The minder had been well-briefed. A few years earlier they had gathered near Como in Italy, the first time one of their meetings had been held in a rural location. The formal sessions occurred as usual, but outside of these, scientists discussed and argued as they walked by the lake and hiked into the surrounding hills, and solitary figures could be seen at all hours pounding the country paths rapt in thought. The formal sessions were nourished by these rambles – ‘On a recent walk it occurred to me,’ became a repeated refrain – and since then all their meetings had been held in rural settings.
Several well-documented discoveries in the early years of nuclear physics had occurred while scientists were out walking. Lise Meitner, one of Helen’s favourite scientists, first identified nuclear fission while tramping through the Swedish snow with her nephew, Otto Robert Frisch. Meitner, an Austrian of Jewish ancestry, had worked for many years at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Following the Anschluss in March 1938, she had been forced into exile in Sweden, severed from her science, her laboratory and her colleagues. It was a sad and lonely time, and when she was invited by friends to spend the Christmas holiday in Kungälv on the west coast of the country, she was quick to accept. Frisch, also a physicist working in exile, at Niels Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen, had also been invited for the Christmas holiday in Kungälv.
(It had always annoyed Helen that Frisch, half the physicist his aunt was, had found work with the great Niels Bohr while Meitner had been lucky to get a much lowlier position in Sweden. Meitner had been forced to put up with so many indignities simply because she was a woman. Fortunately she lived long enough to witness the start of a changing attitude towards women in science – she died in 1968 at the age of ninety – but how very different her career might have been if she had been born fifty years later, or a man.)
A few days before she left for the holiday, Meitner had received a letter from Otto Hahn, her long-time collaborator in Berlin, in which he described some puzzling experiments. Meitner suggested to her nephew that they take a walk in the countryside to ponder Hahn’s results. Frisch donned his new cross-country skis, the tiny Meitner, barely 150 centimetres tall, relied on a pair of small wooden skis and off they went through the snow. Hours later, after much discussion and some crude diagrams – Meitner was a far better physicist than she was artist – Meitner hit on the solution: what Hahn had demonstrated but had been unable to interpret was nuclear fission. Nuclear fission, experimentally demonstrated by a German chemist working under the Nazi regime and interpreted by two exiled Jewish physicists as they pounded back and forth through the Swedish snow. The history of science is full of such wonders. And full of slights too: Hahn received the Nobel, Meitner did not.
‘And horses,’ the minder was still talking in her tour-guide fluency. ‘The conference centre at Aiken has its own stables and the management is happy to provide horses for the guests.’ Her tone of voice switched up a register. ‘Aiken is regarded by many as the Florida for horses. Thoroughbreds from the northern states spend the winter there and horse training is one of the major local industries. Polo is popular in the region, and riding to hounds too.’
‘Polo and fox hunting, I can’t believe it.’ Sam from England spoke so loudly he earned a suspicious glance from the non-speaking minder.
Ruggedly innocuous, this second minder was the sort of middle-sized, middle-aged, middle-of-the-road man who was born to be background. Helen assumed he was one of the ‘observers’ who attended all their meetings these days. They usually appeared in pairs (perhaps this man’s mate was already at Aiken), had barber-shop groomed hair, were clean shaven (as far as Helen knew they had all been men), wore neither jewellery nor interesting neckties. To describe one was to describe them all. They attended every session, but made themselves so inconspicuous that you soon forgot they were there.
‘Talking of major industries,’ Josh said, ‘the Savannah River Plant is – or was – another major employer in these parts.’ He turned towards the speaking minder, ‘Does it still produce plutonium?’
The speaking minder ignored the question and drew their attention to the highway turn-off to Augusta, home of the US Masters.
‘I like a game of tennis,’ Jeanne said.
Takeshi smiled. ‘It’s a golf tournament.’
‘Hard to see the point of golf,’ Helen said.
‘Or any form of sport,’ Sam added.
An hour later they arrived in Aiken. It was a surprisingly un-American city, pretty, with vast mansions set behind towering serpentine brick walls that unfurled along the roads in long, graceful waves. There were large and well-tended public gardens and a paucity of the usual chain stores; even aluminium siding was less abundant here. Helen had spent sufficient time in America to know there would be an other-side-of-the-tracks part of town and that as a visitor she would not be seeing it. Neither did it matter, for she was here for the science, four days of strenuous work, four days when she was determined to put her career worries aside, four days of willed myopia if need be.
As a result of her Austrian nationality together with the protection of Max Planck of quantum physics fame, Lise Meitner had kept her job at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute long after other Jewish scientists had been barred from working in Germany. At the end of the war Meitner was critical of herself for not having left Germany earlier, but at the time – and what a time it had been for nuclear physics – she was prepared to keep a low profile and manage without several of the benefits enjoyed by her Aryan colleagues in order to do her science.
Helen believed Meitner had been too harsh on
herself. Discrimination was one thing but mass murder quite another, and in the early 1930s when most German-Jewish scientists were forced from their positions, no one anticipated the systematic slaughter of Europe’s Jews. Besides, where would Meitner have gone? When Hitler took power much of the world was still clawing its way out of the Depression. Jobs were scarce and often poorly paid, and while Einstein, the most famous scientist in the world, was welcomed everywhere, other immigrant scientists would be seen to be taking positions from local scientists.
(And where would she herself go, Helen wondered, if she took a stand on how her work was being used. None of the major laboratories would want her and, unlike Meitner, she had neither the patience nor tolerance to work in a minor one.)
Being born female in 1878 Meitner had struggled every step of the way. Forced by Austrian law to leave public school at fourteen, through private study she had eventually acquired her high school qualification and against much opposition from those who believed university was no place for a woman, she enrolled for her degree. She earned her doctorate at the age of twenty-eight but no university wanted to employ her. When first she started at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, she was forced to work in a makeshift basement laboratory separate from the men – as if femaleness itself was not simply a distraction but an insult to serious work. For science, however, she was willing to tolerate the slights, the neglect, and certainly the lack of windows. Where other people had pride and envy and ambition, Meitner had only a passion for science.
Just like Helen. Too bright for her local state school, too outspoken for her conformist parents, too big for her rural city, if she had been any less strong-willed or any less passionate about science she would never have become a scientist. And such an exclusive and demanding passion it was. Whenever she returned from one of her scientific meetings, friends would ask about the Hermitage or the Louvre or the Taj Mahal or the Rockies or, as she stared through the window of the bus, Aiken’s five-star stables. But in the hot-housing of ideas and argument she would never have voluntarily absented herself before the talking stopped. The tourist attractions, she would tell her friends, would be in the same place and the same form when next she visited. But science would have moved on and she was determined not to be left behind.
How could she give this up? And, more to the point, why should she? She was not living in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, this was not the repressive 1930s or 1950s; the world had moved on. But had it? Had the world really changed? She stewed in the terrible question. She was not naïve, she knew of science’s alliances with dictators and murderous regimes, but for most of her life she had been convinced the exceptions proved the rule: that science was essentially good and scientific progress desirable. But with science now moving so fast, and scientists comprising only a tiny element in enterprises far too large and complex for any one person to grasp, it seemed the exceptions had become the rule. She could no longer pretend that the purposes for which she was working shared much in common with the objectives of those who paid for her work or decided its applications. Well might she love her work, but at what cost?
Lise Meitner, whose research in nuclear fission had led directly to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, never worked on any weapons project. Like Einstein she was outspoken in her belief that the vast energy released in fission should be channelled into peaceful purposes. What makes one scientist speak out and others not? And for those who do not, what is this passion for science that it could so effectively mute ethical standards and beliefs? How can it happen that you find yourself behaving in ways that in a different context you would judge as indefensible?
How wily are beliefs, the way they insinuate themselves so completely into your existence that you would no more question them than you would your heartbeat. You know they are there, you know they are essential, you pay them little mind. Helen had long believed in the goodness of science and the goodness of her own motives as a scientist; she had tucked these beliefs away while she settled down to work. But you need to keep your beliefs active, you need to dust them off regularly, and most particularly you need to debate them and their allegiances. It seemed to her now that her beliefs had become like a comfy old couch she would notice only if it were removed. Her beliefs – there was no avoiding it any longer – had shielded her from some of science’s more sinister happenings.
There was a crunch of gravel as the minibus turned into the driveway of the conference centre. At the entrance stood a welcoming committee of her colleagues, smiling and waving at the new arrivals. Helen gazed at these people, good scientists all of them, men and women with whom she had shared some of the best experiences of her life. These were her friends, she reminded herself, as she stepped out of the warm bus into the warmer embrace of her colleagues, not in the solid, unchanging, shared-past friendship of Jack, Ava and Connie, but with a more up-to-date, more immediate, more adaptable dynamic.
And despite her doubts, despite her fears, she was, she realised, exactly where she wanted to be.
She and the other newcomers were swept into the lobby. Soon they had separated into their usual groups – the cholera contingent, the salmonellas, the E. colis, her own shigella mob, and some general transgenic people, molecular free-floaters, who for the first time gravitated towards her group.
It was Heisenberg who said that ‘science is rooted in conversations’. Many a marriage has disintegrated because a scientist prefers discussing research with colleagues rather than the children’s schooling with a spouse. When scientists get together they start talking where they left off at the last meeting, the last paper, the last email communication. The shigella group comprised Dory from the CDC in Atlanta, Maarten from Holland, Takeshi and Helen. Katarina from Russia was absent as her son was getting married and, despite her pleading, the young couple had refused to change their wedding date when it clashed with the meeting.
They immediately started discussing a recent outbreak of Shigella sonnei which had occurred simultaneously in a number of observant Jewish communities in North America. The contamination had been traced to a particular kosher ice-cream.
‘We did the typing at the CDC,’ Dory said. ‘As well as ice-cream, there was a problem with a particular batch of kosher cheese.’
‘Same milk products obviously,’ Helen said.
As it turned out, little was obvious about this outbreak.
‘Given the restricted food choices of orthodox Jews, it took only a few interviews to trace the problem to ice-cream,’ Dory said. ‘We alerted the usual people, nothing out of the ordinary. And then just as we thought we were winding up, the security people arrived.’
‘So was the contamination intentional?’ Takeshi asked. ‘Someone deliberately targeting Jews?’
‘The security guys pounded us with questions, they insisted on more tests, but no other related organisms showed up on the system. The men stayed for two weeks then they disappeared.’ Dory hesitated before adding, ‘And we’ve heard nothing since.’
‘You did the work,’ Helen spoke slowly, ‘but you’ve never been told whether the outbreaks were deliberate?’
Dory nodded. ‘That’s right.’
There was a long pause while everyone waited for someone else to raise the issue of the elephant in the room – or rather, the laboratory.
Finally Helen spoke up. ‘How often does it happen that we do the science but are kept in the dark? And not just for outbreaks: there’s also the issue of how our work is being used.’
There was a shifting of gaze, a shuffling of feet, a burrowing into a backpack, and in the silence Helen wondered how many of them had tossed in the ethical towel in order to do their science. How many even acknowledged what was happening to scientific research? Many of her colleagues were funded through groups that made no attempt to hide their military affiliation, but it was the rare scientist who owned up to any restrictions or compromises. Yet it had been clear to her for some time that the balance between research freedom and cen
tral direction had disappeared. And it was no gentle altering of the scales, more like a seesaw when one of the riders gets off.
The silence was finally broken with the approach of an organiser who herded them towards reception.
Helen moved slowly, letting the others go before her. For twenty years she had done the science of her dreams. She had presided over a fabulously equipped laboratory within an internationally recognised centre; she had been supplied with abundant funds and seemingly abundant research freedom; her team had made several significant contributions to diarrhoea control and prevention. She had been travelling the main highway, no doubt about it, but she could no longer ignore that while she might have been the driver she wasn’t navigating, nor did she own the vehicle. Her laboratory was no more hers than Fritz Haber’s had proved to be his when in 1933 Hitler ‘Aryanised’ the civil service, and Lenard and Stark, both Nobel Prize winners, had fostered ‘Aryan physics’ (and if ever there was a warning to be wary of the Nobel it resided in the awards to these two men). Or five years later when Lise Meitner had been forced from her laboratory, more home to her than her tiny apartment, and certainly more home than Austria or Germany. Helen habitually thought of her laboratory. But it wasn’t hers, not when politics guarded the door.
Her relationship to her work these past many years now seemed rather like a marriage in which one of the partners stays purely for love while the other, in addition to love, has other more pragmatic reasons. And if now and then there is a vague hint of this, wouldn’t you, the purely loving one be prepared to ignore or rationalise certain actions in order to maintain the marriage? In order to love in the way you have always wanted? Helen loved science. Whether working in her laboratory, writing up papers or gathered with the best scientists in the world she was – and this was no exaggeration – enraptured.
Some excellent scientists had already left research, including two from another division at her own centre, one for a community college, the other with more than forty publications to his credit to teach high school when no reputable laboratory or university would employ him – although what constituted reputable these days Helen no longer knew. These two scientists had cited political interference in their research and had lodged formal complaints. Within a short time they had found themselves frozen out of research funds and subsequently out of work.
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