Carson found the kiva about one hundred yards to the southwest. The roof had collapsed, and the kiva was now nothing but a circular depression in the desert, thirty feet across and perhaps seven feet deep. Its walls were of shaped rock, from which projected a few stubs of ancient roof timbers. De Vaca came running at his call, and together they stood at its edge. Near the bottom, Carson could make out places where the walls were still plastered in adobe mud and red paint. At the base, the wind had piled up a crescent of sand, completely burying the floor.
“So where’s this sipapu?” Carson asked.
“It was always in the exact center of the kiva,” said de Vaca. “Here, help me down.” She scrambled down the side, paced off the center, then knelt, digging in the sand with her fingers. Carson dropped down and began to help. Six inches into the sand, their hands scraped against flat rock. De Vaca brushed the sand away excitedly, moving the stone aside.
There, in the sipapu hole, sat a large plastic specimen jar, its GeneDyne label still intact. Inside the jar was a small book with dented corners, bound in a stained, olive-colored canvas.
“Madre de Dios,” de Vaca whispered. She lifted the jar out of the sipapu, pried open the lid, and pulled out the journal, opening it as Carson looked on.
The first page was headed May 18. Below the date, the page was covered in dense, precise handwriting, so tiny that two lines were written in each ruled space.
Carson watched as de Vaca flipped through the pages incredulously. “We can’t bring this back to Mount Dragon,” he said.
“I know. So let’s get started.”
She turned to the beginning.
May 18
Dearest Amiko,
I write to you from the ruins of a sacred Anasazi kiva, not far from my laboratory.
When we were packing my things, that last morning before I flew to Albuquerque, I stuck this old journal into the pocket of my jacket, on impulse. I’d always planned to use it for bird sightings. But I think now I’ve found a better use for it.
I miss you so terribly. The people here are friendly, for the most part. Some, like the director, John Singer, I think I can even count as friends. But we are associates before we are friends here, all pushing toward one common goal. There is pressure upon us; tremendous pressure to move ahead, to succeed. I feel myself drawing inward under such pressure. The endless desolation of this awful desert magnifies my loneliness. It is as if we have stepped off the edge of the world.
Paper and pencil are forbidden here. Brent wants to keep track of everything we do. Sometimes, I believe he even wants to keep track of what we think. I’ll use this small journal as my lifeline to you. There are things I want to tell you, in good time. Things that will never appear in the on-line records at GeneDyne. Brent is, in many ways, still a boy, with boyish ideas; and one of those ideas is that he can control what others do and think.
I hope you will not worry when I tell you such things. But I forget; when you read this, it will be with me by your side. And these will be but memories. Perhaps the passage of time will allow me to laugh at myself and my petty complaints. Or feel pride at what we have accomplished here.
It’s a long walk out to this kiva, and you know how poor a rider I am. But I think it does me good, to spend this time with you. The journal will be safe here, under the sand. Nobody leaves the facility except the security director, and he seems to have his own strange desert business to attend to.
I will come again, soon.
May 25
My darling wife,
It is a terribly hot day. I keep forgetting how much water one needs in this frightful desert. I will have to bring two canteens next time.
It is no wonder, in this waterless landscape, that the entire religion of the Anasazi was directed at the control of nature. Here, in the kiva, is where the rain priests called on the Thunderbird to bring the rain.
Oh, male divinity!
With your moccasins of dark cloud, come to us,
With the zigzag lightning flung out on high over your head, come to us soaring,
With these I wish the foam floating on the flowing water over the roots of the great corn,
Happily abundant dark clouds I desire,
Happily abundant dark mists I desire,
Happily may fair blue corn, to the ends of the earth, come with you.
This was how they prayed. It is a very ancient desire, this thirst for knowledge and power, this hunger to control the secrets of nature, to bring the rain.
But the rain did not come. Just as it does not come today.
What would they think if they could see us now, laboring day after day, in our warrens beneath the earth, working not only to control nature, but to shape it to our will?
I can write no more today. The problem I’ve been given is demanding all my time and energy. It’s hard to escape it, even here. But I will return soon, my love.
June 4
Dearest Amiko,
Please forgive my long absence from this place. Our schedule in the laboratory has been fiendish. Were it not for the requisite decontaminations, I believe Brent would have us working round the clock.
Brent. How much have I told you about him?
It’s strange. I never knew that I could feel such profound respect for a man, and yet dislike him at the same time. I suppose I might even hate him. Even when he’s not actually pushing me to work faster, I can still see his face, frowning, because the results are not as he would like. I hear him whispering in my ear: Just five more minutes. Just one more test series.
Brent is probably the most complex person I’ve ever met. Brilliant, silly, immature, cool, ruthless. He has an enormous internal storehouse of witty aphorisms which he brings forth for any occasion, quoting them with great delight. He gives away millions while arguing bitterly over hundreds. He can be suffocatingly kind to one person and unbearably cruel to the next. His knowledge of music is extraordinary. He owns Beethoven’s last and finest piano, the one that supposedly prompted him to write his final three sonatas. I can only guess at the price.
I’ll never forget the first time I spoke to him. It was when I was still working in GeneDyne Manchester, shortly after my breakthrough with GEF, the filtration system. Our preliminary results were excellent, and everyone was excited. The system promised to cut production time in half. The team in the transfection lab were beside themselves. They told me they were going to nominate me for president.
That’s when the call came from Brent Scopes. I assumed it was congratulatory; perhaps another bonus. But instead, he asked me to come to Boston, on the next plane. I had to drop everything, he said, to assume leadership of a critical GeneDyne project. He didn’t even allow me to finish the final tests on GEF; I had to leave that to my staff at Manchester.
You remember my trip to Boston. I’m sure I must have seemed evasive on my return, and for that I am sorry. Brent has a way of pulling you in behind his banner, of electrifying you with his own enthusiasm. But there seems no reason not to tell you about it now. It will be in all the newspapers in a matter of months, anyway.
My task—putting it simply—was to synthesize artificial blood. To use the vast resources of GeneDyne to genetically engineer human blood. The preparatory work had already been done, Brent said. But he wanted someone with my background, and my expertise, to see it through. My work on the GEF filtration process made me the perfect choice.
It was a noble idea, I admit, and Brent’s delivery was superb. Never again would hospitals suffer from blood shortages and emergencies, he said. No longer would people have to fear contaminated transfusions. No longer would people with rare blood types die for lack of a match. GeneDyne’s artificial blood would be free of contamination, would match all types, and would be available in limitless quantities.
And so I left Manchester—I left you, our home, everything I hold dear—and came to this desolate place. To pursue a dream of Brent Scopes, and, with any luck, make the world a better place. The dream lives. But
its cost is very high.
June 12
Dearest Amiko,
I have decided to use this journal to continue the story I began in my last entry. Perhaps that was my purpose all along. All I can tell you is that, after leaving this kiva on my last visit, I felt a tremendous sense of release. So I will continue, for my own sake if not for posterity.
I remember one morning, perhaps four months ago. I was holding a flask of blood. It was the blood of a human being, yet it had been manufactured by a form of life as far removed from human as possible: streptococcus, the bacterium that lives in the soil, among other places. I had spliced the human hemoglobin gene into strep and forced it to produce human hemoglobin. Vast quantities of human hemoglobin.
Why use streptococcus? Because we know more about strep than about almost any other form of life on the planet. We have mapped its entire genome. We know how to snip apart its DNA, tuck in a gene, and sew everything back together.
You will forgive me if I simplify the process. Using cells taken from the lining of a human cheek (my own), I removed a single gene located on the fourth chromosome, 16s rDNA, locus D3401. I multiplied it a millionfold, inserted the copies into the strep bacteria, and grew them in large vats filled with a protein solution. Despite how it sounds, my dear, this part wasn’t difficult. It has been done many times before with other genes, including the gene for human insulin.
We made this bacterium—this extremely primitive form of life—ever so slightly human. Each bacterium carried a tiny, invisible piece of a human being inside it. This human piece, in essence, took over the functions of the bacterium and forced it to do one thing: produce human hemoglobin.
And that, to me, is the magic—the irreducible truth of genetics, the promise that will never grow stale.
But this is also where the difficult work really began.
Perhaps I should explain. The hemoglobin molecule consists of a protein group, called a globin, with four heme groups riding shotgun on it. It collects oxygen in the lungs, exchanges this oxygen with carbon dioxide in the tissues, and then dumps carbon dioxide into the lungs to be exhaled.
A very clever, very complicated molecule.
Unfortunately, hemoglobin by itself is deadly poisonous. If you injected naked hemoglobin into a human being, it would probably be fatal. The hemoglobin needs to be enclosed in something. Normally, this would be a red blood cell.
We therefore had to design something that would seal up the hemoglobin, make it safe. A microscopic sack, if you will. But something that would “breathe,” that would allow oxygen and carbon dioxide to pass through.
Our solution was to create these little “sacks” out of pieces of membrane from ruptured cells. I used a special enzyme called lyase.
Then came the final problem: to purify the hemoglobin. This may sound like the simplest problem of all.
It was not.
We grew the bacteria in huge vats. As the amount of hemoglobin produced by the bacteria built up, it poisoned the vat. Everything died. We were left with a soup of crap: molecules of hemoglobin mixed with dead and dying bacteria; bits of DNA and RNA; chromosomal fragments; rogue bacteria.
The trick was to purify this soup—to separate the healthy hemoglobin from all the junk—so that we would end up with pure human hemoglobin and nothing else. And it had to be extremely pure. Getting a blood transfusion is not like taking a tiny pill. Many pints of this substance might go inside a human being. Even the slightest impurities, multiplied by those quantities, could cause unpredictable side effects.
It was around this time that we got word of what was going on back in Boston. The marketing people were already studying—in great secrecy—how to market our genetically engineered blood. They assembled focus groups of ordinary citizens. They discovered that most people are terrified of getting a blood transfusion because they fear contamination: from hepatitis, from AIDS, from other diseases. People wanted to be reassured that the blood they were receiving was pure and safe.
So our unfinished product was dubbed PurBlood. And the decree came down from corporate headquarters: henceforth, in all papers, journals, notes, and conversations, the product would be called PurBlood. Anyone calling it by its trade name, Hemocyl, would be disciplined. In particular, the marketing decree stated, any use of the word “genetic engineering” or “artificial” was verboten. The public did not like the idea of genetically engineered anything. They didn’t like genetically engineered tomatoes, they didn’t like genetically engineered milk, and they really hated the phrase “genetically engineered artificial human blood.” I guess I can’t blame them, really. The thought of having such a substance pumped into something as inviolate as one’s own veins has to be disturbing to a layman.
My love, the sun is growing low in the sky, and I must leave. But I will return tomorrow. I’ll tell Brent I need a day off. It’s not a lie. If you only knew how pouring out my soul to you on these pages has lifted a great weight from my shoulders.
June 13
Dearest Amiko,
I come now to the most difficult part of my story. The part, in fact, that I was not sure until now I could bring myself to tell you. I may yet burn these pages, if my resolve weakens. But it is a secret I can no longer keep within myself.
... So I began the purification process. We fermented the solution to free the hemoglobin from its bacterial prison. We centrifuged it to clear out the refuse. We forced it through ceramic micron filters. We fractionated it. To no avail.
You see, hemoglobin is extremely delicate. You cannot heat it; you cannot use overly strong chemicals; you cannot sterilize or distill it. Each time I attempted to purify the hemoglobin, I ended up destroying it. The molecule lost its delicate structure: it “denatured.” It became useless.
A more delicate purification process was required. And so Brent suggested we try my own GEF filtration process.
I realized immediately that he was right. There was no reason not to. It must have been misplaced modesty on my part that kept it from occurring to me before.
The process I’d been working on in Manchester was a type of modified gel electrophoresis, an electric potential that drew precisely the correct molecular weight molecule through a set of gel filters.
Setting up the process took time, however—time during which Brent grew increasingly impatient. At last, I was able to purify six pints of PurBlood using the gel process.
The GEF process was successful beyond my wildest hopes. Using four of the six pints as samples, I was able to prove the mixture was pure down to sixteen parts per million. Thus, out of one million hemoglobin molecules, there were no more than sixteen foreign particles. And probably less.
This may sound pure. And it is pure enough for most drugs. But, in this case, it was not. The FDA had decided, with typical capriciousness, that 100 parts per billion would be safe. Sixteen parts per million was not. The number 16—it will haunt me forever. In scientific terms, a purity of 1.6 X 10-7.
Please don’t misunderstand. I believed—and I still believe—that PurBlood is much purer than that. I just couldn’t prove it. The difference is crucial. But to me, the distinction was unfair and artificial.
There was one test for purity—the ultimate test—that I had not performed, because it was discouraged under FDA regulations. I secretly performed that test. Please forgive me, my love—one night, in the low-security lab, I opened a vein in my arm and bled out a pint. Then I replaced it with a transfusion of PurBlood.
It was rash, perhaps. But PurBlood passed with flying colors. Nothing happened to me, and all medical tests proved it was safe. Naturally, I couldn’t report the results of that test, but it satisfied me that PurBlood was pure.
So I did something else. I infinitesimally diluted my last pint of PurBlood with distilled water, two hundred to one, and ran the array of tests that automatically calculated and recorded purity. The result was, of course, a purity of 80 parts per billion. Well within the FDA safety range.
That was al
l I had to do. I did not make a report, I did not change figures or falsify data. When Scopes downloaded the test results that night, he knew what they meant. The next day he congratulated me. He was beside himself.
The question I now ask myself—the question you may ask me—is why did I do it?
It wasn’t for the money. I have never really cared that much about money. You know that, my darling Amiko. Money is more trouble than it’s worth.
It wasn’t for fame, which is a terrific nuisance.
It wasn’t to save lives, although I have rationalized that this was the reason.
I think perhaps it was pure, naked desire. A desire to solve this last problem, to take that final step to completion. It is the same desire that led Einstein to suggest the terrible power of the atom in a letter to Roosevelt; it is the same desire that led Oppenheimer to build the bomb and test it not thirty miles from here; it is the same desire that led the Anasazi priests to meet in this stone chamber and exhort the Thunderbird to send the rain. It was the desire to conquer nature.
But—and this is what haunts me, what has driven me to commit this all to paper—the success of PurBlood does not alter the fact that I cheated.
I am only too well aware of this. Especially now ... now that PurBlood has gone on to large-scale production, and I am banging my head against another, even more insoluble problem.
Anyway, dearest one, I hope you can find it in your heart to understand. Once I am free of this place, I will make it my life’s resolve never to be apart from you again.
And perhaps that will be sooner than you think. I’m beginning to suspect certain people here of— but more on that some other time. I had best end this for today.
You will never know what being able to speak this secret has done for me.
Mount Dragon Page 24