by J. Manuel
“So we are going to market with it? How soon can it be ready?”
“Not for quite some time. We still have more trials, years of trials to go.”
“You don’t have years. We go with what we have soon, by the end of the year.”
“That’s simply impossible.” William rarely stood his ground but his science was his line in the sand. Nobody in his or her right mind would question him on his science, but William had come to realize over the past year that Eckert was not in his right mind.
“It is only impossible if you think it’s so. We need it out there ready for tests.” Eckert’s extended arm pointed menacingly out through the walls of the lab and into the world.
“But the FDA will not approve it. It is simply madness to move forward without at least a few trials in chimps. We can’t jump from computer concept to petri dish to mice to humans without at least continuing our trials in the proper manner. We don’t know how effective it will be in higher order mammals or primates, and what, if any, side effects it will have.”
“Bill, we have already opened the D.C. clinic. It is the perfect place to run the trial, you said so yourself. You were the one who presented me with the epidemiology charts saying that there were large clusters of cancers in the D.C. area, which were concentrated in the poor, homeless, mostly African-American communities. You said this, Bill, not anyone else. And now that BioSyn has spent a few million dollars opening this facility, you have cold feet and want to back out?”
“No. No, of course I don’t want to back out. I just need more time.”
“Time? Bill, what do you expect BioSyn to do in D.C.? Handout needles to junkies and give pap-smears to hookers? Seriously Bill! We have a cure here and you are slow-walking it. Maybe you don’t like black people, Bill? Is that it?”
“Eckert, that’s unfair,” William stammered. “Of course I want to help. This is just unethical. We’ve had success in the mice over a few trials now, but I am just worried about the repercussions.”
Eckert’s jaw clenched tighter than his fists and he fought the urge to punch the good doctor in the face. He leaned over Bill, grabbing him by the tie, managing just a few words in a hushed tone. “Bill. You will get it done. Are we clear?” He relaxed his grip on Bill’s tie just enough to let some blood flow pass through his carotid arteries. Bill gasped, nodding in agreement. Eckert straightened out the terrified scientist’s tie and patted his shoulders as a smile crept across his lips.
“Good. I’m glad you are going to make this a success. Honestly, Bill, this thing doesn’t work without you. It’s your baby. Treat her right and see where she leads you.” He picked up his suit jacket and strutted out of the lab, whistling as he exited.
William was terrified about what he would do, what he had to do. He had no choice but to go ahead as instructed. He just could not see how this would not end horribly. He could take every precaution but they were not ready. What could he do? Who could he report this to? No one would listen to him. It would be career suicide. The fact was that BioSyn owned him and his work. They were a multi-billion-dollar, influential corporation, and he was a scientist with a company that had floundered under his leadership. Darcy could not help him. He was so desperately alone and powerless, and so he resigned himself to his work to improve Lilith to make her safer for the trials. He tried to concentrate on the possible good that it would do the subjects of the trials. They were not volunteers, and yes this was problematic, but they were downtrodden and unable to afford quality health care, let alone something as cutting edge as Lilith, and so William convinced himself that he could salvage something good out of the situation.
William tried to shake off the remaining fear-inspired adrenaline dump into his bloodstream and attempted to focus on his work. He wished that Manny was here with him. He had the stamina of youth on his side and steadier hands than his. William’s hands were still shaking thirty minutes later as he fumbled with the buttons on his lab coat trying to undress. He looked past the three sets of glass partitions separating him from Lilith. She was soon to be unleashed. It was inevitable.
She had come so far from when he and Manny had first succeeded three years earlier, the memory of them staring at the image from the scanning electron microscope was fading. She was almost unrecognizable in her carbonic cloak. Like a ghost conjured from an ethereal world she had been brought into being. William and Manny had marveled at their creation, a purely synthetic organism made entirely from synthetic DNA. Previous scientific endeavors had inserted strands of synthetic DNA into existing organisms, but that was akin to tweaking a software program. What William and Manny had managed to do was write an entirely new organism into existence.
This lab had been their Eden, Lilith their creation, and they, God. William recalled how Manny had stepped back slowly from the monitor where the two had stood. A look of wonderment gave way to a creeping sadness and turmoil. For Manny, it was the fulfillment of his life’s work, but he was still young. William understood his colleague’s mixed emotions, but he reveled in the moment of his long-awaited triumph. Darcy would have been proud.
“What do we call…her?” Manny managed.
“Lilith.” The name still echoed in the recesses of his memories as it had in the chamber that day. “That would have been our daughter’s name.”
Manny approached the monitor and took a screen-shot, freezing the image of the carbon-based life-form that was suspended in solution in a petri dish in a separate, isolated room. He erased the markings “LV-117” and labeled it “Lilith d/o/b 11/11/11”.
CHAPTER 16
Karen arrived in San Francisco on the redeye from Logan Airport. Her flight had been delayed for several hours because of the unpredictable New England weather; a freak hailstorm that had developed out of thin air. Her flight out of Boston was turbulent and terrifying. She was not a good flyer, but her nerves were calmed by a couple of anti-anxiety pills and beers humming through her system. She was relieved to finally be firmly planted on solid ground. Her feet were swollen; she was hungover and tired from a lack of sleep. It was midnight, California time, and she just wanted to find a bed to fall into. Manny had arranged for a car service, but she had been expected hours ago. She had been texting him incessantly, keeping him updated on the travails of her journey. As she emerged from her less inhibited stupor, she scrolled through the conversation, which had taken on a slightly flirtatious tone at first but had become downright sexual. Her head began to ache with embarrassment and nervous regret as she read through a few of the more salacious bits.
She found her suitcase at the sparsely attended baggage carousel and walked out to the arrivals platform. The cool San Francisco Bay air invigorated her lungs and forced out the recycled air that had chocked her for hours. She was about to text Manny again when a small, beat-up hatchback pulled up in front of her.
“Can I help you with your bags, Miss?” Manny stepped out from behind the driver’s side door grinning ear to ear. Even in the dim, foggy light of the bay and with her inhibitions returning, Manny was still cute in a dorky sort of way. He jogged around the car with his arms open and hugged her unexpectedly, tightly, and for an unusually long time. “Welcome to Cali, Karen!” His eyes smiled. He hurriedly loaded her heavy suitcase into the open hatch of the little car. She wondered if it would even fit. It did, just barely. He slammed the trunk lid shut successfully on the third try and jogged back over to open her door. “Buckle up; remember, click-it or ticket,” he sang as he jogged around the car once again and jumped into the driver’s seat.
“You seem a little too excited for this time of night.” Karen tried not to sound obnoxious, but failed. He recoiled momentarily but returned immediately to his giddy state.
“Oh I just got out of my lab. I was working on your chrysalis, bonding it with Lilith.” His face was intermittently illuminated by the streetlights heading out of the airport. A plane on final approach skimmed just above their heads and sent shudders through the little hatchback.
“That’s what we call her - it - Lilith.”
“What is it - she?”
“I don’t want to give anything away; you’ll have to wait until morning. It’s a half-hour drive to the valley, but I live in San Jose, which is forty-five minutes away. It’s late and I’m sure that you are tired. There aren’t any good hotels near where I live, and I don’t want to leave you by yourself somewhere. You can stay with me. I’ve made a bed. Well… it’s in the spare bedroom, which has a bed that is already made, but it has clean sheets and everything. It’s on the opposite end of the apartment, so you will have your privacy, but we do have to share the shower. Not share the shower at the same time obviously, but I mean that you don’t have your own.”
Karen smiled. Manny was definitely a dork, but a sweet one. She was hooked. “It’s okay. I’m sold. To San Jose it is.”
- - - - - - -
The next morning dawned brightly over the distant eastern foothills of San Jose as the sun drove its light through Karen’s clenched eyelids. Manny walked into the room already chatting away. He had been up for hours fine-tuning his previous day’s work on the chrysalis fusion and he had apparently made some exciting strides while she slept off her hangover and jetlag.
“Karen, I thought you were probably getting ready by now. We need to put a move on it. I didn’t hear any noise, so I just… I helped you to bed last night, which is why you are still in your clothes.” Manny shied away from the dilemma that he faced when he did so.
“Um… thanks.” She reached for the covers but there was no need, nothing was hanging out. “Please tell me there’s coffee.” Manny nodded and darted from the room. She took the chance to check herself again. Everything looked buttoned, clasped, and zipped, though honestly she had practically roofied herself and would not have remembered.
“I hate to rush you and all but we don’t have much time. I want to get to the lab before everyone else, so that I can have some time to show you around one-on-one.” He peeked his head through the door this time. “Coffee!”
Still feeling the ill effects of the pills and booze combo, Karen muscled herself out of bed and toward her salvation in his outstretched hand. “I’ll be out in five minutes. I promise.” Manny nodded and hummed his way out to the living room. Karen then dragged herself into the shower. She stepped out of her room about a half an hour later to find Manny pacing anxiously by a table with a plated breakfast waiting for her. She scarfed down the food and poured herself another cup of coffee as the two headed out the door.
Manny raced his little hatchback joyfully west through the empty, early morning roads of San Jose with the giddy excitement of a child on Christmas morning. Karen was less enthused as she attempted to hold down her breakfast. About thirty minutes later, they arrived at the gate of a rather large technology park. The setting was surprising. Most of the research facilities where she had worked back East were usually located in university research centers and other stodgy environs. Even at this early hour, bike riding hipsters were reporting for work, materializing silently out of the sunlight. They emerged singularly, then in pairs, dribs and drabs, then in steady streams of never-ending Schwinn Cruisers, darting here and there with several mopeds sprinkled in for flavor.
Manny slalomed through the course of bicycles and passed by several opulent structures exuding the latest in LEED Platinum design. Environmental consciousness was no longer just about doing the right thing for the planet, but it was about who could claim it as a status symbol. What was the sense in being progressive if you couldn’t flaunt it in proper California fashion? They continued down to a cul-de-sac, which rounded in front of a humble two-story building, whose understated exterior obscured the truly cutting-edge science within. The building appeared empty. Karen looked around the unoccupied parking lot that sat in front. Their little hatchback, the lone vehicle, broke up the pale-lined symmetry of the gridded spots.
“This is it.” Manny was clearly happy that they were the first to arrive. The pair stood in the entrance as Manny inserted a keycard in a security slot and punched in a code, after which two large double-doors hissed opened with a clamor. Seeing her recoil in surprise, Manny offered an ill-timed warning. “Sorry. You’ll have to get used to that. Most of the doors inside do it. The entire building is negatively pressured.” Manny said that so matter-of-factly that Karen walked a couple of steps before she questioned the statement.
“The entire building? Why?”
“Oh, sorry, I guess I should tell you. We’re working with some pretty sensitive stuff. Originally it was just the Level 4 labs that had it, but we expanded that building wide, for insurance purposes.”
Karen’s unease returned though this time she was sure that it was not the hangover. “Wait you have a Level 4 lab in this facility?”
“Two of them actually and they are something else. That’s where we’re going. That’s where Lilith is. I want to show you our baby.”
Karen was quiet. There was something about how Manny had said ‘our baby’ that muted her. Manny continuously filled the silence as he talked about the high-tech building design. Sure the building’s exterior was unexceptional but its interior housed the latest in autonomous design. The building functioned as a fully autonomous organism. It required only a part-time staff of two people and they were just there to request maintenance as needed. The interior halls were devoid of decoration, hospital-white coated its walls with somber effect. Besides the myriad of security checkpoints, the interior appeared to consist of nothing more than a labyrinth of long hallways.
Manny shepherded Karen through a gauntlet of autonomous checkpoints; requiring a litany of keycards, pin codes, palm scans, and iris scans.
“What are you working on in here? I thought this was a biotech lab,” Karen half-kidded as she sized up the uncomfortably high security—high even by Level 4 standards. She had spent a year of post-doctoral research working at the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas doing some research with infectious diseases before she was recruited to head her lab in Massachusetts. That experience gave her a taste of the safety protocols used to work in high-risk environments though she had only worked on Level 2 diseases such as Hepatitis C, influenza A, Lyme disease, and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA. She had shadowed a handful of researchers working with Level 3 diseases such as SARS virus, bacterial tuberculosis, yellow fever, West Nile virus, and rabies, and the experience was enough to convince her that she never wanted to work with the monsters that inhabited Level 4.
Manny finally noticed her unease. “Relax Karen. We don’t have any Level 4 pathogens here. Those things are highly regulated as you well know and they’re commercially useless for BioSyn not to mention that the insurance for that kind of work is insanely expensive! I mean, from a pure scientific research standpoint, I’d love to get my hands on them. Imagine creating an Ebola or Marburg vaccine, but you know how the research dollars work. It takes money to make money and if you aren’t going to make money than you don’t get money!” He smiled glibly and Karen nodded in agreement about the reality of scientific funding. Privatization and commercialization were great for innovation in most areas of biotechnology but they were pretty poor in others. Funding was always poured into fortune-making treatments for chronic diseases such as diabetes, high-blood pressure, cholesterol, depression, and erectile dysfunction because they required the patient to become life-long, money-generating, and dependent customers of the pharmaceutical industry. Infectious diseases on the other hand were largely ignored. This calculation was mostly based on the short-sighted twentieth century thinking that ignored the twenty-first century reality of the planet’s interconnectedness. Accessibility to the developing world, where most of the highly contagious and deadly diseases originated, had grown exponentially. Viruses such as Ebola, Marburg and SARS were now just one or two hosts away from jumping out of their remote communities and spreading to the globe through the world’s highways and airports.
&
nbsp; “Then why would you waste all of that money on these expensive systems?”
“Well like I said it’s a precaution.” Manny pointed to a steel-gray door which resembled one used to secure a meat-locker, on which a prominent sign boldly warned ‘Biohazard! BioSafety Level 4, Authorized Personnel Only’. “You see, Lilith is a biosynthetic organism that Dr. LaPierre and I created. More precisely Lilith is the mother of a few hundred thousand little organisms we call Lilicytes which we use to target cancer cells.” Manny turned to Karen, his tone now serious and proud, “We’ve developed a cure for cancer.”
CHAPTER 17
Karen was astonished. “A cure for cancer? Which kind?”
“All of them!” Manny grinned, relieved to reveal his great secret. “And you’ve provided the capstone for our project. Your chrysalis is better than I could’ve imagined. If you suit up now, I can show you so that you can see her with your own eyes.”
Karen nodded quickly as her fear was overcome by sheer excitement. The two young researchers began the methodical preparations required to enter the Level 4 facility which lay just beyond the massive security doors. Manny handed her a sealed package containing a blue spacesuit-like garment; a standard, self-contained, Positive Pressure Protective Suit used by the CDC and the U.S. Army to work in Level 4 environments. As its name implied, the suit had its own air supply and provided the wearer with a positive pressure atmosphere that served the dual purpose of providing oxygen and a high pressure barrier to keep contaminants out. If the suit were to suffer a puncture, then the air inside of the suit would be forced out by the positive pressure. The rush of pressurized air would not allow the lower pressure air of the exterior laboratory to come into the suit and potentially expose the wearer to whatever dangerous pathogen was in the laboratory.