McKean 02 The Neah Virus

by Thomas Hopp

  “An unusual placement,” McKean said. “But not entirely unheard of. Anything remarkable about the inserted sequence?”

  Beryl shook her head. “I ran a DNA comparison of the insertion versus the entire viral-genome databank and got no matches. It’s not related to any viral gene that’s ever been sequenced.”

  “Human, animal, or plant genes?”

  “I’m still checking.”

  “I’d like to take a look at it myself - only as a matter of curiosity, I suppose, now that Holloman and Curman are having their way. When you have a minute, please email it to Kay Erwin. She should have a copy. And perhaps I will have a look over her shoulder, so to speak. That way you won’t commit the sin of email communication with me, which I assume will be forbidden by tomorrow.”

  Beryl looked confused. “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s been fired for insubordination,” I said for McKean, who seemed disinclined to say it.

  “Is that true?” she asked, her eyes widening.

  McKean nodded. “Please don’t let it slow down your efforts with this virus. Your work is too important.”

  A minute after Beryl went back into the lab, Janet appeared at the door looking even more stricken than Beryl. Tears over-brimmed her eyes. “How can I work for Holloman or Curman?” she quavered, dobbing her eyes with a tissue from McKean’s desktop Kleenex box. “I hate them both.”

  “Of course you can work for them, Janet. Your part in the fight against this virus is too vital to stop now. Just find the time to do the odd experiment for me in between what they ask of you. That way, things we’ve been working on will still move forward.”

  “But what about you, Peyton? What will you do?”

  “I’ll think of something. That’s my forte, coming up with the unanticipated.” He patted her on the shoulder and she seemed to take heart.

  She took a deep breath and said, “Okay. I’m all right now. We’ll muddle through, won’t we?”

  “As always,” McKean replied.

  She had brought a handful of computer printout pages with her. She held them out and said, “I’ve got the first results from that other experiment you requested - “

  “The last experiment you’ll request!” a snide voice interrupted. All three of us turned to find David Curman at the door. He had recovered his color and now looked red-faced. He went straight for the papers and snatched them from Janet’s hand. “What sort of skunkworks are these?” He briefly shuffled through them and then cast them down on the computer desk without interest. “Janet,” he warned, “if I see any more work on this subject, you’ll be put on indefinite leave. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  He turned to McKean. “You’re finished.” He said this with a note of perverse pride, and a self-righteous look on his boyish face that made me want to leap up from my chair and strike him. Instead, I sat still and watched him gloat. “So, the great Dr. McKean is done lording it over every other scientist at ImCo.”

  McKean looked disgusted. “You’ve got what you wanted,” he muttered. “My team, my project, my labs, everything. This must be a dream come true for you.”

  “You’re a colossal egotist,” Curman said with a vindictive grin. “I overheard you from my office and I knew I’d better come and see what trouble you were stirring up. Now, you’d better face the fact that I’ve beaten you, Peyton McKean, and leave - before I call security.”

  McKean simmered but said nothing. He rose and put on his green field coat and hat. As he did, Curman gloated, “I’ve waited a long time for this day, Peyton McKean.”

  As McKean stepped out his door, he paused and asked Curman, “How does that injection site feel?”

  Curman touched his shoulder gingerly. “Just fine,” he said.

  I followed McKean to the elevator and down to the underground parking garage where his silver Volvo station wagon was parked. McKean was grim-faced and silent as he got in and closed his door. I got in the passenger side and he fired the ignition. He said, philosophically, “I’ll tell you this, Fin. Don’t ever come off as being smarter than the man who employs you. Of course, I suppose I have been guilty of a lack of humility.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I confronted Holloman without trying to cultivate a positive reaction first. I should have been more diplomatic.”

  I laughed. “It’s not your style, Peyton. And you didn’t exactly have a lot of time for diplomacy.”

  “I suppose not,” he agreed. “The pace of events limited my options. But look what I’ve gotten for my aggressive stance. Nothing left for me to do but watch Holloman and his lap dog Curman release an untested vaccine.”

  “Whatever happens won’t be your fault.”

  “But if there is a catastrophe, I’ll feel personally responsible. The Holloman vaccine was originally my idea, but I let it get out of my control.”

  He drove up the ramp and exited onto the street, intending to drop me at my apartment on his way home. However, as he turned in that direction, people milling in the middle of University Street blocked our way. Across the street in the empty paved spaces of a parking lot, a crowd had gathered around a long white banner with black lettering that read, “Vaccine now!” The crowd had overflowed the curb and spilled into the street. McKean rolled a window down to listen to them chant. “Vaccine now! Vaccine now!”

  “I suspect Stuart Holloman is behind this somehow,” McKean muttered. He called out his window, “You idiots!” But his voice was lost in their chant. “Vaccine now! Vaccine now!”

  “This vaccine has become a juggernaut,” he muttered. “It’s just about unstoppable by me or anyone else.”

  “You must be able to do something, Peyton. People will listen to you.”

  “Like they listened in there? Like they’re listening out here? I’m just one person. This rush to the Holloman vaccine is becoming a social phenomenon. I don’t see how I can stop it.” He eyed the crowd disgustedly as he nosed his car in among them and they parted to let him pass. “I’m going home,” he murmured, sounding depressed, as he turned the corner and headed north to deliver me to my apartment. “Maybe I’ll just wait this thing out. I’m getting to where I don’t give a damn any more.”

  “Peyton!” I exclaimed. But there was nothing else I could say.

  Behind us the crowd chanted on. “Vaccine now! Vaccine now!”

  Chapter 19

  That evening as I sat at my kitchenette counter eating dinner, listening to the Early Mozart Channel on Apple TV and thinking over the day’s events, Penny Worthe knocked at the door. I opened it to find her in her usual state of half-dress. “Have you seen what’s on the evening news?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Well turn it on, quickly!”

  I went for the channel clicker, tuned in the news and sat on the couch with Penny. “It’s so terrible,” she said, prefacing a news report that was just starting. A Northwest Cable News team was on location on a street corner in Port Angeles. An ominous cloud of black smoke rolled across a twilight sky. Arran Fisk began, “We are witnessing a town that has literally gone mad. Behind me, you see the smoke of multiple burning buildings. We don’t know who set the fires, but the central business district of Port Angeles has descended into chaos. There are literally scores of zombie-like disease victims rampaging in the streets. It looks a like a scene from Night of the Living Dead.”

  Meg Kale, the Seattle anchor asked, “Are these people who have escaped from the isolation wards at Olympic Medical Center?”

  “No Megan. From what we’ve learned, all cases admitted to the hospital are still there, and quite a few of them have died from fevers and convulsions. These seem to be new victims who have just come from…well, they have just come from everywhere.”

  “It sounds terribly frightening, Arran. Is the epidemic out of control?”

  “Meg, I think it’s safe to say, at least here in Port Angeles, it is definitely out of control.”

  She replied,
“All of us here at the station wish you the best of luck in getting out of there safely, Arran.”

  “I certainly would like to,” he said. “But the authorities have roadblocks on all sides of town. They’ve given orders to shoot to kill, no matter whether people are trying to enter or leave. They are not allowing anyone to go anywhere. We’ll try to ride things out at the local TV station.”

  “Please Arran, be careful. Get yourself back to us safely as soon as you can.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Next,” Meg continued, “we’ll go to a live interview at Immune Corporation, already in progress.”

  A group of reporters had circled Dr. Holloman on the sidewalk outside ImCo and were shoving microphones in his face. One asked, “How do you respond to the views Dr. McKean brought up today about the danger of moving too rapidly with the vaccine?”

  “The colleague you refer to,” Holloman replied coolly, “has some personal problems, including a colossal ego. Suffice it to say he is no longer with the company.”

  As quickly as the news segment had begun, it ended when Meg cut in. “We take you now to the White House for a special announcement from the President.” The screen cut to the President’s desk. He sat there with a grim expression, flanked by the presidential and U.S. flags.

  “Good evening fellow Americans,” he began. “By now, many of you have heard that the news from Washington State is not good. There are reports of a growing number of cases of the disease we now call the Neah virus. In response, I’m taking further steps to assure public safety. I’ve placed the entire Olympic Peninsula under quarantine and martial law. Everyone there is to remain in his or her home. I’ve mobilized additional National Guard units to establish more checkpoints intended to stop the spread of the disease. Effective immediately, I am imposing a shutdown of all airports in the Pacific Northwest. Furthermore, interstate road travel in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho will be halted for a period of at least two weeks. The people of the Pacific Northwest are urged to stay in or near their homes at all times. The Army and National Guard will set up distribution lines for food and medicine, and deliver these supplies directly to neighborhoods. They will feed and support the population until the emergency is over. Let me assure you that the U.S. Government and the Centers for Disease Control are prepared for every eventuality, including this one. Everyone’s needs will be met, and there is no cause for alarm.”

  “Boy, I wish I believed him,” I whispered.

  “Me too,” Penny agreed, twining an arm around mine for comfort.

  “Secondly,” the President went on, “I am pleased to announce that the U.S. Government will throw its full weight behind two existing programs to combat the Neah virus. Seattle’s Immune Corporation and Virogen in Bethesda already have vaccines under development, and I’ve called on the National Institutes of Health and the National Guard to assist them in producing more vaccine and distributing it to the public as quickly as possible.”

  He finished his speech and pundits came on to analyze it. I shut off the set and we sat in stunned silence for a moment. “This was just what Peyton McKean warned against,” I said. “They’re rushing an untested vaccine forward without proof it’s safe.”

  “Maybe that’s the best thing to do,” Penny said. “I know I want to get a dose.”

  I shook my head. “If Peyton McKean’s hunch is right and something is wrong with the G1 protein, then the President could be declaring a death sentence on the whole population of the state.”

  “That’s impossible, isn’t it?”

  “I wish. But I can’t stop thinking of McKean’s absolute certainty that there is something odd about G1.”

  “Aren’t you scared, Fin?”

  “Well, I suppose I am.” I gave her what I hoped was a brave and reassuring smile. I had always thought Penny too plain and tastelessly dressed to make an adequate target for my affection. But somehow, on this evening and under these circumstances, her fear and need for comfort touched me. I put a soothing hand on her shoulder and she turned to me. We embraced and she held me tightly.

  After a long moment I disengaged her and led her to the door. “I’ll see you,” I said. “Thanks for the heads-up on the news.”

  She said goodnight and went across the landing to her apartment.

  * * * * * * * * * *

  Late the next morning I paid a call on Peyton McKean at his home. He and his wife and son live in a lovely large house in West Seattle, a two-story white Victorian on a wide bluff-top lot with a sweeping view over Puget Sound to the Olympic Mountains. I parked on the semicircular drive, climbed the steps of the colonnaded porch, and rang the doorbell. I rang several times before he answered.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was playing hide-and-seek with Sean. Come along Fin, let’s go up to my office.”

  He led the way through a finely furnished great room and up a tall, wide staircase and into a spacious office that faced the sound-and-mountain view. He sat at his desk, which, unlike his ImCo desk, was large and made from finely crafted oak. Like his ImCo desk, a pile of papers cluttered its surface. He turned on his desktop computer as I sat down in a guest chair on his right. He clicked his mouse a few times and then sat back in his high-backed green leather chair and motioned for me to come close so I could look at the screen. “As you heard yesterday, Beryl emailed the G1 sequence to Kay Erwin, who passed it along to me. And I have been puzzling over it most of the morning. I am still not certain what to make of its unusual structure.”

  “The inserted sequence?”

  “Exactly. I’ve turned up something most peculiar. It’s closest sequence match among all known animals is with a portion of the chicken genome.”

  “Chicken? That’s out of the blue.”

  “But perhaps not too farfetched. Remember, Avian flu spread from chickens to humans.”

  “So this virus has some connection to the poultry industry?”

  “Perhaps, but there are other possibilities. Wild birds, perhaps. However, the genomes of the many non-domesticated birds have never been sequenced, so we remain in the dark as to an exact match. But the partial match has given me much to think about.”

  “Which protein is it?”

  “Not a single protein, but rather a large family of related cell-to-cell contact molecules called cell-adhesion molecules, or CAMs for short. One or another of them would be a logical DNA segment for a virus to capture into its own genome - giving it a good way for attaching to its target cells in the bird - or human - it infects.”

  “Scary,” I said.

  “And I was just about to turn my attention to that issue of human infections.” He typed a few commands and the screen presented Beryl’s DNA sequence data: countless A, T, G, and C code letters in seemingly random order, in a series of horizontal lines arranged from the top to the bottom of the screen like long strings of text.

  “Now, let’s see…” He typed a command into a text box at the bottom of the screen:

  homology search versus entire human genome

  He punched the return key and turned to me. “I’ve asked the National Library of Medicine’s mainframe computer to check every code letter in the inserted segment against every code letter in the human genome. It will take a minute or two.”

  “So, what’s the mainframe looking for?”

  “Sequence matches. Places where the viral sequence is identical with human DNA.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “Answer: no. But if it occurs, it means real trouble in a vaccine that stimulates immunity against G1, because antibodies from that response might cross-react with both the bird protein and with a human protein, thereby attacking the human body that made them. It’s a rare but not unheard of thing. A match in my search would identify the CAM protein in the human body that would be attacked by those antibodies.”

  After a moment, the line at the bottom of the screen changed to:

  NO MATCHES FOUND

  “Whew,” I exhaled. “I was holding my brea
th on that one.”

  McKean sat back in his chair and stared at the line for a moment. “That’s what Beryl told me,” he said. “No matches. And so far, that’s what I have found with every query I’ve made to the NLM computer.”

  “So there’s nothing to worry about.” I felt greatly relieved. “Holloman’s right. The vaccine is safe.”

  “Normally, I would agree,” said McKean. “But I can’t help worrying. The sequence contains three segments that don’t match the bird sequences. In fact, they don’t match anything at all. It’s unusual to find something truly new under the sun. It remains possible there is a hidden relationship of the G1 insertion with yet another protein molecule. That’s why I want to try a few unusual tricks to tease out an answer.”

  He typed a new line:

  protein translation

  He pressed the enter key and the sequence lines immediately altered. Beneath each DNA code line, a new line of three-letter codes appeared.

  “Remember protein code?” he asked. “Cells convert the DNA code to an RNA copy and then read it by stringing amino acids together like beads according to the RNA sequence. They incorporate only one amino acid for every three RNA code letters. And proteins are very different beasts from DNA or RNA molecules. Where DNA exists as long double helix strands of millions of code letters, proteins are much shorter strands - one or several hundred amino acids - that jumble up as if you had wadded up a string of beads. Proteins take on shapes and corresponding functions dictated by their amino acid sequences. They are the workhorses of the cell. Protein enzymes burn sugar for fuel, chop up other molecules in the digestive process, or in the case of CAMs, cover the surfaces of cells.”

  “I’m with you so far.”

  “Now, there are ways of telling which parts of a protein are exposed at its surface and therefore are targets for attachment of our immune system’s antibodies. And what I’m after right now are the surface portions of the G1 insertion.”

  He typed another line:

  hopp and woods analysis

  “This,” he said as the computer worked, “is a tried-and-true method of identifying surface portions of proteins. Antibodies stick to these portions and trigger white blood cells to attack intruders like the Neah virus. Ahh.” He leaned forward and looked at the screen as it changed to a new, simplified display with three rows of six amino acid codes each: