The Rationing

by Charles Wheelan

  These were the thoughts that Indian intellectuals had begun to bandy about. The Prime Minister was never confused with the intellectuals. He did, however, have a brilliant sense of which way the intellectual winds were blowing. The U.S. Ambassador to India, a former senator from New Hampshire, was a keen enough observer of Indian politics to spot an opportunity in all this. We should be thankful that the Ambassador was not one of those political hacks who make huge contributions to a presidential campaign and then find themselves ambassador to a country that they cannot find on a map. Rather, the Ambassador had started his career in the Foreign Service and had been a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Senate. The President had offered him the post as a consolation after he was beaten unexpectedly in a Democratic primary. He knew politics. He knew diplomacy. And he understood the needs and wants of the Indian Prime Minister. As the South China Sea Agreement drama was unfolding, the Ambassador passed an urgent message along to the Secretary of State: If we play our cards right, India might be the solution here.

  When the Secretary of State and the U.S. Ambassador were finally able to speak, shortly after Air Force One had touched down in Australia, the Ambassador laid out his thinking: “If we can create a political win for the Indian Prime Minister, he’ll give us whatever Dormigen we need.”

  “He turned down our earlier inquiries without a second thought,” the Secretary of State said skeptically.

  “That was then. This is now,” the Ambassador explained. “There are murmurings in the press and elsewhere that this could be India’s shining moment on the world stage, the perfect opportunity to poke a finger in China’s eye.”

  “Do they have enough Dormigen?” the Secretary of State asked.

  “Yes,” the Ambassador answered confidently. The Secretary of State did not ask how the Ambassador would know something like this. She assumed that the resident spooks in New Delhi had done their homework.

  “Okay, then, I think we should pursue a conversation,” the Secretary of State said.

  “Yes, well, there’s one caveat,” the Ambassador said.

  “Of course there is. What?” the Secretary of State asked.

  “The Prime Minister is going to have to think this is his idea. If we ask again for the Dormigen, we’re not going to get it. He needs to offer it to us. It has to be his shining idea, and Indian voters need to know that.”

  “Really?” the Secretary of State asked. She was intolerant of the exigencies of politics in the best of times. Now, having slept little and facing a deadly deadline, the Secretary of State was even less patient with such silliness. “Really? We’re facing down a hundred thousand deaths, and he needs to feel this is his idea? Are we dealing with a teenager?”

  The Ambassador laughed. “That would not be a bad guide for the negotiations. But if I’m being more charitable, I’d say that one does not become prime minister in a country of a billion people, many of them illiterate, without some rather coarse political calculations.”

  “Okay, fine. How do we make this his idea?” the Secretary asked.

  “I was hoping you would have a suggestion,” the Ambassador answered.

  The Secretary of State relayed the conversation to the President, who seized on the possibility eagerly. “It can’t be too hard to feed this idea to the Prime Minister,” the President said. “I don’t care who gets the credit.”

  “Washington is full of people who think they’ve come up with other people’s brilliant ideas,” the Strategist offered.

  “Exactly,” the President agreed. “Can’t we do a poll, something that shows that Indian voters want to come to the rescue here?”

  “There’s not enough time,” the Strategist said. “We need three or four days to do a decent poll. And that’s in the U.S.; India is even more complicated.”

  “Give me something here,” the President said in exasperation. “I’m tired of people telling me what I can’t do.”

  “Poll results, on the other hand—I could do that in about five minutes,” the Strategist said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” the Secretary of State asked suspiciously.

  “It means we create the results we want and leak them to an influential Indian news source,” the Strategist explained.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, that’s exactly the kind of thing that will make people around the world even more paranoid about American meddling,” the Secretary of State said.

  “Let’s worry about that next week, when people aren’t dying of Capellaviridae,” the President said.

  “With all due respect, sir, we should think very carefully—”

  “I just did,” the President said sharply. “Make it happen. The two of you. I want the Indian Prime Minister to wake up tomorrow and think that his entire political future depends on shipping huge quantities of Dormigen to the United States. How you make that happen—that’s your job.”

  69.

  LIONEL GISCARD ARRIVED AT THE NIH OFFICES WITH GREAT fanfare. He had long gray hair and a carefully manicured goatee. He wore a blue suit with a florid purple shirt and a paisley silk scarf around his neck that he wrapped and unwrapped frequently, almost like a nervous tic. Giscard was stylish for a fifty-year-old man; by NIH standards he looked like a fashion model (with a great accent). Giscard’s arrival caused a frisson of excitement. Those who knew him greeted him effusively. Others waited to be introduced. I was surprised by how all the charges of bad behavior melted away in his presence—scientific celebrity. I also recognized that celebrity can be relative. As soon as Giscard stepped out of our scientific den onto the street, he became just another old guy with a goofy-looking scarf.

  The NIH Director ushered Giscard into a conference room, where the Capellaviridae team was assembling. I was seated at the table; the Director introduced me as the resident Capellaviridae expert. “Okay, yes,” Giscard said. “But I am not familiar with your work. You publish on Capellaviridae, yes?”

  “I did my doctoral work on it,” I said.

  “And since?”

  “I work on the staff here.”

  “Ah, yes, I see.” His tone could not have been more dismissive. He immediately turned and looked around the room. His gaze settled on Jenna, who was seated in the back of the room in one of the chairs reserved for junior staff.

  “Good to meet you,” I said sarcastically as Giscard made a beeline for Jenna, like a wolf that has spotted a baby rabbit limping in the grass. From across the room I watched as Giscard shook Jenna’s hand, placing his other hand lightly on her arm. She laughed at something he said. Some of the senior scientists waited patiently to meet Giscard while he finished his flirtation.

  The NIH Director called the room to order. She introduced Giscard to the senior staff and gave a brief overview of our progress to date, including a summary of my “hostage hypothesis.” “But of course,” Giscard said. “This makes perfect sense. I have been working on a paper to this effect. In French, we say ‘preneur d’otages,’ the taker of hostages.” Like so much else with Giscard, it is hard to know if this was the truth, an exaggeration, or a complete falsehood. He claimed he was working on a paper with a theory of lurking viruses similar to what I had proposed. “You were invited to the conference in Toronto, yes?” he asked me.

  “I wasn’t able to attend,” I said. That was technically true. If one is not invited, it is difficult to attend. Also, I had no idea what Toronto conference he was referring to.

  When the Director finished her briefing, the room fell silent. All eyes turned to Giscard for some pearl of wisdom. He swept the paisley scarf around his neck with even more care than usual. “Mais oui,” he said, drawing the attention of the few people in the room who had not been looking at him. He struck a pensive tone, deliberately unfurling the scarf. At last: “I think that if a vector can spread a virus, then it can also spread an antibody, yes?” He had a prodigious ability to appear profound while repeating what he had just been told.

  “That is the hypothesis we are now
exploring,” the Director said.

  “By this thinking, the small bug—how does one say it?”

  “The North American dust mite,” the Director offered.

  “Yes, the dust mite. The dust mite becomes valuable to its host, the human, because it somehow introduces the antidote for Capellaviridae. Yes?”

  A scientist at the conference table interjected, “We’ve not found any sign of an antibody. That was one of the first things we checked for. We cannot find any antibodies in those who are not affected—”

  “Yes, yes, okay,” Giscard said, cutting him off and, at least from my perspective, dismissing him with what looked like a wave of the scarf. “I assume as much, or I would not be here. This is not your typical potato, right?” Remarkably, people throughout the room, including most of the senior scientists, laughed at this bizarre potato comment. Giscard continued, “But somehow the ongoing presence of this small bug—”

  “The dust mite,” a scientist sitting opposite Giscard offered.

  “Yes, okay, the presence of the dust mite is somehow affecting Capellaviridae so it does not turn dangerous.”

  Tie Guy, who was sitting in a chair against the wall, interjected confidently, “We have nothing to show causality here—no biological evidence whatsoever—just a robust inverse correlation. When people are exposed constantly to the dust mite, they do not get sick. When that exposure is interrupted, either because the dust mite is successfully exterminated, or because a person moves to an area where there are no dust mites, Capellaviridae is prone to turn virulent.”

  “Yes, yes, like the Director said,” Giscard agreed. “And when you expose people who are sick with Capellaviridae to the dust bug, they get better?”

  “It’s been very hard to test,” I offered. “Most people get better on their own, so we’d need a huge trial to prove effectiveness. We don’t have the time and we don’t have the volunteers.”

  Giscard gave the scarf one final furl around his neck. He leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together, making sure that the whole room recognized that he was now engaged in deep contemplation. “And so here we are,” he said.

  “This is where we’ve been since I proposed the hypothesis,” I said with more than a little irritation.

  “Can we break for a coffee?” Giscard asked. “I think this situation is very manageable.”

  “It’s not feeling manageable,” the Director said. “We have very little time.”

  “Let’s have a coffee,” Giscard insisted. “I have some ideas.” The Director was nonplussed at having the meeting interrupted for a coffee break. (There were urns of coffee in the conference room.) Giscard was disrupting the protocol: reports to be presented, assignments to be made, and so on. The guy had no official role, and now here he was proposing a coffee break eighteen minutes into our official daily briefing.

  “We have a lot of business to get through,” the NIH Director said.

  Giscard waved dismissively at the crowded conference table. “But this is not how science happens, with bureaucratic meetings. We need to think—how do you say it, brainstorm. We do not need the accountants in the room.” Obviously there were no accountants in the room, and Giscard had now managed to annoy much of the staff, but he was not entirely wrong. The NIH meetings had become increasingly mechanistic and process-oriented. The time spent in meetings like this drowned out some of the casual conversations among researchers that could often lead to breakthroughs.

  “We have some important things to get through,” the Director said. “Then perhaps we can do a smaller session a little later with no agenda. Please understand that we are keen to take advantage of your expertise, Dr. Giscard.”

  “As you like,” Giscard said with a twirl of the scarf. “I am here because there is a crisis.”

  The Director moved through business quickly, after which a group of us on the science side retired to a small windowless conference room with whiteboards on three walls. As we filed into the room, Giscard spotted Jenna speaking with the Director. Once again, he made a beeline for her. “Will that room be okay, Dr. Giscard?” the Director asked as he approached.

  “Yes, yes,” he assured her as he turned to Jenna. “But you will join us?”

  “Me?” Jenna asked, apparently oblivious to the fact that Giscard was stalking her. “I’m just an extra pair of hands around here.”

  The Director, no naïf when it came to predatory scientists with huge egos, said quickly, “Jenna has some things to do for me. She’s not part of the virus working group.”

  Giscard touched Jenna lightly on the shoulder: “We will talk later.”

  “That would be great,” Jenna said.

  With the flirtation out of the way (for the time being), a group of six or seven of us retired to our small windowless room. Tie Guy spoke first, outlining his statistical findings. A scientist from the CDC summarized what we had learned about Capellaviridae, including its similarity to the influenza virus. Giscard behaved differently in this environment—more scientist and less French showman. It may have been my imagination, but I think he even twirled his scarf less often. Moments earlier I had felt a strong urge to strangle him with the scarf, but now I could not help admiring how his mind worked. I presented my theory that the North American dust mite was somehow using Capellaviridae to gain an evolutionary advantage. “I suspect this virus has an on-off switch—somewhere, somehow,” I said. “The dust mite controls that switch and benefits as a result.”

  “Yes, this is right,” Giscard said confidently.

  “We can’t find any evidence of that,” a CDC scientist objected. “The virulent and dormant forms of the virus are identical.”

  “That’s not right,” Giscard said dismissively. “One form of the virus makes you sick, one does not. Those are not the same. They cannot be the same.”

  “They have the same DNA,” the scientist replied.

  Giscard grew even more dismissive, something I did not think possible. He made a strange pffff sound, blowing air out his pursed lips. He pointed at a young CDC scientist sitting next to him. “You have DNA. I hit you with a mallet. Your DNA does not change. But now you are different because your brain is on the floor.” He paused as we digested and recoiled from his analogy, not least the scientist whose hypothetical brain was now lying on the floor. Giscard continued, “If you people start with the assumption that the virulent form of the virus is no different than the dormant virus, then of course you will miss the difference!” I watched the body language of the scientists around the table as this French interloper chided them for their sloppy work. There were a few sets of rolled eyes, but I suspect most in the room were feeling some variation of what I was feeling, namely that Giscard was a complete asshole who was probably right.

  “Healthy people carrying Capellaviridae have no antibodies,” I offered. “It’s not that their bodies are fighting it off. There is nothing to fight off. It’s innocuous—until it’s not.”

  “Okay, yes,” Giscard said, encouraging this line of thought. I felt like an elementary school student who has answered a math problem correctly, basking in the admiration of my teacher. I hated myself for it, but I wanted Giscard to appreciate my input.

  “So what’s happening is not a difference in reaction to the virus,” I continued. “It’s not that some people fight it off and others don’t. The virus itself appears to be behaving differently. Maybe there is a difference at the molecular level.”§

  “Exactly,” Giscard said.

  “The President is going to speak in about twenty-five minutes,” Tie Guy said.

  Giscard turned to him, seemingly annoyed by the interruption. “The President is not going to help us understand the virus,” he said.

  “I’d like to watch,” one of the CDC scientists said with a hint of hostility.

  “We have time to waste?” Giscard asked.

  “I’ll stream it on my laptop,” I said. “We don’t have to interrupt what we’re doing.”

  The res
t of the meeting is the subject of what might generously be called “competing memories” (which have in turn generated competing news accounts, competing lawsuits, competing memoirs, and even one pathetically inaccurate French documentary, The Hero in the Room). Here is what we do know: (1) the biochemists began comparing the molecular structures of the dormant and virulent Capellaviridae viruses; (2) we proposed a hypothesis whereby Capellaviridae is rendered indolent by the disruption of a key protein; and (3) we further hypothesized that the North American dust mite transfers an enzyme to humans that renders Capellaviridae harmless. Our theory left some crucial questions unanswered (e.g., Why did this effect appear to be only temporary?). But for the first time, we had an elegant and testable hypothesis that could explain not just Capellaviridae, but potentially all lurking viruses. Most important, if we were correct, we would in theory have an antidote for the virulent form of Capellaviridae: the mystery enzyme.

  The biochemists immediately reached out to their colleagues at the NIH and in academe to begin examining the protein structures of the virulent and indolent Capellaviridae viruses. I briefed the NIH Director on our progress. She in turn called the Chief of Staff to report the potential breakthrough. And Lionel Giscard, as best as I can tell, immediately set to work claiming credit for all the important work we had done.