Bad Medicine- A Life for a Life; Bed of Nails; Going Viral

by Puckett, Andrew

  She put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me, her mouth warm in the cold air, then she walked away. I went slowly back to the bar, deep in thought.

  There was another drink in front of my seat. He’d known I’d come back.

  ‘You stupid bastard,’ I began, never one for originality. ‘You — ’

  ‘All right, I know. There’s nothing I haven’t called myself already.’

  ‘But why, John? She didn’t deserve that — ’

  ‘Leave it!’ he snapped. ‘I suppose you think she’d be better off with Phil, or you perhaps — ’ He broke off and stared at me and I felt myself redden.

  ‘Can’t think about getting involved with a woman,’ I mumbled. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Let’s leave it,’ he said more gently. ‘I know I’m going to lose her soon, but I can’t help it.’ We drank in silence for a moment, then he said, ‘I could love her, you know, but I daren’t let her get too close.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My work.’ He drained his glass, set it down. ‘I want to tell you something,’ he said carefully, ‘about my work.’

  I found myself listening despite everything, his work was something he never talked about.

  ‘Well?’ I said at last.

  ‘Don’t crowd me.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Get me another pint.’

  I did, and he said, ‘I think — no, I’m sure, I’ve found a cure for AIDS.’

  Well, I’d been expecting something good…

  ‘I found it by accident when I was working at Parc-Reed.’

  ‘You were at Parc-Reed?’

  ‘For a short while.’

  ‘Is that why you and Charles don’t get on?’

  ‘That mealy-mouthed prat. Calls himself a scientist! What do you know about AIDS?’ he demanded abruptly.

  ‘Not all that much, I’m not a virologist. I know it’s caused by HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, which attacks lymphocytes — ’

  ‘An’ it’s gonna hit this country hard,’ he interrupted. ‘Not just poofters and junkies but anybody. You can forget about prevention, there’s too many like me who can’t keep their wee Robbies to themselves. An’ you can forget about a vaccine, too — ’ ‘What’s a wee Robbie?’

  ‘Wha’d’ya think?’ Impatiently. ‘Robbie Burns, he wasnae just our national poet. Forget it, let’s get back to vaccines.’

  ‘The virus changes its coat, doesn’t it? Like the ’flu virus?’

  ‘Right! Anyway, a vaccine’s no good to anyone who’s already got the virus. But somethin’ that attacks the virus itself…that’s different.’

  ‘And you’ve found that something?’

  ‘Look, the virus is like this.’ He pushed aside his beer mug and started drawing on the table-top with spilt beer. ‘You gotta phospholipid membrane like this, it’s covered in spikes.’ He started drawing them.

  ‘Oh, this is no bloody good!’ He rubbed it out and stood up. ‘Come on.’

  ‘I could follow that, John — ’

  ‘I said come on, I’m gonna show you somethin’.’ He pulled on his coat and made for the door.

  I followed him out into the frosted night.

  He walked quickly and after a few minutes we passed through the hospital gates. When we reached the lab, he thrust his fingers into the letter-box and pulled out the key, which was on the end of a piece of string. A moment later we were climbing the stairs. I followed him through his office to the Electron Microscope room, where he switched on the light and flung his coat on to a chair.

  He turned to me. ‘Ever used one of these?’

  ‘I’ve seen one used,’ I said, gazing up at the barrel of the microscope, a stainless steel tube four feet high and perhaps six inches wide, rising from a desk-console of grey metal covered in switches and dials. Massive cables fed into the barrel at intervals.

  John sat at the console.

  ‘Doesn’t it have to warm up?’ I asked.

  ‘Not when it’s been left on,’ he said, grinning.

  He pulled a switch and a circle of green light grew on the screen directly beneath the barrel. It was encased in metal and with glass portholes through which you could see, and the whole structure made me think of the inside of a submarine.

  He turned a dial and the light grew in intensity. ‘Saturation,’ he murmured, half to himself as his hands strayed over the controls on the console. ‘Focus. Condenser.’ A blurred image of the microscope’s filament appeared and disappeared on the screen. ‘That’s fine.’

  He stood up, went over to a drawer and took out a small container. With a pair of forceps he extracted from it a minute circular grid perhaps a millimetre in diameter, which he then teased carefully into a slot in the end of the metal holder about the size of a toothbrush. This he took over to the microscope and inserted into a hole about a third of the way up the barrel. There was a hiss, then the whine of an electric motor.

  ‘Vacuum pump,’ he said. ‘You always lose some of the vacuum when you put in a specimen.’ He sat at the console again and reached for a row of buttons. ‘Low magnification first,’ he said, pressing one, and the criss-crossed image of the grid leapt on to the screen. ‘Kill the light, will you?’

  I did so, and the image on the screen became clearer in the darkness. ‘Magnification,’ he muttered, turning a dial on his right, and with each click the image jumped in size. After two clicks, we were looking at a single square. With another control, he moved the field of view around, searching for a suitable area.

  ‘What magnification is that?’ I asked. He indicated a digital reader which read 1000, the upper limit of an ordinary light microscope. ‘We’ll have to go to about 50,000 to see the virus,’ he said. ‘Ah, this one’ll do.’ He twisted the magnification dial again, the image on the screen jumping with the clicks, then began a systematic search of the area he had selected.

  ‘What is the material?’ I asked.

  ‘T4 lymphocytes, infected with HIV in vitro, pelleted, embedded in resin, then sectioned — Ah!’ He manoeuvred the image of an intact cell into the centre of the screen; I recognized it as a lymphocyte by its shape and the large single nucleus.

  ‘You can see all the structures,’ said John. ‘Look. Nuclear membrane, mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum — this is a good microscope. Let’s look at the cell membrane…’

  More clicks as he turned the dial, the cell expanded until only a fraction of it was visible, yet the detail was still perfect, and I felt we were walking on hallowed ground, trespassing, prying almost voyeuristically into the cell’s most intimate secrets…now all we could see was the double line of the cell wall across the screen —

  ‘See the bi-molecular structure?’ said John. ‘Phospholipid, like most cell membranes — right? That’s what the virus steals for its own coat as it emerges, so let’s go along it until — no, that’s not so good…’ He tracked along the membrane until a crudely circular structure came into view, clearly outside the cell, yet still connected to it by a strand of membrane.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he breathed. He turned to me, his face radiant in the green light from the screen. ‘May I introduce you to HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency, or AIDS, virus.’

  I gazed at it in silence.

  It was just a circle of material, about the size of a two-penny piece on the screen, with another circle inside and a rectangle of denser material in the middle. Another click, and it filled the screen. The magnification indicator read 50,000.

  ‘I’ll take you through it,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Here’s the coat — ’ he pointed to the outer circle — ‘stolen from the lymphocyte. It’s covered in spikes it uses to attach itself to its next host, but you can’t see them. Here — ’ he pointed to the inner circle — ‘the protein core, icosahedral in structure. And here — ’ the dense material — ‘the RNA. But it’s RNA with a difference.’ He turned to me. ‘Before it can insert itself into the cell’s DNA, it has to make a DNA copy of itself — ’

  ‘Reverse Transcriptase
!’ I said. ‘That’s the enzyme it uses, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very good — for a bacteriologist.’ He swallowed. ‘It’s that enzyme that everyone’s assumed is the Achilles’ Heel of the virus. It’s what the drug AZT attacks.’

  I listened, fascinated. Only the occasional slurred word betrayed the fact that he’d had seven pints of beer.

  ‘Now.’ He leaned back. ‘Where would you attack it?’

  ‘The membrane?’

  ‘S’been tried. BHT — Butylated Hydroxytoluene — ’ he got the words out somehow — ‘incorporates into the membrane which then dishrupts — ’cept that it doesn’t. Where next?’

  ‘What’s wrong with the Reverse Transcriptase?’

  ‘Nothin’, ’cept that the world’s best brains’ve bin workin’ on it for three years, an’ only come up with Suramin, which doesn’t work, an’ AZT, which half works. So where?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Listen.’ He leaned forward, his eyes bright, his words clearer again. ‘What I found at Parc-Reed was another Achilles’ Heel — found it by accident. The viral DNA made by the enzyme inserts into the host cell DNA an’ codes for the coat, the core an’ the enzyme, right?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘But there’s more DNA, so-called redundant DNA, that codes for more proteins, only no one knows what they’re there for yet. Now, they gotta be there for somethin’, right? Nature doesn’t make proteins for fun, does it?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Listen — when the virus gets into you — into someone — they get a temperature and a rash, then they get better. ’Cept they’ve still got the virus lyin’ dormant in a few lymphocytes goin’ merrily around in their bloodstream. So wha’ happens next? I’ll tell you — the virus jus’ sits there, p’raps for years, hangin’ like a Sword of Damocles — classical education, see? Tha’s why these poor devils hang around for so long, waitin’. Waitin’ to see whether they’re gonna get AIDS.

  ‘An’ then in most cases, the virus suddenly starts multiplyin’ again — an’ no one knows exactly why. The lymphocytes die, an’ hundreds of new viruses emerge an’ kill hundreds more lymphocytes, an’ so on till they’re all dead, an’ your immunity’s buggered an’ you die of stupid infections that normally wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  ‘But why?’ As he leaned forward, a speck of saliva touched my cheek. ‘I’ll tell you; it’s those extra proteins, they’re regulatory proteins an’ they control that surge of activity that kills everything. Well, I’ve found somethin’ that screws up one of those proteins. I know which one, and I know how my substance works. But I dunno what that protein’s there for.’

  He told me how by chance, he’d noticed the virus culture die in the presence of the substance, how he’d isolated it and tried it again and again until he knew how it worked, and I realized as I listened that he’d discovered his substance in the same way that Fleming had discovered penicillin, he’d noticed something strange and his mind wouldn’t rest until he’d found out why.

  ‘It’s fantastic, John, but why didn’t you go on working on it at Parc-Reed?’

  ‘They sacked me, di’nt they?’ Now that he’d shown me, the drink began to take effect again. ‘Di’nt know what I’d found, did they?’

  ‘Why, John? Why did they sack you?’

  ‘Got me hand in the wrong pair o’ drawers.’ He drew himself up. ‘Very proppa firm,’ he said in what he imagined to be an English upper-crust accent, ‘can’t have that sort of thing going on, can we?’ He collapsed in giggles and I wondered how I was going to get him home.

  Then he said, ‘God, Chris, I wanna nail this stuff, I want it more than anything. Tha’s why I came here, Carey doesn’t know what I’m doin’. Thinks I’m workin’ on a new test for the virus — ’

  ‘Why don’t you tell him, he — ’

  John snorted. ‘You don’t know what he’s like. He’d pinch it for himself, kick me out once he knew how it worked.’

  ‘But how can you stop him? He’s bound to find out.’

  John started giggling again. ‘’Cos I’ve hidden the data where no one’ll ever find it.’

  ‘But what when you’ve finished, what are you going to do with it?’

  ‘Thash my secret,’ he said. He faced me. ‘Don’ look at me like that, Chris. I’ve tried to play it straight all my life, at school, at college, then at Parc-Reed, but what do I get for it? A kick in the teeth ’cos I’m not good enough for them… Well, now I’m gonna keep what’s mine.’ He started rambling again. ‘I got plans…plans…’

  I got him out of the building somehow, where the cold air revived him a little. He clung to my shoulder while we walked back to Bile, then I drove him home.

  As he staggered through the gate, I wondered how he’d feel in the morning. Needless to say, he was the same as usual, except for a healthy flush around his cheeks.

  CHAPTER 4

  I got back to the lab in a thoughtful mood and sat working in automatic, going over what John had told me those five months before. I still had no idea where he might have hidden his data.

  ‘I don’t think there’s much point in setting these up.’

  ‘Mmm?’

  It was Ian. ‘Not much point in growing these lymphocyte cultures if John won’t be wanting them.’

  ‘He might be back tomorrow.’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so.’

  I swivelled round to face him. ‘Why not?’

  He considered a moment. ‘I’ve got a feeling we won’t be seeing John again.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Well, he was getting pretty fed up. Told me last week that he’d had enough. I think he’s the sort of bloke who’d just up-sticks and go.’

  ‘Did he say what he was fed up about?’

  ‘I can’t remember exactly.’

  ‘Try, it’s important.’

  He frowned in concentration. ‘It was something like…he was fed up with being made use of. He said he’d been tricked…conned, and he wasn’t going to put up with it.’

  ‘Did he actually say he was going?’

  ‘Well, not in so many words.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘And you’d been growing a lot of cultures for him until then?’

  ‘Tons. Asked him whether he’d been putting them in his sarnies last month.’

  ‘What did he say to that?’

  ‘Laughed and told me to get on with it.’

  We grinned at each other, then I said, ‘Let’s have a look at your work-book a moment.’

  I flipped back through the weeks and months; John certainly had used ‘tons’ of cultures, but then I knew why.

  On impulse, I got up and went across to his office. It was quiet and still. I sat at his desk and thought for a moment, then pulled open the filing cabinet and shuffled through the contents.

  Yes — this might be it ‘HIV: Extraction and separation of antigens, and absorption on to a plastic carrier.’ In other words, sticking bits of the virus on to the walls of a plastic plate, the work Carey had given him to do.

  I went through the file. John was a neat worker, it was easy to follow and I began to understand how he’d managed to work both the projects at once. Both required growth of the virus and the extraction of proteins, it was no wonder he’d been able to fool Carey.

  But the point was: had he fooled Carey?

  I stood up, walked through the Electron Microscope room and stared through the glass door of the airlock into the containment laboratory. HIV isn’t a very infectious virus, but the consequence of catching it can be so terrible that it has been classified as a Category 3 organism, and needs a fairly high level of security.

  My eyes ranged over the equipment on the benches. Unless you examined it very closely, you wouldn’t have known exactly what it was being used for, a fact that had helped John disguise what he was doing.

  I went back through to the office and picked up the file. Surely Carey would have tried the filing cabinet?

  W
ell, let’s find out.

  His door was open, he was sitting at his desk checking through a pile of reports and signing them so that they could be sent out.

  He looked up as I tapped. ‘Come in, Chris.’

  I held out the file. ‘I think this must be what you’re looking for, Dr Carey.’

  ‘Well done! Where did you find it?’

  He took it from me and became too engrossed to notice whether I replied or not, so I didn’t. I watched his face. It clouded with disappointment, which he quickly tried to hide.

  ‘Well, this material is certainly useful, but I have a feeling there’s another file.’ He looked at me. ‘On similar work.’

  ‘Not that I know of, I’m afraid. Do you want me to keep looking?’

  ‘Please, if you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘And if I see him before you, shall I tell him you’re looking for him?’

  ‘Er — yes. That might be an idea.’

  I returned to my bench.

  There was no doubt, he’d already known about the contents of that file, probably had his own copy, since he’d given John the work to do in the first place. In other words, he knew what John was really working on.

  Perhaps he’d known ever since the Christmas party.

  *

  Just after five I drove round to John’s flat again, although with no great hope of finding him. As I walked up to the door, it opened and Dave stepped out. We both froze. He recovered first. ‘Looking for John?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s not there.’

  ‘How do you know?’ And then, because this sounded too hostile, ‘D’you know him, then?’

  ‘That’s right. He’s away this week. Asked me to keep an eye on his flat.’ The flat London accent was too smooth, I didn’t believe him.

  ‘D’you know where he is at the moment?’

  He shook his head. ‘Just said he’d be away. None of my business where. All right?’

  He made to pass me, but I didn’t move. ‘You’ve got a key, have you?’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, perhaps you wouldn’t mind letting me in for a moment. He borrowed a book that I need back.’