Decoded Dog

by Dianne Janczewski

  By the time I arrived at the lab from my bike ride down memory lane, I decided to call Neil when our time zones meshed, and just give him a heads-up. Though Chris suggested against this as it might put Neil in an awkward position, I thought it would help not to blindside him, and it couldn’t hurt. His assistant answered the phone. She was her usual overly bubbly self. Recognizing my name, she said he was about to head off to a meeting, but would see if he could take my call.

  “Hello, Dr. Winthrop.”

  “Hi, honey. I see Perky is still with you.”

  “Yes she is. Some people like her.”

  “I’m sure the men do.”

  “You are too harsh on other women. And as you know, this is a man’s world.”

  He was right. I ignored him. “Hey, I just wanted to give you a heads-up.”

  “That you’re submitting a grant proposal?”

  “Ah, so I am not the first friend giving you a call.”

  “I’d say you are the only friend. The rest just think they are.”

  “I love you too.” I smiled. “I thought it best that you knew before it hit your desk.”

  “Sure you did,” he said sarcastically.

  “Stop it.”

  “It’s okay. We learned from the master to capitalize on any connection that might give us an advantage, didn’t we?”

  “Guilty, but I refuse to accept that I’ve turned into our dickhead adviser.”

  “Never. So go ahead and send it directly to Donna and she’ll—”

  “Donna?”

  “Perky. She does have a real name.”

  “Oh, my bad,” I said.

  “I’ll tell her to look out for it.”

  “Won’t that flag your direct involvement?”

  “It is what it is. When the reviews are done, I might have to recuse myself on the decision anyway, but not before I give my opinion,” he acknowledged. “You think you have a good angle?”

  “I think so. We had several ideas, but this one seems to provide the best chance of finding some link. And we can add our own data. How’s Regnum handling this new opportunity?”

  “Jury’s still out. The Board has been watching this since the first dog deaths—always business smart—and made sure we were poised to jump in there in the event that a pattern emerged.”

  “I was surprised to see grant offerings from both Regnum and BeneVivite happen so fast.”

  “We had it pretty well fleshed-out and ready to go. It simply required an emergency board meeting when the first reports of the October dog deaths came in. Within forty-eight hours of the decision our web developers were posting the application page. I think the bodies were still warm.”

  “I could tell. there’re a few typos on the page.”

  “Geez-us, you would think a multi-billion-dollar company could hire a proofreader.”

  “I’m available—if I don’t get any new funding,” I chided. “How are you?”

  “Okay I guess. Like I said, it’s frustrating that this is taking all my attention. I feel it’s at the expense of all the long-term projects. We have a separate committee for this, but they still want me heavily involved. Frankly, I don’t think that this is going to lead to anything.”

  “You don’t?” I was taken aback. Like I said, he was and is brilliant and I had always trusted his instincts, especially when it came to science.

  “I think a lot more dogs have to die before we have anything to research, but my Board wants to be the first one out of the blocks. I think it’s going to cost us dearly.”

  “So I assume you had a hand in getting CDC and AVMA to work together?”

  “Did you like that? Money talks, and with our profit margins, we have a lot to talk with. Let’s just leave it at that in case my phone is bugged.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was kidding. “But if you’re right . . .”

  “It’s a bad investment. Between you, me, and the lamppost, I’m not happy with the gamble, but then I’m only one vote.”

  It sunk in that he was always right and I was likely wasting my time.

  “Does Perky have a last name?”

  “Don’t take a sip of your coffee or you will spray it all over the place. Peebles, Donna Peebles.”

  “Oh my God, Perky Peebles?!”

  “Send her the proposal. Gotta run. Love you.”

  “Bye,” I mumbled.

  The day steamrolled along as I filled out forms, conducted more background research, and wrote, rewrote, and wrote some more. Purpose, technical approach, sample plan, data analysis plan, every sentence carefully crafted. Preliminary data would be a plus, and we could include the summaries of our cohorts of DNA, from a variety of breeds and mixed dogs. With only fifteen pages to convince the reviewers to give us several hundred thousand dollars and a share of the coveted samples, every word was critical. Even more so the budget. Over the next two days my team would have to think and rethink how we would divide, process, and analyze each precious sample to get the most out of it; more than likely, something would be reveled in the course of our research that would lead to more questions and more possible paths to explore. Maximizing the amount of DNA was paramount. Being able to grow and preserve live cells from samples would be even better, but as of yet, no one had started collecting those from dying dogs.

  Anna and I met to discuss some new Addison’s patients she had, but more importantly, her thoughts on how we might piggy-back Addison’s research on anything I did on CRFS. Though it’s a common practice in the research community to overlap projects, I wanted to be very careful on paper to separate the work proposed for the grant from on-going work in the lab, yet ensure that we had all our bases covered so we could peek over the shoulder of the CRFS research to see if there was anything Addison’s-related.

  A stack of messages awaited me when I returned from lunch. The university grants office was none too pleased with my request that morning to accelerate their approval process. They said they would do it, of course, but that I “must understand that this was not the normal process.” Their need for acknowledgement of their self-importance was duly noted. Messages from sales reps, recycled; message from students, I’d start on this evening.

  “You got a call from someone at Xlar. A Dr. Kendal Kovak?” Kate said.

  “Oh, reeeeally,” I said. “What did she want?”

  “Something about whether you kept any of your cell lines from domestic cats. Are those the ones marked FCA in the freezer?”

  “Yup. Felis catus. I hung on to a few just in case I ever had nostalgia for the good old days.” I searched for and opened a file on my computer. “I don’t even know if they can still be revived, but would you pull a vial of FCA3, and see if you can get some to grow? Did Dr. Kovak say she wanted to talk to me?”

  “No, but I have her number.”

  “That’s okay. You can call her back and arrange a shipment with her. She isn't one of my closer friends, so I’m happy to let you handle it.”

  Kate headed out into the wide hall, opening the -135°C freezer, where live cells are suspended in tiny vials of solutions that prevent them from cracking open as they wait for someone to restart their life. Cold smoke billowed as she pulled a rack of small boxes that was immersed in the liquid nitrogen. No respectable graduate student hadn’t learned the hard way to hold their breath as they leaned into the freezer. The lungs immediately informed you that there was nothing usable in vapor.

  “Who is she? Dr. Kovak?” Kate asked, returning and putting the vial in the benchtop water bath to warm up the suspended cells.

  “She was a postdoc in my lab, a few years ahead of me. Very smart, somewhat talented, but not warm and fuzzy.” She’d had a crisp, carefully-crafted look about her that tried to say she was headed to bigger and better things than the rest of us. “We were essentially colleagues.”

  What I wanted to say is that she was a, well, not a nice person. She was a major source amusement during my days as a graduate student, but also irritation. She was insecur
e, and insecurity can be dangerous. imagined her as the kid who was a tattletale in order to gain the teacher’s attention, a behavior she carried into adulthood with greater consequences. Everyone screwed up, splattered solutions across the bench, poked, sliced, cut, and bruised themselves in the quest for data. Lab work is physical; everyone wasted materials forgetting a critical step and ruining a run, bubbling over solutions onto the stir plate, and forgetting to account for a reagent or two. The lab was full of “Oh, shit!” moments, and these were late-night fodder for the inside jokes between grad students and postdocs. Kendal made it her job to report these mishaps to our main adviser, particularly those of anyone who made her feel the slightest bit threatened.

  For some unknown reason, I was one of them. As far as I could tell, my only egregious offense was that I was younger. She branded me with a target on my back for the duration of our overlap in the lab. Her attacks ran from laughable commentary on the correct way to do things, to the ultimate insult to a scientist, accusing me of making up data, which caused me to have to endure extra sessions with our adviser to scrutinize the raw outputs of my experiments—the autorads, the sequence alignments, all my notes. Scientific integrity is paramount and assumed until evidence to the contrary, and it took all my strength not to pay her back for casting a shadow over my work. I was convinced she would have finished her work a year earlier if she hadn’t spent so much time spying on the rest of us. But I suppose I would have been less prepared for the real world without her training in mind games.

  Anyone with a Ph.D. would tell you that getting one was not a matter of brains, but a matter of tenacity. When I started, my father, who obtained his from Georgetown, gave me one piece of advice, and it became my mantra—“Don’t let the bastards get you down.” Pure and simple, it was the adviser’s and committee’s job to toss in the obstacles and spin you around until you either crashed and burned and were out, or until the ride stopped and you were still hanging on, albeit a bit befuddled. It wasn’t so much a matter of doing great research, though that was the hope from the student’s perspective. It was a matter of becoming one of the club who had survived the long, arduous, tedious, and painful journey. One who stood in the face of those bastards and smiled, and answered yet another question about the evolutionary theories of Richard Lewontin and EO Wilson, and drew B and Z DNA on the board, and spent an obscene number of late nights in the lab. Mine had a special brand of torture that involved pitchers of cheap beer in smoky college town bars, listening to my adviser pontificate, words increasingly slurred and demeanor increasingly belligerent, as his alcohol consumption accelerated—and being stuck with the bill on a graduate student’s paltry salary.

  I survived by the comradery of my fellow students. Kendal survived by being a suck-up. One of our adviser’s warped benchmarks was to make most graduate students cry. He was an equal-opportunity bully who found this an effective way to assert his dominance over those who would someday be a competitor, and to humiliate subpar performers, driving them from the program. To her credit, Kendal managed to turn this benchmark in her favor. She excelled at tears, making him so uncomfortable that he learned to leave her to her work.

  While she was seemingly successful at manipulating our adviser, she was not very astute on the coming realities of the scientific community. She left the lab with few friends, few who would trust and collaborate with her, which was critical in the science world. To my surprise I learned that our adviser was not actually blind to her manipulative tears and tattletale antics, but since the project she had worked on was important to the lab’s foundation, he took the path of least resistance. That revelation was worth at least that night’s contribution to the beer purchases.

  I could have said all this to Kate, but instead, I verified with her at the end of the day that the cells were viable, and the sample had been sent. I needed to grow up myself and let it go.

  Four weeks flew by, and our proposal came together; it was well-designed, intriguing, and solid. After it was approved by the university, I sent it off to Perky. I made my hotel and plane reservations for the conference and allowed myself thirty seconds to envision the moment I heard our lab announced as one of the Regnum grant recipients.

  With our proposal in, two weeks remained to finish up some work, plan for the conference, and get to know my family again. Home is found in the mundane—grocery shopping, laundry, even making dinner. My family was grateful that the house elf was back and tending to their daily needs.

  Surrendering control of my schedule to wait in the parent taxi line rewarded me with an infusion of commentary on events critical to the new generation. “Ugh! This annoying girl in my biology class always has to interject her own story to top yours even if it’s made up, which it often is! My teacher is supposed to be teaching government but can’t help but spout his personal beliefs on how religion should be the underlying principle of laws and he doesn’t even believe in climate change!”

  “Can we go shopping this weekend for new dance shoes?” asked Diana.

  “Why? I thought–” I started.

  “Last year’s are the wrong color and besides are too small and so are my winter boots and can you chaperone dress rehearsal?”

  “Don’t forget you said you would volunteer at the science fair next week!” Tess said.

  “Yup. Science fair is on my calendar. How’s your project coming along? Are you going to at least do a run-through for your dad and me since we aren’t allowed to judge your grade?” She said she was counting on our input, and I caught my breath at her adult-like recognition.

  Reconnected to my daughters, a strange transforming frenzied calm set in. Captives in my car, they occasionally forgot that I was there and chattered between themselves, unveiling a closely-guarded side.

  But two weeks wasn’t enough time to reestablish reconnections in all directions. Kids come first, dogs wiggle in between, and there wasn’t enough time to become content and to fall back in love with the amazing guy who shares my bed.

  Enough time though for three more dog shows, and twenty-three more dead dogs. Two were breed-specific or “specialty” shows, one for two types of collies (rough coat or smooth) held at a rec center in southern California, the other a specialty for dachshunds of two sizes, standard and miniature, and three coat varieties, smooth, wirehaired, and longhaired, held at an equestrian center in Middleburg, Virginia. The third show, at another recreation center in Texas, was a Group show that involved all breeds in the AKC Herding Group. Twelve dogs were lost there including shelties, border collies, corgis, Briards, German shepherds, an old English sheep dog, and an Australian cattle dog. This was the first-time multiple animals of the same breed were stricken at the same show, and though reporters pounced on this as a new revelation, the scientific community was not impressed. Two does not a pattern make. But it was startling to see several shows hit at the same time.

  There was also a fermenting belief that there were non-show dog deaths resulting from CRFS. Dogs die every day from unknown causes. Often they eat or drink something toxic, but more often a dog dies of a long-term ailment—cancer, organ failure—unnoticed until it is too late. We love our dogs because they bear the weight of our needs, rarely asking for reciprocal support, keeping silent until it is too late. When a dog dies quickly, grieving owners rarely have the emotional capacity to ask for a necropsy to determine the cause.

  Anna called me while I sat at the airport. “Just off the phone with Dana, remember her? She was in the class after me in vet school. The bohemian one who was a great cook. She works as a travelling vet between a number of shelters and rescue centers. She swears they are seeing cases of CRFS with large numbers dying right and left. They thought it was a new strain of parvo, but the pattern of infection doesn’t follow the same progression.”

  “Why hasn’t there been anything on the news about it?”

  “Think about it. No one wants to say anything. They are afraid that if word gets out, adoptions will come to a screeching hal
t, and you know what that means—more dogs euthanized. Dana called me to see if I have had any deaths that I think are related.”

  I hadn’t even bothered to ask in the past few weeks, as I figured she would tell me. “Well, do you?”

  Silence answered my question.

  MONEY AND FAME

  I LEFT my car at the airport. Chris wanted to drive me but I didn’t want to have to depend on him to get a ride back, he had enough on his plate being a single dad for the next five days. Disappointed, he was still engaged and loving, reminding me that I had other great research to do, that this was not the center of my life’s work. He is always pragmatic, and I knew he meant it to help me focus on what was important, but that didn’t take the sting out of the implication that he wanted me to be prepared in case we didn’t receive a grant award.

  Chicago in November. I would have preferred to see the city in the summer, as I’ve heard it’s great, but I had only been here in the winter for meetings, confined to inside venues. The scientific research community is not a wealthy bunch, living from grant to grant, and it’s common for us to get our kicks from the free, great outdoors. Hosting meetings at expensive, lavish locations is not typically reflective of our ilk, though we are known to host conferences in the winter at ski resorts. Big pharma on the other hand, will grace us with their presence, but only as a break from their usual over the top locations like Las Vegas.

  Having avoided any contact with Neil the past few weeks, I texted him and asked if he wanted to get together while we were both here.