“Isn’t that what you did?” Eileen asked.
Mitch snorted with little humor. “It’s a fair cop,” he admitted.
“These are not rational times,” Eileen said. “You’ll understand soon enough. Don’t we all need to know what it means to be human? Now more than ever? How we got to where we are, and what’s going to come later?”
“What are a few old Indian bones going to tell us that we don’t already know?” Mitch asked, feeling his sense of discovery start to sputter and stall.
“Would I have called you out here if that was all we had at stake?” Eileen said. “You know me better than that, Mitch Rafelson. I hope you do.”
Mitch wiped his hand on his pants leg and looked over his shoulder at the long fan of the wash. They had climbed about twenty feet, but he could still see evidence of ancient bank erosion. “Big river, way back when,” he said.
“It was smaller at the time of our site,” Eileen said. “Just a broad, shallow stream filled with salmon. Bears used to come down and fish. One of my students found an old male on the other side. Killed by an early phase of the ash fall, stage one of the eruption.”
“How long ago?” Mitch asked.
“Twenty thousand years, we’re estimating. Ash gives a good potassium-argon result. We’re still refining with carbon dating.”
“Something more than just a dead grizzly?”
Eileen nodded like a little girl confirming that there were, indeed, more dolls in her room. “The bear was female. She was missing her skull. It had been cut off, the bones hacked through with stone axes.”
“Twenty thousand years ago?”
“Yeah. So my student crossed the Spent River and started looking at other reveals. Just killing time until the Land Rover came to pick her up. She found an eroded layer of high-silica ash, right down there, about fifty meters from where the camp is now.” Eileen pointed. “She almost stepped on a human toe bone mixed with some gravel. Nothing spectacular, really. But she tracked down where it had weathered out, and she found more.”
“Twenty thousand years,” Mitch said, still incredulous.
“That isn’t the half of it,” Eileen said.
Mitch took a huge leap of supposition and bent backwards, then did a little dip of disbelief. “You are not suggesting…”
Eileen stared at him keenly.
“You found Neandertals?”
Eileen shook her head, a strong no, then rewarded him with a teary-eyed smile that gave some hint of the distress she had gone through, at night, lying awake and thinking things over.
Mitch let out his breath. “What, then?”
“I don’t want to be coy,” she said primly, and took his hand. “But you’re not nearly crazy enough. Come on, Mitch. Let’s go meet the girls.”
21
BALTIMORE
Morgenstern’s questions were spot on and difficult to answer. Kaye had done her best, but she felt she had goofed a few of her responses rather badly. She felt like a mouse in a room full of cats. Jackson appeared more and more confident.
“The fertility group concludes that Kaye Rafelson is not the proper individual to continue research in ERV knock outs,” Morgenstern concluded. “She has obvious bias. Her work is suspect.”
A moment of silence. The accusation was not rebutted; everyone was considering their options and the map of the political minefield around them.
“All right,” Cross said, her face as serene as a baby’s. “I still don’t know where we stand. Should we continue to fund vaccines? Should we continue to look for ways to create organisms without any viral load?” Nobody answered. “Lars?” Cross inquired.
Nilson shook his head. “I am perplexed by Dr. Morgenstern’s statements. Dr. Rafelson’s work looks impressive to me.” He shrugged. “I know for a fact that human embryos implant in their mothers’ wombs with the aid of old viral genes. Dr. Morgenstern is undoubtedly familiar with this, probably more than I.”
“Very familiar,” Morgenstern said confidently. “Utilization of endogenous viral syncytin genes in simian development is interesting, but I can quote dozens of papers proving there is no rhyme or reason to this random occurrence. There are even more remarkable coincidences in the long history of evolution.”
“And the Temin model of viral contributions to the genome?”
“Brilliant, old, long since disproved.”
Nilson pushed his scattered notes and papers into a stack, squared them, and thumped them lightly on the table top. “All my life,” he said, “I have come to regard the basic principles of biology as tantamount to an act of faith. Credo, this I believe: that the chain of instruction arising from DNA to RNA to proteins never reverses. The Central Dogma. McClintock and Temin and Baltimore, among many others, proved the Central Dogma to be wrong, demonstrating that genes can produce products that insert copies of themselves, that retroviruses can write themselves to DNA as proviruses and stay there for many millions of years.”
Kaye saw Jackson regarding her with his sharp gray eyes. He tapped his pencil silently. They both knew Nilson was grandstanding and that this would not impress Cross.
“Forty years ago, we missed the boat,” Nilson continued. “I was one of those who opposed Temin’s ideas. It took us years to recognize the potential of retroviruses to wreak havoc, and when HIV arrived, we were unprepared. We did not have a crazy, creative bouquet of theories to choose from; we had killed them all, or ignored them, much the same. Tens of millions of our patients suffered for our own stubborn pride. Howard Temin was right; I was wrong.”
“I would not call it faith, I’d call it process and reason,” Jackson interrupted, tapping his pencil harder. “It’s kept us from making even more horrible blunders, like Lysenko.”
Nilson was having none of this. “Ah, get thee behind me, Lysenko! Faith, reason, dogma, all add up to stubborn ignorance. Thirty years before that, we had missed the boat with Barbara McClintock and her jumping genes. And how many others? How many discouraged postdocs and interns and researchers? It was prideful, I see now, to hide our weaknesses and spite our fundamentalist enemies. We asserted our infallibility before school boards, politicians, corporations, investors, patients, whomever we thought might challenge us. We were arrogant. We were men, Ms. Cross. Biology was an incredible and archaic patriarchy with many of the aspects of an old boy network: secret signs, passwords, rituals of indoctrination. We held down, for a time at least, some of our best and brightest. No excuses. And once again we failed to see the coming juggernaut. HIV rolled over us, and then SHEVA rolled over us. It turned out we knew nothing whatsoever about sex and evolutionary variation, nothing. Yet some of us still act as if we know it all. We attempt to assess blame and escape our failures. Well, we have failed. We have failed to see the truth. These reports sum up our failure.”
Cross seemed bemused. “Thank you, Lars. Heartfelt, I’m sure. But I still want to know, where do we go from here?” She hammered her fist on the table with each emphatic word.
Still stuck in his chair in the far corner, pushed back from the table, wearing his trademark gray jacket and yarmulke, Maurie Herskovitz raised his hand. “I think we have a clear-cut problem in epistemology,” he said.
Cross squeezed her eyes shut and pressed the bridge of her nose. “Oh, please, Maurie, anything but that.”
“Hear me out, Marge. Dr. Jackson tried to create a positive, a vaccine against SHEVA and other ERV. He failed. If, as Dr. Morgenstern accuses, Dr. Rafelson came to Americol to demonstrate that no babies would be born if we suppressed their genomic viruses, she has made her point. None have been born. Regardless of her motivations, her work is thorough. It is scientific. Dr. Jackson continues to put forth an hypothesis that the results of his labors seem to have disproved.”