Catching the scent of her barracks mates was reward enough. It made her feel as if she were a part of something worthwhile, something not human.
11
Americol Research Headquarters
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
“Elcob hobe!”
Liz Cantrera rushed past Kaye, a rack of clear plastic trays clattering in her arms beneath the flopping edge of a folder clamped between her teeth. She deposited the rack near the safety sink and pulled the black-bound folder from her mouth. “This just in from La Robert.”
Kaye hung her coat on the knobs behind the lab door. “Another salvo?”
“Mm hmm. I think Jackson is jealous you were asked to testify and not he.”
“Nobody should envy me that.” Kaye waggled her fingers. “Give it to me.”
Cantrera smirked and handed her the folder. “He'll be pushing a disease model long after the Karolinska hangs gold on you.”
Kaye leafed through the fifty-page brief and response to their work of the last two years. This was the big one. Robert Jackson, PI for the larger group and in some respects her boss, was working very hard to get Kaye out of his labs, out of the building, out of the way.
The expected publication date for Jackson's paper in the Journal of Biologics and Epigeneticswas sticky-tabbed to the last page: December. “How nice he's passed peer review,” Kaye said.
Liz put her hands on her hips and stood in an attitude of defiant expectation. She pushed back a strand of curly strawberry blonde hair and loudly chewed a wad of gum. Her eyes were bright as drops of fresh blue ink. “He says we're removing necessary transcription factors surrounding our ERV targets, throwing out the baby with the contaminated bathwater.”
“A lot of those factors are transactivated by ERV. You can't have it both ways, Dr. Jackson. Well, at least we can shoot that one down.” Kaye slumped on a stool. “We're not getting anywhere,” she muttered. “We're taking out the viruses and not getting any baby chimps. What does it take for him to come around?” She glanced up at Liz, who was still waggling her hips and snapping her chewing gum in mock defiance of La Robert.
Liz cracked a big sappy smile. “Feel better?”
Kay shook her head and laughed despite herself. “You look like a Broadway gamine. Who are you supposed to be, Bernadette Peters?”
Liz cocked her hips and fluffed her hair with one hand. “She's a corker. Which play?” she demanded. “Revival of Mame?”
“Sweeney Todd,”Kaye said.
“That would be Winona Ryder,” Liz countered.
Kaye groaned. “Where do you get so much energy?”
“Bitterness. Seriously, how did it go?”
“I'm being used as a prop by one side and a patsy by the other. I feel like Dorothy in the tornado.”
“Sorry,” Liz said.
Kaye stretched and felt her back pop. Mitch used to do that for her. She riffled through Jackson's folder again and found the page that through instinct, and a touch of luck, had caught her eye a moment before: suspect lab protocols.
As ever, Jackson was trapped in a maze of in vitro studies—test-tube and petri dish blind alleys using Tera2 tumor cell lines—proven traps for making mistakes with ERV. Hell, he's even using chicken embryos,she thought. Egglayers don't use ERVs the same way we do.
“Jackson's vaccines kill monkeys,” Kaye said softly, tapping the page. “Marge doesn't like projects that never get past animal studies.”
“Shall we play another game of Gotcha with Dr. Jackson?” Liz asked innocently.
“Sure,” Kaye said. “I am almost cheered by this.” She dropped the folder on her small, crowded desk.
“I'm off to check our arrays, and then I'm going home,” Liz called out as she pushed through the door with the tray. “I've been working all night. You in for the week?”
“Until they fire me,” Kaye said. She rubbed her nose reflexively. “I need to look over the fragile site studies from last week.”
“Prepped and digitized. They're on the photobase,” Liz said. “There's some leftover spaghetti in the fridge.”
“Heavenly,” Kaye said.
“Bye,” Liz called as the door swung closed behind her.
Kaye got up and rubbed her nose again. It felt slightly stuffy, not unpleasantly so. The lab smelled unusually sweet and fresh, not that it ever smelled dirty. Liz was a stickler for cleanliness.
The scent was hard to place, not at all like perfume or flowers.
There was a long day's work ahead, preparing for tomorrow's morning meeting. Kaye closed her eyes, hoping to find her calm spot; she needed to focus on the chromosome results from last week. Get the sour clamp of Washington off her gut.
She pulled the stool over to the workstation and entered her password, then called up the tables and photos of chimpanzee chromosome mutations.
Early-stage embryos modified for lab work had had all of their single-copy ERVs deleted, but all multicopy ERVs, LINEs, and “defective” ERVs left intact. They had then been allowed to develop for forty-eight hours. The chromosomes, bunched up by mitosis, were removed, photographed, and crudely sequenced. What Kaye was looking for were anomalies around fragile sites and hot spots in the chromosomes—regions of genes that responded quickly to environmental change, suggesting rapid adaptive response.
The modified chimp chromosomes were severely distorted—she could tell that just by looking at the photos. The fragile sites were all screwed up, broken and rearranged incorrectly. The embryos would never have implanted in the womb, much less gone to term. Even single-copy ERVs were important to fetal development and chromosome adaptation in mammals, perhaps especially so in primates.
She looked over the analysis and saw random and destructive methylation of genes that should be actively transcribing, necessary lengths of DNA mothballed like a fleet of old ships, curling the chromatin into an agony of alternating misplaced activity and dark, inactive lassitude.
They looked ugly, those chromosomes, ugly and unnatural. The early-stage embryos, growing under the tutelage of such chromosomes, would die. That was the story of everything they had done in the lab. If, by rare chance, the ERV-knockout embryos managed to implant and begin development, they were invariably resorbed within the first few weeks. And getting that far had required giving the chimp mothers massive drug regimens developed for human mothers at fertilization clinics to prevent miscarriages.
The ERVs served so many functions in the developing embryos, including mediating tissue differentiation. And it was already obvious that TLV—the Temin-Larsson-Villarreal conjecture—was correct. Highly conserved endogenous retroviruses expressed by the trophectoderm of the developing embryo—the portion that would develop into the surrounding amnion and placenta—protected against attacks by the mother's immune system. The viral envelope proteins selectively subdued the mother's immune response to her fetus without weakening the mother's defenses against external pathogens, an exquisite dance of selectivity.
Because of the protective function of legacy retroviruses, ERV knockout—the removal or stifling of most or all of the genome's “original sins”—was invariably fatal.
Kaye vividly remembered the chill she had felt when Mitch's mother had described SHEVA as “original sin.” How long ago had that been—fifteen years? Just after they had conceived Stella.
If SHEVA and other ERV constituted original sin, then it was starting to look as if all placental mammals, perhaps all multicelled life forms, were filled with original sin, required it, died without it.
And wasn't that what the Garden of Eden was all about? The beginning of sex and self-knowledge and life as we know it.
All because of viruses.