Starting with a short list of references from Carl Lessing, Macandrew dug out what he could in the Med Centre library and made photocopies of relevant articles. There were a number of references to journals that the Med Centre did not take so he asked the librarian to put out an inter-library request for them. They arrived in due course and he was able to complete a file — albeit a painfully thin one — on the subject.
Most of the published material comprised straightforward case reports on patients who had been diagnosed as suffering from the condition: these did not tell him anything new. The condition was so rare that the reports had been published for that reason alone. There was no instance of anyone ever having made a full recovery but, as Carl Lessing had pointed out, none had died from the condition either. They had survived surgical removal of the tumour, only to be left confused and facing life in a mental institution for the remainder of their days.
There were however, a number of recent research papers which proved interesting. They originated from a laboratory in the medical school at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. A Dr John Burnett emerged as principal investigator. He was sole author on the earlier work but appeared to have been joined later by, Drs Ashok Mukherjee and Simone Robin. Between them, these three had published several papers on the chemical changes in the brain associated with Hartman’s tumours and had managed to identify an unusual acidic substance secreted by them — it was this substance that had been responsible for the colour change in the staining reaction of the tissue samples in the Path lab and which had alerted Carl Lessing to the possibility of a Hartman’s tumour.
As a medic rather than a scientist, Macandrew found the science hard going but the gist of the research approach seemed to be centred on finding a way to counteract the effects of the secretion on adjacent cerebral tissue. If this could be done then the damaging effects of the tumour might be limited. Using material obtained at autopsy, the researchers had identified a bank of cells in the normal brain that the Hartman’s chemical appeared to affect and had subsequently gone on to describe a protein secreted by these cells that seemed to be its specific target.
By the time he had read the last of the papers, Macandrew was quite excited by their findings. If they had really identified the target protein in the normal brain then surely in this day and age it should be possible to synthesise the protein in vitro and replace it in brain-damaged patients.
Macandrew looked at the date on the last paper and was disappointed to find that it was over two and a half years old. He considered possible reasons for this — the most likely and most depressing being failure to synthesise the protein in the lab. But was the team still trying? Or had research on the subject stopped completely? There was also the very real possibility that funding had been withdrawn from the project. Competition for research funding was always fierce and Hartman’s tumours were such a rare condition that that might militate against support.
Macandrew considered contacting the university, but then it occurred to him that there might be a quicker way. He could use the Med Centre’s computer to find out if anything at all had been published by any of the three named scientists in the last three years. To survive in research, it was essential to publish. Any researcher who had failed to publish anything in three years would be in serious career trouble.
It was a system that could be terribly unfair at times and also led to the scientific journals being inundated with less than compelling work, but its best defence was that there wasn’t a better way. Peer review did much to screen out the dross but despite this, every scientific journal with perhaps the exception of the top two or three, carried a large proportion of i dotting and t crossing. Career fodder.
Macandrew tried entering John Burnett’s name first and asked for a full list of his publications. This wasn’t as straightforward as he’d hoped because there was more than one John Burnett in the database and he had to sort through them before establishing that it was the John Burnett who worked in cell biology at Edinburgh University that he was interested in.
The publication list came up on the screen and Macandrew read through an impressive record, finishing with the three-year old paper in Cell Biology he’d just read. John Burnett had not published anything at all in the interim, not even a review — the traditional stop-gap of senior scientists when times were tough and ideas scarce.
Macandrew stared at the screen and wondered if Burnett had retired. He didn’t know anything about the man. It was conceivable that he had reached retirement age and was now growing roses by the sea. If that were the case, he might be able to confirm this by judging his age from his publication list. He looked back to the beginning of the list and found two papers that were cross-referenced to Burnett’s doctoral thesis. He noted the date and made a mental calculation. Assuming Burnett had had a conventional academic background, with four years for an honours degree followed by three or four more for his doctorate, he reckoned that John Burnett would be in his mid to late thirties. A bit young for roses.
He drummed his fingers lightly on the desk while he tried to think of alternative possibilities. The librarian shot him a disapproving look and he stopped with a half apologetic smile. Librarians could be so intimidating. He instigated a new search and entered Ashok Mukherjee’s name. This produced the work he’d published jointly with John Burnett and nothing else.
The only Simone Robin in the database was listed as being on the staff of the Institut Jacques Monod at the Seventh University of Paris, France but her publication list immediately told Macandrew that she was the lady he was looking for. He found the papers that she had published with John Burnett in Edinburgh and then four more, submitted from the French institute in the last three years but in a different area of research. He calculated that Simone Robin had left the University of Edinburgh around the time Burnett had stopped working on Hartman’s tumours. She had obviously returned to France and was now working on something else entirely.
The depressing thing from Macandrew’s point of view was that, as far as he could tell, Burnett’s team had been the only one in the world carrying out research on Hartman’s brain damage. If they had given up then no one was doing it. He copied down details of addresses and phone numbers from the on-screen information and logged off. He might not pursue things any further but then again, he just might. It would be interesting to find out why such promising work had suddenly stopped.
Two days later, Macandrew was in the scrub room after completing a long operation when a nurse relayed the information that Saul Klinsman wanted to see him. He dried himself quickly and slipped on some fresh surgical greens before hurrying up to Klinsman’s office. Carl Lessing was sitting there. Neither he nor Klinsman were smiling.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘You’re not going to like this, Mac,’ said Klinsman.
‘Like what?’
Lessing was looking embarrassed. He said, ‘Christ, Mac, I’m sorry, I don’t know exactly how it happened and when I find the guy responsible I’m going to cut off his...’
‘What’s happened? What’s going on?’ asked Macandrew. He sensed big trouble and looked to Klinsman for answers.
Klinsman responded by looking to Lessing.
Lessing said, ‘The plain fact of the matter is that we can’t provide the Mao Clinic with tumour tissue taken from Jane Francini.’
‘Why the hell not?’
‘We no longer have it. Someone chucked it.’