Nancy Jaax felt a wave of unease. She was distressed by the sight of the dead and suffering monkeys. As a veterinarian, she believed that it was her duty to heal animals and relieve their suffering. As a scientist, she believed that it was her obligation to perform medical research that would help alleviate human suffering. Even though she had grown up on a farm, where her father had raised liverstock for food, she had never been able to bear easily the death of an animal. As a girl, she had cried when her father had taken her 4-H Club prize steer to the butcher. She liked animals better than many people. In taking the veterinarian’s oath, she had pledged herself to a code of honor that bound her to the care of animals but also bound her to the saving of human lives through medicine. At times in her work, those two ideals clashed. She told herself that this research was being done to help find a cure for Ebola, that t was medical research that would help save human lives and might possibly avert a tragedy for the human species. That helped reduce her feeling of unease, but not completely, and she kept her emotions off to one side.
Johnson watched Jaax carefully as she began the removal procedure.
Handling an unconscious monkey in Level 4 is tricky operation, because monkeys can wake up, and they have teeth and a powerful bit, and they are remarkably strong and agile. The monkeys that are used in laboratories are not organ-grinder monkeys. They are large, wild animals from the rain forest. A bite by an Ebola-infected monkey would almost certainly be fatal.
First Nancy inspected the monkey, looking through the bars. It was a large male, and he looked as if he was really dead. She saw that he still had his canine fangs, and that made her nervous. Ordinarily the monkey would have had its fangs filed down for safety. For some reason, this one had enormous natural fangs. She stuck her gloved fingers through the bars and pinched the monkey’s toe while she watched for an eye movement. The eyes remained fixed and staring.
“GO AHEAD AND UNLOCK THE CAGE,” Lieutenant Colonel Johnson said. He had to shout to be heard above the roar of air in their space suits.
She unlocked the door and slid it up until the cage gaped wide open. She inspected the monkey again. No muscle twitches. The monkey was definitely down.
“ALL RIGHT, GO AHEAD AND MOVE HIM OUT,” Johnson said.
She reached inside and caught the monkey by the upper arms and rotated him so that he was facing away from her, so that he couldn’t bit her if he woke up. She pulled his arms back and held them immobile, and she lifted the monkey out of the cage.
Johnson took the monkey’s feet, and together they carried him over to a hatbox, a biohazard container, and they slid the monkey into it. Then they carried the hatbox to necropsy room, shuffling slowly in their suits. They were two human primates carrying another primate. One was the master of the earth, or at least believed himself to be, and the other was a nimble dweller in trees, a cousin of the master of the earth. Both species, the human and the monkey, were in the presence of another life form, which was older and more powerful than either of them, and was a dweller in blood.
Jaax and Johnson moved slowly out of the room, carrying the monkey, and turned left and then turned left again, and entered the necropsy room, and laid the monkey down on a stainless-steel table. The monkey’s skin was rashly and covered with red blotches, visible through his sparse hair.
“GLOVE UP,” Johnson said.
They put on latex rubber gloves, pulling them over the space suit gloves. They now wore three layers of gloves: the inner-lining glove, the space suit glove, and the outer glove. Johnson said, “WE’LL DO THE CHECK LIST. SCISSORS, HEMOSTATS.” He laid the tools in a row at the head of the table. Each tool was numbered, so he called the numbers out loud.
They went to work. Using blunt-ended scissors, Johnson opened the monkey while Jaax assisted with the procedure. They worked slowly and with exquisite care. They did not use any sharp blades, because a blade is a deadly object in a hot zone. A scalpel can nick your gloves and cut your fingers, and before you even feel a sensation of pain, the agent has already entered your blood stream.
Nancy handed tools to him, and she reached her fingers inside the monkey to tie off blood vessels and mop up excess blood with small sponges. The animal’s body cavity was a lake of blood. It was Ebola blood, and it had run everywhere inside the animaclass="underline" there had been a lot of internal hemorrhaging. The liver was swollen, and she noticed some blood in the intestines.
She had to tell herself to slow her hands down. Perhaps her hands were moving too quickly. She talked herself through the procedure, keeping herself alert and centered. Keep it clean, keep it clean, she thought. Okay, pick up the hemostat. Clamp that artery ‘cause it’s leaking blood. Break off and rinse gloves. She could feel the Ebola blood through her gloves; it felt wet and slippery, even through her hands were clean and dry and dusted with baby powder.
She withdrew her hands from the carcass and rinsed them in a pan of disinfectant called EnviroChem, which sat in a sink. the liquid was pale green, the color of Japanese green tea. It destroys viruses. As she rinsed her gloves in it, the liquid turned brown with monkey blood. All she could hear was the noise of the air blowing inside her suit. It filled her suit with a roar like a subway train coming through a tunnel.
A virus is a small capsule made of membranes and proteins. The capsule contains one or more strands of DNA or RNA, which are long molecules that contain the software program for making a copy of virus. Some biologists classify viruses as “life forms,” because they are not stricky known to be alive. Viruses are ambiguously alive, neither alive nor dead. They carry on their existence in the borderlands between life and nonlife. They are dead. They can even form crystals. Virus particles that lie around in blood or mucus may seem dead, but the particles are waiting for something to come along. They have a sticky surface. If a cell comes along and touches the virus and the stickiness of the virus matches the stickiness of the cell, then the virus clings to the cell. The cell feels the virus sticking to it and enfolds the virus and drags it inside. Once the virus enters the cell, it becomes a Trojan horse. It switches on and begins to replicate.
A virus is a parasite. It can’t live on its own. It can only make copies of itself inside a cell using the cell’s materials and machinery to get the job done. All living things carry viruses in their cells. Even fungi and bacteria are inhabited by viruses and are occasionally destroyed by them. That is, disease have their own disease. A virus makes copies of itself inside a cell until eventually the cell gets pigged with virus and pops, and the viruses spill out of the broken cell. Or viruses can bud through a cell wall, like drips coming out of a faucet—drip, drip, drip, drip, copy, copy, copy, copy—that’s the way the AIDS virus works. The faucet runs and runs until the cell is exhausted, consumed, and destroyed. If enough cells are destroyed, the host dies. A virus does not “want” to kill its host. That is not in the best interest of virus, because then the virus may also die, unless it can jump fast enough out of the dying host into a new host.
The genetic code inside Ebola is a single strand of RNA. This type of molecule is thought to be the oldest and most “primite” coding mechanism for life. The earth’s primordial ocean, which came into existence not long after the earth was formed, about four and a half billion years ago, may well have contained microscopic life forms based on RNA. This suggested that Ebola is an ancient kind of life, perhaps nearly as old as the earth itself. Another hint that Ebola is extremely ancient is the way in which it can seem neither quite alive nor quite unalive.