This is what happened to AIDS victims. Most never perished directly as a result of having the HIV infection, but rather they succumbed to obscure cancers and diseases from which the person’s impaired immune system could no longer protect them.
Sarah sat at her office chair and forced herself back to the present. There was a meeting to organize for this afternoon. In the meantime, she would need to begin learning everything she could about dormant viruses emerging from the permafrost.
CHAPTER 5
Sarah’s meeting with Rhonda had not been an easy one, and now she had to break the bad news to her team. It wasn’t entirely bad news, she told herself as she hobbled toward the elevator. She was trying to put a positive spin on a disappointing situation, but all she could manage was that at least Rhonda trusted them enough to let them handle this new outbreak. She had loads of confidence that no other team could handle this investigation as well as hers could.
Still, having to put aside all of their work and begin a whole new project would be stressful, and she was not pleased at the prospect.
“But, we were making so much progress on AIDS research—why does she want us to turn away now?” asked Tally.
Sarah and her five researchers sat perched on metallic four-legged stools in the teaching lab. They all wore white lab coats, long pants and closed-toed shoes, as safety protocol dictated.
She understood their distress. Research involved a lot of time spent reading and preparing before any experiments were performed, and even more time reading and researching published scientific literature after the results of the experiments came in, no matter what those results were. Experiments had to be repeated multiple times, with every control conceivable in order for the results to be credible.
Sarah recalled when she had first learned about controls. One of her professors had placed three blank sheets of paper, each on black tables in different parts of the room. The students were allowed to walk over to examine each piece of paper, but were not allowed to touch them. Then he asked what color the papers were. The class had immediately replied that they were all white.
“Are you sure?” he asked. Yes, they were sure. Then he had removed the sheet of paper from the first table and placed it partially on top of the second sheet of paper, so that both could be seen, and now the first sheet looked a pale shade of gray when compared to the second sheet. Then he had walked the two pieces of paper to the third table, and sure enough, the last sheet was clearly a different shade, even whiter.
“If I had separated this classroom of people,” he said, “and asked each of you to tell me the color of these three items, all of you would have reported that they were white. But only one of them is truly white. When I place it next to the others, that’s when I can tell. That’s why you need controls in an experiment. Without something to compare your answers against, your answers cannot be trusted.”
To further complicate matters, they were working with living organisms and many things could go wrong. How often had cultures become contaminated when instead of being kept warm, they had been allowed to grow cold because the motor on an incubator had gone out? How frustrating was it to accidentally contaminate a bacterial culture when the instruments used to seed it had not been properly sterilized in the high pressure steam autoclave? And if the cells were delicate, like human or mouse culture ones, how exasperating was it to have them explode or shrivel up because the solution in which they were suspended, the buffer, was too salty or not salty enough?
Therefore, Sarah could identify with Tally’s frustration at having to change gears and focus on a new set of experiments. “Believe me, I was none too happy about Rhonda’s decision either. But she does not have control over this choice. The president of the university is involved in this decision. Apparently the university’s focus is off of the AIDS problem for now, since the Laptev epidemic is exploding all over the Arctic.”
“Exploding?” asked Emile.
Sarah noticed that Shane, the younger of the two post-docs, made a popping sound with his mouth and moved his fingers as if imitating an explosion. He had only been in her lab for a few months, and Sarah found him to be boorish and quite immature in spite of the fact that he was twenty seven years old. She was still uncertain as to whether he should remain in the lab, but Emile, whom she greatly appreciated as he had worked with her for almost eight years now, had vouched for Shane, saying that he was a hard worker and a clear thinker, even if he occasionally blurted out whatever was on his mind, no matter how inappropriate.
“Okay, poor choice of word, you’re right,” Sarah conceded.
“Although maybe Sarah has a point. It’s killed dozens of people up there,” said Drew, thoughtfully. “This is the virus that was discovered under ice, right?”
“Yes, apparently it’s one of several gigantic viruses that have been found in the last few years in remote places all over the planet. They discovered another one in the permafrost in Siberia, not too far from where the Laptev one was found, and one down in Chile, under the ocean. This particular virus, the one we’ll be investigating, belongs to the group of Megaviridae, which have much larger genomes than the viruses we’ve always known. I believe some of them are large enough in size to be viewed under a light microscope,” said Sarah.
“Whoa! Do you think that the reason more of these viruses are emerging now is because the Arctic is warming at twice the speed of anywhere else on the planet?” said Tally.
“Um,” said Sarah. The thought had not crossed her mind.
“I can see the headlines now,” said Shane, lowering the pitch of his voice to imitate a newscaster and holding his arm out as if he were placing the words on a giant screen. “‘FROZEN VIRUS RELEASED. Scientists say the cold never bothered it anyway.’”
Several people chuckled at the reference to the Disney movie, and Sarah felt some of the tension in the room disperse.
“I remember reading about those megaviruses in one of my graduate virology classes last year, but I thought that they only infected amoebas,” said Miquela, bringing the team back to the subject. Miquela spoke softly and clearly, though she always seemed a bit intimidated, often crossing her arms over her chest as she spoke. Sarah thought of her as the more mature of the two post-docs. She and Shane were about the same age, but Miquela, with her quiet manner and her dark-framed glasses, seemed much more poised and focused on her work.
“That is a question that a good epidemiologist would pose,” replied Sarah, beaming at Miquela. “According to Rhonda, the reason researchers thought that it only infected amoebas was because they only provided amoebas as host cells to draw the huge viruses out in the first place. However, the Laptev virus, like several of the other Megaviridae, most likely contains genes for over 2,500 proteins. It is the largest megavirus ever found, and as our bad luck would have it, some of those genes allow it to enter and infect human cells.”
“But, what’s the mode of transmission? It can’t just jump from amoebas into people,” said Tally.
“That’s one of the questions that researchers haven’t quite resolved yet, and one of the first ones we will have to address,” Sarah said with a sigh. Rhonda had provided her with a dossier of reports from Riesigoil and in the hours between her meeting with Rhonda and this one with her team, Sarah had skimmed through all of them. Then she had used her university ID to access the world’s leading scientific research sites so that she could read up on Megaviridae in general. Most of the scientific information nowadays was inaccessible to the average internet user and required steep subscription prices to even begin searching the sites. Universities spent a lot of money each year to be able to provide access to this information for their researchers.