Then she remembered her freshman roommate saying, “Patience is a virgin,” and that made her smile.
Suddenly the phone rang. Sarah hesitated, wondering if it might be her mother again. She stared at the little screen but all it said was “INCOMING CALL.” Not the least bit helpful.
“Kevin?” she asked.
“Dr. S.,” he said, breathing heavily as if he had run all the way to the Waiting Room. Maybe he had.
“Yes?” she asked, fearing the worst.
“Got ‘em,” he said confidently. “Where do you want ‘em?”
Sarah said a silent prayer of gratitude. “Thank you so much, Kevin. Please have them sent to the lab and ask Tally to call me when they arrive. They need to stay in quarantine, so be careful. But I want every last one of them to have a special blood test.”
CHAPTER 20
“We’ve got an intriguing situation,” Sarah explained the next day. She was addressing all of her group, as well as Rhonda and Angela, who had insisted on being a part of the meeting. Sarah was not at all pleased about having these last two members attend her group meetings, but there was nothing she could do about it. She had briefly explained the contamination issue to Rhonda that morning, and Rhonda had insisted on calling Angela and having her attend the next meeting.
“I made a chart of which mice lived and which ones did not for each dilution level, and it turns out that the C12 prefix ones, meaning all of the mice that came from room C12, are the ones that survived…” began Sarah.
“‘The boy that lived,’” said Shane in a mocking voice.
Sarah scowled at him.
Shane blushed and she wondered if he had meant to make his comment out loud. “Sorry, it was just the way you said it reminded me of Harry…” he said quietly. “Sorry, won’t happen again.”
Sarah took another breath and continued, “As I was saying, we know that we have a group of mice that lived, but what we don’t know is why that is the case. At first we thought it was a bad thing that half of our groups had perished, but we were focusing on the wrong half of the groups and asking the wrong questions. What is clear now is that we can see this situation as an opportunity. The first question we need to ask ourselves is why did the C12 group live?”
Everyone was silent for a moment as they pondered Sarah’s words.
“What if the mice were resistant to the virus because it has undergone a mutation and it was no longer virulent?” said Tally.
“If that were so, wouldn’t more mice than just half have been resistant?” asked Miquela.
Tally nodded, “Yeah, good point.”
“Well, Miquela’s right that it’s not likely, but it is still a possibility,” admitted Sarah. “Let’s try infecting a few fresh C8 mice with the same vial of virus and see what happens. Tally, do we still have that vial? Yes? Good. Would you mind taking care of that test and report back to us?”
Tally nodded, jotting down the experiment outline.
Then Sarah addressed the group again. “What else could it be?”
“What if for some reason the mice did not receive the adequate dose for infection?” asked Emile.
Sarah nodded. She was back in her element now. Ever since Kevin had managed to save the mice the day before, she had been feeling exuberant. “That’s also possible, though it would be strange that only the C12 mice, which were mixed with the C8 mice, were the ones who did not receive the adequate dose. Kevin, are there any C12 mice left that we haven’t used?”
Kevin jabbed his thumbs at his phone a few times. “Yes,” he said, momentarily. “There are about 20 more.”
“Okay, Emile, please take two of our C12 group of mice that have not been used before and inoculate them with a fresh batch of virus. Let’s see what happens.”
“But you don’t think that either of these things are what has happened, do you?” asked Rhonda.
Sarah had to smile. “It’s just a hunch,” she said, “but no, I don’t.”
The room was silent for a few seconds.
“Well, are you going to tell us what you think might be happening?” asked Angela.
Sarah hesitated briefly while she gathered her thoughts. Her idea was a bit far-fetched and she was suddenly abashed to describe it in front of her visitors. She took a deep breath and reminded herself of the reasons why her hypothesis seemed like a good one. “Well, I could be totally in left field, but this is what I’m thinking: what if, for some reason, the mice in C12 were already resistant?”
“They can’t be resistant to Laptev if they’ve never seen the virus and have not been inoculated beforehand,” said Emile. “And Laptev is a megavirus, which means that it belongs to a group of viruses that is exceedingly rare and found only in remote locations around the planet. So it’s impossible that the mice could be resistant. Maybe some of them could have had some natural immunity to viruses in general, or maybe they had some sort of interferon thing going, but it’s unlikely that the whole group from C12 would be resistant, while none of the C8 ones were.”
“Interferon?” asked Angela.
“It’s a compound that host cells release when they are being attacked by a pathogen like a virus. It lets its neighboring cells know that there is danger around so that they can increase their defenses.”
“Some call it a ‘Paul Revere’ molecule,” said Shane. “The viruses are coming, the viruses are coming!”
“No they don’t. I’ve never heard that,” said Emile, rolling his eyes. “Anyway, Sarah, like I said, there’s no way that the mice can be resistant.”
Sarah looked at him enigmatically, raising one eyebrow.
“Sarah, it’s not magic,” said Emile, with a note of impatience creeping into his voice. “If the mice have never seen the virus, which they shouldn’t have since it was locked in the ice for 30,000 years, there’s no way they would have been able to create antibodies against it. We also know there are no similar viruses that infect mammals nowadays, so there’s no chance of cross-immunity. There’s simply no way for the mice to have developed an immune response before they were exposed.”
“I agree,” said Sarah hesitantly, “and we can run a couple of ELISA tests to see if the infected mice that lived have anti-Laptev antibodies.”
The enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, often called by its acronym, ELISA, was a great diagnostic tool that was often used in a microbiology laboratory as it employed antibodies, which were like precise keys, to identify certain substances. The substances thus marked would glow in the dark and could be captured in a photograph.
“Actually,” said Tally, “I ran an ELISA.”
“You did?” said Sarah and Emile in unison.
Tally nodded. “And it gave me an idiosyncratic answer. Look.”
Sarah leaned in and watched as Tally clicked on the progressively magnified images. Her eyes widened with barely concealed delight as she watched. She had seen viruses being attacked by host defense systems many times, but she had never seen anything like this. The magnified ELISA images showed a single megavirus that was perfectly surrounded by a lustrous ring, as if the virus had donned a snug, luminous coat. The light was due to the huge antibody complexes that were attacking it. The antibodies had been labeled with fluorescent markers and she could just imagine them clustering furiously around the antigen.
When she thought of these complexes she was always reminded of Koi ponds she had seen as a little girl, which teemed with brightly colored yellow, orange and white fish. As the fish swam, their long, diaphanous fins billowed out, their tails trailing gracefully in the water. But when she threw a few pellets of food into the pond, the fish had become a writhing mass, pouncing on the pellets as if they were starving.
“I don’t get it,” said Angela. “What exactly are we looking at here? I see a dark elongated blob surrounded by something that shines, but I can’t tell what any of it means.”