This material would definitely be on the midterm, but almost no one was typing or writing. How can you forget something like that?
8.
THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WAS NOT A PARTICULARLY nice man. At times he could be kind of an asshole, to be honest. The curious thing is that I do not think that made him a bad president. If anything, it may be an essential characteristic for the job.
I met the President on the first of April. I know it was April 1 because it was my thirtieth birthday. That morning I was trying to fix the power source in one of our microscopes in the lab. The phone rang in my office, which was really just a small nook with a desk in a corner of the laboratory. I did not have a secretary; no one in the laboratory did. The microscope was disassembled all over my workspace, so I let the call go. Then my cell phone rang, and I ignored that, too. I figured it was someone calling to wish me a happy birthday and I could call them back. (The good news about a birthday on April Fool’s Day is that people tend to remember.) But just a few minutes later a woman whom I recognized as the assistant to the Director walked into the lab. She looked around quickly, spotted me, and headed briskly in my direction: all business. “You need to answer your phone,” she said.
“I was in the middle of something,” I replied. I was more puzzled than defensive. I did not get a lot of important calls and none that were time-sensitive. I was paid to do research, not talk on the phone.
“The Director needs to see you right now,” she said.
I felt a tinge of panic at that point, right in the pit of my stomach. Three days earlier, a college friend had sent an e-mail to my work address with a subject line that urged me to “TAKE THE TEST.” I foolishly opened it, and the link led me to an Internet slide show with twenty pairs of bare breasts. In each pair, one set of breasts was real, and one was “enhanced.” I did not even take the test—I was smart enough to know that—but as I rushed to close the screen, with two large sets of breasts plastered across the entire thirty-five-inch monitor, one of our lab assistants walked by my desk. “Nice,” she said sarcastically. I closed the window immediately, but still… not good. And now, with the Director’s assistant standing officiously in front of me, I thought, Very bad. Very, very bad.
The lab is funded almost entirely by the federal government. My computer was government property. Roughly 80 percent of the scientists are men; the Director, a woman, was appointed in part to send a signal about the importance of promoting women in science. I had been to three full-day seminars on gender sensitivity in the workplace. (Everyone at the National Institutes of Health had to do this; I was not singled out for any particular behavior.) Even without the sensitivity training, I was well aware that studying real and fake boobs on a government computer with a huge monitor at a federally funded laboratory was frowned upon.
Was it enough to get summoned to the Director’s office? Maybe. I stood there for a minute, trying to remember if I had deleted the e-mail. The servers were all backed up, so it probably did not matter anyway.
“Hurry up. And bring your coat,” the Director’s assistant said. My coat?
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” she answered curtly. “They just told me to find you as quickly as possible and take you to the rear entrance. The Director is going to meet you there.” At that point I knew this was not about trying to tell real boobs from fake boobs in a government laboratory. If anything, the pit in my stomach grew more intense. My chest felt tight, like someone was squeezing it from behind.
The Director was standing next to a black Town Car in the circular drive at the back of the building. As I appeared, she opened a rear door of the car and motioned me in. I slid across the seat and she got in beside me, slamming the door. The car pulled out immediately. The Director introduced herself and offered a handshake. Obviously I knew who she was, but I appreciated the gesture. Many of the people whom I would meet in the coming days did not extend the same courtesy, including the President. Then again, I suppose it is silly for the President of the United States to introduce himself, just false modesty.
“What can you tell me about lurking viruses?” the Director asked.
“What would you like to know?” I asked. She had asked a broad question, the virology equivalent of asking a historian to tell you about wars in Europe. “You should read my Ph.D. dissertation. You’d be the fourth person,” I said, trying for humor.
The Director had a nondescript black trench coat folded across her lap. She pulled a copy of my dissertation from beneath the coat. I could tell from the binding that it was the copy from our library at the lab. “I flipped through it,” she said. “You need to give me the basics.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To the White House.”
“Has there been some kind of attack?” I asked. Anybody in my field knew the risks of biological warfare. The public tends to freak out about nukes, but if you put some of those nasty pathogens that Huke taught us about on a simple rocket—the kind that Hamas can build in a garage—you could kill, maim, and terrify a lot of people. Pathogens are easier to acquire than nuclear weapons and far easier to move across international borders. That was one reason our laboratory had been relatively well funded over the previous decade.
“It’s more complicated than that,” she said.
“Every lurking virus that I’m aware of responds to Dormigen,” I offered.
“Yeah,” she said in a strange, noncommittal kind of way.
Only later, when I was sitting on a couch opposite the President, with a White House steward offering me coffee or water, would I understand what she meant by that.
9.
THE FIRST KNOWN CASE WAS IN NATICK, MASSACHUSETTS. A thirty-seven-year-old man had been shoveling after a particularly heavy snowstorm in late March. He came into the house and complained of flu-like symptoms. By midnight he was in the emergency room with a 103-degree fever that would not respond to aspirin or ibuprofen. His white blood cell counts were elevated, but there was no obvious sign of infection or illness. At two-thirty a.m., after the fever climbed to 104, the attending physician prescribed Dormigen. The fever abated quickly and the patient was released from the hospital later that morning.
We know about that particular case only because the ER physician did what she was supposed to do, which was report the illness and its symptoms to a central database jointly maintained by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), my employer. True, the patient walked out of the hospital nearly recovered, and there were no recurring symptoms, but that had become a problem in the post-Dormigen world. Dormigen is effective against all known pathogens, meaning that doctors can cure a patient without having any idea what the underlying illness is.
This is a great thing—mostly. Public health officials also recognized it as a looming problem. If Dormigen were to go the way of penicillin and just about every other breakthrough antibiotic—as will almost certainly happen, unless we can somehow stop the process of natural selection—we might have no knowledge of the illnesses that had been afflicting us. Dormigen took us to a strange place in medicine. A physician can have no idea what is wrong with a patient, and yet a ready cure is never more than a prescription away: the doctor hits a key, a CVS drone drops the medicine at your door, and the disease is beaten back—whatever it may have been. Many health care experts pointed out, half seriously, that if you showed up in an emergency room with flu-like symptoms, the guy mopping the floor in the waiting area could treat you just as effectively as any of the professionals in white coats. “Here, take Dormigen,” the janitor would offer before going back to his mopping. And it would work.