Darwin's Children (35 page)

“You’re scenting,” Celia warned in a whisper behind her. “Miss Kantor turned her nosey on.”

Stella did not know how to stop. She could feel the changes coming.

“You’re doing it, too,” Felice whispered to Celia.

“Damn,” Celia said, and rubbed behind her ears, eyes wide.

“Girls,” Miss Kantor called from the front of the classroom. “Be quiet and watch the film.”

19

BALTIMORE

P
romptly at eleven, Kaye entered the Americol twentieth-floor conference room, Liz close behind. Robert Jackson was already in the room. His hair had turned salt and pepper over the years but otherwise he had not matured much either in behavior or appearance. He was still handsome, skin pale to the point of blueness, with a sharply defined nose and chin and a glossy five o’clock shadow. His quartzlike eyes, dark gray, bored into Kaye whenever they met, occasions she tried to keep to a minimum.

Angled on either side of Jackson at the corner position he favored were two of his postdocs—research interns from Cornell and Harvard, in their late twenties, compact fellows with dark brown hair and the nervous aloofness of youth.

“Marge will be here in a few minutes,” Jackson told Kaye, briefly half-standing.

He had never forgiven her an awkward moment in the early days of SHEVA, sixteen years ago, when it seemed that Marge and Kaye had ganged up on him. Jackson had won that round in the long run, but grudges came naturally to him. He was as passionate about office politics and the social side of research as he was about science as an ideal and an abstraction.

With so keen a sense of the social, Kaye wondered why Jackson had been other than brilliant in genetics. To Kaye, the processes behind both were much the same; to Jackson, that idea was heresy of a disgusting magnitude.

The representatives from three other research divisions had also arrived before Kaye and Liz. Two men and one woman, all in their late forties, bowed their heads as they pored over touch tablets, getting through the perpetual network-enabled tasks of their day. They did not look up as Kaye entered, though most of them had met her and conversed with her at Americol mixers and Christmas parties.

Kaye and Liz sat with their backs to a long window that looked out over downtown Baltimore. Kaye felt a breeze go up her back from a floor vent. Jackson had taken pole position, leaving Liz and Kaye with the air conditioning.

Marge Cross entered, alone for once. She seemed subdued. Cross was in her middle sixties, portly, her short-cut, scraggly hair brilliantly hennaed, her face jowly, her neck a landscape of hanging wrinkles. She possessed a voice that could carry across a crowded conference hall, yet carried herself with the poise of a ballet dancer, dressed in carefully tailored pant suits, and somehow could charm the butterflies out of the skies. It was difficult to know when she did not like what she was hearing. Like a rhino, Cross was said to be at her most dangerous when she was still and quiet.

The CEO of Americol and Eurocol had grown stouter and more beefy-faced over the years, but still walked with graceful confidence. “Let the games begin,” she said, her voice mellow as she made her way to the window. Liz moved her chair as Cross passed.

“You didn’t bring your lance, Kaye,” Jackson said.

“Behave, Robert,” Cross warned. She sat beside Liz and folded her hands on the table. Jackson managed to look both properly chastened and amused by the jabbing familiarity.

“We’re here to judge the success so far of our attempts to restrict legacy viruses,” Cross began. “We refer to them generically as ERV—endogenous retroviruses. We’ve also been concerned with their close relations, transgenes, transposons, retrotransposons, LINE elements, and what have you—all mobile elements, all jumping genes. Let’s not confuse our ERV with someone else’s ERV—
equine rhinovirus,
for example, or
ecotropic recombinant retrovirus
, or, something we’ve all experienced in these sessions, a sudden loss of
expiratory reserve volume
.”

Polite smiles around the room. A little shuffling of feet.

Cross cleared her throat. “We certainly wouldn’t want to confuse anybody,” she said, her voice dropping an octave. Most of the time, it hovered between a quavering soprano and a mellow alto. Many had compared her to Julia Child, but the comparison was surface only, and with age and hennaed hair, Cross had gone well beyond Julia and into her own stratospheric realm of uniqueness. “I’ve looked over the team reports from our vaccine project, and of course the chimpanzee and mouse ERV knockout projects. Dr. Jackson’s report was very long. Also, I’ve looked over the research reviews and audits from the fertility and general immunology groups.” Cross’s arthritis was bothering her; Kaye could tell from the way she massaged the swollen knuckles on her hands. “The consensus is, we seem to have failed at everything we set out to do. But we’re not here for a postmortem. We need to decide how to proceed from where we are at this moment. So. Where are we?”

Glum silence. Kaye stared straight ahead, trying to keep from biting her lip.

“Usually, we toss a coin and let the winner start. But we’re all familiar with this debate, up to a point, and I think it’s time we begin with some probing questions. I’ll choose who goes first. All right?”

“Fine,” Jackson said nonchalantly, lifting his hands from the tabletop.

“Fine,” Kaye echoed.

“Good. We all agree it sucks,” Cross said. “Dr. Nilson, please begin.”

Lars Nilson, a middle-aged man with round glasses, had won a Nobel twenty years ago for his research in cytokines. He had once been heavily involved in Americol’s attempts to resolve retroviral issues in xenotransplants—the transplanting of animal tissues into human recipients—a prospect that had come to a drastic halt with the appearance of SHEVA and the case of Mrs. Rhine. He had since been reassigned to general immunology.

Nilson peered around the room with a wry expression, looking to Kaye like a gray and disconsolate pixie. “I presume I’m expected to speak first out of some notion of Nobel
oblige
or something more awful still, like seniority.”

A small, very slim elderly man in a gray suit and yarmulke entered the room and looked around through friendly, crinkled brown eyes, his face wreathed in a perpetual smile. “Don’t mind me,” he said, and took a chair in the far corner, crossing his legs. “Lars is no longer senior,” he added quietly.

“Thank you, Maurie,” Nilson said. “Glad you could make it.” Maurie Herskovitz was another of Cross’s Nobel laureates, and perhaps the most honored biologist working at Americol. His specialty was loosely labeled “genomic complexity”; he now functioned as a roving researcher. Kaye was startled and a little unnerved by his presence. Despite his smile—built-in, she suspected, like a dolphin’s—Herskovitz was known to be a demanding tyrant in the lab. She had never seen him in person.

Cross folded her arms and breathed loudly through her nose. “Let’s move on,” she suggested.

Nilson looked to his right. “Dr. Jackson, your SHEVA vaccines have unexpected side effects. When you work to block transmission of ERV particles between cells in tissue, you kill the experimental animals—apparently in part because of a massive overreaction of their innate immune system—whether they be mice, pigs, or monkeys. That seems counterintuitive. Can you explain?”

“We believe our efforts interfere with or mimic some essential processes involving the breakdown of pathogenic messenger RNA in somatic cells. The cells seem to interpret our vaccines as a byproduct of the appearance of viral RNA, and stop all transcription and translation. They die, apparently to protect other cells from infection.”

“I understand there may also be a problem with shutting down function of transposases in T cells,” Nilson continued. “RAG1 and RAG2 are apparently affected by nearly all the candidate vaccines.”

“As I said, we’re still tracking that connection,” Jackson said smoothly.

“Most expression of ERVs doesn’t trigger cell suicide,” Nilson said.

Jackson nodded. “It’s a complicated process,” he said. “Like many pathogens, some retroviruses have developed a cloaking ability and can avoid cell defenses.”

“So the model that all viruses are interlopers or invaders may not apply in these cases?”

Jackson vehemently disagreed. His argument was rigidly traditional: DNA in the genome was a tightly constrained and efficient blueprint. Viruses were simply parasites and hangers-on, causing disorder and disease but, in rare instances, also creating useful novelty. He explained that putting viral promoters in front of a necessary cellular gene could cause more of that gene’s products to be manufactured at a key moment in the cell’s history. More rarely, within germ cells—egg or sperm progenitors—they might land, randomly, in such a way as to cause phenotypic or developmental variation in the offspring. “But to call any such activity orderly, part of some cellular reaction to the environment, is ridiculous. Viruses have no awareness of their actions, nor are the cells specifically activating viruses for some wonderful purpose. That has been obvious for more than a century.”

“Kaye? Do viruses know what they’re doing?” Cross asked, turning in her chair.

“No,” Kaye said. “They’re nodes in a distributed network. Greater purpose as such lies with the network, not the node; and not even the network can be described as self-aware or deliberately purposeful, in the sense that Dr. Jackson has purpose.”

Jackson smiled.

Kaye went on. “All viruses appear to be descendants, directly or indirectly, of mobile elements. They did not pop up from outside; they broke free from inside, or evolved to carry genes and other information between cells and between organisms. Retroviruses like HIV in particular seem closely related to retrotransposons and ERV in the cells of many organisms. They all use similar genetic tools.”

“So a flu virus, with eight genes, is derived from a retrotransposon or retrovirus with two or three genes?” Nilson asked with some disdain. His brows dropped into a puzzled and stormy expression at this patent absurdity.

“Ultimately, yes,” Kaye said. “Gaining or mutating genes, or losing them, is mediated by necessity. A virus entering a new and unfamiliar host might take up and incorporate useful genes found within the host cell, but it’s not easy. Most of the viruses simply fail to replicate.”

“They go in, hoping for a handout at the gene table?” Jackson asked. “That’s what Dr. Howard Urnovitz believed, isn’t it? Vaccinations led to HIV, Gulf War Syndrome, and every other illness known to modern man?”

“Dr. Urnovitz’s views seem closer to yours than to mine,” Kaye replied evenly.

“That was more than twenty years ago,” Cross said, yawning. “Ancient history. Move on.”

“We know many viruses can incorporate genes from ERVs,” Kaye said. “Herpes, for example.”

“The implications of that process are not at all clear,” Jackson said, a rather weak-kneed response, Kaye thought.

“I’m sorry, but it simply is not controversial,” she persisted. “We know that is how Shiver arose in all its variety, and that is how the virus mutated that gave our children lethal HFMD. It picked up endogenous viral genes found only in non-SHEVA individuals.”

Jackson conceded these points. “Some of our children,” he amended quietly. “But I’m willing to concede that viruses may be enemies from within. All the more reason to eradicate them.”

“Just
enemies
?” Cross asked. She propped her chin in one palm, and looked up at Jackson from beneath her bushy eyebrows.

“I did say ‘enemies,’ not handmaids or subcontractors,” Jackson said. “Jumping genes cause problems. They are rogues, not handmaids. We know that. When they’re active, they produce genetic defects. They activate oncogenes. They’re implicated in multiple sclerosis and in schizophrenia, in leukemia and all manner of cancers. They cause or exacerbate autoimmune diseases. However long they can lie dormant in our genes, they’re part of a panoply of ancient plagues. Viruses are a curse. That some are now tame enough to get by without causing their hosts major damage is just the way disease evolution works. We know that HIV retroviruses mutated and jumped from one primate species to another, to us. In chimps, the HIV precursor evolved to be neutral, a genetic burden and little more. In us, the mutation proved to be highly immunosuppressive and lethal. SHEVA is little different. The ERV we are fighting are simply not useful to the organism in any fundamental way.”

Kaye felt as if she had traveled back in time, as if thirty years of research had never happened. Jackson had refused to change despite massive strides; he simply ignored what he could not believe in. And he was not alone. The number of papers produced each year in virology alone could fill the entire meeting room. To this day, most such papers stuck to a disease model for both viruses and mobile elements.

Jackson felt safely enclosed by thick walls of tradition, away from Kaye’s mad, howling winds.

Cross turned to the sole woman on the review committee, Sharon Morgenstern. Morgenstern specialized in fertility research and developmental biology. A nervous-looking, thin woman, reputedly a spinster, with a withdrawn chin, prominent teeth, wispy blonde hair, and a soft North Carolina accent, she also chaired the Americol jury that approved papers before they were submitted to the journals—in-house peer review set up in part to quash publications that might reveal corporate secrets. “Sharon? Any questions while we’re jumping up and down on Robert?”

“Your test animals, when given candidate vaccines, have also been known to suffer the loss or reduction of key sexual characteristics,” Morgenstern began. “That seems exceptionally odd. How do you plan to get around those problems?”

“We have noticed reduction of certain minor sexual characters in baboons,” Jackson said. “That may have no relevance to human subjects.”

Nilson moved in once more, ignoring Morgenstern’s irritated expression.
Let the woman finish,
Kaye thought, but said nothing.

“Dr. Jackson’s vaccine could be of immense importance in our attempts to neutralize viruses in xenotransplant tissues,” Nilson said. “Dr. Rafelson’s endeavors also hold tremendous promise—to knock out all ERV genes in these tissues has been one of our holy grails for at least fifteen years. To say we’re disappointed by these failures is an understatement.” Nilson shifted in his seat and referred to his notes by leaning over sideways and looking through the edge of his glasses, like a bird examining a seed. “I’d like to ask some questions about why Dr. Jackson’s vaccines fail.”