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She took a sip from her glass of water. ‘So how are things going with your pigs?’

The EcoPig was the trademark for a genetically modified line of Duroc pigs that Rutherford had been working on. The aim was to develop a transgenic pig with an enhanced digestive system capable of breaking down otherwise indigestible chemicals in pig feed, thus reducing the environmental damage caused by farming pigs on an industrial scale.

Before Rutherford could answer the waiter arrived to take their order. Alison had missed lunch and she chose the pasta bake and a side salad, asking the waiter if she could have the salad without tomatoes. The dean finished his wine, pouring himself another glass while she ordered. When it was his turn he chose the sea bass and another bottle of the Sauvignon. For a few minutes he talked while they waited for their food. In truth Alison had little interest in Rutherford’s pigs. It seemed to her that the problem might just as easily have been solved by either altering their diets or alternatively changing the conditions in which they were reared. But agripharmaceuticals - pharming, as Rutherford liked to call it - was big business, and the department was always in need of funding.

Transgenics - using DNA from different sources to genetically engineer new organisms –
was
important to her, however. It might even hold the key to her own research. For years studies of Alzheimer’s had been limited by the lack of a reliable animal model. The development of the amyloid precursor protein mouse in the ’nineties had helped researchers understand the pathology of the disease, but the mouse had not been the perfect model. In the last few years pigs containing genes thought to be responsible for Alzheimer’s had been created at universities in Copenhagen and Århus and she had followed the work of the Danish scientists closely. Based on the growth rates and life expectancy of the animals, it was expected that the transgenetically cloned pigs would soon start to show symptoms of the disease. And because pigs were in many ways comparable to humans it was hoped that research into their behavior would yield better results than the mice had.

The technology was not new: DNA contained the genetic instructions for life, and scientists had been swapping those instructions between different organisms since the early ’seventies. The theory was relatively straightforward. Take a fragment responsible for a unique trait in one organism and splice that DNA into a different host, in the hope that the gene would perform in the same way as it had in the old organism. Restriction enzymes acted as the scissors to cut the DNA, attacking a specific sequence, splitting the base pairs apart, leaving single helix strands at the end of two double helixes. You were then free to add whatever genetic sequences you wished into the broken chain. Another enzyme, ligase, to repair the spliced strand, and suddenly you had a new creation, a species that would never have existed otherwise.

In practice the process was seldom that simple however. For a start, the DNA segment from a source organism was rarely capable of being spliced directly into the host DNA. It needed to be introduced biologically, through bacteria plasmid, or mechanically, using gene guns or micropipettes. Alison had studied these techniques as well, and knew them intimately. But even so, the process was complex and unpredictable. The same gene-splicing operation might need to be performed hundreds of times before a successful result, a ‘viable’, could be achieved, with often little clue as to why scores of earlier, seemingly identical, attempts had failed.

And then would begin the watching, the waiting. Inserted genes were prone to overexpression, becoming overactive. Or the spliced material might mutate, disrupting the functioning of other genes. Transgenic animals often underwent complex and unanticipated physical changes that caused painful diseases, accelerated ageing, death. What might initially appear to be a normal, healthy organism could have unexpected flaws in its internal make-up. Immuno-deficiencies, unusual growth patterns, debilitating diseases were all common, and might not appear for months or even years.

But the potential was huge. Once the relevant genome had been mapped in theory the technology was only limited by the imagination of the bio-engineer. Some of the projects that had already been completed were truly unbelievable. Rabbits and cats spliced with transgenes from jelly fish, making them appear fluorescent; pigs with a desaturase gene from spinach, inserted to convert saturated fats into unsaturated linoleic acid. Canadian scientists had even spliced spider DNA into a goat, and had extracted spider silk protein from the animal’s milk. Once purified the protein could be spun into super strong fibers. Lightweight, more durable than Kevlar, stronger than steel and yet more elastic than nylon, the applications were endless.

But it was the combination of human and animal DNA that interested her most, for there lay the greatest potential to find cures for hundreds of diseases that afflicted mankind. Unfortunately experimenting with human genetic material was still regarded as controversial. Certainly, gene splicing with human DNA was more complex, the risks significant. But the objections to the technology typically weren’t expressed rationally. Most were based on nothing more than what she thought of as the ‘yuk’ factor, a negative gut reaction to procedures that seemed ‘unnatural’. She could understand it; she’d had trouble eating tomatoes ever since she had learned that a splice with a cockroach gene had been created in the hope of producing a subspecies with a harder skin to protect the fruit during transportation.

But nearly all of modern medicine required unnatural intervention. The first vaccines had been extracted from cow sores. And before scientists had found a way to harvest insulin from plasmid DNA spliced with a human gene it had had to be extracted from the pancreases of fresh corpses. Besides, it wasn’t as if they were creating real hybrids; the goat-spider splice had contained only a single spider gene. Understanding of genetic modification remained low however, with most of the public seemingly happy to receive their science lessons from Hollywood.

‘So have you thought any more about my offer?’

Rutherford’s question brought her back. He had a small farmhouse in Napa and had been trying to persuade her to spend Christmas with him, suggesting that it might be a good time for them to work on her research. The offer had made her uncomfortable. She had hoped he had forgotten about it.

‘Listen, Mark, I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Besides, I already have plans to spend Christmas with my mother.’

He took another drink and reached across the table, placing his hand over hers.

‘Well I’m sure your mother could spare for you for a few days, Alison. Especially if she realized how important I might be to your work. To your career.’ He paused, letting the meaning sink in. ‘Your research is so important, Alison. You don’t want others to suffer like your father.’

Alison stared back across the table, for the moment unsure what to say. How could she have been so naive? She was aware that most of her colleagues at the faculty regarded her as driven, even obsessed. Few of them knew her well enough to understand the reason. She now regretted having confided in the dean.

She had grown up in Manchester, Maryland, a small suburban town in the north-eastern corner of Carroll County. An only child, her parents had doted on her and her early memories were as idyllic as the tidy picket-fenced houses and quaint downtown shops that epitomized the sleepy town. The Stone family’s world was soon to be torn apart however. In her junior year of high school her father had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. He was forty-five.

The news had devastated the small family. Alison remembered sitting between her parents as a consultant had quietly explained what lay ahead. Her father could expect increasing forgetfulness and as the disease progressed, confusion. His personality would change. There were treatments, many of them experimental, that might delay the progress of the condition for a while, but there was no cure. In the end he would suffer from seizures and would have difficulty eating or swallowing. Death would most likely come from either infection or malnutrition. Her mother had started to sob quietly as the doctor had explained that they probably had no more than ten years. 

Alison adored her father and hadn’t been prepared to lose him, piece by piece, to this horrific disease. She had read everything she could lay her hands on, desperate for theories on how to manage the disease, for details of the cures that were being worked on. At school she had been a bright if somewhat relaxed student, but now she focused all her energy on obtaining a scholarship to Johns Hopkins where she could continue to study her father’s illness. Baltimore was less than twenty-five miles from Manchester. Studying there would allow her to continue to live at home to help her parents.

At twenty she had graduated
magna cum laude
with a major in biomedical engineering. By then Pete Stone’s illness had progressed beyond its early stages, and previously a placid man, he was increasingly subject to fits of agitation, followed by bouts of depression. She would often come home to find him standing by the curb outside their house, with no recollection of why he had come outside.

Realizing that her father might not have the time she needed to find a cure, she had enrolled in the university’s medical school hoping that she might at least learn enough to ease his symptoms as he progressed through the disease’s final stages. But the condition had proved unusually aggressive in Pete Stone and by the time she was in her third year he was completely bedridden, no longer recognizing either her or her mother. As the disease moved to his brain stem, shutting down the basic processes of digestion and respiration, it was no longer possible for him to remain at home. She would visit him every day in the hospital, but by then he had stopped eating and was sleeping most of the time. In the end, one spring morning barely seven years after he had first been diagnosed, her father had simply stopped breathing.

Alison had graduated medical school three months later. The faculty had pleaded with her to take up a place as an intern but the memories of her father had been too painful for her to remain there. Stem cell research provided the most promising field for a cure and so she had transferred to the graduate program in genetics at Harvard Medical School. Although her father was gone she was determined that others wouldn’t have to experience a similar loss. Completing her doctorate at the age of twenty-seven, she had been offered a position as a post-doctoral fellow at the university. But when California had passed Proposition 71, with a single stroke making available funding that promised to change the landscape for stem cell research in the United States, she had decided to move west, and had accepted a teaching post at Berkeley.

She knew that the disease that she had chosen as an adversary, that in reality had selected her, was a formidable one. In reality they still knew so very little about how the human brain really worked. She had been certain however that with the facilities available to her at Berkeley she would be able to make significant steps towards finding a cure for the condition that had killed her father. It might take years, decades, but she would dedicate her life to finding a cure if she had to.

But now Rutherford was letting her know that if she chose to refuse his advances her position at the university was likely to become a lot more tenuous. He certainly had the power to make good on the threat. She didn’t have tenure, and was unlikely to be eligible for consideration for several more years. And as dean of the faculty he would have a large say in that decision when the time came. The publicity that her article had generated a few months before certainly hadn’t helped her case. Neither could she rely on a breakthrough in her research to guarantee her a position. Even with Rutherford’s help, progress, if it came, was more likely to come in modest increments. And California was a popular choice for researchers. The university would have little trouble finding someone to replace her.

She saw the waiter arriving with her salad. As he placed it on the table she saw that he had forgotten about the tomatoes.

It didn’t matter.

She had lost her appetite.

7

THE
PERSISTENT
CHIRPING dragged Lars from a deep slumber. He groped with one hand on the nightstand for the phone, carefully shifting the other from under Ellie’s neck, hoping not to wake her. It was still dark outside, probably an hour yet till dawn. He flipped up the phone to silence the ringing, mumbling to the caller to hold on while he climbed out of bed. The young man who had been tied to the gurney in the back of the van was his only hope to get to the bottom of what had happened, and Lars had left his cell number with instructions to be contacted the moment anything changed with his condition. He was expecting to hear that the man had died. But instead the doctor on the other end of the line was telling him he was gone.

Lars collected his clothes from where he had left them only a few short hours before. His gun belt hung over the back of the chair that stood next to his side of the bed, and he picked it up, buckling the old leather around his waist, feeling its familiar weight settle on his hip. He knew Ellie hated having a gun in the bedroom but until Mineral County’s tiny budget could stretch to getting him one of those fancy gun cabinets installed there was nowhere else in the small house that he felt safe leaving it. Jake looked up expectantly from his basket as he made his way out through the kitchen to where the cruiser sat parked by the side of the house.

He drove in silence back towards Hawthorne. The narrow strip of asphalt hugged the contours of Walker Lake, the twin beams from the cruiser’s headlights occasionally illuminated the glassy still of the waters only yards to his left. But the road was familiar to him and Lars let his mind wander, trying in vain to piece together the pieces of the puzzle that lay before him.