Death of the Magpie

by William McMurray

CHAPTER TWO

  The first rays of sunlight touched the tree-branches, and a few skeins of early mist persisted as Janet stood again at the cliff’s edge next morning. Below were the rocks of the river bank, and it was necessary for her to spring outwards as she dove into the depths of the Watanabe. She struck out briskly for the point up-river that was about a half kilometre away. At home she would have would have gone for a ten kilometre run to settle her mind, but here the wilderness trails were too uneven and she had to settle for a swim as a purgative for the dark thoughts crowding her consciousness.

  The river banks were virtually deserted at this early hour. Further up-stream, nearer the landing at the lodge she could just make out a lone canoe pushing aside the low mist toward the opposite shore. And as she made the turn, Janet thought she caught sight of a figure on the cliff near where she had set her customary breakfast orange and towel. However, by the time she got close enough to have a decent look the person had vanished. The canoe across the river had also disappeared among the swirling foggy canopy. Janet huddled under her towel against the morning chill and polished off the orange. The exhilaration of the swim, the rough comfort of the towel, and the warm sunshine on her back provided balm for her battered psyche. Whatever the day had to offer she knew now that she would have the power to handle it.

  The atmosphere of the lecture room was subdued and sober by contrast with the holiday mood of the previous evening's events. Participants were reluctantly entering in twos and threes when Janet arrived. With the exception of the morning's speakers, conference organizers and a few senior scientists with myopic vision or hearing aids, most of the audience filled the hall in the manner of students-- starting in the back rows. A safety feature in the event of fire or boredom, thought Janet, as she settled into a seat not far from the projector and close to the rear exit door. The speakers had deposited their slides for the talks with the young projectionist, who was distractedly attempting to arrange them in order of presentation and had already started loading the first set into the projector's carousel for the opening talk. On the opposite side of the projection stand Janet noticed Linda apparently none the worse for her confrontation of the previous night, and Celia with Doug. Their mood seemed notably cheerier than last evening also, and Janet wondered if some reconciliation had taken place between them.

  Now the buzz of conversation, the rustle of note-books, and snapping of binders gradually subsided as the conference chairman, Professor Beadle, mounted the dais. The opening papers, consisting chiefly of sequence analysis of the better known protein growth hormones and the strategies for cloning their genes, were heavy going for Janet, and she departed with alacrity via the back door into the dazzling sunshine at the mid-morning break. Most of the other conferees had pushed through the front of the auditorium, either to convey or extract gems of wisdom not covered in the discussion of the papers, or to perform some stimulant therapy for their sagging mental condition at the coffee urn.

  The rear of the conference hall opened onto a cleared space containing playing fields for volleyball, baseball, and beyond, the screened-in tennis courts. Janet stretched, yawned, and was about to set out for a walk when she was overtaken by Celia.

  They exchanged a few remarks about the morning papers as they strolled in the grassy field, and as they approached the tennis court fence Celia inquired about the afternoon’s programme, and if it were true that no talk were scheduled.

  "Well, so far as I could gather the first afternoon is always left open. I guess that the organizers must realize that the audience needs some chance to recuperate before facing another battery of "speakers tonight."

  "Would you be interested in playing some tennis after lunch then, Dr. Gordon?"

  Janet was delighted to be asked. though she had never played with Celia she had watched her graceful style with approval on occasion from an adjacent court. She would be only too happy to agree to a set or two, if they could find a vacant court.

  "Oh, that’s great responded Celia. "Dr. Elster was wondering if you and Doug might play some mixed doubles with us. And he said he will reserve a court for two o’clock, if that time is alright for you?"

  Janet, feeling trapped, had to agree although with dampened enthusiasm, that two o’clock would be convenient if she could organize Douglas. By now the audience had started to filter back after its brief recess, and she stomped across the field to the resumption of the morning session with more vehement thoughts about Karl. It was not enough that he should dominate their research collaboration; he must also try to exert his supremacy on the combat field of the tennis court. As she stumbled toward her seat, eyes barely accommodated to the darkness of the auditorium, she brushed against someone coming away from the projectionist‘s table. One of the earlier speakers retrieving his slides, she guessed, and wondered irritably why on earth he would have waited until the next session instead of collecting them in the interlude.

  The first speaker of the second session was well launched into his presentation by the time Janet was settled in her chair. For a while she tried to make notes following the protocols for the isolation of embryonic growth factors. This was all fairly pedestrian stuff, standard column chromatograms--jagged peak after jagged peak flashing across the screen -- almost identical to the separation methods Karl Elster had used for her cytomitins fractions. Her cytomitins-- and he was (according to Doug's account) about to claim them as his own! In the darkness she felt the heat of anger surging up her neck again. Would she have the self-control to remain in her seat if Karl in fact started projecting her cytomitins peaks on the screen without acknowledging her priority on the work? She sat squirming, only half listening to the saga of the embryonic growth factors, wondering whether she should bolt for the rear exit before Karl came up to the dais. But before she could act on this impulse the speaker had concluded his talk, and the chairman, suggesting that discussion be reserved until the last speaker had also finished, proceeded to introduce Karl to the audience.

  It was the first time that she had heard Karl give a formal lecture and Janet was not greatly impressed with his delivery. He seemed to be embarking on a lesson on how not to give a talk, speeding through the acknowledgements and introduction, reading directly from his prepared manuscript, and scarcely giving a glance in the direction of audience or screen. It all comes, she thought, from too little class-room exposure. Her freshman biology class would not have tolerated such a performance; by now there would have been much scuffling of feet, rumbling of conversations punctuated by loud coughs and occasional titters. The present audience was too staid and courteous for such signs of outright disapproval, though there was a detectable air of restless inattention. But still Karl droned on. Part of the problem was that he talked down to the audience, as though he were instructing the uninitiated into the elements of peptide chemistry. He spared them none of the ghastly details, each component of the isolation media, buffers, stabilizers, protease inhibitors.

  The latter inhibitors were one of Karl’s pet subjects. As he rambled on, rhyming off their acronyms-- DFP, TACK, NEM-- Janet thought back to his early days in their lab, and how he had lectured her on the artefacts produced from autolytic actions of cell extracts, a hazard of which she was already aware. The health hazards from handling these often highly toxic inhibitors of autolysis were more serious concerns to her than they seemed to be to Karl; he exhibited an unhealthy lack of respect for the deadly reagents, a contempt bred no doubt from habitual familiarity.

  With only a passing mention of the previous work done by herself or Douglas, Karl now proceeded to relate the events leading to the discovery of the cytomitins. Janet’s early trials to isolate unknown substances from the culture fluid that might trigger dormant cells to enter mitosis and multiply were almost held up to ridicule as naive attempts using primitive techniques. Then he proceeded to describe the exciting revelation that more than one factor was involved: that the two factors had to work together synergistically. All of this had been a
ccomplished before Karl had set foot in the lab, but Janet could see that the impression was being conveyed that these refinements of protein fractionation coincided with his entry on the scene.

  Most of the slides he had shown, Janet recognized either as copies of her own, or slightly modified versions. Some were replicas of the data she had planned to use for her own talk later that night. It was in fact worse than she had imagined from Doug's information. She sat in impotent rage wondering if Karl would dare to show her key experiment, the chromatographic separation with her two discrete peaks of the cytomitins A and B, which was to have formed the crux of her evening presentation.

  It was just at this point when her worst suspicions were about to be confirmed, as she thought of it later, that the bomb-shell fell in the auditorium. Karl had been leading up to the perplexing problem which had almost stumped Janet early in the investigation. As she had purified the growth-stimulating protein from the cell culture medium the ability of the fractions to activate cell division seemed to simply vanish, despite the addition of inhibitors to prevent protein breakdown. Then, as Karl expressed it reading from his manuscript "it became apparent (meaning apparent to him) that the active fraction had separated into two large peaks (my two peaks) which were inactive separately, but fully effective when combined again together". Janet was looking down at her clenched fists in her lap, but she knew which slide showing her two peaks was due to appear next on the screen. It was only gradually that she became aware of the audience response: first an assortment of embarrassed giggles, then a few chuckles, and finally a chorus of ribald guffaws. Neither speaker nor projectionist had yet taken in the spectacle before them.

  "Well", thought Janet in astonishment, "those certainly aren’t my two peaks!"

  Looking up from his notes querulously in response to the unexpected laughter in the hall, Karl was probably the last to realize that the black and white line-drawing had been replaced by a technicolor photograph of the upper torso of a healthily endowed female, quite décolleté. The projectionist too was frozen momentarily in inaction, until unbidden he slipped in the next slide. The audience evidently considered this to be a joke in somewhat dubious taste, perpetrated by the speaker. To Karl, and to Janet who knew him well enough to disregard that possibility, it was apparent that he had been the butt rather than the perpetrator of the joke, and he had a difficult time recovering his composure.

  Karl bumbled along with the presentation, frequently losing his place in the manuscript with the consequence that the slides appeared at inopportune moments or in the wrong sequence. As he had to look up each time to ascertain that a bogus slide had not been inserted he became more flustered, repeating his previous statements or getting the order further muddled. Deciding that blame for the fiasco should not rest with him, Karl proceeded to take out his ire and frustration upon the unfortunate projectionist. The latter in response deliberately removed and inspected each slide before showing it to detect any more coloured anatomical displays, thereby ensuring that every third slide was either backwards or inverted. There was a palpable sense of relief among the audience when Karl feebly discussed the significance of his findings, and finished his presentation somewhat prematurely.

  Professor Beadle did his best to restore a serious tone during the general discussion. He summarized the morning's results of the labours of the expert protein biochemists who had produced a great lesson for the assembled biologists about doing good research only on good, clean protein fractions. There followed a few questions about details of techniques and protocols, mainly among the elite club of the session presenters. Professor Beadle was about to thank them and conclude the session, when Janet noted with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension the figure of her Professor striding with determination to the speakers' podium and removing the microphone from the hand of the rather startled chairman.

  "As a founding member of this colloquium," John Antwhistle began, establishing his credentials for the benefit of upstart scientists in the audience, "I wish to echo some of the words of my esteemed colleague and worthy chairman. This evening I shall be chairing the sister session on the biology of these important growth-promoting factors. I would be the first to agree with our chairman that isolation of clean factors is primary in studying their function. However, the primary finding in every case is a biological phenomenon and, obviously, the existence of the factors for isolation could never be known without the labours of the cell biologist. In the last analysis, the designations-- chemist, biologist, biochemist-- are irrelevant in assigning credit for the fruits of our labours. In short this work must be a team approach of diverse scientists with each bringing his or her special talents to bear. In the case of the cytomitins in my own Department I am sure that Dr. Elster would be the first to agree (although he was no doubt distracted from saying so at the end of his talk by the lively prank played on him by persons unknown) that it was in fact Dr. Gordon who originally demonstrated the synergism of the two fractions which he has subsequently so elegantly characterized as cytomitins A and B, but we await eagerly further chemical characterization of the differences between A and B, and we also await with excitement Dr. Gordon’s elegant biological characterization of the events of the cell cycle that are affected by these agents later this evening." And he sat down.

  During this extraordinary speech Janet felt her anger transformed into a warm glow of affection for her protector, mingled with an embarrassing yet satisfying sense of being the centre of attention. She only hoped that she would live up to all the hype and advanced billing for her evening talk. The other centre of attention, Karl, on the other hand could only nod dumbly in assent to the comments attributing priority for discovery of the factors to his colleague. At the chairman’s behest the audience signalled the adjournment of the proceedings with a round of applause for the speakers, and made a rapid departure for the lunch-room. Just before slipping out the back door, Janet noticed Karl walking angrily toward the projectionist, doubtless to continue his castigation in private. It had the makings of a jolly doubles grudge match this afternoon, she thought.