Mutant

by Peter Clement

  “Then we’re okay,” he said, his voice immediately dropping an octave. “With our new filters, she’ll find no traces of what we’re making, right?”

  “Right,” he answered, getting out of bed and growing uneasy over how readily Morgan grew rattled whenever they encountered a problem. The man would need a lot steadier nerve for what lay ahead. “And more than that, she could be doing us a big favor,” he reassured, figuring the more secure he made Morgan feel, the better.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Think about it. You could confront her with the fact that you know she snooped around the place illegally, then challenge the great Dr. Kathleen Sullivan to release the results she obtained from the samples she took. She’d have to pronounce us clean as a whistle. A seal of approval like that from someone with her credibility would guarantee we won’t be under any additional scrutiny for the time being. What better conditions could we have for preparing the attack?”

  “But what if her finding nothing fails to make her back off?”

  “Then our client will arrange that she disappears.”

  Three Weeks Later

  Sullivan recognized most of the reporters sitting around the long conference table from their visit to Agrenomics together. The woman representing Environment Watch, who’d challenged her on the lack of research findings relating directly to humans, rose to her feet. “So what were your test results, Dr. Sullivan?” she demanded.

  “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to my laboratory,” Sullivan replied, pointedly ignoring the question. “Before we get down to business let me introduce the newest member of our team, Azrhan Doumani, our chief resident, who is with us on scholarship from the University of Kuwait and doing his graduate thesis on the effects of naked DNA. I figured that since he did the testing you want to discuss, he should be here.”

  The young man sitting beside her at the head of the table smiled nervously and nodded, his dark features in brilliant contrast to his lab coat.

  “And to his right is a special guest I invited to join us today whom some of you may already know, CEO of the Blue Planet Society, environmentalist Steve Patton, a longtime friend and colleague.”

  A distinguished-looking gray-haired man in a dark suit seated beside Doumani rose to his feet. His lean physique and tanned features lent him the healthy aura of an outdoorsman at odds with the sallow complexions and doughy body shapes that predominated among those reporting the nature beat. “Glad to be here,” he acknowledged, grinning broadly.

  “And I won’t be puttin’ up with any rudeness to these two gentlemen from you lot,” Sullivan added, punctuating her lilting admonishment with a pointed finger and the flash of her own well-known smile.

  Everyone laughed except the grim spokesperson for Environment Watch. “Really, Dr. Sullivan,” she began, raising her voice over the chuckling of her colleagues, “we didn’t come here to hear you act cute—”

  “You requested this interview, not me!” retorted Sullivan, her eyes all at once shooting flares of emerald fire at the woman. “Any point in my asking who tipped you off about my extracurricular activity at Agrenomics?”

  Silence.

  “Ah, yes, never reveal a source. Well, as long as you’re here, we might as well talk.”

  “So you admit you surreptitiously took samples from the grounds of the laboratory?” inquired a man seated opposite her.

  “Of course.”

  Her reply set off a flurry of questions.

  “Why?”

  “What did you take?”

  “How did you test them?”

  She surveyed their expectant faces for a few seconds and then replied, “I’ll begin by reminding you what I explained three weeks ago back at Agrenomics—that genetic engineers create vectors of naked DNA to jump genes from one species to another, and how afraid I am that these agents, once they are released into the environment, will infect other organisms, including humans. I figured one way of demonstrating their infectiousness would be to demonstrate traces of them in the plant life growing near the outlet vents at a facility using genetic vectors.”

  More questions erupted.

  “What did you find?”

  “You’ve confirmed your suspicions?”

  “Are we in danger?”

  “First let me outline what I did,” she shouted above the noise, “and then I’ll conclude with my results.” She immediately held up a green binder with a handwritten title in black ink which read, DNA Fingerprinting for Veggies.

  Everyone at the table burst into laughter, including the austere woman from Environment Watch.

  “Some wag in our lab did the label, but it’s not far off,” Sullivan continued when the room grew quiet again. “What forensic scientists can do to bloodstained gloves in L.A., we can do to pine needles, roots from Kentucky bluegrass, and bits of soil. Except I’m looking for man-made strands of naked DNA vectors that have set up shop in the chromosomes of an unintended host.”

  The absolute silence of the listeners in the room confirmed to Sullivan that she had their attention. “Mr. Doumani will now explain the process in detail.”

  A very astonished Azrhan Doumani, who obviously didn’t expect to be called on so soon, hesitantly got to his feet, swallowed a few times, and stated, “When Dr. Sullivan came back with her samples, we first treated each of the specimens to a shot of liquid nitrogen, freezing them into a brittle solid that we can easily grind to a fine mash using a mortar and pestle.”

  “We also go for the dry ice effect,” Sullivan interjected with a wink to her nervous colleague. “White vapors billowing out of beakers and rolling over the lab bench—it makes for great visuals whenever the media’s around.”

  The quip brought a few chuckles, but more important to Sullivan, she saw her young protégé’s shoulders relax a notch.

  “We then reach into the geneticist’s toolbox,” he continued, his manner less stiff than before, “take out a concoction of chemical washes called C-Tab, add them to our ground-up powder through a complex series of steps, and, after a spin in the centrifuge, end up with a solution of pure chromosomes—the gene strands of the organism—floating above all the debris. We siphon this off, again reach into our bag of tricks, this time to pull out what geneticists use to cut and paste DNA— restriction enzymes. We add them to our solution, where they break the chromosomes into genes and the genes into even smaller strands of DNA suitable for testing. Each enzyme attacks a specific site on the chain, and in this case, we treated our samples with the enzymes that would break off among other things pieces of DNA from a cauliflower mosaic virus, or CaMV. This is the most common invasive organism used in genetic engineering. Our idea was to look for DNA fragments from it, reasoning that by demonstrating their presence we’d have confirmation of a vector’s having infected the vegetation we were testing.”

  He paused, taking a sip of water, and Sullivan used the moment to gauge the audience’s interest. Several chairs squeaked, there were a few coughs, but tape recorders continued to roll and pens remained poised in midair, ready to write. Good, he’s still got them, she thought, breathing a sigh of relief, because unless they understood the test process, they wouldn’t grasp the real story hidden behind it all.

  Doumani continued. “Searching for and identifying these fragments amongst all the rest involves a few more of the standard procedural tools of our trade—separating out the various pieces of DNA on an electrophoretic gel, locating them by using a hideous carcinogen called ethidium bromide, which turns them pink, then literally giving them a scrub with a wash called GENE CLEAN— until we’re finally ready to lift a genetic fingerprint from them. Now, whether we’re after a drop of blood at a crime scene or a vector in plants, the identification technique involves the most basic tool a geneticist uses— stock DNA preparations called primers. When we add a specific set of them to strands of DNA, they line up and lock on to the portions of the strands where the nucleic acid sequences are exactly complementary to their own
. In other words, for our purposes here, we can use these primers as probes, to find whether a particular type of DNA is present in the chain we’re studying, provided we know what to test for. In this case, since we could only make an educated stab at what they used in the vectors, we also were guessing about what primers to employ, again settling on those for the cauliflower mosaic virus.” He paused again.

  No one made a sound.

  Still so far so good, thought Sullivan.

  “We heated each tiny specimen of DNA we were testing to near boiling,” resumed Doumani, “ninety-four degrees centigrade exactly, to break the DNA’s double helix structure into single strands. Afterward, we lowered the temperature to fifty-five degrees centigrade and added the primers, letting this mix stand for sixty seconds. . . .”

  Sounds of a dozen chairs scraping and people noisily clearing their throats quickly filled the room as his audience expressed their disinterest in the technical detail. Continuing to talk, Azrhan gave desperate little glances toward his supervisor that begged for a rescue.

  “Just like making soup,” broke in Sullivan. “In fact I could cook up a batch of the stuff in my kitchen if the oven timer weren’t broken.” There were a few isolated chuckles, but the restlessness persisted. “In the lab it’s even easier, because we have a machine the size of a double microwave to do all this finicky business for us, so let’s give that part a pass.”

  “Thank God!” someone muttered gratefully.

  “Because what comes now is the secret ingredient,” she continued, lowering her voice and drawing them to her, “an enzyme called Taq polymerase.”

  “Taq what?” exclaimed a man taking notes two seats away.

  “Taq polymerase,” she said lightly, as if to imply everyone should be familiar with the term. “Marine biologists first discovered this reagent decades ago, in the bacteria which thrive amidst the scalding waters of thermal vents at the ocean floor. The substance’s job is to set in motion the process that replicates DNA in these microbes, the same role all polymerases play in plants and animals throughout the planet. But a man named Kary Mullis realized that, unlike the others, this polymerase could function at the high temperatures we need to uncoil and mark specific segments of DNA with primers, as Azrhan so eloquently described. In 1993 Mullis received the Nobel Prize for using this observation to develop the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR— the technique used today to multiply a specific portion of a DNA strand starting from just a few molecules. Since that discovery, mankind’s study of DNA became infinitely easier, our unlocking the human genome is proceeding faster than anyone expected, and our ability to free the innocent or convict the guilty from evidence based on a microscopic drop of blood or semen has changed justice forever.” She paused to let what she’d said sink in so she wouldn’t overwhelm them with what came next.

  “Dr. Sullivan, cut to the chase. What did you find?” demanded the woman from Environment Watch, her tone a splash of acid against the eardrum.

  To Sullivan’s surprise, Azrhan, who had sunk into his seat when she first started talking, now leaped to his feet and, taking a deep breath as if to steel himself, took over the press conference again. “Our machine nudged the temperature up to seventy-five degrees centigrade, added the Taq polymerase, and stirred in a good supply of nucleotides—the basic building blocks of DNA. Normally this would start the reaction we were after, if the cauliflower mosaic virus was present. For those of you who are interested, Taq polymerase moves up and down the DNA strand to be replicated and, using it as a template, brings in the appropriate nucleotides, stringing them together in the right order. The result is a new strand of DNA complementary to the original. But as Mullis discovered, it can only set up on the strand to be copied at the points where that strand has a primer on it.” His voice confident, his delivery assured, and his eyes sparkling with enthusiasm for the work he obviously loved, he recaptured everyone’s attention. “In other words, since our primers were specific to cauliflower mosaic virus, if replication occurred at all, we’d have our proof that a naked DNA vector successfully infiltrated the flora on the grounds at Agrenomics. Furthermore, passing these copied bits and pieces of CaMV genes through an electrophoretic gel would sort them out according to molecular weight, thereby offering up that intruder’s genetic fingerprint.” He abruptly retook his seat, leaving everyone leaning forward expectantly in their chairs. Instead of saying anything, he looked at his mentor, as if waiting for her to speak.

  “Can we finally know what you found once you studied all this DNA you made?” a man at the end of the table called out, his voice brimming with exasperation.

  “Nothing,” said Sullivan.

  At first there was dead quiet.

  “Pardon?” the man finally managed to say, his tone incredulous.

  “I said we found nothing,” repeated Sullivan. “No replication occurred.”

  A chorus of disbelief erupted.

  “What!”

  “You wasted our time for this?”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  Above the din the familiar shrill voice of Environment Watch called out, “Does this mean your concerns over naked DNA vectors are bogus?”

  “Not at all!” shouted Sullivan to make herself heard. “It could simply mean that we don’t know what vectors Agrenomics is using. Or it could even be that they’ve installed proper filters.”

  “Are you saying they take your claims seriously?”

  “Ask them that.”

  “How do we know you wouldn’t come up just as empty around other research centers which use naked DNA vectors, filters or no filters—that the stuff just isn’t infectious?”

  “We don’t. I’m suggesting we check the grounds of every such plant worldwide, to find out. And for the tests to be reliable, the companies must be pressured to disclose what vectors they’re using so we’d know which primers to use.”

  The initial outburst subsided to a sullen grumbling as the rest of the reporters, most of them ignoring the two women’s conversation, angrily shoved back their chairs, stuffed notepads into briefcases, and packed up tape recorders. More than once Sullivan heard the word hoax.

  “Wait a minute. Listen, all of you!” said Steve Patton, jumping up from his chair. “Don’t you realize the real story here is the testing method we just walked you through— that there exists an easy and cheap way to screen whether naked DNA has infected the environment?”

  “Sit on it, mister,” snarled the man at the end of the table. “I don’t like being manipulated.” He stormed out the door.

  “The fact that no one is running such tests is really what you should be in an uproar about,” Patton shouted after him. “The fact that not one corporation worldwide provides independent geneticists with the access they need to company grounds or discloses the vectors we should be testing for—that’s the true outrage. And I’m here to announce that the Blue Planet Society would finance any such study.”

  The reporter never looked back.

  Patton turned to Sullivan and shrugged.

  Sullivan eyed those who were still packing up their equipment. “Won’t you grasp the opportunity here? You could report how these simple standard procedures can be used to establish essential screening, then maybe pressure will build to make it happen. If it does, possibly someone somewhere will find the hard evidence we need to wake everyone up to the fact that the risks are real. And if we’re truly lucky, that will happen before some lab accidentally causes a catastrophe with permanent consequences, such as resurrecting a new equivalent of the Spanish flu.”

  A few paused to listen, but most left, still fuming. The woman from Environment Watch said nothing more, but rather stood where she was and regarded Sullivan with a steady, thoughtful gaze. After a few seconds, she nodded and joined the others.

  “It’s so unfair,” consoled Azrhan later as he took a cup of tea with Sullivan and Patton in his mentor’s office. “They were the ones who insisted on coming here.” He appeared much more relaxed now that
he’d proved himself in his first encounter with the press.

  Sullivan sighed wearily. “I’d so hoped that we could convince them to get on board with us—issue a call for mandatory screening and a disclosure of vectors.” She gave a sarcastic laugh. “As it is, we’ll get pasted for crying wolf, or if we’re lucky, they’ll consider it ‘no news’ and run nothing.” She absently fingered the printouts that documented their negative findings. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think that somehow Bob Morgan discovered what I did and was so confident I’d ‘come up empty,’ as that shrew from Environment Watch put it, he leaked the fact that I was running the tests to the media—all to discredit me.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” scoffed Patton with a laugh.

  “Is it? Who else would know? Surely no one here spilled the beans. And he’s such a creep—I can just imagine him gloating over me having to say that I could find no evidence of environmental contamination around his plant.”

  Patton smiled behind his hand, his round wire-rimmed glasses and curly gray hair making him look owlishly wise in a way she found irksome.

  Azrhan, on the other hand, stared at her, his eyes widening in earnest amazement. “You really think he’d do that?” he said.

  “You bet I do. And for him to be that certain I’d find nothing, it means for sure they’re using a vector he knows we’ll never guess the primers for, or they really do have effective filters.”

  Azrhan nodded and continued to sip his tea in silence, letting his gaze slip out the window to where the winter dusk was settling over downtown Manhattan. Sullivan absently followed his line of sight, and saw he was watching the Twin Towers reflect the final seconds of the setting sun and turn themselves into pillars of fire.

  “Concentrate on the press, Kathleen,” said Patton with a chuckle. “You’ll accomplish more if you succeed in getting our message out with them than by obsessing about Agrenomics.” He got up from the easy chair opposite her desk. “And I wouldn’t write off that ‘shrew’ from Environment Watch. She seemed to be listening to you at the end.”