Green Earth

“We’re going to have to tell Derek the bad news.”

“Derek is not going to like it.”

“Not going to like it! Fifty-one million dollars? He’s going to hate it!”

“Think about blowing that much money. What an idiot he is.”

“Is it worse to have a scientist who is a bad businessman as your CEO, or a businessman who is a bad scientist?”

“What about when they’re both?”

They sat around the bench looking at the mice cages and the rolls of data sheets. A Dilbert cartoon mocked them as it peeled away from the end of the counter. It was a sign of something deep that this lab had Dilberts taped to the walls rather than Far Sides.

“An in-person meeting for this particular communication is contraindicated,” Brian suggested.

“No shit,” Leo said.

Marta snorted. “You can’t get a meeting with him anyway.”

“Ha ha.” But Leo was far enough out in Torrey Pine Generique’s power structure that getting a meeting with Derek was indeed difficult.

“It’s true,” Marta insisted.

“Which is stupid,” Brian pointed out. “The company is totally dependent on what happens in this lab.”

“Not totally,” Leo said.

“Yes it is! But that’s not what the business schools teach these guys. The lab is just another place of production. Management tells production what to produce. Input from the agency of production would be wrong.”

“Like the assembly line choosing what to make,” Marta said.

“Right. Thus the idiocy of business management theory in our time.”

“I’ll send him an e-mail,” Leo decided.

So Leo sent Derek an e-mail concerning what Brian and Marta persisted in calling the exploding mice problem. Derek (according to reports they heard later) swelled up like one of their experimental subjects. It appeared he had been IV’d with two liters of genetically engineered righteous indignation.

“It’s in the literature!” he was reported to have shouted at Dr. Sam Houston, his vice president in charge of research and development. “It was in The Journal of Immunology, there were two papers that were peer-reviewed, they got a patent for it, I went out there to Maryland and checked it all out myself! It worked there, damn it. So make it work here!”

“Make it work?” Marta said when she heard this. “See what I mean?”

“Well, you know,” Leo said grimly. “That’s the tech in biotech, right?”

“Hmmm,” Brian said, interested despite himself.

After all, manipulations of gene and cell were hardly ever done “just to find things out.” They were done to accomplish certain things inside the cell, and later, inside a living body. Biotechnology, bio techno logos; the word on how to put the tool into the living organism. Genetic engineering meant putting something new inside a body’s DNA, to effect something in the metabolism.

They had done the genetics; now it was time for the engineering.

So Leo and Brian and Marta, and the rest of Leo’s lab, began to work on it. Sometimes at the end of a day, when the sun was breaking sideways through gaps in the clouds out to sea, shining weakly in the tinted windows, they would compare their most recent results, and try to make sense of the problem. Sometimes one of them would stand up and use the whiteboard to sketch out some diagram illustrating his or her conception of what was going on, down there forever below the level of their physical senses. The rest would comment, and drink coffee, and think it over.

“What we need is to package the inserts with a ligand that is really specific for the target cells. If we could find that specificity, out of all the possible proteins, without going through all the rigmarole of trial and error …”

“Too bad we don’t still have Pierzinski! He could run the possibilities through his algorithm.”

“Well, we could call him up and ask him to give it a try.”

“Sure, but who’s got time for that kind of thing?”

“He’s still working on a paper with Eleanor on campus,” Marta said, meaning UCSD. “I’ll ask him when he comes down.”

They wandered off to go home, or back to their desks and benches, thinking over plans for more experiments. Getting the mice, getting the time on the machines, sequencing genes, sequencing schedules; when you were doing scientific work the hours flew by, and the days, and the weeks. This was the main feeling: there was never enough time to do it all. Was this different from other kinds of work? Leo’s things-to-do list grew and shrank, grew and shrank, grew and then refused to shrink. He spent much less time than he wanted to at home in Leucadia with Roxanne. Roxanne understood, but it bothered him, even if it didn’t bother her.

He called the Jackson labs and ordered new and different strains of mice, each strain with its own number and bar code and genome. He got his lab’s machines scheduled, and assigned the techs to use them, moving some things to the front burner, others to the back, all to accommodate this project’s urgency.

On certain days, he went into the lab where the mouse cages were kept and opened a cage door. He took out a mouse, small and white, wriggling and sniffing the way they did, checking things out with its whiskers. Quickly he shifted it so that he was holding it at the neck with the forefingers and thumbs of both hands. A quick hard twist and the neck broke. Very soon after that the mouse was dead.

This was not unusual. During this round of experiments, he and Brian and Marta and the rest of them tourniqueted and injected about three hundred mice, drew their blood, then killed and rendered and analyzed them. That was an aspect of the process they didn’t talk about, not even Brian. Marta in particular went black with disgust; it was worse than when she was premenstrual, as Brian joked (once). Her headphones stayed on her head all day long, the music turned up so loud that even the other people in the lab could hear it. Ultraprofane hip-hop. If she can’t hear she can’t feel, Brian joked right next to her, Marta oblivious and trembling with rage, or something like it.

But it was no joke, even though the mice existed to be killed, even though they were killed mercifully, and usually only some few months before they would have died naturally. There was no real reason to have qualms, and yet still there was no joking about it. Maybe Brian would joke about Marta (if she couldn’t hear him), but he wouldn’t joke about that. In fact he insisted on using the word kill rather than sacrifice, even in write-ups and papers, to keep it clear what they were doing. Usually they had to break their necks right behind the head; you couldn’t inject them to “put them to sleep,” because their tissue samples had to be clear of all contaminants. So it was a matter of breaking necks, as if they were tigers pouncing on prey. If done properly it paralyzed them so that it was quick and painless—or at least quick. No feeling below the head, no breathing, immediate loss of mouse consciousness, one hoped. Leaving only the killers to think it over. Usually the mice deaths occurred in the mornings, so they could get to work on the samples. By the time the scientists got home the experience was somewhat forgotten, its effects muted. But people like Marta went home and dosed themselves with drugs on those days—she said she did—and played the most hostile music they could find, 110 decibels of forgetting. Went out surfing. Didn’t talk about it.

In the meantime, while they were working on this problem, their good results with the HDL “factory cells” had been plugged into the paper they had written about the process, and sent upstairs to Torrey Pines’ legal department, where it had gotten hung up. Repeated queries from Leo got the same e-mailed response: still reviewing—do not publish.

“They want to see what they can patent in it,” Brian said.

“They won’t let us publish until we have a patent and a delivery method,” Marta predicted.

“But that may never happen!” Leo cried. “It’s good work, it’s interesting! It could help make a big breakthrough!”

“That’s what they don’t want,” Brian said.

“They don’t want a big breakthrough unless it’s our big breakthrough.”

“Shit.”

Leo had never gotten used to this. Sitting on results, doing private science, secret science—it went against the grain. It wasn’t science as he understood it, which was a matter of finding out things and publishing them for all to see and test, critique, put to use.

But it was getting to be standard operating procedure. Security in the building remained intense; even e-mails out had to be checked for approval, not to mention laptops, briefcases, and boxes leaving the building. “You have to check in your brain when you leave,” as Brian put it.

“Fine by me,” Marta said.

“I just want to publish,” Leo insisted grimly.

“You’d better find a targeted delivery method if you want to publish that particular paper, Leo.”

So they continued to work on the Urtech method. The new experiments slowly yielded their results. The volumes and dosages had sharp parameters on all sides. The Maryland method stubbornly remained an artifact.

By now, however, enough time had passed that Derek could pretend that the whole Urtech purchase had never happened. It was a new financial quarter; there were other fish to fry, and for now the pretense could be plausibly maintained that it was a work in progress rather than a total bust. It wasn’t as if anyone else had solved the targeted nonviral delivery problem, after all. It was a hard problem. Or so Derek could say, in all truth, and did so whenever anyone was inconsiderate enough to bring the matter up. Whiners on the company’s website chat room could be ignored as always.