Читать книгу Green Earth - Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 10

Leo Mulhouse kissed his wife Roxanne and left their bedroom. The light was halfway between night and dawn. He went onto the balcony, heard the rumble of surf against the cliff. Out there lay the vast gray plate of the Pacific.

Leo had married into this clifftop house, so to speak; Roxanne had inherited it from her mother. Its view was something Leo loved, but the little grass yard below the second-story porch was only about fifteen feet wide, and beyond it was an open gulf of air and the gray foaming ocean, eighty feet below. And not that stable a cliff. He wished that the house had been placed a little farther back on its lot.

Back inside, down to the car. Down Europa, past the Pannikin in Leucadia, hang a right and head to work.

The Pacific Coast Highway in San Diego County was a beautiful drive at dawn. In any kind of weather it was handsome: in the sun with all the blues of the sea gleaming, in low clouds when shards and rays of horizontal sunlight broke through, or on rainy or foggy mornings when the narrow but rich palette of grays filled the eye. The gray dawns were the most frequent these days, as the region’s climate settled into what appeared to be a permanent El Niño—the Hyperniño, as people called it. The whole idea of a Mediterranean climate was leaving the world, even in the Mediterranean. Here coastal residents were getting sunlight deficiency disorders, and taking vitamin D and antidepressants to counteract the effects, even though ten miles inland it was a cloudless baking desert all the year round. The June Gloom had come to stay.

Leo took the coast highway to work every morning, enjoying the slight roller-coaster effect of dropping down to cross the lagoons, then rising back up to Cardiff, Solana Beach, and Del Mar. These towns looked best at this hour, deserted and as if washed for the day.

Then up the big hill onto Torrey Pines, past the golf course, quick right into Torrey Pines Generique. Down into its garage, into the biotech beast.

Complete security exam, metal detector, inspection by the bored security team, hardware and software check, sniff-over by Clyde the morning dog, trained to detect signature molecules: all standard in biotech now, after some notorious incidents of industrial espionage. The stakes were too high to trust anybody.

Then Leo was inside the compound, walking down long white hallways. He turned on his desktop screen, went out to check the experiments in progress. The most important current one was reaching an endpoint, and Leo was particularly interested in the result. It was a high-throughput screening of some of the proteins in the Protein Data Bank at UCSD, trying to identify ones that would make certain cells express much more high-density lipoprotein than they would normally. Ten times as much HDL, the “good cholesterol,” would be a lifesaver for people suffering from any number of ailments—atherosclerosis, obesity, diabetes, even Alzheimer’s. Any one of these ailments mitigated (or cured!) would be worth billions; a therapy that helped all of them would be—well. It explained the high-alert security enclosing the compound, that was for sure.

The experiment was proceeding but not yet done, so Leo went back to his office and read Bioworld Today on-screen. Robotics, artificial hormones, proteomic analyses—the whole industry was looking for therapeutic proteins, and ways to get those proteins into people. They were the recalcitrant problems, standing between “biotechnology” as an idea and medicine as it actually existed. If they didn’t solve these problems, the industry could go the way of nuclear power. If they did solve them, then it would be more like the computer industry in terms of financial returns—not to mention the impacts on health of course!

When Leo next checked the lab, two of his assistants, Marta and Brian, were standing at the bench, both wearing lab coats and rubber gloves, working the pipettes on a bank of flasks filling a countertop.

“Morning guys.”

“Hey Leo.” Marta aimed her pipette like a PowerPoint cursor at the small window on a long, low refrigerator. “Ready to check it out?”

“Sure am. Can you help?”

“In just a sec.” She moved down the bench.

Brian said, “This better work, because Derek just told the press that it was the most promising self-healing therapy of the decade.”

Leo was startled to hear this. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“No, please. Not really.”

“Really.”

“How could he?”

“Press release. Also calls to his favorite reporters, and on his webpage. The chat room is already talking about the ramifications. They’re betting one of the big pharms will buy us within the month.”

“Please Bri, don’t be saying these things.”

“Sorry, but you know Derek.” Brian gestured at one of the computer screens glowing on the bench across the way. “It’s all over.”

Leo squinted at a screen. “It wasn’t on Bioworld Today.”

“It will be tomorrow.”

The company’s website BREAKING NEWS box was blinking. Leo leaned over and jabbed it. Yep—lead story. HDL factory, potential for obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease …

“Oh my God,” Leo muttered as he read. “Oh my God.” His face was flushed. “Why does he do this?”

“He wants it to be true.”

“So what? We don’t know yet.”

With her sly grin Marta said, “He wants you to make it happen, Leo. He’s like the Road Runner and you’re Wile E. Coyote. He gets you to run off the edge of a cliff, and then you have to build the bridge back to the cliff before you fall.”

“But it never works! Coyote always falls!”

Marta laughed at him. She liked him, but she was tough. “Come on,” she said. “This time we’ll do it.”

Leo nodded, tried to calm down. He appreciated Marta’s spirit, and liked to be at least as positive as the most positive person in any given situation. That was getting tough these days, but he smiled the best he could and said, “Yeah, right, you’re good,” and started to put on rubber gloves.

“Remember the time he announced that we had hemophilia A whipped?” Brian said.

“Please.”

“Remember the time he put out a press release saying he had decapitated mice at a thousand rpm to show how well our therapy worked?”

“The guillotine turntable experiment?”

“Please,” Leo begged. “No more.”

He picked up a pipette and tried to focus on the work. Withdraw, inject, withdraw, inject—alas, most of the work in this stage was automated, leaving people free to think, whether they wanted to or not. After a while Leo left them to it and went back to his office to check his e-mail, then helplessly to read what portion of Derek’s press release he could stomach. “Why does he do this, why?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Marta and Brian were now in his doorway, Marta implacable: “I told you—he thinks he can make us do it.”

“It’s not us doing it,” Leo protested, “it’s the gene. We can’t do a thing if the altered gene doesn’t get into the cell we’re trying to target.”

“You’ll just have to think of something that will work.”

“You mean like, build it and they will come?”

“Yeah. Say it and they will make it. That’s Derek.”

Out in the lab a timer beeped, sounding uncannily like the Road Runner. Beep-beep! Beep-beep! They went to the incubator and read the graph paper as it rolled out of the machine, like a receipt out of an automated teller—like money out of an automated teller, in fact, if the results were good. One very big wad of twenties rolling out into the world from nowhere, if the numbers were good.

And they were. They were very good. They would have to plot it to be sure, but they had been doing this series of experiments for so long that they knew what the raw data would look like. The data were good. So now they were like Wile E. Coyote, standing in midair staring amazed at the viewers, because a bridge from the cliff had magically extended out and saved them. Saved them from the long plunge of a retraction in the press and subsequent NASDAQ free fall.

Except that Wile E. Coyote was invariably premature in his sense of relief. The Road Runner always had another devastating move to make. Leo’s hand was shaking.

“Shit,” he said. “I would be totally celebrating right now if it weren’t for Derek. Look at this”—pointing—“it’s even better than before.”

“See, Derek knew it would turn out like this.”

“The fuck he did.”

“Pretty good numbers,” Brian said with a grin. “Paper’s almost written too. It’s just plug these in and do a conclusion.”

Marta said, “Conclusions will be simple, if we tell the truth.”

Leo nodded. “Only problem is, the truth would have to admit that even though this part works, we still don’t have a therapy, because we haven’t got targeted delivery. We can make it but we can’t get it into living bodies.”

“You didn’t read the whole website,” Marta told him, smiling angrily.

“What do you mean?” Leo was in no mood for teasing. His stomach had already shrunk to the size of a walnut.

Marta laughed, which was her way of showing sympathy without admitting to any. “He’s going to buy Urtech.”

“What’s Urtech?”

“They have a targeted delivery method that works.”

“What do you mean, what would that be?”

“It’s new. They just got awarded the patent on it.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes.”

“Oh my God. It hasn’t been validated?”

“Except by the patent, and Derek’s offer to buy it, no.”

“Oh my God. Why does he do this stuff?”

“Because he intends to be the CEO of the biggest pharmaceutical of all time. Like he told People magazine.”

“Yeah right.”

Torrey Pines Generique, like most biotech start-ups, was undercapitalized, and could only afford a few rolls of the dice. One of them had to look promising to attract the capital that would allow it to grow further. That was what they had been trying to accomplish for the five years of the company’s existence, and the effort was just beginning to show results with these experiments. What they needed now was to be able to insert their successfully tailored gene into the patient’s own cells, so that afterward it would be the patient’s own body producing increased amounts of the needed proteins. If that worked, there would be no immune response from the body’s immune system, and the patient would be not just helped, but cured.

Amazing.

But (and it was getting to be a big but) the problem of getting the altered DNA into living patients’ cells hadn’t been solved. Leo and his people were not physiologists, and they hadn’t been able to do it. No one had. Immune systems existed precisely to keep these sorts of intrusions from happening. Indeed, one method of inserting the altered DNA into the body was to put it into a virus and give the patient a viral infection, benign in its ultimate effects because the altered DNA reached its target. But since the body fought viral infections, it was not a good solution. You didn’t want to compromise further the immune systems of people who were already sick.

So, for a long time now they had been the same as everyone else chasing the holy grail of gene therapy, a “targeted nonviral delivery system.” Any company that came up with such a system, and patented it, would immediately be able to have the method licensed for scores of procedures, and very likely one of the big pharmaceuticals would buy the company, making everyone in it rich, and often still employed. Over time the pharmaceutical might dismantle the acquisition, keeping only the method, but at that point the start-up’s employees would be wealthy enough to laugh that off—retire and go surfing, or start up another start-up and try to hit the jackpot again. At that point it would be more of a philanthropic hobby than the cutthroat struggle to survive that it often seemed like before the big success arrived.

So the hunt for a targeted nonviral delivery system was most definitely on, in hundreds of labs around the world. And now Derek had bought one of these labs. Leo stared at the new announcement on the company website. Derek had to have bought it on spec, because if the method had been well proven, there was no way Derek would have been able to afford it. Some biotech firm even smaller than Torrey Pines—Urtech, based in Bethesda, Maryland (Leo had never heard of it)—had convinced Derek that they had found a way to deliver altered DNA into humans. Derek had made the purchase without consulting Leo, his chief research scientist. His scientific advice had to have come from his vice president, Dr. Sam Houston, his friend and partner. A man who had not done lab work in a decade.

So. It was true.

Leo sat at his desk, trying to relax his stomach. They would have to assimilate this new company, learn their technique, test it. It had been patented, Leo noted, which meant they had it exclusively at this point, as a kind of trade secret—a concept many working scientists had trouble accepting. A secret scientific method? Was that not a contradiction in terms? Of course a patent was a matter of public record, and eventually it would enter the public domain. So it wasn’t a trade secret in literal fact. But at this stage it was secret enough. And it could not be a sure thing. There wasn’t much published about it, as far as Leo could tell. Some papers in preparation, some submitted, one accepted—he would have to check that one out as soon as possible—and a patent. Sometimes they awarded them so early. Two papers were all that supported the whole approach.

Secret science. “God damn it,” Leo said to his room. Derek had bought a pig in a poke. And Leo was going to have to open the poke and poke around.

There was a hesitant knock on his opened door, and he looked up.

“Oh hi, Yann, how are you?”

“I’m good Leo, thanks. I’m just coming by to say good-bye. I’m back to Pasadena now, my job here is finished.”

“Too bad. I bet you could have helped us figure out this pig in a poke.”

“Really?”

Yann’s face brightened like a child’s. He was a true mathematician, and had what Leo considered to be the standard mathematician personality: smart, spacy, enthusiastic, full of notions. All these qualities were a bit under the surface, until you really got him going. As Marta had remarked, not unkindly (for her), if it weren’t for the head tilt and the speed-talking, he wouldn’t have seemed like a mathematician at all. Whatever; Leo liked him, and his work on protein identification had been really interesting, and potentially very helpful.

“I don’t know what we’ve got,” Leo admitted. “It’s likely to be a biology problem, but who knows? You sure have been helpful with selection protocols.”

“Thanks, I appreciate that. I may be back anyway, I’ve got a project going with Sam’s math team that might pan out. If it does they’ll try to hire me on another temporary contract, he says.”

“That’s good to hear. Well, have fun in Pasadena in the meantime.”

“Oh I will. See you soon.”

And their best biomath guy slipped out the door.