Science makes only one demand: contribution to science.
- Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo
“You can’t do that. The ends doesn’t justify the means.” Gumbing said, speaking in idioms as usual. Gumbing was the kind of man who could summarize an entire philosophy in bumper stickers. A man who was so used to repeating what he’d heard and seen that he wasn’t sure which words were his and which he was quoting. His balding head was perpetually covered by a salt stained baseball cap. Like a horse who develops patches of salt from the dried sweat of working muscles, Gumbing’s only working muscle left the crystallized white line across his cap. I thought that if it weren’t for his animated way of talking and shaking his head, the salt deposits would grow, forming stalactites. They would increase in size, covering the symbol of his favorite team, continuing over his body until he was encased in the crystalline structure any scientist finds beautiful.
“Shut up Gumbing,” Stern announced without looking up from the letter. The notice had come a few months ago. In amazing briefness it announced the end of us. Charles Stern, Bryan Gumbing and I were the co-heads of the Institute for Zoonotic Potential. Our laboratories depended heavily on funding from the National Institutes of Health to stay running. The thousands of dollars that our labs spent in a day had to come from somewhere and for the past decade that somewhere had been the NIH.
“It’s those damn budget cuts,” Gumbing continued. “Anything that doesn’t make people bleed out of their orifices or spread through sex is considered expendable.” Gumbing was repeating what we all knew. Science is supposed to be immune from politics and subjectivity, but in the end it still depends on keeping people interested. I spent the last ten years working sixty hours a week because I was fascinated by “the bug” as we called it. Arsineous immoralis was a small bacteria that was normally found in chickens, but it had an amazing capacity for adaptation. Any treatment we thrown at it was useless at first. Lately we had begun to make progress at treating it and curing it.
“Exactly, that’s why this is the only option.” I had to remind them of the task at hand. We were meeting to discuss the death or life of our labs. “We all know that this bug has the potential to jump species from chicken to pig and pig to person. We all know that potential plus time equals inevitability. If we don’t continue this research, then when this bug does finally jump species there won’t be any therapies to fight it. There won’t be any published papers on it’s mechanism of adaptation. We’ll be helpless.”
Stern looked up at me. Whenever Gumbing and I got into arguments over the future course of the project he would look up at whomever he agreed with. I knew that I had him.
“How would we do this?” The fact that he was willing to consider particulars meant I had already overcome the first obstacle, opening the floor to discussion.
“I can’t believe you’re considering this. This is insane.” Gumbing was like a broken record.
“Shut up Gumbing,” I said. Now that Stern was on my side we could overrule our fearful colleague. “You never have the guts to make a decision and act. All you do is theorize.” He was a fossil. Gumbing was twice my age and he came from a different era of science. He was a boy scout. All of the people in his lab used carbon copy lab notebooks. He would never let them fudge a result or make an assumption. He was a man paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake. Like his speaking style he had acquired his sense of scientific ethics from others who were already dead. This fear was the reason he was as old as Stern, but not nearly as respected in his field. He was a failure.
“Well, we’d have to overcome the species specificity, but the only problem there is the protein marker. We could get the right gene from E. coli or almost any other bacteria that does naturally infect humans.” The ease with which the bug might begin to infect people was what attracted us to the organism to begin with. “Monica has been studying the E. coli’s similarity to immoralis for a few months now. I’m sure we could use her data and material to find an appropriate candidate.” Monica was an intern in my lab and my latest fling. With my work week it becomes difficult to find romance anywhere but the lab. She was just here for the summer and her ability in the lab wasn’t great, but she had determination. That could make up for a lot.
“But how would we get it out of the lab? Who would be the index case and how would we prevent it being linked to us?” Stern was asking the question I had been asking myself for awhile now. The only way I could think of to start the spread of the disease was a sacrifice. “There’s no way the NIH isn’t going to realize that our lab was the source of the infection. We’re the only ones working on this bug. One of us has to get it and spread it.”
“One of us? You’re crazy! That thing is lethal. If it leaked into the human population it would spread like wildfire. You want one of us to die first. Besides, how is the NIH going to feel about funding a lab that has just leaked out a deadly bacterium?” Gumbing was right. Generally a scientist who screws up on one tenth the scale we were thinking would be severely reprimanded and regulated. Criminal action could follow. This, though, was anther part of the sacrifice.
“The NIH will hate it, but they’ll have no choice. It’s biological blackmail. Any investigation into the leak will lay the blame on whichever of us is chosen to spread it. That person will be dead before the dishonor hits. We are the only lab doing this research and we are the best hope for fighting the spread. We’ll have more grant money than we know what to do with. There will be other labs that start in, but we’re ahead of them. In the end it will open up the field to funding and resources. We’ll learn more about this thing in the next year than we have in the past ten. People will be begging to collaborate with us.”
“By us you mean the two who survive,” Stern added, reminding us of the decision we now faced. “Well, choosing the one who has the least to lose is ridiculous. Gumbing has a family, I’m the most accomplished and you have the most ahead of you in life. We’ll break three graduated pipettes into unequal lengths. The person who chooses the short pipette gets infected. Are you in, Gumbing?”
Gumbing had been against this from the beginning, but his opposition was based more on fear than morals. Once he realized he was in the minority he quickly acquiesced. “No Max. I understand we need this.”
So, the pipettes were broken and put into a bucket of ice. The length of each pipette was unknown. It was the ultimate experiment. We each stood in front of one of the pipettes and grabbed the end. On the count of three we would remove the pipette and see who was to make the sacrifice. Who would be the index case in the new outbreak of a previously little known and little cared about bacteria?
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