|
Center for Animal Testing and Research, 4:30
PM
The needle pierced the fur and skin swiftly like a ray of silver
light. As Matt injected the contents of the syringe into the mouse’s
hindquarters the animal gave a small squeak, but a few seconds later
it was roaming freely in its plexiglass cage with its littermates,
the episode seemingly forgotten.
“Any progress?” I asked quietly when he looked
up from the notes he was jotting in his notebook. He closed the
book and grinned. “I don’t know, what do your tissue
samples say?”
I pulled the pictures gingerly out of the folder I was carrying
and took the pen he held out to me. “Well, I’m reluctant
to confirm anything, but....” Pointing to the large patches
of abnormal cells in the photographs from the week before and placing
these side by side with the ones I’d taken just that morning,
I gave him to understand that the mouse tumors were indeed shrinking
at a considerable rate. “What can it mean?” I demanded.
“They said it was impossible.”
Matthew Rainer examined his mice with an odd expression on his face.
“I’ll tell you in a bit,” he said. “First,
I have to ask you not to tell a soul about anything I’m about
to say to you.”
I considered this for a moment. “You’re not saying Dr.
Stahl doesn’t know...?”
“Anything whatsoever. Are you with me?”
As a lowly undergrad and an ethics student, I knew I could not agree
to anything, and yet curiosity had always been something of a failing
for me.... I nodded.
The mice scurried heedlessly around the cage. Whether they knew
of the malignant moraloma growing within their small, furry bodies
I could not say. It was a rare enough disease; its first symptoms
were a marked level of antisocial and violent behavior that made
it an unpleasant task for me to obtain the tissue samples I took
every morning for the microscope. It was, however, unusual, and
therefore interesting, in that it possessed, like a few of its human
cousins, the ability to spread through a virus. Matt, being a graduate
student in virology, had readily undertaken the project to study
the disease and its progress.
It had been an uphill battle, to say the least. If we had been using
monkey models or working with stem cells, I doubt the project would
have stayed afloat as long as it had in the face of animal rights
and pro-life activists. But as we could not exactly use plants,
and as the alternative would have been no progress at all, we were
allowed to continue under scrutiny.
The lab had isolated what might have been the responsible gene just
before I arrived, and my job was to identify and track the growth
of cancerous cells in infected mice. But lately my samples had been
doing something unexpected, and I suspected Matt was onto something.
He led me down the hall and pulled open the door of a freezer along
a wall. Retrieving a small glass vial containing a clear liquid,
he shot me a conspiratorial look and ducked into an empty lab. I
followed and locked the door behind me. “Now tell me.”
“Any guesses as to what this is?” he said, turning on
a single light and swirling the tube under it.
“No,” I replied, “but I assume you’ll enlighten
me.”
“This,” he began, “is what I like to call an ‘anti-virus....’”
His project had been to study the mechanism of infection of the
virus, and in an odd burst of inspiration he had managed to make
a copycat version, or so he thought. As it had been his job also
to inject the mice with different concentrations of the pathogen,
he had decided to take a few cells from one of his unsuspecting
victims to test out his creation. What had followed must have been
one of the great accidents of science.
By some grand miscommunication he had misread a note I had left
that evening saying that I had rearranged the cages to make data-gathering
more convenient and noting their new positions. Instead of healthy
mice he had drawn a sample straight from a tumor on one of the mice
from his highest-dosage group. By the time he’d noticed his
mistake, he had already mixed the cells with some of his concoction.
But he decided to keep the sample for a positive control, since
in any case they were already diseased and could only become more
so, and went back for normal cells. The next morning, to his utter
amazement, he had returned to reverted cancer cells and perfectly
unchanged normal ones. So, naturally, after a few repeats, he had
decided to treat the mice themselves.
“So, then, do you think it could have been a fluke?”
I asked, eyeing the half-empty vessel anxiously.
“Not likely,” he answered, showing me his notebook.
“I wrote it all down to the last detail last time, besides
which this is actually my second batch that I have here. Your results
have been consistent?”
“Almost to the cell.” I was starting to get excited.
“So this ‘anti-virus,’ how exactly does it work?”
“Why, almost precisely how I dubbed it-—it mimics
the moralysis virus in reverse, and removes the virus gene.”
“Matt,” I said in a low voice, “you have to publish
this.”
“No.”
“But imagine the consequences! We could reverse some of the
worst plagues on mankind. We could wipe out disease altogether.
It would be the best thing that ever happened!”
He stared at me. “I want to believe you,” he said slowly,
“but I’m not so sure. You see, I’ve been having
this dream. Somehow, somebody else gets hold of this recipe, and
instead of using it to help people he uses it to decimate his enemies.
So he unleashes some bug on an entire country and withholds the
cure. Friends of the afflicted country let out their own bug, and
sooner or later they start a new kind of war, one that doesn’t
require soldiers, or heavy weaponry, or obeying any kind of orders.
But by then no one any longer has the capability, or even the desire,
to reverse the plague....”
“Well, yeah, but doesn’t that sound a bit farfetched?”
I countered. “What if, thanks to your work, somebody manufactures
a cure for AIDS? Would you try to prevent that?”
“What if they do?” He shrugged. “Look, I want
to do good, but how much do you imagine the manufacturer of this
miracle cure would charge for it? It happens all the time, you know:
if you’re rich you can live indefinitely, if you’re
poor it’s just too bad. That includes rich and poor countries
too. So instead of ‘I wish there were something I could do,’
it becomes, ‘sorry, we only save those who can pay.’
How much good would that do?”
I was dumbfounded. This was not the warm, idealistic Matt Rainer
I had liked immediately for his intelligent smile and the way he
seemed to respect even the poor mice that were to be his subjects.
“What happened?” I demanded quietly.
He sighed and took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. “This.”
It was an article from an online news journal. Our main sponsor
was withdrawing funding for our project on the grounds of animal
cruelty. Dr. Stahl had never even been informed. “That the
inhuman practice of infecting innocent creatures with a fatal disease
to study its effects has been going on for this long is an outrage,”
a leading activist was quoted to say. I crumpled the paper in my
hands.
“I don’t suppose a Nobel Prize would shut them up?”
I sneered.
“I wouldn’t know,” he replied. “What they
don’t want, I’m not giving them.”
Our eyes met, and, after what seemed like a long time, I nodded.
“How much serum have you got left?”
“Enough for the last batch of mice.”
“What are you doing with the recipe?”
He looked down at the notebook in his hands. “I hadn’t
really thought about it....”
The mouse cages had been padded down with extra shreds of paper,
and it was time to leave. As I turned to go, Matt looked up from
his last mouse and smiled ironically. “Have fun at ethics,”
he said.
I watched a quivering nose and whiskers that were pressed up against
the glass of the cage beside me. “Goodbye, little fella,”
I cooed. “You won’t tell a soul, will you?”
|
