Michael Palmer - Natural Causes

"There ain't much of our little viral friend in your lady's blood," Mulholland said with something of a midwestern twang. "But he's there, alive and kicking. For now, until we've got something a bit more scientific, we're calling him George. Although we could just as easily have made him a Georgia. The first evidence we got was indirect-an antiviral antibody that didn't match any of the ones we know about. Now we have some actual electron microscope pictures of the little guy. Handsome. A veritable matinee idol. Might be in the adenovirus class. We're going to be working today on completing the chemical dissection of his DNA. But as far as we've gone, he's a perfect match with the DNA sequence from the previous sample you sent us from Lisa Grayson. How much time before we get to your hospital, Dr. Baldwin?"

"Ten minutes. Less actually. Listen, though. I'm afraid that when I'm being addressed by someone to whom I already owe a great deal of gratitude, I'll have to insist on 'Sarah.' "

"Well, then, Sarah-and you, too, Rosa-supposing I use the drive time we have left to give you both a little background of what we're up against, and what we're going to try to do today. I'm glad I decided to conduct this business up here. It'll be much easier for me to operate without looking over my shoulder every other minute. I've disconnected the screen on the terminal in our lab. The modem's hidden beneath a pile of papers. My department head-or yours, Rosa-could be standing three feet away, and he'd have no idea that data's pouring out of the place."

"Thank you for going to all this trouble," Sarah said.

"Just being cautious. This woman here's a star. It's time some people down there besides me know it. Now, then. There's no question your Miss Grayson has a low-grade viral infection of some sort."

"And not a commonly known virus?" Rosa asked.

Mulholland shook his head. "Hardly. We're going to finish mapping out George's DNA as soon as we get your computer booted up. But even at this point, I can say that whatever George is, he ain't in the books I've checked. He could still be something natural that we just don't know about yet. But I doubt that. A much better bet is something man-made. With luck, we'll know for certain by lunchtime."

"Then what?" Sarah asked.

"Well, assuming we finish our DNA sequencing and still suspect George is a product of man rather than a production of God, I think it will be time for a crash legal course on Diamond versus Chakrabarty."

"What's that all about?"

The virologist nodded respectfully toward Rosa Suarez.

"Well," he said, "it's about these hungry little bacterial beasties that eat oil slicks. I suspect that when we get to that point, Dr. Rosa, here, will tell you all about it, since she's the one responsible for introducing it to our unit. Before we can do anything with Diamond versus Chakrabarty, though, we have to get a more detailed biochemical picture of George."

Sarah pulled up to the security gate at the MCB campus.

"We're just going in to drop some things off, Joe," she lied. "We'll be out in half an hour. Probably less."

Finding parking within the enclosed campus was never any great problem. But getting past the security guard often demanded inspired guile and panache. This morning Sarah had both. She found an empty slot directly behind the Thayer Building.

"Welcome to the Medical Center of Boston, Dr. Mulholland," she said.

On the far side of the campus, workmen were setting up barriers around the antiquated, decaying Chilton Building.

"Is that the building they're going to blow up?" Rosa asked.

"Blow down, from what I understand," Sarah said. "An implosion. Next Saturday. The hospital press release said that the expert doing the demolition is the best in the world. He claims there won't be so much as a brick outside of the barriers."

"Should be quite a show," Mulholland said.

"Almost everything that happens around here is quite a show. Glenn Paris, the president of the hospital who's providing your computer today, is the one primarily responsible for that atmosphere. This time he's actually having grandstands put up. He's also raising money by raffling off the chance to be the one who actually presses the button. I bought five chances myself."

"Sounds exciting," Rosa said. "Well, if I'm still around here, perhaps I'll join you."

By noon they were getting close to identifying the man-made recombinant DNA virus that Ken Mulholland had named George. With the exception of a five-minute break to stretch and plod to the men's room, the virologist had not moved from in front of the screen. Seated to his right, equally immersed in the evolving puzzle, Rosa Suarez determined various probabilities with a calculator and took notes on a yellow legal pad. Sarah, feeling at times like a fifth wheel, came and went, seeing her patients in the clinic, and trying to do some reading for an article she was writing. She returned to the small office each time with coffee or Coke and Danish-always politely refused by Rosa and inevitably wolfed down by Mulholland, who seldom took his eyes off the screen to see what he was eating.

He was younger than Rosa by two decades or so, but it was clear the two of them delighted in working with one another. Three hundred IQ points between them, Sarah estimated. Probably more. She felt a spark of anger at those who had the audacity, arrogance, and self-serving immorality to have tampered with their BART investigation results.

"Okay," Mulholland said, still transfixed on the screen, "this is the next sequence. A-T, A-T, C-G, A-T."

A-T: adenine and thymine; C-G: cytosine and guanine. The paired deoxyribose bases that were the building blocks of life. From medical school courses, Sarah knew the rudiments of DNA structure, function, and replication. But these two, working with Mulholland's biochemist in Atlanta, were operating in the stratosphere of the subject. At the Atlanta end of the modem connection, the chemist-a woman named Molly-had used specific enzymes to chop the viral DNA into small segments. Those segments had been identified and now were being sequenced by computer to re-create the complex, three-dimensional, DNA double helix that was, in essence, the virus. Mulholland and Rosa were pausing with each new set of data to extend the model they were building on the screen, and to compare it to an extensive library of knowns.

Sarah watched Ken Mulholland down a pastrami sandwich as he recited the latest sequence of phosphates and deoxyribose units to Rosa.

That's all she wrote, Ken. What you have is what George is. I'm finished

… and famished. Good Luck. Molly

The message appeared on the screen, and was followed by a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon in which two geeky scientists, peering intently into their microscopes, were themselves beneath someone's huge microscope lens. Rosa took a turn at the keyboard, running the final piece of structural information against the library of known viruses. In just a few minutes she shook her head.

"Not here," she said.

Rubbing his eyes, Mulholland swung his chair around to Sarah.

"George is some sort of adenovirus, but he's had parts added," he said.

"He's bioengineered," Rosa said. "No es de Dios. Not of God. The questions now to be answered are: By whom? and Does George have anything to do with DIC?"

"Diamond versus-" Sarah was going to attempt the other name in the case, but Mulholland spared her the effort.

"Chakrabarty," he said. "Rosa, do you want to explain?"

"No, no. You go ahead, please."

"She's too modest," Mulholland said. "Okay. D. versus C. is the landmark case for patenting new life forms. Ananda Chakrabarty was a microbiologist working for General Electric. Back in the early seventies, he genetically altered the naturally occurring bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The resultant bioengineered germ could digest a number of the hydrocarbons found in crude oil, breaking chemical bonds, and in effect turning a disastrous slick into fish food. The discovery was potentially worth hundreds of millions. But the U.S. patent office refused to allow him to patent the beastie. In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decision, saying in effect that there was no difference between building a better mousetrap and building a better mutant."