Ken McClure - Hypocrite's Isle

Simmons had the distinct impression that Gavin was telling him what he wanted to hear. ‘Then maybe we should just leave it at that, shall we?’

‘Yes, boss,’ said Gavin. ‘No point in going up blind alleys.’

Simmons returned to his office and sighed as he slumped down into his chair. The fact that Gavin had quoted his own advice back at him was making him doubly suspicious about what Gavin was thinking. He knew it was all too easy for research students to go off at a tangent when they weren’t fully committed to their designated project, and that certainly would apply to Gavin, whose imagination had clearly been fired by seeing how well Valdevan worked in vitro . If Gavin’s heart was in something, he could be left alone to get on with it. If it wasn’t... he’d have to keep a close eye on him.

Simmons’ suspicions were well-founded, because Gavin had just discovered something that was occupying his full attention. He waited until Frank had returned to his office before picking up his eye lens and resuming what he had been doing. He had seen something in the report photographs that put a whole new slant on the Valdevan story and his pulse was racing. The more convinced he became of what he was seeing, the more excited he became, until he found it impossible to sit still any longer. Without saying anything to anyone, he got up, grabbed his jacket and left the lab.

Gavin started out across the Meadows. The blustery, wet weather of the past few days, with its accompanying strong westerly winds, had given way to clear skies and a slight but bitterly cold wind coming in from the east, but he welcomed the icy breaths he took as he headed for nowhere in particular at a brisk pace.

Because the drug had failed to kill tumour cells in patients suffering from cancer, the Grumman Schalk team had understandably assumed that either it had been inactivated in the body or had been prevented in some way from reaching the site of the tumour. They had put all their time and effort into determining what the problem was, but in the end had drawn a blank. Gavin now knew that they had been wasting their time. It was quite clear from the photographs he had been examining for the past hour that the drug had reached the tumour cells and had been active when it got there.

Close examination of the photographs of cells taken from patients showed what he now recognised as the typical membrane pinching caused by Valdevan, despite no mention of this by the company in their report — but of course, they had not been looking for slight membrane defects; they had been looking for cell death.

Gavin’s discovery had left him with a puzzle. The fact that you could have membrane damage without resultant cell death implied that the S16 was not an essential gene. If the drug could knock it out and the cells could continue to grow and divide, this was the very opposite of what he’d found in his lab experiments, where membrane pinching was always followed by cell death.

Forty minutes of walking round in circles deep in thought brought some measure of calm to his mind, which was important because he had decisions to make. Frank didn’t want him investigating the failure of Valdevan because he felt that Grumman Schalk had already taken it as far as it could go. But what he’d seen in the photographs was making him reluctant to stop and switch to studying something else, when so much remained unanswered.

Apart from anything else, biochemistry was not Gavin’s favourite branch of science. It could be long, tedious and boring, with constant, fidgety adjustments to experimental times and conditions being necessary before things started to work — if they ever did. What was certain was that he couldn’t start work on a biochemical study of the new strain and continue to investigate the failure of Valdevan. There weren’t enough hours in the day.

He supposed he could come clean with Frank: tell him what he had seen in the photographs and hope that he might change his mind, but on the other hand, he might not. He took a kick at a discarded Coke can lying in the grass beside the path and swore under his breath. He couldn’t leave things the way they were, he decided. One way or another he had to follow it up.

It dawned on him that he could work on Valdevan over the Christmas break. No one would be around at that time for nearly two weeks and, even if Frank should find out what he was up to, he could hardly insist that he work on something else in what was officially a holiday period. He felt more relaxed. All he had to do now was work out exactly what he was going to do...

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand the significance,’ said Caroline when the pair met in Doctors at eight and Gavin, full of enthusiasm, told her what he had discovered.

‘Don’t you see? The company thought that Valdevan wasn’t reaching the tumours in cancer patients — either that or it was being inactivated in the body in some way — but it wasn’t either of these things. The drug did reach the tumours and it was still active when it did.’

‘But it still didn’t work,’ said Caroline.

Gavin brushed the objection aside as if it were trivial. ‘I know, but the research angle changes, don’t you see? Frank’s been insisting that the company had probably investigated every angle that could be investigated, but that’s not true. They were asking the wrong questions about the wrong problem. They spent hundreds of man hours altering drug composition and changing the ways of administering it in order to ensure that Valdevan got to the cancer when it was getting there all along!’

‘Maybe the concentration was too low when it got there?’

‘They monitored drug levels in the patients. It was well above what killed the cells in the lab experiments.’

‘But it still didn’t work,’ said Caroline, leaning across the table to make her point. ‘Surely that has to be the bottom line, doesn’t it?’

‘But that’s exactly what I want to investigate,’ said Gavin.

‘But you’ll be right back at the beginning, and now you’ll have an even bigger problem to investigate than the company thought they had. You don’t even have a working hypothesis about why it didn’t work.’

‘It’s still worth doing,’ said Gavin stubbornly.

Caroline looked doubtful. ‘What’s Frank saying to all this?’ she asked.

There was a pause which allowed disbelief to grow in her eyes. ‘You’re going to say you haven’t told him?’

‘There’s a conflict of interest,’ said Gavin.

Caroline had to prompt him. ‘I’m waiting.’

‘Frank doesn’t want me spending any more time on Valdevan. He wants me to move on and try a biochemical approach, using a strain deficient in another gene.’

‘I’m with Frank,’ said Caroline. ‘If Valdevan didn’t work before, it’s not going to now. If one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world had to give up on it after shelling out millions of dollars, what are you going to come up with that’s so different?’

‘If they got the basis of the report all wrong, God knows what else they might have missed.’

‘Mmm,’ said Caroline.

Gavin took a sip of his beer and sighed deeply. ‘Okay, maybe I am getting a bit carried away here,’ he conceded. ‘But the company’s efforts to find out what the problem was were misdirected. They don’t count. It would be like starting over.’

‘But that’s exactly my point,’ agreed Caroline. ‘It would; and that means having an enormous mountain to climb with little chance of reaching the top.’

‘But it’s an exciting mountain, don’t you think?’ said Gavin, with what he hoped might be an argument-winning smile.

Caroline gave a small shake of the head. ‘Is it one you’d want to gamble your entire future on?’