Kim Stanley Robinson - Green Earth

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.

Charlie Quibler had barely woken when Anna left for work. He got up an hour later to his own alarm, woke Nick with difficulty, drove him to school with the sleeping Joe in his car seat, then returned home to fall asleep again on the couch, Joe never awake during the entire process. An hour or so later Joe would rouse them both with his hungry cries, and then the day would really begin.