new novel: excerpts

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

Chapter 2 (excerpts).

"I'd like for us to change the fundamental way that we think about viruses."

Mike Garrity nodded slightly, indicating that he was hearing what was being said. Not necessarily listening actually, but hearing at least. To indicate that a trace of consciousness was stirring somewhere deep inside his skull: a sine pulse beat of minimal awareness. He noticed something like a faint smile turning the corners of Percy's mouth. The old man was looking at him with that strange, detached focus that he had: simultaneously intent on you, but also seeming to be not quite entirely in the same room with you. Mike had got that feeling from Percy for as long as he'd known the great man. It was like a quantum mechanical thing, a simultaneity of presence and absence, here and not here. To be localized and to be removed, all at the same time.

He knew he wasn't alone in feeling this way about Percy Blake. "He's like a cobra smiling at you in that absent way of his, secretly hypnotizing you, looking blissful as the Buddha and carefully not letting his gaze shift down to the clutch of eggs you're setting."

That's how Martin, the lab's newest addition, had expressed it a few nights ago when they were in San Francisco. They were sitting together in a tiny all-night Chinese hole-in-the-wall, come back late from the bars for a little hometown hot and sour soup. Outside the wind was blasting down the dark streets, steep and narrow and running with slick, flickering neon and thin swirls of oil and gasoline. A freezing icy rain had been pattering the city intermittently since late afternoon. Spasmodically. The soup had been peppery-hot: perfect for drying dripping noses and driving off the night's cold from their bones.

Martin had come off a farm somewhere in Iowa, so his metaphor made sense. It was a hick image, but it was true enough, Mike thought. A snake with a hypnotic gaze prepared to go for your eggs. Your nads. Yes. Maintain proper respect with that one. You better not mess with Percy Blake.

Not that he'd ever known Percy to strike at a student, literally or figuratively. But Percy was a smart one -- too smart, maybe, for MSU. Shrewd. And he was dangerous, surely. Sly as a fox. Someone like Percy Blake didn't have to provide demonstrations of ferocity. He inspired loyalty because of his obvious towering intellect, and out of the professional connections he had, and out of. . . .fear. Someone like that could make you, or he could destroy your career. You just knew that. Looking at him you could tell, from his legendary cold, supercilious smile, always alert, always weighing you, judging you. Measuring you. His cold gaze penetrated directly into your soul.

He's not really supercilious. Or not necessarily. He's not arrogant that way. But you always absolutely know your place relative to him. What kind of a fool would go up against him?

A fool like me.

"What I mean," Percy continued, "is I want us collectively to begin changing the way we think about viruses in the lab. What viruses are. What they do. What they can do. This new approach has been in my thoughts for some time. I want to bring everyone else around, to get us all on the same page. I want to put us on a new conceptual foundation in this lab, say. And I want you to spearhead the effort, Mike."

He nodded again, hoping he looked more pensive than he felt. His thoughts were bleary and unfocused. It was too early. If he'd had any coherent thoughts yet this morning, they mostly were in orbit around the iconic image of coffee. He gazed down to the document he held in his lap, thumbing through it, delicately turning back the sheets. It proved to be one long, fifteen page chart, stapled in the corner. It was, he realized, actually a single very long table stacked up under the brooding heading: VIRAL TAXONOMIC INDEX. Different sections were shaded in light pastel colors, setting out at a glance the various relationships among six broad viral groups broken out by nucleotide chemistry (single-stranded DNA, double-stranded DNA, sense- and anti-sense- strands of single- or double-stranded RNA), and the Retroviridae. An extensive index filled the last five pages. An index for an index, he thought. So very Percy Blake.

It was exquisitely, excruciatingly anal-retentive. No one took virology so seriously as Percy Blake. The old, infamous hair-splitter.

"We're returning to the Baltimore scheme?" Mike asked, turning back to the top page. He straightened the document on his lap and reached back for his latte grande, perched precariously on a cleared edge of Percy's desk. Only tiny portions of the desktop were visible under the mountains of books and stacks of papers spilling across the desk.

"This index is just our guide," Percy explained, his voice calm and soft. "It's like a periodic chart of the viruses. Baltimore is good for feeling your way around regardless of whatever violence it does to phylogeny. It's a focusing tool, just like the periodic table of the elements is. Consider it a gross map of the landscape. But the map is not the new conception I have in mind. In this case, at least, the medium is not the message."

Mike nodded again, savoring another salvo of caffeine spreading from his belly to his bloodstream, signaling the promise of amplifying clarity.

What time does the old guy get up? What does his wife think of all this?

He could guess.

He looked around the office. The room was large but impossibly cramped: his major advisor's littered desk was only a study in miniature of the more gravid chaos whirling all around the room like some violent hurricane of esoteric data frozen in one impossible instant of silence. Being in this room always made Mike feel that he'd stumbled inside some mad wizard's alchemical den. Ill-lit. Gloomy. Dusty. Percy Blake was a latter-day Merlin lost inside his complicated thoughts, oblivious to the physical bedlam roaring around him. The omnipresent technical debris was comprised of stacks of reprints and journals and miscellaneous other materials and notes accumulated in towering stacks and mounds of manila folders on the verge of collapsing and spilling their contents across the room. Other chairs around the desk and near the stuffed bookcases held more piles of books and papers. A number of filing cabinets were pushed against the walls and near the door. He always wondered whether Percy's mind could possibly be organized in so slipshod a manner as his office. There must be some truth to that, but if so, then the office could not be so chaotic as it seemed, because Percy's mind was perfectly sharp, and besides, he could always locate any document he sought within all the piles and mounds awash in the room with surprisingly little effort. There must be some imperceptible method to all this madness.

Unlike everyone else, Percy had never pushed a television set into his office, but a tiny clock-radio balanced high up on the west wall was kept tuned to National Public Radio and was never shut off all day long, although the volume was so very low that Mike could barely follow anything that was being said, and that only if he concentrated intently. The heavy blinds were pulled closed on the east wall but a blinding white beam of early morning light was streaming in. He had to keep edging forward toward the desk to keep the light out of his eyes.

He redirected his gaze back to his major advisor and discovered with a start that the old man was watching him, the usual wry half-smile still on his face. The man's skin was pale, the flesh of his face full and framed by a neatly trimmed mane of blond hair. The dome of his forehead was high. Percy was in his early fifties, but he seemed as physically fit as he was mentally acute. He was tall and muscular, but paradoxically he carried himself with a gentle grace, like an outsize dancer. His eyes were like hard blue marbles, icy and deep. It was his eyes that were most astonishing. That gaze he had, that unnerving stare. . . .it was not reptilian -- the faint smile on his mouth kept him from seeming too cold and remote -- but there was something not entirely believable about the overall presentation. Like Martin said. The eyes and the mouth didn't ever completely match up. You never knew what he was thinking. You never could guess precisely what he thought of you.

Mike swallowed. "My students will like this," he said, nodding down at the index in his hand.

"Students are always impressed by a massive collection of information," Percy said. He leaned back slightly in his chair. "Having all that information in one place always makes them feel that they know all that information without actually having to learn any of it."

Mike smirked and nodded.

Percy raised his hands and locked them behind his head.

"We think of viruses in terms of biology. This is natural enough, for their life histories are intimately entwined with our own. Of course a virus is strikingly unlike a living organism, lacking its own metabolism, as even your students will attest. But I intend that we should emphasize the differences and distinctions even more. The taxonomists tracing viral phylogeny and evolution are right, but those concepts lock our minds in a kind of phylogenetic box that's hard to escape. We end up conceiving of viruses only in terms of their evolutionary relationship to biology. To biochemistry. But there are other ways to approach these bits of free-form genetic code. Code. That's it. That's the key. That's the essence. We must begin to see every virus as a kind of genetic probe. A key to a lock. A special key to a special kind of lock. The phenomenon of viral diseases. . . ." he frowned and waved a hand dismissively before his face. "Trivial side-effects."

Mike frowned.

"You object?"

"Well. . . .Disease is a trivial side-effects? Surely that's overstating--"

"Trivial for our purposes. Our purposes."

"Most of our students -- myself included -- we have a certain vested interest in the medical aspects of virology."

"Fine. That's fine. That's what medical microbiology is for. We're not going to jettison that."

"Well, that's a relief."

"But that will no longer be the focus of this lab. Plenty of virology labs out there to keep that eternal flame burning for centuries to come. It's a useful point of view, but it's a restrictive perspective. No. We're disembarking from that train. We're done with thinking about viruses as mere medical marauders. Outlaw code, like Jesse James riding into town one day and laying waste to the respiratory epithelium, and all that. Well, it's not like that, not really like that, not at all. Ease and disease. Dis-ease. That's a loaded concept. A distorting concept for an informational system that has coevolved over millions of years. Not even coevolved. There's an inderdependence in play. Host and parasite cannot be pulled apart like that way. The words themselves betray the bias: host and parasite. So prejudicial, eukaryocentric, but neither host nor virus enjoys any privileged status. That's the bias we're going to resist and eventually, I trust, conquer." His brow furrowed and the focus of his blue eyes suddenly turned inward. "So distorting, concepts of disease, of predation. Parasitism. From now on, we're coming at virus-host interactions from a more. . . .mathematical perspective. Cybernetically. Starting today, we're taking genomes, both host and viral genomes, as integrated, encoded bits of physiology-sensitive information."

Mike listened to this, watching the old man, trying to absorb the concepts. He saw Percy's eyes lift then, gazing into some unvisualizable, nebulous space hanging up near the ceiling somewhere. He considered gulping down the last of his coffee, but it had grown too cold. He looked down at the desk for the tiny space he'd located before and set the cup down again. The blinding sunlight flashed in his eyes: on-off, on-off. He looked into the sheaf of pages in his lap and lifted a page again, another. He stared at it blankly. Physiology-sensitive information. It was familiar material for anyone with more than a passing interest in the field, this systematic organization of viral types. Could he make any connection between what he saw in these pages and what Dr. Blake was talking about? No. Not really.

His mind went back to a story he'd heard on the drive in this morning. Biotech firm announces cloning human embryos for purposes of stem cell harvesting. Somatic cell nuclear transfer. Embryo mining. Predictable political panic. But political on both sides. That's why raise the issue in the first place. Why else? Advance the biotech war. Jostle the front. Not much new here, not really. Only two of eight eggs divided to produce four cells. One progressed to a six-cell stage before cell division stopped. Cells divide all the time. Mitosis. And meiosis. Oh, yes, never forget meiosis. Send in the clones. Fear of Xerox generation. Why? Photocopy humans. Predicted to provoke Bush Administration officials into fit of wetting pants. . . .

Ethical problems. Fear. Rush to congressional hearings. Budget-fudgers debating niceties of molecular biology on the taxpayer dime. Last line of defense against ten thousand rubber stamp liberal eggheads on the march. Elitist intellectuals. Why is the right wing so afraid of intellectuals? The question answers itself. Preserve humanity. Ban cloning now.

"So?" Percy said.

Mike blinked.

"Ah. . . .When you say cybernetic, you're talking strictly about information content. Am I right?"

"That's right."

"So really, if I understand you, you're talking about setting aside. . . .Well, setting aside consideration of life altogether, both in the virus and in the host. Like trying to conceive of the whole system in more inorganic terms. Like. . . .programming."

"That's it. That's exactly right."

"Genetics as programming."

"Yes. It's not hierarchical in the traditional sense. Organ system to tissue to cell to metabolism to nucleotide sequence. It's all integrated with elaborate feedback arcs and no true primacy, but the nucleotides are the entry point for programming, and the virus is the interface."

He nodded.

"Okay."

Viruses as tools, he thought. Like cloning as a tool. Tool, as in hammer or saw or screwdriver. Basic fundamental level. Simple tool. Screwdriver virus. Like that. Good mental picture. Custom stem cells. Immune-compatible starter cells for tissue engineering and transplants. Immune privilege. Cells talking to cells. Shake hands with communication signaling molecules. All nice and friendly. Or rewrite code at the end of viral screwdriver. That's where this goes, of course. If you take it far enough.

The editable man.

He glanced up at the diplomas on the wall behind Percy's head, located the certificate from the NIH. When was he there? A citation from 1978. How's a wunderkind like Percy Blake go from the NIH to the CDC to MSU? It never seemed right to him. Some part of the story was missing. Percy, he knew, had started out working on the immunology of tissue rejection. How did that connect to virology? Major histocompatibility complex. The same cell-surface molecules that present foreign antigen for immune recognition are primary targets in tissue rejection. . . .

Mike imagined those molecules as microscopic mushrooms studding the surface of all nucleated cells. Class I MHC. And Class II antigens were similar, but found only on cells involved in the immune response.

They were powerfully antigenic. That was why tissue typing was crucial, and why bone marrow transplantation remained iffy. But what could they have really understood about any of it back in the 1970s?

Very little, he thought. Next to nothing. Panels of polyspecific sera. Messy almost to the point of incomprehension. He was grateful that he'd never have to deal with the like. Few monospecific reagents back then. Prohibitively expensive. He'd have to go back over some of those old reprints, he thouhg. Wait until the old man had left the office and rifle his files. Not that there could be much there worth finding. 1970s immunology. Well before AIDS. Didn't AIDS create immunology as a discipline? So Percy himself had proclaimed, many times. When was AIDS? Mid-1980s, Mike thought. Have to confirm that, too. . . .

Therapeutic cloning, he mused, his thoughts turning back once again to the story on the radio, and custom cell lines. Immune privilege. Self-antigens. Custom organs grown from custom stem cells, covered with one's own MHC molecules. . . .The body wouldn't reject that. Grow your own replacement parts. No viruses involved, but a similar kind of game.

It all keeps coming back to immunology. Defining the battleline that separates me from not-me. Restriction enzymes chopping up aggressive, pushy invaders. How do you tell yourself apart from your environment? Here I end, and here the world begins. . . . Ahh, the caffeine begins to kick in.

Percy leaned across the desk with another stapled document and handed it to him.

"Here. I want you to have a look at this."

He took it. "What is it?" It looked like a preprint, or an early draft. "Systems Biology: Genomics" was the title.

"It's work I'm doing with a couple friends in London. It's early thinking on the cybernetic approach. I'd like your thoughts on it. It's a kind of spectral analysis of metabolism: moving from causal gene/protein reductionism to what we call 'a dynamic choreography of tandem, multi-element systems over time.' Well, I guess that doesn't explain anything. We haven't found exactly the right metaphor yet. Maybe you can help with that. It's your copy. Feel free to mark it up."

He nodded. "Okay."

"Did you have a good time at the conference?"

He blinked.

"Uh, yeah. Yes. It was great."

"Good. How about Martin?"

"Martin too. I don't know how much he learned. A lot of it was over his head. But it opened his eyes."

"That's the point. You have to start somewhere. He seems bright."

"Yes. I think he is."

"Find any good restaurants?"

"Great restaurants. We found several little places around the hotel. Amazing, really."

"San Francisco has amazing food. We'll have a lab lunch later in the week. Wednesday. No, I've got something Wednesday. Make it Thursday. Let everyone know. I want everyone to bring the most interesting materials they got from the conference, give a little presentation around the table. You know the routine. Nothing fancy."

"Alright."

"How about you?"

"Me?"

"Busy schedule today?"

He shrugged under the snaky assessing stare, cryptic smile, scrutinizing, weighing.

"The usual. Teaching. Experiments. Getting caught up after a week off."

Percy nodded.

"Okay. Let's get to work then."

Mike rose. He reached for his coffee cup. He looked down and saw Percy already engrossed in some other document on his desk.

Meeting's over, he thought.

He turned and hurried out of the office.