Green Earth. Kim Stanley Robinson
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Bri, don’t be saying these things.”
“Sorry, but you know Derek.” Brian gestured at one of the computer screens glowing on the bench across the way. “It’s all over.”
Leo squinted at a screen. “It wasn’t on Bioworld Today.”
“It will be tomorrow.”
The company’s website BREAKING NEWS box was blinking. Leo leaned over and jabbed it. Yep—lead story. HDL factory, potential for obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease …
“Oh my God,” Leo muttered as he read. “Oh my God.” His face was flushed. “Why does he do this?”
“He wants it to be true.”
“So what? We don’t know yet.”
With her sly grin Marta said, “He wants you to make it happen, Leo. He’s like the Road Runner and you’re Wile E. Coyote. He gets you to run off the edge of a cliff, and then you have to build the bridge back to the cliff before you fall.”
“But it never works! Coyote always falls!”
Marta laughed at him. She liked him, but she was tough. “Come on,” she said. “This time we’ll do it.”
Leo nodded, tried to calm down. He appreciated Marta’s spirit, and liked to be at least as positive as the most positive person in any given situation. That was getting tough these days, but he smiled the best he could and said, “Yeah, right, you’re good,” and started to put on rubber gloves.
“Remember the time he announced that we had hemophilia A whipped?” Brian said.
“Please.”
“Remember the time he put out a press release saying he had decapitated mice at a thousand rpm to show how well our therapy worked?”
“The guillotine turntable experiment?”
“Please,” Leo begged. “No more.”
He picked up a pipette and tried to focus on the work. Withdraw, inject, withdraw, inject—alas, most of the work in this stage was automated, leaving people free to think, whether they wanted to or not. After a while Leo left them to it and went back to his office to check his e-mail, then helplessly to read what portion of Derek’s press release he could stomach. “Why does he do this, why?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Marta and Brian were now in his doorway, Marta implacable: “I told you—he thinks he can make us do it.”
“It’s not us doing it,” Leo protested, “it’s the gene. We can’t do a thing if the altered gene doesn’t get into the cell we’re trying to target.”
“You’ll just have to think of something that will work.”
“You mean like, build it and they will come?”
“Yeah. Say it and they will make it. That’s Derek.”
Out in the lab a timer beeped, sounding uncannily like the Road Runner. Beep-beep! Beep-beep! They went to the incubator and read the graph paper as it rolled out of the machine, like a receipt out of an automated teller—like money out of an automated teller, in fact, if the results were good. One very big wad of twenties rolling out into the world from nowhere, if the numbers were good.
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