Intuition (3 page)

“So what?”

They both knew that in the end, talent hardly mattered if you couldn't get results. Lots of people were talented. Talent and intelligence, not to mention tireless hard work, got lab scientists through the door, but—this was the dirty secret—you needed luck. You might be prepared and bright and diligent, and fail and fail and fail. The gene you sought to isolate, the phenomenon you thought significant, could still elude you; the trend and significant pattern of disease could devolve into an endless hell of ambiguities.

“I still think he has potential,” Marion pressed.

“Potential for what?”

She said nothing. Sandy was probably right. Still, she would not simply cut Cliff loose. She knew what it was like to struggle. At the Philpott she had fought for her scientific life, foraged and competed for every last piece of equipment in her lab. After years of ceaseless competition, she'd grown thin and patient, critical of herself and others. Anyone who worked for Marion tensed at her glance and dreaded her questions—never rhetorical, never dramatic, but quietly devastating in their acuity. With one pointed query she could lift the paint off the best ideas to reveal the rotting suppositions underneath.

“You know he has to go,” Sandy said.

Still, she frowned and ever so slightly shook her head.

Marion had been a lithe young scientist once, a beautiful, impulsive girl who earned a PhD at twenty-five and imagined Harvard would hire her just for her elegant work in crystallography. She had been quick to smile, joyous in her facility as carbon structures opened up to her, each in turn, lovely and elliptical. The scientific world had seemed to her then translucent, sparkling, orderly as the Peabody Museum's collection of glass flowers. But there was no job for her at Harvard. A sly postdoc named Arthur Ginsburg got a position there instead, and Marion almost came to believe what others said of her: that her papers were repetitive, descriptive, and nothing more. She scrambled to find a place for herself and the means to carry on her work, and when she ended up at the Philpott Institute, she came as a pauper and had to switch fields. She knew the misery of starting over.

“‘It is too little to call Man a little World,'” Kate recited in the library. Cliff sat in a brown leather chair and Kate perched on the matching brass-studded ottoman. “‘Except God, Man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consistes of more parts—'”

“‘More pieces,'” corrected Cliff. Kate had brought down Donne's
Devotions
so he could check her.

“‘Man consists of more pieces . . .'”

“Right.”

“‘And if those pieces were extended, and stretched out in Man, as they are in the world, Man would be the gyant, and the Worlde the Dwarfe, the World but the Map, and the Man the World.'” She stopped for a moment, and Cliff thought she'd forgotten her lines again, but she shook her head, interjecting, “He makes man a microcosm of the earth, and then he just explodes the metaphor! Because man is more complex than the world, more subtle, and more . . . vast.” Kate beamed for a moment, radiant, pedantic. She was herself a secret poet, essayist, dedicated humanist—her mother's child.

“Hmm.” Cliff stared at the open page before him. Truth be told, until now, he hadn't heard of John Donne. He hadn't learned much about seventeenth-century poets during his years of chemistry and biology and graduate school. It occurred to him now that he'd spent his whole adult life in a prison workshop. Years and years of manual labor went by. New results filtered through only on the rarest occasions, and always to other people. Miracles didn't happen, but Cliff and his friends kept on working. Like scientific sharecroppers, they slaved all day. They were too highly trained to stop. Overeducated for other work, they kept repeating their experiments. They kept trying to live on their seventeen-thousand-dollar salaries. There was not much poetry in that, or if there was, Cliff had certainly not been privileged to see it.

“Kate, what are you doing?”

“Are you reciting poems to the guests again?”

Kate's older sisters had come to rescue Cliff. They burst into the library laughing, impudently underdressed in jeans. The young women were like Ann, tall and auburn-haired, their arms elegantly slender, their complexions fair. They looked nothing like Sandy, but they possessed something of his frenetic energy and self-confidence. They laughed because they knew that when they whirled into the room they changed the weather; they were the magician's daughters.

“It's not poetry,” Kate said, “and he asked.”

“Be honest, did you really ask her to recite for you?” inquired Louisa.

“I did,” said Cliff. “And I like it.”

“Oh, really!” Louisa pulled up a straight-back chair and sat down on it backward, long legs straddling the seat. “It must be good stuff, then.”

“What is it? Let me see.” Laughing, Charlotte leaned over to read the title of the book in Cliff's hands.

“Don't tease her.” Louisa was protective, gentle-hearted, though frighteningly accomplished.

Cliff ignored all this and turned to Kate with such warmth and pleasure she nearly blushed. “Where were you?” He turned back to the
Devotions
.

“‘If all the Veines in our bodies, were extended to Rivers,'” Kate recited, “‘and all the Sinewes, to Vaines of Mines, and all the Muscles, that lye upon one another, to Hilles, and all the Bones to Quarries of stones, and all the other pieces, to the proportion of those which correspond to them in the world, Aire would be too little for this Orbe of Man to move in . . .'”

Sipping his drink, Cliff kept listening, prompting Kate when she forgot a word. Her sisters left, but he stayed on, letting his mind wander in Donne's ever-evolving conceits. Man was like a world, but so much greater, so much more complex. The world was plagued with caterpillars, serpents, and vipers. Man's diseases were like giants. Monsters. Through the library's great square doorway he could view the others standing in the dining room, feasting at the long table. Robin was playing her part, listening intently to Ann Glass. He could not see Marion or Sandy, but could easily imagine them somewhere in the house, plotting some punishment for him in the guise of a new research program. It was good to take refuge in the library with Kate. Cliff felt himself covered by metaphors there, safe, as if he were hidden behind old tapestries. “‘And can the other world name so many venimous, so many consuming, so many monstrous creatures, as we can diseases . . . ?'” Kate read, and he smiled at her for bestowing her unexpected archaic self upon him, for reciting instead of forcing him to make conversation. He laughed softly at the words—really not a bad description of a postdoc's life: “‘O miserable abundance, O beggarly riches!'”

3

T
HE GUARD
at the institute barely looked up from his
Boston Globe
the next morning as Marion headed for the back stairs to the underground animal facility. She came in almost every Sunday to look in on the mice, her lab's tiny livestock.

On the Philpott's lowest level, she made her way through a labyrinth of white-tiled hallways cluttered with rolling carts and bins. There were bins of rumpled lab coats, which would go out Monday to the laundry service, and carts of clear plastic cages replete with smudged water bottles and soiled pine shavings, all stacked up like a thousand dirty dishes at the door of the equipment room. Lab techs would sterilize and return them, sparkling clean. This institute had never suffered sabotage from animal rights activists. Still, there were locks on every door. There was the unspoken sentiment that this work was safer here, under the earth.

At a bank of lockers in the hall, Marion donned a clean pale blue lab coat. All personnel had to wear them in the animal facility. She slipped aqua disposable paper booties over her shoes and a matching cap over her hair. Then, briskly, she made her way toward the numbered doors where the Philpott's mice were kept. Each door had a window tinted red. From the outside looking in, each holding area looked like a little room in hell, but the devilish red glow in Philpott's animal rooms was actually a precaution. The animals needed rest, and the red windows shielded them from the hall lights at night.

Marion was an attentive and compassionate investigator, almost fond of her small charges, proud and careful of them—not as if they had rights or souls, but as a craftsman might treat precious tools. She had worked with many strains of mice in her time and knew their particular traits. She knew the sleek albinos, their fine white hair and timid manner, their ruby eyes like the tiny birthstones in children's jewelry. She knew a particular strain of black mice, always agitated, jumping and flipping over constantly, like dark socks in a Laundromat dryer. Those animals knocked food pellets from their wire holders. Their fur was spiked and greasy with their rations, their manner mischievous. They looked like little punks. She knew a gray strain that fought, and others that wouldn't breed. She knew the strains that habitually ate their own pups—although all the mice ate their young to some extent. She had seen mice rip each other to pieces, and watched, as well, as three or four slept together, breathing delicately, in one soft mossy heap. These and others lived at the Philpott: some thin, some fat, some drug addicted, some healthy, some sick by design. She knew them all well, but these days she worked with mice the color of pink rubber erasers; they lacked a thymus gland, and because of this condition, they were hairless. They were called nude.

Nude mice lack a normal immune system. They cannot reject grafts of foreign tissue. Like quivering pink agar they would accept tissue from a lizard or a cat or even a patch of chicken skin complete with tiny feathers. Nude mice accept these xenografts and support the tissue as if it were their own. Marion's mice harbored human cancer cells. With her athymic mice, she could study tumors in vivo.

Nude mice were, in many ways, ideal vessels for Marion's experiments, but their great utility was also their weakness. They could not fight off contaminants as ordinary mice might, and so they were a target for disease. The Philpott maintained strict rules for the care of these animals. Their water and food, bottles and cages, were all sterilized. Food pellets for nudes had a soggy, cooked texture from the autoclave. Entering the athymic mouse room after handling other animals was strictly prohibited.

Peering through the red window in the door of the lab's animal room, she was pleased to see that Feng had come in before her. Each postdoc had lab duties, and Feng managed the colony record keeping. He often came in on weekends, and, like her, he'd come to check up on each group of the lab's experimental mice.

His full name was Xiang Feng, but he went by Feng, which Marion only gradually realized was pronounced Fung. Feng himself had been too polite to correct her. He'd been born in Beijing, but had grown up in the north, where his professor parents had been reeducated to grow soybeans. Despite his father's transformation from molecular biologist to farmer, and his mother's parallel metamorphosis from historian to productive member of the proletariat, Feng had excelled in academic subjects and placed high enough on his national exams to earn admittance to Beijing University. In his graduate work he had excelled again, and after several years of research and teaching had petitioned successfully to come to the United States to train with Marion. He had arrived in Cambridge with a Pan Am flight bag, one suitcase, and a formidable arsenal of lab techniques.

Feng kept a punishing schedule. He chose his problems well, and he worked constantly. He seemed to live the life of a scientific ascetic—except that he was so funny. That was the odd thing about Feng. He was driven like few Marion had ever seen, but his manner was entirely bubbly. He wore glasses, but he also sported a mustache. A demon for accuracy, he kept meticulous records but downplayed the effort. He'd spent years beating his head against intractable problems, but this did not discourage him. He did more than any other postdoc in the lab, but he expected nothing. He worked with a kind of gallows humor to which the others could only aspire. Deliciously self-deprecating, he dismissed his own results as minor, or even accidental. “It's random luck,” he'd say whenever he published an article or research note, and this, along with myriad other sayings of Feng's, had become a catchphrase in the lab. “Fungi,” the other postdocs called them. To Marion's secret amusement, the researchers collected Fungi in their lab books. For the past six months or so the postdocs had been compiling a lexicon that included such classic definitions as:

Successful grant proposal (idiom): “major disaster, long-term”

Analyze (verb): “to flounder”

Hypothesis (noun): “highly flawed thinking”

Conference (noun): “cancer junket”

Government Appropriations for Cancer Research: GAC (acronym): “sick tax”

Breakthrough (noun): “artifact”

Feng kept his sense of humor, and he stayed calm. When progress stalled and it seemed to Marion the others wallowed in self-pity, Feng persevered.

He nodded to her as she opened the door, and together they faced the cages that filled the windowless white room. Five steel racks held between twenty and thirty cages each. Over one hundred cages, almost three hundred mice. A living library of the hairless creatures. And yet the room was almost silent. The animals had been bred for quiet, as they had been bred for so many other conveniences. Only once in a great while did the faintest squeak escape from any of the mice living there together.

“What did you find?” Marion asked Feng.

“We'll see.” Feng opened his record book. Cage number, mouse number, weight, condition. Each was neatly marked in columns on the pale green and white page. Finding his place in the record, Feng took two of Cliff's cages from their rack and carried them to the high stainless steel worktable. Then Feng turned on the laminar flow hood, a mechanism that blew a constant stream of air over his work surface and sucked away contaminants. Under the hood, Feng picked up and turned the experimental mice one by one. Their skin rippled and wrinkled with every move. The creatures seemed nearly transparent under the examining light. Their organs showed lavender and purple through their thin skin, and the blood vessels in their ears were clearly visible, like the red veins in budding leaves. In some ways the animals acted like normal mice, nosing their food curiously, standing up on hind legs and cleaning their front paws—but without fur, the mice looked like wizened little men. They seemed fussy and careful. They strained to reach the edges of their cages when the lids were removed; they tried to chin themselves up over the side; but it never occurred to them to dash around wildly, spring into the air, and make a break for it, as an ordinary mouse would do. The nudes were rarefied creatures. Outside the animal facility, no field mouse would recognize them.

These animals were already quite sick. Tumors bulged grotesquely, as if the mice had swallowed marbles. By Marion's reckoning, most of the tumors were close to the institute's mandated one-centimeter limit. Cancer had deformed the animals entirely. Indeed, there was the first fatality, a small body lying in the corner of a cage. As Marion recorded the death, Feng sealed the dead mouse in a black plastic bag. He would put the corpse in the refrigerator that served as the animal facility's morgue.

As Feng examined the mice in one cage, Marion studied those in another. In silence Feng and Marion held each mouse gently, with gloved thumb and forefinger grasping the fold of skin behind the neck. Positioned on their backs, the mice flailed their legs helplessly and could not turn or bite while Feng and Marion measured their tumors with tiny calipers. Cliff had injected six groups of mice with breast cancer cells. Nine mice in each group. Fifty-four in all. After the tumors developed, he'd injected three groups with his virus, and set three groups aside for his control. Each experimental group had received a different genetic variant of the virus. The mice in two groups with the virus had already died, and those in the third group were close to death as well. Marion couldn't help tsking for a moment at the waste. She wasn't proud of sacrificing living creatures for the idle repetition of failed experiments.

“Marion,” Feng said.

He rarely spoke while working, and she started, surprised to hear his voice.

“What is this?” He was turning a mouse slowly in his hand. “Is this mouse correct?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is it from the protocol?” Feng asked.

“I've already checked that. This is the correct mouse. This is number three hundred sixty-three,” she said, pointing to the metal tag on the mouse's translucent ear.

“Then where is it?” Feng asked.

“Where is what?”

“The tumor,” he said.

She took the mouse herself and turned and felt the wriggling body in her hands. Instinctively, the creature flexed its feet as Marion palpated the first set of mammary glands. The tumor was barely perceptible, scarcely protruding on the animal's neck.

“Now look at this one. Three-sixty-five.” Feng lifted another mouse from the cage. “This one last week had a tumor point five centimeters in diameter. Where is it now?”

They began to examine all the mice, comparing tumor size with the records in Feng's lab book. Nearly all had tumors as big as, or slightly bigger than, they had been before. Three mice, however, had tumors significantly smaller. How could this be? Somehow three tumors had actually shrunk.

Marion and Feng looked at each other. After repeated failure, could one of Cliff's viral variants actually have some effect? What had changed here? What had Cliff done? The variation of the virus was
R-7. Cliff had scrawled a note on the blue index card labeling this cage of mice. But he'd never gotten R-7 to work effectively in live animals before. Were these three mice significant? Or were they outliers of some kind—tainted by some other condition? This was the difficulty with animal research: so many different things could go wrong. Cancer cells would not grow or grew too slowly, blood work was inconclusive, animals died of some extraneous illness. Despite all Marion's precautions, there had been an outbreak in the colony years before. Only a few animals had died, but Marion had terminated all her experiments anyway. “The mice were exposed to pathogens, and they're tainted,” she'd announced at the lab meeting. “Obviously, we can't study cancer and some other unknown infection as well. What would we be looking at?”

What were they looking at now? Probably nothing. And yet . . . What were the chances that Cliff had actually happened onto something? If there was a real cause and effect, if R-7 actually reversed the progress of cancer growth, then they must find out how. Marion was not excited; she would never pin her hopes on one such observation, but she could not let it pass either.

She knew Feng was making the same calculations she was. The odds were against them. Still, there was the slight chance of some significance, that Cliff's technique might have had some effect on these three mice. If that was the case, the ramifications could be huge. Holding a mouse on its back, Marion accidentally pinched the loose skin of its neck. The mouse's eyes bulged, its mouth popped open, exposing sharp white teeth. The animal's pink face started into a tiny mask of surprise.

“I don't think there's anything here,” Marion said.

“I doubt it,” Feng agreed.

“We'll observe them, in any case,” Marion said. “We'll watch to see if the cancer grows again, or if for some reason tumors on other mice decrease. We can see if anything more happens here.”

“I don't think anything will,” Feng said cheerfully. When it came to nonchalance and scientific pessimism, he outmatched even Marion. The difference was, Marion's pessimism had been earned, while Feng was a natural.

Marion arrived home to find Jacob playing speed chess at the kitchen table with their son, Aaron. Jacob pushed his knight forward and slapped down the button on his side of the time clock with his hand; Aaron countered with his bishop, then slapped the clock in turn. At fourteen, Aaron had his father's lanky body, messy brown hair, and craggy nose. He was a nationally ranked chess player in the under-eighteen category, but his father still beat him on occasion. Although Jacob no longer practiced seriously, he was a wily competitor.

Marion's husband had been that rarest of creatures, a child prodigy. Growing up in Cincinnati, Jacob spoke late, but his first word, according to family lore, was “delicious.” He could read A. A. Milne to himself at the age of four, Dickens by six and a half. At seven, he made his concert debut, playing Mozart's second violin concerto with the local youth orchestra. At age nine he matriculated at the University of Cincinnati. He graduated with a degree in biology just before his bar mitzvah, and then stayed on for his doctorate. By the time he was seventeen he had left home for a postdoc with Franz Applebaum at Columbia. He arrived with glowing recommendations from all his professors, and three publications. Like an academic red carpet, his future seemed to unroll before him.