Transfection Read online

  Transfection

  by David Gaughran

  Editor: Karin Cox

  Cover Design: Kate Gaughran

  Published May 2011 by Arriba Arriba Books

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright © 2011 David Gaughran

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Transfection

  Dr. Carl Peters prided himself on being unconventional. He stood out among the eccentric, doddering, forgetful professors of his faculty, who grimaced at the prints of Dalí, Tesla, and George Best that decorated his office, and was happy to. He knew he could not count any of them as friends. Dr. Peters didn’t mind. He knew most of the truly great scientific discoveries were made by outsiders; the only way to shift the paradigm was to reject it in the first place.

  His only real friend on the staff was his assistant, Jim Glover, a PhD candidate helping him with his research. His wife regularly joked she was jealous of Jim, who spent more time with her husband than she did, but beneath the teasing Dr. Peters suspected she harbored real resentment.

  “Why don’t you move into the private sector?” his wife asked, when he came home from work on time for once and complained that his grants were being cut again. They’d had this conversation, in one form or another, frequently—ever since she had spotted her dream summerhouse on a realtor’s webpage.

  “It’s always the same bullshit choice,” he said. “Fire Jim and scale back my work, or take the hit in my own salary. I’m sick of it.”

  She barely looked at him. “I hear there’s lots of money in the private sector.”

  They had stopped talking with each other years ago. Now they just talked at each other.

  Dr. Peters turned up the volume on the TV. A special report showed an interview with a team of medical researchers, who were announcing that animals fed exclusively on genetically modified foods were six times more likely to develop cancers than those given organic feed. Dr. Peters shook his head, absorbed. He didn’t even notice his wife leave the room.

  His phone rang; it was Jim. “Are you watching this?”

  “I just switched it on. I can’t believe it.”

  “They’ll be throwing money at us now to fix it. Anyway, I’ll let you get back to it. I just wanted to check.”

  Dr. Peters put down the phone and switched over to the business channel. It predicted plummeting shares in big GM producers, coupled with surging food prices. He switched the TV off and went into his study to think.

  Dr. Peters had jumped at the chance to work at the university—not because they paid the most or had the best facilities (they didn’t), but rather to live in a city with a grid-system, allowing endless ways to walk from one point to another without getting bored. Novelty was important to him—new things, new ideas, new ways of looking at old, intractable problems.

  He first became interested in genetic modification because it was a radical way of solving an age-old problem: the price and availability of food. Since the Great Economic Collapse a few years back, commodity prices had been rising, helped in part by extreme weather conditions. GM food finally took off. People still had concerns, but when GM food became considerably cheaper their concerns seemed to matter less. This news, however, changed everything. Lost in thought, Dr. Peters did not even hear his wife’s car reverse out of the driveway.

  Dr. Peters got more money to solve the GM food problem, as expected, but the following year was still a frustrating one. He had been an advocate for GM food, and still saw an important future for it if these problems could be resolved, but he didn’t have the medical background to build on the cancer research, although he understood enough to guess that tampering with cell structures was having unintended consequences.

  Genetic modification was a complex process, but Dr. Peters knew that the root cause of the problem would likely be the foreign DNA that was being inserted into the host. He suspected the answer lay in the transfection process.

  While walking to and from the university, always by a different route, he struggled with the problem again and again. As he did so, he noticed the city changing around him. Vegan cafés and bakeries were opening on every corner. The meat trade had been hit hard—steakhouses and burger joints were closing down. More and more people became vegetarian. Each week another company was forced to admit their products were not—as advertised—GM-free. Farmers’ markets were springing up in every park and square across the country. Around the nation, people were fastidiously checking the organic claims of every product. Even so, Dr. Peters didn’t find any of these developments threatening. Change was good, he thought; it created opportunities.

  His wife saw things differently, and their marriage suffered. He knew it was his fault. The fanaticism he applied to his work left little room for anything else. He was aware of that, but did nothing about it, so he figured he deserved whatever came his way.

  The day after his wife left him, Dr. Peters was in the lab as usual. He was relieved, in a way. He had disappointed his wife for the last time. Although sad, on some level, that it had come to this, his obsession with his research allowed him to ignore his emotions.

  “My wife left me. Now I’ll be able to spend more time here,” he told Jim, just like that, as soon as he came to work. Cold. Matter-of-fact.

  Jim did not seem surprised. After an awkward silence, Jim attempted to change the subject by showing Dr. Peters a small handheld Geiger counter he bought off the internet.

  “Really,” said Dr. Peters, “I’m fine, don’t worry about me. See if you can pull up the chart from yesterday, I’m going to begin the transfection this morning.”

  “Do you want the biolistic gun?” asked Jim. “I don’t think we have any cartridges prepared.”

  “No. I’m going to do this one manually.” Dr. Peters pulled the Eppendorf tube and the tissue culture flask from the incubator. The first contained the host cell, the second, the desired gene. Under his specialized optical microscope, Dr. Peters injected the gene into the host cell membrane with a glass micropipette.

  A squawk surprised him from behind. He dropped the pipette, the glass shattering into tiny fragments on the polished concrete floor.

  “What the hell was that?” Jim rushed out of the office, which was separated from the lab by a glass door.

  “I don’t know, but it came from behind me somewhere.”

  They both peered along the workbench. “The Geiger counter!”

  “No way,” said Jim, “I mean—”

  “—don’t say anything. Let’s do another. This time I want you right beside me, holding that thing.”

  It was confirmed: a short burst of radiation occurred at the moment the transfection process began. It didn’t make any sense. Radiation came from radioactive isotopes and while all living things had trace amounts, the numbers the Geiger counter produced were way off.

  “I don’t know.” Jim frowned. “There’s something not right about this. Maybe it’s coming from the lab downstairs. Perhaps some of their machines are leaking radiation.”

  “Impossible! They have all sorts of monitoring systems down there. Besides, the Geiger counter only picked it up when we began the transfection.”

  Jim shook his head. There was no plausible scientific explanation for what they had witnessed. A burst of radiation could trigger mutations, which could be the cause of increased cancer rates. But what was causing the radiation bursts? Dr. Peters made Jim swear to keep this quiet, then went for a short walk to clear his head, murmuring the same thing over and over: “This is huge.”

  Over the next few weeks, as Dr. Peters conducted his s
ecret experiments, three things became clear. First, while all plant cells emitted a short burst of radiation at the moment of genetic modification, he could not replicate this process in animal cells. Second, the pattern of radiation varied from species to species but also altered with each iteration. Third, once the cell had been genetically altered, further DNA injections failed to produce the same reaction.

  Dr. Peters began recording radiation bursts and feeding them into computers, then combed the printouts for commonalities. There didn’t seem to be any. The same sample with the same stimuli could produce different levels of radiation on different occasions. There was no logic to it.

  When his research grant came up for review, Dr. Peters was forced to share his findings with the faculty. Naturally, there was skepticism, but after Dr. Peters replicated the results his team was expanded to include radiation specialists, nutrition experts, oncologists, and three prestigious molecular biologists. Dr. Peters began to feel marginalized. He lacked the expertise to follow the direction the project was taking. He was relegated to trying to discern patterns in the radiation bursts. He recorded them, spliced them, and looped them. He translated them into pictograms, sound files, and binary code—anything to make sense of what everyone else had already written off as unintelligible nonsense.

  One morning, Jim Glover arrived at work to find his boss stone-cold drunk. He must have been there all night. Jim could smell him from the other side of the table, on which pizza crusts were scattered beside an empty quart of scotch. The otherworldly cackling of a Geiger counter filled the room. Even stranger, Dr. Peters was tapping the desk in time with the beat.

  “Carl?”

  He didn’t answer, just stared straight ahead.

  Jim went over to the computer and stopped the sound file. When he came back, Dr. Peters was smiling.

  “It’s a code.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a code. Don’t you see?” Dr. Peters made a series of taps on the desk.

  Jim didn’t get it. “Like Morse code?”

  “Not quite. I haven’t figured it all out yet, but it’s definitely a code.”

  “But what you’re saying is…” Jim paused, trying to understand.

  “…crazy, I know, but it’s the only answer. It has to be.”

  “I don’t think it’s the only answer.” Jim chose his words carefully. “It could be nothing. It could be random. Could be gibberish.”

  Dr. Peters started tapping the desk again. “Don’t you see? They’re trying to communicate with us.”

  Jim shook his head. “Let’s get you cleaned up, Carl. You don’t want the others to see you like this.”

  Dr. Peters looked across at the empty whiskey bottle, ran his hand over his stubble, and stretched. “All right,” he said, “I could do with some sleep.”

  Things went downhill pretty quickly after that. Despite the best efforts of his assistant, rumors began to circulate about Dr. Peters’ theories. His colleagues began referring to him as “the man who talks to vegetables”. He was officially reprimanded for sleeping in his office. Then, after an incident at a faculty dinner, he was pulled from the project. The Dean warned Dr. Peters that his contract was up for review in the summer, but he never even made it that far. After a final warning to stop his research, Dr. Peters knew he was going to be fired. He dumped all of his data on a thumb drive and slipped out of his office at lunchtime, never to return.

  His disappearance surprised few, and the chatter around campus quickly faded. For Dr. Peters, however, life was very different. He moved into a small one-room apartment in a low-rent neighborhood and rarely ventured outside, spending all his time hunched over his laptop, trying to decode the indecipherable. He took up smoking again—a habit he had kicked ten years prior, and developed the paunch of a man subsisting exclusively on takeaway pizza and soda. His skin became slack and pallid. His eyesight worsened as he strained to see things that weren’t there, hoping against hope to discover the key to the language of the plant world. Eventually, his savings dwindled and he was evicted and thrown out on the street, the landlord swiping his computer in the process.

  In the beginning—before he gained the hardened, weather-beaten look of someone who has been sleeping rough—he was able to get a room most nights in a shelter. They all had a strict “no alcohol” policy and after he broke it one too many times he got blacklisted and was forced to take his chances under the stars. But he never abandoned his research.

  His pockets were filled with crazed notes on code-breaking and linguistics as well as a few Kilgore Trout stories he rescued from a dumpster. Aside from the stories and his tattered clothes, his only other real possession was the thumb drive, secured on a shoelace around his neck. On occasion he sought the favor of a kind-hearted soul and was able to clean himself up. He would then venture into the public library, where he waited patiently for a free computer so he could plug in and listen to the music of the cells.

  Throughout his time on the streets, Dr. Peters never bumped into anyone he knew. Sure, there had been times he thought he spotted someone—times he put his head down and continued shuffling, just in case—but whenever he saw his reflection he realized there was no need to hide. With his shaggy, graying hair and unkempt beard he barely even recognized himself. Whenever he found a newspaper, Dr. Peters would flick through it searching for any mention of his old project, or, he had to admit, his old self. But it was always the same—stories of war, corruption, and celebrity perfume launches. Now and then an article would appear about GM food. Experts wondered if veganism was a fad and whether the meat industry would bounce back.

  About ten months after his disappearance, it began. The first articles appeared discrediting the scientists whose cancer research had started the panic. Dr. Peters had seen this before—with global warming. He had no doubt he was seeing a concerted, surreptitious PR campaign by the GM food industry. The critics, hacks mainly, never disputed the findings. Instead, they attacked the people who conducted it: their political beliefs and individual peccadilloes. Next came a barrage of scientists, usually employed by corporate-backed foundations, who “disproved” the cancer link to GM foods.

  The next time he gained access to the library, Dr. Peters checked the university’s website. He found no mention of his project, but he saw something else. The home page announced one of the largest GM companies had purchased naming rights to the new college football stadium, helping pay for its prime downtown location.

  Things started getting weird close to the anniversary of his disappearance. An article about him appeared in a tabloid, buried twelve pages in. It was just three short paragraphs and an unflattering quote from his wife about alimony, but a full-page spread appeared two days later, with his picture from the faculty yearbook and a grainy one from his wedding day alongside. Despite all the things that were said, it was the headline that really got to him: “The Man Who Talked To Vegetables, Still Missing.”

  A couple of the broadsheets picked up the story over the weekend. It unnerved him. Dr. Peters hadn’t been happy, per se, but he had reached an equilibrium that was comforting. He only became anxious when he went long periods without using a computer.

  One day, walking past a newsstand, his simple peace was shattered forever. The front page news read: “Madness Spreads, Research Assistant of Crazed Professor Talks to Plants.”

  Dr. Peters fished in his pocket and put all the change he had—a handful of pennies and nickels—on the counter, then begged the difference. Clutching his copy, he hurried to the first free park bench and started reading. Jim Glover, his assistant, had been moving some files into storage and had come across his research data. Bored, and hoping to gain some insight into the disappearance of his boss, Jim decided to give it another look and took the file home for the weekend. What followed was a predictable mixture of sensationalism and wisecracks at Jim’s expense, but a few facts were clear: Jim agreed with him—the plant cells were trying to communicate—and, most importantly, Jim claime
d to know what they were saying.

  For the next few days Dr. Peters wandered around the city, agonizing over whether to contact Jim. Nothing had been in the newspapers since, but whenever he worried he had imagined the whole thing, he would unfold the article and read it again.

  The next time he went to the library he discovered Jim had published a research paper in a prestigious scientific journal. It was co-authored by some of his colleagues from the project, all experts in their fields. He downloaded the paper, noting the dedication: “To Dr. Carl Peters, who boldly went.”

  Dr. Peters’ hands started trembling. Before he knew it he was sobbing. The security guard came over and told him to pull it together, but that just made things worse. Soon, Dr. Peters was openly bawling. The guard put a hand on his shoulder and told him he was going to be escorted from the premises. If he resisted, the police would be called. Dr. Peters stood, allowing the guard to take his elbow and guide him towards the door. At the last moment he remembered his thumb drive—still plugged into the computer—and turned to retrieve it. The guard, misinterpreting his actions, attempted to put him in an armlock, but Dr. Peters wriggled free and shoved the guard against the wall. Running to the computer, he stooped to grab his thumb drive, but was tackled from behind. Flat on his face, he stretched out his free hand. It was no use. The drive was out of reach.

  At the police station Dr. Peters was permitted a single telephone call. He agonized before choosing Jim. When Dr. Peters was released into the waiting room an hour later, Jim was on his cell phone and didn’t notice his former boss. It was only when Dr. Peters stood right in front of him that Jim’s mouth dropped open in recognition. Jim ended his call without saying goodbye.

  “Dr. Peters?”

  “Believe it or not.”

  “What happened to you? Jesus! Let’s get you out of here.”

  In the car, Jim opened both windows. For the first time in months Dr. Peters was conscious of his body odor. “I suppose I could do with a shower.”