A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [84]
During the early days in Sylvia Chen’s lab at Columbia, flushed with a series of successes, he had nicknamed his program Orion, in honor of the legendary great hunter of Greek mythology. Griff’s Orion had only one mission: hunt WRX3883 to extinction, without harming the host. For now, Orion was computer-generated, but if Griff could map out the right RNA design, it could be synthesized in a lab or even inserted into a cell line.
For a time, the excitement surrounding his work was dizzying.
Then, the failures began.
In every computer simulation he ran, WRX3883 battled his creation with the same lethal ferocity of the gods’ assassin, Scorpius, the scorpion, who eventually felled the great hunter Orion.
This scorpion’s lethal weapon: mutation.
WRX3883 was as quick as it was deadly. From a germ with effects limited to the deep central nervous system, suddenly there were computer indications of disastrous damage to tissue cultures grown from blood and gastrointestinal cells as well.
Again and again, Griff’s attacking protein seemed close to working. But in this battle, Orion’s near successes were still the equivalent of abject failure. The missing link, he knew, might be something as close as a minor RNA sequence modification, or something as distant as Orion, the constellation. No matter how close the breakthrough was, according to Griff’s models the result for the infected host remained the same—death.
Another stroll through the Kitchen, and he shifted his attention from the television screen of magnified WRX virus to Sylvia Chen’s laboratory notebooks, which were laid open and stacked atop one another on the stainless steel table beside the electron microscope. He flipped through pages of notes dictated into a computer program, or written in his former boss’s small, irregular hand, but as with the images generated by the microscope, exhaustion blurred the words. He’d come to the last of the three-ring binders, and was flipping through old lab notes searching for anything of interest to his work, when one report in particular caught his breath.
The report, titled simply “The Macaque Incident,” and dated a year and a half ago, detailed the most horrific account of animal testing Griff had ever seen. A simple protocol mistake by an animal keeper in Hell’s Kitchen—Sylvia Chen’s animal lab—infected thirty Rhesus monkeys with exceedingly high doses of WRX3883. Their decline, stunningly rapid, was captured on video for later study.
Chen’s documented account was disturbingly graphic, and evoked in Griff memories he had long wished to forget. It was his policy never to go near the animal lab unless he positively had to. But the cries for help from the caretaker had brought him down there. He tried to help the animals with a variety of antiviral drugs, and even one of his more advanced serums. But there was nothing he, or anybody, could do to save them. He could still hear screams of dying monkeys, some so sick that they used their rapier-like nails to slice their own bodies to ribbons, trying to scratch the virus out.
The disastrous Macaque Incident notwithstanding, Sylvia Chen remained convinced that her work with primates held the answer to terminating a WRX3883 infection before the microbes could mutate. Griff constantly considered incorporating elements of Chen’s research findings with his own, but could not bring himself even to appear to endorse her methods. Now, as much as it sickened him to read through her notes, he knew they might contain useful nuggets that could help uncover Orion’s missing piece.
Griff had read a survey in which 90 percent of the general public accepted the use of