Executive orders - Tom Clancy [184]
You forgot bad luck, but that's only one percent or so. Alexandre picked up the thread. It's starting to look as though E-Strain-that cropped up in Thailand-well, that it makes the heterosexual jump a lot more easily than B. It's evidently a heartier version of our old friend.
Has CDC quantified that yet? Cathy asked.
No, they need a few more months, least that's what I heard a couple weeks ago.
How bad? Altman asked. Working with SURGEON was turning into an educational experience.
Ralph Forster went over five years ago to see how bad things were. Know the story, Alex?
Not all of it, just the bottom line.
Ralph flew over on a government ticket, official trip and all that, and first thing happens off the plane, the Thai official meets him at customs, walks him to the car and says, 'Want some girls for tonight?' That's when he knew there was a real problem.
I believe it, Alex said, remembering when he would have smiled and nodded. This time he managed not to shudder. The numbers are grim. Mr. Altman, right now, nearly a third of the kids inducted into the Thai army are HIV positive. Mainly E-Strain. The implications of that number were unmistakable.
A third? A third of them?
Up from twenty-five percent when Ralph flew over. That's a hard number, okay?
But that means-
It might mean in fifty years, no more Thailand, Cathy announced in a matter-of-fact voice that masked her inner horror. When I was going to school here, I thought oncology was the place to be for the supersmart ones-she pointed for Altman's benefit-Marty, Bert, Curt, and Louise, those guys in the corner over there. I didn't think I could take it, take the stress, so I cut up eyeballs and fix 'em. I was wrong. We're going to beat cancer. But these damned viruses, I don't know.
The solution, Cathy, is in understanding the precise interactions between the gene strings in the virus and the host cell, and it shouldn't be all that hard. Viruses are such tiny little sunzabitches. They can only do so many things, not like the interaction of the entire human genome at conception. Once we figure that one out, we can defeat all the little bastards. Alexandre, like most research docs, was an optimist.
So, researching the human cell? Altman asked, interested in learning this. Alexandre shook his head.
A lot smaller than that. We're into the genome now. It's like taking a strange machine apart, every step you're trying to figure what the individual parts do, and sooner or later you got all the parts loose, and you know where they all go, and then you figure out what they all do in a systematic way. That's what we're doing now.
You know what it's going to come down to? Cathy suggested with a question, then answered it: Mathematics.
That's what Gus says down at Atlanta.
Math? Wait a minute, Altman objected.
At the most basic level, the human genetic code is composed of four amino acids, labeled A, C, G and T. How those letters-the acids, I mean-are strung together determines everything, Alex explained. Different character sequences mean different things and interact in different ways, and probably Gus is right: the interactions are mathematically defined. The genetic code really is a code. It can be cracked, and it can be understood. Probably someone will assign a mathematical value to them complex polynomials he thought. Was that important?
Just nobody smart enough to do it has come along yet, Cathy Ryan observed. That's the home-run ball, Roy. Someday, somebody is going to step up to the plate, and put that one over the fence, and it will give us the key to defeating all human diseases. All of them. Every single one. The pot of gold at the end of that rainbow is medical immortality-and who knows, maybe human immortality.
Put us all out of business, especially you, Cathy. One of the first things they'll edit out of the human genome is myopia, and diabetes and that-
It'll unemploy you before it unemploys me, Professor, Cathy said with an impish smile. I'm a surgeon, remember?