Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [109]
I gave him a look that asked, Should we be holding our breath? His reply was at once apologetic and resigned: “The fact is, if we were a [biotechnology] company, we’d have the research all done by now.”
At this point in our conversation, we left his office and stepped into the adjacent lab, a functional space, but, as he accurately described it, “far from plush.” He noted that, though he’d prefer to spend all his time in here working on research, every year the struggle to obtain government and foundation grants gets tougher. “I spent 50 percent of my time last year traveling around trying to get the funds.” He sighed his frustration. “It’s not right.”
The basic science required to hunt down CAF offers no guarantee of a quick return on investment, he continued; it’s just too “high risk” for a biotech company to consider. Enter irony: Levy has received offers to become the head of a few such companies, to which his reaction has always been, “But then who’s going to work on CAF?”
Levy agreed to show me his other work spaces and led me down hallways that interlocked with the puzzling aspect of a hedge maze. Finally ushering me through a door, he said with good humor, “You need roller skates to get from one lab to another,” though, I must say, Levy is not a man one can easily imagine on skates. A Segway, however, is a distinct possibility. He motioned to a glass-front refrigerator, and I peered in at a fleet of vials. “In here, we’ve got cells that are growing the virus. In the old days,” he added dryly, “no one would come in this room.”
“In the old days, no one would come in this room.” Jay Levy in his laboratory, 1984
In a connected lab, Dr. Levy pointed out two members of his staff, impossibly young-looking postdoctoral fellows, Leyla and Hillary. They gave a quick, friendly wave. “Leyla’s the one who narrowed it down to fourteen proteins,” he said with pride. “It took her four years.” She smiled modestly and I thought, Remember that face: You might just see it on the cover of Time someday.
Although he and his staff hope to get through all fourteen in the next three years, Levy conceded, “We may end up finding we missed it.” His entire body language answered my unasked question: Yes, the hunt would then start over.
As we were stepping out the door, a splash of color caught my eye, a familiar poster, BE HERE FOR THE CURE. We’d given away thousands of these back in ’92. I smiled and gestured to it: “That looks good.” Levy said it had been up since the forum. The poster, I noticed, hung right where they turn the lights on every day—click—and where they turn them off.
A few days later I visited Chiron Corporation and spoke with a former senior member of Levy’s team, Dr. Susan Barnett. Chiron, whose U.S. headquarters is in Emeryville, just across the Bay from San Francisco, is a global biotech company with a legendary namesake: Chiron was the centaur who’d taught the healing arts to Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine and father of the goddess of cure-alls, Panacea.
Barnett, an effervescent forty-eight-year-old, is Chiron’s project leader for HIV vaccines. She greeted me in the soaring atrium of the life sciences building and led me up a broad stairway to her sleek, uncluttered office. I happened to be meeting Barnett on a day when she was experiencing a heady milestone of her own. In a phone call, she’d just gotten “the thumbs-up” from the FDA for the first Phase I clinical trials of their new HIV vaccine, a product Chiron’s been developing for almost ten years. I do believe that, had Barnett had a confetti cannon, she’d have set it off right then and there. “I’m as excited as a scientist can get,” she admitted. “We’re on the precipice,” she added with a warm smile, although her imagery clearly