Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [111]
I remembered how, ten or twelve years ago, researchers often bridged the notion of a preventive vaccine with a “therapeutic” one, meaning that what would protect the uninfected should also aid the infected. Did this still hold water today? Mentioning my partner, I asked Barnett, “Could this vaccine be used in people with HIV as well?”
She put down the marker and returned to her desk, quiet every step. She sat, then said, “It’s complicated.”
It’s unlikely, in other words. And, as she went on to clarify, it’s simply not part of Chiron’s plan. Of course, there is a scenario in which the vaccine might be used in a person with HIV: if a trial participant becomes infected. As I knew, slip-ups will be necessary for determining ultimately whether an AIDS vaccine is a success, although this is a harsh reality that Barnett and I did not discuss.
Barnett had worked with Jay Levy for four years and counts him as a valued colleague but she is also an outsider, so she seemed the right person to ask, “What’s your take on CAF?”
“Well,” she said, stretching the word almost to its breaking point. “What Jay’s been going toward, it’s a noble quest.” She leaned forward in her chair. “His work on CAF has been seminal. He showed that this factor specifically inhibited HIV.” Furthermore, other scientists, following Levy’s lead, began searching for CAF and discovered something unexpected, chemokines, chemical substances that also inhibit HIV. Even more important, Barnett emphasized, they discovered why chemokines inhibit the virus: They bind to the same receptors on the T cell as HIV does, so, in essence, it cannot “dock.”
“Now we know where HIV binds,” she said, her voice and eyes sharing the same fire. “Now we know how HIV gets into the cell.” She let that steep for a moment, then recapped: “So we went from his initial discovery to discovering beta chemokines to discovering the receptors for them to discovering how the virus gets into the cell.
“And for me, designing a vaccine,” she added, “if I know how the virus binds, then I can figure out how to block it.” She sat back, smiling, gently shaking her head in wonder. “So that is pretty amazing. He doesn’t have the factor, but look at all the research it has stimulated.”
I liked her use of noble quest, but I doubted Jay Levy would’ve liked its ring. Built into the phrase is an acceptance that the destination may never be reached, that the journey may be all. When I’d spoken with the man three days back, doubt never once entered the discussion. “When we find the factor,” Levy had said, “it’s gonna be a hell of a discovery.” Amen, I’d thought. “People will say, ‘God, they spent twenty years on this thing.’ Well, that’s not unusual—factor VIII took years to be discovered. And penicillin! Interferon’s another example. That’s what’s going to happen here.”
He added, “That’s what keeps me going.”
“Keeps you on the odyssey?” I said.
“That’s right,” Dr. Levy replied. “I haven’t met the Muses yet.”
FOR ME, IT’S NOT THE MUSE’S CLEVER WEAVING OF THE TIME-TOSSED tale or the hero’s cunning escape from the Cyclopes or even his sweet reunion with his wife after twenty years away. No, what brings me back to The Odyssey time and again is a passage right at the halfway point in the story, when Odysseus and his surviving crew are so utterly, epically lost that their only hope of ever finding home is to journey into hell itself to ask directions of a dead, blind prophet. Directions from a blind man. That doesn’t sound promising.
Considering all they’ve gone through since leaving Troy, their descent to the underworld isn’t particularly perilous. There Odysseus stands at a rocky pinnacle where the River of Flaming Fire and the River of Lamentation meet, and he carves a narrow trough in the ground at his feet. Following careful instructions, he performs a lengthy ritual that culminates in his pouring fresh blood into the pit. Souls instantly swarm, craving a drink, a ghostly multitude of old men, unmarried youths, “once-happy girls with grief still fresh in their hearts,” and a