Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [60]
“Yes,” Yann agreed, “I guess maybe. I hadn’t thought about it that way.” This kind of obliviousness had always been characteristic of Yann. “But maybe so. You’d have to try some trials. Take the palindrome codons and repeat them maybe, see if they make the same choice in the operation if that’s the only codon you have there?”
Frank made a note of it. It sounded like some pretty good lab work would be needed. “You’ve got Leo Mulhouse back here, right?”
Yann brightened. “Yeah, we do.”
“Why don’t we go ask him what he thinks?”
So they went to see Leo, which was also a kind of flashback for Frank, in that it was so like the last time he had seen him. Same people, same building—had all that out in D.C. really happened? Were they only dreaming of a different world here, in which promising human health projects were properly funded?
But after a while he saw it wasn’t the same Leo. As with the lab, Leo looked outwardly the same, but had changed inside. He was less optimistic, more guarded. Less naive, Frank thought. Almost certainly he had gone through a very stressed job hunt, in a tight job market. That could change you all right. Mark you for life sometimes.
Now Leo looked at Yann’s protein diagrams, which illustrated his model for how the palindromic codons at the start of the KLD gene expressed, and nodded uncertainly. “So, basically you’re saying repeat the codons and see if that forces the expression?”
Frank intervened. “Also, maybe focus on this group here, because if it works like Yann thinks, then you should get palindromes of that too…”
“Yeah, that would be a nice result.” The prospect of such a clearly delineated experiment brought back an echo of Leo’s old enthusiasm. “That would be very clean,” he said. “If that would work—man. I mean, there would still be the insertion problem, but, you know, NIH is really interested in solving that one…”
Getting any of their engineered genes into living human bodies, where they could supersede damaged or defective DNA, had proven to be one of the serious stoppers to a really powerful gene therapy. Attaching the altered genes to viruses that infected the subject was still the best method they had, but it had so many downsides that in many cases it couldn’t be used. So literally scores or even hundreds of potential therapies, or call them outright cures, remained ideas only, because of this particular stumbling block. It vexed the entire field; it was, ultimately, the reason that venture capital had mostly gone away, in search of quicker and more certain returns. And if it wasn’t solved, it could mean that gene therapy would never be achieved at all.
To Frank’s surprise, it was Yann who now said, “There’s some cool new stuff about insertion at Johns Hopkins. They’ve been working on metallic nanorods. The rods are a couple hundred nanometers long, half nickel and half gold. You attach your altered DNA to the nickel side, and some transfer-rin protein to the gold, and when they touch cell walls they bind to receptors in pits, and get gooed into vesicles, and those migrate inside the cell. Then the DNA detaches and goes into the nucleus, and there it is. Your altered gene is delivered and expressing in there. Doing its function.”
“Really?” Leo said. He and his Torrey Pines Generique lab had been forced to look at a lot of options on this front, and none had worked. “What about the metals?”
“They just stay in the cell. They’re too small to matter. They’re trying out platinum and silver and other metals too, and they can do a three-metal nanorod that includes a molecule that