Back inside, fill his travel coffee cup, down to the car. Down Europa, past the Pannikin, hang a right and head to work.
The Pacific Coast Highway in San Diego County was a beautiful drive at dawn. In any kind of weather it was handsome: in new sun with all the pale blues lifting out of the sea, in scattered cloud when shards and rays of horizontal sunlight broke through, or on rainy or foggy mornings when the narrow but rich palette of greys filled the eye with the subtlest of gradations. The grey dawns were by far the most frequent, as the regions climate settled into what appeared to be a permanent El Niño the Hyperniño, as people called it. The whole idea of a Mediterranean climate leaving the world, even in the Mediterranean, people said. Here coastal residents were getting sunlight deficiency disorders, and taking vitamin D and anti-depressants to counteract the effects, even though ten miles inland it was a cloudless baking desert all the year round. The June Gloom had come home to roost.
Leo Mulhouse took the coast highway to work every morning. He liked seeing the ocean, and feeling the slight roller-coaster effect of dropping down to cross the lagoons, then motoring back up little rises to Cardiff, Solano Beach and Del Mar. These towns looked best at this hour, deserted and as if washed for the new day. Hiss of tyres on wet road, wet squeak of windshield wipers, distant boom of the waves breaking it all combined to make a kind of aquatic experience, the drive like surfing, up and down the same bowls every time, riding the perpetual wave of land about to break into the sea.
Up the big hill onto Torrey Pines, past the golf course, quick right into Torrey Pines Generique. Down into its parking garage, descending into the belly of work. Into the biotech beast.
Meaning a complete security exam, just to get in. If they didnt know what you came in with, they wouldnt be able to judge what you went out with. So, metal detector, inspection by the bored security team with their huge coffee cups, computer turned on, hardware and software check by experts, sniff-over by Clyde the morning dog, trained to detect signature molecules: all standard in biotech now, after some famous incidents of industrial espionage. The stakes were too high to trust anybody.
Then Leo was inside the compound, walking down long white hallways. He put his coffee on his desk, turned on his desktop computer, went out to check the experiments in progress. The most important current one was reaching an endpoint, and Leo was particularly interested in the results. They had been using high-throughput screening of some of the many thousands of proteins listed in the Protein Data Bank at UCSD, trying to identify some that would activate certain cells in a way that would make these cells express more high-density lipoprotein than they would normally perhaps ten times as much. Ten times as much HDL, the good cholestorol, would be a life-saver for people suffering from any number of ailments atherosclerosis, obesity, diabetes, even Alzheimers. Any one of these ailments mitigated (or cured!) would be worth billions; a therapy that helped all of them would be well. It explained the high-alert security enclosing the compound, that was for sure.
The experiment was proceeding but not yet done, so Leo went back to his office and drank his coffee and read Bioworld Today onscreen. Higher through-put screening robotics, analysis protocols for artificial hormones, proteomic analyses every article could have described something that was going on at Torrey Pines Generique. The whole industry was looking for ways to improve the hunt for therapeutic proteins, and for ways to get those proteins into living people. Half the days articles were devoted to one of these problems or the other, as in any other issue of the newszine. They were the recalcitrant outstanding problems, standing between biotechnology as an idea and medicine as it actually existed. If they didnt solve these problems, the idea and the industry based on it could go the way of nuclear power, and turn into something that somehow did not work out. If they did solve them, then it would turn into something more like the computer industry in terms of financial returns not to mention the impacts on health of course!
When Leo next checked the lab, two of his assistants, Marta and Brian, were standing at the bench, both wearing lab coats and rubber gloves, working the pipettes on a bank of flasks filling a countertop.
Good morning guys.
Hey Leo. Marta aimed her pipette like a power-point cursor at the small window on a long low refrigerator. Ready to check it out?
Sure am. Can you help?
In just a sec. She moved down the bench.
Brian said, This better work, because Derek just told the press that it was the most promising self-healing therapy of the decade.
Leo was startled to hear this. No. Youre kidding.
Im not kidding.
Oh not really. Not really.
Really.
How could he?
Press release. Also calls to his favourite reporters, and on his webpage. The chat room is already talking about the ramifications. Theyre betting one of the big pharms will buy us within the month.
Please Bri, dont be saying these things.
Sorry, but you know Derek. Brian gestured at one of the computer screens glowing on the bench across the way. Its all over.
Leo squinted at a screen. It wasnt on Bioworld Today.
It will be tomorrow.
The companys website Breaking News box was blinking. Leo leaned over and jabbed it. Yep lead story. HDL factory, potential for obesity, diabetes, Alzheimers, heart disease
Oh my God, Leo muttered as he read. Oh my God. His face was flushed. Why does he do this?
He wants it to be true.
So what? We dont know yet.
With her sly grin Marta said, He wants you to make it happen, Leo. Hes like the Roadrunner and youre Wile E. Coyote. He gets you to run off the edge of a cliff, and then you have to build the bridge back to the cliff before you fall.
But it never works! He always falls!
Marta laughed at him. She liked him, but she was tough. Come on, she said. This time well do it.
Leo nodded, tried to calm down. He appreciated Martas spirit, and liked to be at least as positive as the most positive person in any given situation. That was getting tough these days, but he smiled the best he could and said, Yeah, right, youre good, and started to put on rubber gloves.
Remember the time he announced that we had haemophilia A whipped? Brian said.
Please.
Remember the time he put out a press release saying he had decapitated mice at a thousand r.p.m. to show how well our therapy worked?
The guillotine turntable experiment?
Please, Leo begged. No more.
He picked up a pipette and tried to focus on the work. Withdraw, inject, withdraw, inject alas, most of the work in this stage was automated, leaving people free to think whether they wanted to or not. After a while Leo left them to it and went back to his office to check his e-mail, then helplessly to read what portion of Dereks press release he could stomach. Why does he do this, why why why?
It was a rhetorical question, but Marta and Brian were now standing in the doorway, and Marta was implacable: I tell you he thinks he can make us do it.
It was a rhetorical question, but Marta and Brian were now standing in the doorway, and Marta was implacable: I tell you he thinks he can make us do it.
Its not us doing it, Leo protested, its the gene. We cant do a thing if the altered gene doesnt get into the cell were trying to target.
Youll just have to think of something that will work.
You mean like, build it and they will come?
Yeah. Say it and they will make it.
Out in the lab a timer beeped, sounding uncannily like the Roadrunner. Beep-beep! Beep-beep! They went to the incubator and read the graph paper as it rolled out of the machine, like a receipt out of an automated teller like money out of an automated teller, in fact, if the results were good. One very big wad of twenties rolling out into the world from nowhere, if the numbers were good.
And they were. They were very good. They would have to plot it to be sure, but they had been doing this series of experiments for so long that they knew what the raw data would look like. The data were good. So now they were like Wile E. Coyote, standing in midair staring amazed at the viewers, because a bridge from the cliff had magically extended out and saved them. Saved them from the long plunge of a retraction in the press and subsequent Nasdaq free-fall.
Except that Wile E. Coyote was invariably premature in his sense of relief. The Roadrunner always had another devastating move to make. Leos hand was shaking.
Shit, he said. I would be totally celebrating right now if it werent for Derek. Look at this pointing its even better than before.
See, Derek knew it would turn out like this.
The fuck he did.
Pretty good numbers, Brian said with a grin. Papers almost written too. Its just plug these in and do a conclusion.
Marta said, Conclusions will be simple, if we tell the truth.
Leo nodded. Only problem is, the truth would have to admit that even though this part works, we still dont have a therapy, because we havent got targeted delivery. We can make it but we cant get it into living bodies where it needs to be.
You didnt read the whole website, Marta told him, smiling angrily again.
What do you mean? Leo was in no mood for teasing. His stomach had already shrunk to the size of a walnut.
Marta laughed, which was her way of showing sympathy without admitting to any. Hes going to buy Urtech.
Whats Urtech?
They have a targeted delivery method that works.
What do you mean, what would that be?
Its new. They just got awarded the patent on it.
Oh no.
Oh yes.
Oh my God. It hasnt been validated?
Except by the patent, and Dereks offer to buy it, no.
Oh my God. Why does he do this kind of stuff?
Because he intends to be the CEO of the biggest pharmaceutical of all time. Like he told People magazine.
Yeah right.
Torrey Pines Generique, like most biotech start-ups, was undercapitalized, and could only afford a few rolls of the dice. One of them had to look promising to attract the capital that would allow it to grow further. That was what they had been trying to accomplish for the five years of the companys existence, and the effort was just beginning to show results with these experiments. What they needed now was to be able to insert their successfully tailored gene into the patients own cells, so that afterwards it would be the patients own body producing increased amounts of the needed proteins. If that worked, there would be no immune response from the bodys immune system, and with the protein being produced in therapeutic amounts, the patient would be not just helped, but cured.
Amazing.
But (and it was getting to be a big but) the problem of getting the altered DNA into living patients cells hadnt been solved. Leo and his people were not physiologists, and they hadnt been able to do it. No one had. Immune systems existed precisely to keep these sorts of intrusions from happening. Indeed, one method of inserting the altered DNA into the body was to put it into a virus and give the patient a viral infection, benign in its ultimate effects because the altered DNA reached its target. But since the body fought viral infections, it was not a good solution. You didnt want to compromise further the immune systems of people who were already sick.
So, for a long time now they had been in the same boat as everyone else, chasing the holy grail of gene therapy, a targeted non-viral delivery system. Any company that came up with such a system, and patented it, would immediately have the method licensed for scores of procedures, and very likely one of the big pharmaceuticals would buy the company, making everyone in it rich, and often still employed. Over time the pharmaceutical might dismantle the acquisition, keeping only the method, but at that point the startups employees would be wealthy enough to laugh that off retire and go surfing, or start up another start-up and try to hit the jackpot again. At that point it would be more of a philanthropic hobby than the cut-throat struggle to make a living that it often seemed before the big success arrived.
So the hunt for a targeted non-viral delivery system was most definitely on, in hundreds of labs around the world. And now Derek had bought one of these labs. Leo stared at the new announcement on the company website. Derek had to have bought it on spec, because if the method had been well-proven, there was no way Derek would have been able to afford it. Some biotech firm even smaller than Torrey Pines Urtech, based in Bethesda, Maryland (Leo had never heard of it) had convinced Derek that they had found a way to deliver altered DNA into humans. Derek had made the purchase without consulting Leo, his chief research scientist. His scientific advice had to have come from his vice president, Dr Sam Houston, an old friend and early partner. A man who had not done lab work in a decade.
So. It was true.
Leo sat at his desk, trying to relax his stomach. They would have to assimilate this new company, learn their technique, test it. It had been patented, Leo noted, which meant they had it exclusively at this point, as a kind of trade secret a concept many working scientists had trouble accepting. A secret scientific method? Was that not a contradiction in terms? Of course a patent was a matter of public record, and eventually it would enter the public domain. So it wasnt a trade secret in literal fact. But at this stage it was secret enough. And it could not be a sure thing. There wasnt much published about it, as far as Leo could tell. Some papers in preparation, some papers submitted, one paper accepted he would have to check that one out as soon as possible and a patent. Sometimes they awarded them so early. One or two papers were all that supported the whole approach.
Secret science. God damn it, Leo said to his room. Derek had bought a pig in a poke. And Leo was going to have to open the poke and poke around.
There was a hesitant knock on his opened door, and he looked up.
Oh hi, Yann, how are you?
Im good Leo, thanks. Im just coming by to say goodbye. Im back to Pasadena now, my job here is finished.