happen in vitro, and in mice.”
“What about drawing blood, treating it and then putting it back in?”
“Or hepatocytes?”
“Uptake is in blood.”
“What we need is to package the inserts with a ligand that is really specific for the target cells. If we could find that specificity, out of all the possible proteins, without going through all the rigamarole of trial and error …”
“Too bad we don’t still have Pierzinski here. He could run the array of possibilities through his operation set.”
“Well, we could call him up and ask him to give it a try.”
“Sure, but who’s got time for that kind of thing?”
“He’s still working on a paper with Eleanor over on campus,” Marta said, meaning UCSD. “I’ll ask him when he comes down.”
Brian said, almost as if joking, “Maybe you could try to make the insertion in a limb, away from the organs. Tourniquet a lower leg or a forearm, blow it up with the full dose, wait for it to permeate the endothelial cells lining the veins and arteries in the limb, then release the tourniquet. They’d pee off the extra water, and still have a certain number of altered cells. It wouldn’t be any worse than chugging a few beers, would it?”
“Your hand would hurt.”
“Big fucking deal.”
“You might get phlebitis if it was your leg. Isn’t that how it happens?”
“Well use the hand then.”
“Interesting,” Leo said. “Heck, let’s try it at least. The other options look worse to me. Although we should probably try the mice on the various limits on volume and dosage in the original experiment, just to be sure.”
So the meeting petered out, and they wandered off to go home, or back to their desks and benches, thinking over plans for more experiments. Getting the mice, getting the time on the machines, sequencing genes, sequencing schedules; when you were doing science the hours flew by, and the days, and the weeks. This was the main feeling: there was never enough time to do it all. Was this different from other kinds of work? Papers almost written were rewritten, checked, rewritten again—finally sent off. Papers with their problems papered over. Lots of times the lab was like some old-fashioned newspaper office with a deadline approaching, all the starving journalists churning out the next day’s fish-wrap. Except people would not wrap fish with these papers; they would save them, file them by category, test all their assertions, cite them—and report any errors to the authorities.
Leo’s THINGS TO DO list grew and shrank, grew and shrank, grew and then refused to shrink. He spent much less time than he wanted to at home in Leucadia with Roxanne. Roxanne understood, but it bothered him, even if it didn’t bother her.
He called the Jackson labs and ordered new and different strains of mice, each strain with its own number and bar code and genome. He got his lab’s machines scheduled, and assigned the techs to use them, moving some things to the front burner, others to the back, all to accommodate this project’s urgency.
On certain days, he went into the lab where the mouse cages were kept, and opened a cage door. He took out a mouse, small and white, wriggling and sniffing the way they did, checking things out with its whiskers. Quickly he shifted it so that he was holding it at the neck with the forefingers and thumbs of both hands. A quick hard twist and the neck broke. Very soon after that the mouse was dead.
This was not unusual. During this round of experiments, he and Brian and Marta and the rest of them tourniqueted and injected about three hundred mice, drew their blood, then killed and rendered and analyzed them. That was an aspect of the process they didn’t talk about, not even Brian. Marta in particular went black with disgust; it was worse than when she was premenstrual, as Brian joked (once). Her headphones stayed on her head all day long, the music turned up so loud that even the other people in the lab could hear
“What about drawing blood, treating it and then putting it back in?”
“Or hepatocytes?”
“Uptake is in blood.”
“What we need is to package the inserts with a ligand that is really specific for the target cells. If we could find that specificity, out of all the possible proteins, without going through all the rigamarole of trial and error …”
“Too bad we don’t still have Pierzinski here. He could run the array of possibilities through his operation set.”
“Well, we could call him up and ask him to give it a try.”
“Sure, but who’s got time for that kind of thing?”
“He’s still working on a paper with Eleanor over on campus,” Marta said, meaning UCSD. “I’ll ask him when he comes down.”
Brian said, almost as if joking, “Maybe you could try to make the insertion in a limb, away from the organs. Tourniquet a lower leg or a forearm, blow it up with the full dose, wait for it to permeate the endothelial cells lining the veins and arteries in the limb, then release the tourniquet. They’d pee off the extra water, and still have a certain number of altered cells. It wouldn’t be any worse than chugging a few beers, would it?”
“Your hand would hurt.”
“Big fucking deal.”
“You might get phlebitis if it was your leg. Isn’t that how it happens?”
“Well use the hand then.”
“Interesting,” Leo said. “Heck, let’s try it at least. The other options look worse to me. Although we should probably try the mice on the various limits on volume and dosage in the original experiment, just to be sure.”
So the meeting petered out, and they wandered off to go home, or back to their desks and benches, thinking over plans for more experiments. Getting the mice, getting the time on the machines, sequencing genes, sequencing schedules; when you were doing science the hours flew by, and the days, and the weeks. This was the main feeling: there was never enough time to do it all. Was this different from other kinds of work? Papers almost written were rewritten, checked, rewritten again—finally sent off. Papers with their problems papered over. Lots of times the lab was like some old-fashioned newspaper office with a deadline approaching, all the starving journalists churning out the next day’s fish-wrap. Except people would not wrap fish with these papers; they would save them, file them by category, test all their assertions, cite them—and report any errors to the authorities.
Leo’s THINGS TO DO list grew and shrank, grew and shrank, grew and then refused to shrink. He spent much less time than he wanted to at home in Leucadia with Roxanne. Roxanne understood, but it bothered him, even if it didn’t bother her.
He called the Jackson labs and ordered new and different strains of mice, each strain with its own number and bar code and genome. He got his lab’s machines scheduled, and assigned the techs to use them, moving some things to the front burner, others to the back, all to accommodate this project’s urgency.
On certain days, he went into the lab where the mouse cages were kept, and opened a cage door. He took out a mouse, small and white, wriggling and sniffing the way they did, checking things out with its whiskers. Quickly he shifted it so that he was holding it at the neck with the forefingers and thumbs of both hands. A quick hard twist and the neck broke. Very soon after that the mouse was dead.
This was not unusual. During this round of experiments, he and Brian and Marta and the rest of them tourniqueted and injected about three hundred mice, drew their blood, then killed and rendered and analyzed them. That was an aspect of the process they didn’t talk about, not even Brian. Marta in particular went black with disgust; it was worse than when she was premenstrual, as Brian joked (once). Her headphones stayed on her head all day long, the music turned up so loud that even the other people in the lab could hear
Similar Books
