Olympia knew why Victor Frankenstein made his monster. She’d been in her office, pushing her Sisyphus Stone—grant applications—the first time she spoke to Brian, the venture capitalist. He’d been trolling Parasite Studies, looking for projects like hers that had commercial potential, he’d explained—academic research that could be flipped the way real estate speculators flipped condos, she imagined—when he came upon her work on disease vectors and sand flies: she’d been trying to engineer a sandfly with receptors in its foregut which would be too small to allow the Leishmania parasite that actually caused the disease—a parasite within a parasite—to attach itself inside the sandfly’s stomach. It led him to her suggestion that a protein in bird lice saliva might give humans some immunity against avian flu. He was the one to ask her about engineering an insect to instead vaccinate the birds themselves.
Like getting a little inoculation with every bite, as he put it. She’d agreed to meet him and his partner, Sid. “But not here,” she’d insisted, “your place,” imagining an office like hers, down the hall from the clutter of insects and test tubes, and she felt like a rube when he gave her an address in the financial district.
In a glass tower, Brian and Sid explained how the biotech she was developing could be turned into dollars: with virus outbreaks becoming as common as hurricanes, the floodgates had opened for virus research to get as many legs up on future threats as possible. Though it hadn’t quite reached the level of looking into drinking bleach, Sid joked.
With an infusion of cash, the work her lab was doing on bird lice could tap into it, they thought, given how related it was to avian flu, one of the top candidates for a future outbreak. A technology transfer to bird lice would be an elegant simplification of other insects reengineered to drive out natural populations and their problems: the tsetse fly with a typo in its DNA that would spell the end of its line; pink bollworms that bore larva whose genetic ladders unraveled as they were born….
Ever since labs learned how to reorder The Garden, extinction had been a growth industry, with lots of duds, the way publishers take on hundreds of monster, ghost, witch and wizard novels in the hopes that one will be the next Harry Potter. And it wasn’t as if going commercial hadn’t occurred to her. But she didn’t want to just give away her hand before negotiations even began. So she pressed them on the other thing she thought: that Big Pharma wouldn’t bother with the academic issues she worked on: problems with no solutions. Or, what was the same, solutions to problems that didn’t plague people. If by ‘problems’ you meant problems that could be solved with patents. If by ‘people’ you meant people in Armani suits like the one Brian wore the first time she met him and Sid: two ruddy, middle-aged businessmen who like all their brethren wanted wrinkle-free faces, solid memories, and erect penises into their dotage. Not people with sores from dengue and the scores of other diseases that plagued the bottom-dollar Bottom Billion.
But that was old-school thinking, Brian explained, by which he meant, thinking before Bottom Billion diseases began showing up on Florida golf courses.
The bump up in scale they assumed was as disorienting as the time her grade-school project won the All State Science Fair, and an image of herself in pigtails and braces, explaining her tin-can and drinking-straw display to adult judges with the power to take it global was too much to comprehend, even after they laid out how it could happen.
She gave a laugh, the two men more like genies who would turn back into smoke and return to their prescription bottle.
“What’s so funny?” Brian asked, smiling to be let in on the joke.
She told him: the implausibility of all the dominoes lining up in the order they needed for them to fall the way they were thinking. She knew she wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t know: that pharmaceuticals came into the world less because they were invented than because they precipitated from a cloud of university labs, professors, marketers, lawyers, commercial labs, the military, health clinics, government agencies, grants, regulations, congressmen promoting business in their state, lobbyists, chemical companies supplying the raw materials, equipment manufacturers, information architects, ad agencies, publishers, investors, and venture capitalists, like them….
“At this point we don’t even know if there is a single saliva protein that triggers an immune response, let alone the genes that create it. It might be two genes. Or three. Or a different combination for every louse population….”
“Maybe we concentrate on waterfowl, the most common carrier. We didn’t think there wouldn’t be unknowns. That’s why it’s an investment.”
“Gamble, you mean.”
“Shhh. Never use that word with investors,” Brian said, toying with a chrome letter opener. When it caught the light, the embossed name of an antidepressant manufacturer gleamed. “You have to remember, ‘effectiveness’ has as many definitions as there are stockholders. How else could companies like Pfizer and Eli Lilly and Merck make profits off of drugs for Alzheimer’s that only work in one of three patients? Chemotherapy for cancer?—it’s ‘effective,’ that is, it shrinks tumors by 50%—in a quarter of the patients. That might not seem like a successful drug until you consider that 100% of the patients pay up to $18,000 per year. Would an automaker call a model a success if the brakes worked half of the time in half of the cars? They would if nobody had a better option. Last year the sales of these drugs totaled $584 billion.”
“Wonderful,” Olympia said flatly, thinking of her father; before he died, he’d been on Merck’s Fosamax, a bone-building drug for the elderly that also turned out to make skeletons so brittle that a person’s leg could break from the stress of just standing; some femurs had sheared so cleanly that insurance adjusters thought they were looking at X-rays from auto accidents. But Olympia hadn’t meant to sound sarcastic. Really she was just tired. Most of the people she came in contact with thought that because she worked on insects that plagued the poor, she must be some kind of Mother Theresa. So she let them.
Brian winced cartoonishly. “All Sid means is that you have to think of your project in terms of where it could go, not where it is. That’s been the MO of biotech since the first genetically new-and-improved chicken was shown to be 10% heavier than the old-fashioned, natural kind, even though in practice it turned out to be 200% more susceptible to feed-lot disease. Even today, only 50 of the 400 publicly traded biotech companies make profits. The rest are in the business of The Future.”
Olympia paused: everyone knew that every lab was making a story about the future, no matter what else it was making. But creating a story in a lab was as clean as it got; not nearly as tangled as their plots could become out in the wild: while there wasn’t a vaccine against Lyme disease for humans, there was one—LYMErid, for dogs—that worked on mice. So when ForestFree Labs engineered a mouse with the LYMErid sequence, along with the gene drive needed to override natural selection, they released the engineered mice onto one small isolated island to test the results. As predicted, the mutation spread throughout the entire wild population. As predicted, the mouse population became immune to the ticks that bit them. What wasn’t predicted was that some of the ticks would mutate in response; that they would begin to carry a more virulent form of Lyme disease; that a hawk would catch a mouse carrying one of these more virulent ticks; that the hawk would drop the mouse close enough to the mainland for it to swim ashore, where super-Lyme disease spread among humans faster than ever.
Even field tests of technologies as old as sterile-insect engineering weren’t straightforward: when Aedes aegypti were engineered to die young, they bred with other species and all mosquito populations crashed, and so the herds of caribou that used to migrate into the wind to escape their swarms abandoned their routes; wolves that used to eat those caribou starved, as did dragonflies that ate mosquitos; as dragonfly populations died out, so did the toads, frogs, herons, and fish that ate them; so did the foxes, bobcats, and larger animals that ate frogs and herons…. For lack of a mosquito the food chain was lost. Or so said field tests.
The fickle nature of scientific truth…. And everyone using it to edit the story of Nature.
Sid and Brian exchanged a look. “If we were just in it for the money,” Sid said, “we’d be selling candy-flavored vaping cartridges to kids. Or better yet, Oralet—the narcotic lollipops banned here but still sold in over 60 Bottom Billion countries….”
“Olympia,” Brian said, cutting in to silence Sid. “Your project is good. Something real. All Sid means is that a nation with a more streamlined command structure…”
A dictatorship.
“...might welcome a program that was cheap enough to actually use even if it wasn’t as effective. Just think of the legal fights that break out over every new virus.” He was referring to the last outbreak during which the Indonesian government wouldn’t let the WHOWHO or any other neocolonialists, as they put it, come in, take their ‘resources,’ that is, ‘their’ virus, to develop a vaccine that Indonesia couldn’t afford. “The French, the Wing Foundation, and CDC are still fighting over who owns Ebola, Patent No. CA2741523A1. But if you could turn birds in the wild into living pharmacies….”
They let the implications of this idea swell. Everyone took a breath. Then Brian asked her to speculate about the most obvious problem: how, even if it was possible to trigger an immune response in birds, how it could be used to inoculate a wild population, and her mind flashed to Victor Frankenstein—he made his monster because he couldn’t stand not knowing whether or not he could do it.
On poultry farms, it was an easy matter to put a vaccine into the animals’ food. But this wouldn’t work with birds spread across continents. So, okay, she wrote them her fantasy novel, explaining how the very insect that made the protein might be turned into a delivery system. A method that was patentable, Sid was happy to point out. If her lab was able to identify a protein or proteins in lice saliva that would give birds immunity, they could create a louse with a genetically enhanced ability to create it. Maybe start with a louse like Amblycera that already fed on blood and was a generalist that could range across bird species. Using CRISPR, they could give the louse an enhanced propensity to bite, give it a gene-drive to spread throughout the louse population. Then they could let that louse loose in the wild where it would spread among wild birds like a plague itself. Only this would be a healing plague: a buffer between humans and virus. “Remove the avian from avian flu and the cycle of transmission collapses.” She sat back. She kept wearing her poker face though the idea of having a lab that could actually pull off her fantasy made her breathe quicker. The way they put it, there was all that money flying through the air and she only had to snag some. Who knows, maybe they were right. She couldn’t help but think of the biologist in her first lab who’d come up with a way to cut genetic strings that wasn’t really any better than the enzyme cutting everyone already used. After trying for years to get backing here in Chicago, he moved to San Francisco, hooked up with financiers who set him up with research space and sold the company a year later for $350 million. If he had gone through the tech transfer department at his university, he would have gotten less than a fourth of that.
Like they said, even if they never made a product, there were bound to be spinoffs that she couldn’t even imagine….
Last she heard, that ex-colleague had built a home in the South Pacific and gave a TEDx lecture on one of his hobbies: the search for Amelia Earhart’s plane….
“This is a lot to digest,” she said.