From Filth & Mud (12 page)

Karen was astonished. “A cure for cancer? Which kind?”

“All of them!” Manny grinned, relieved to reveal his great secret. “And you’ve provided the capstone for our project. Your chrysalis is better than I could’ve imagined. If you suit up now, I can show you so that you can see her with your own eyes.”

Karen nodded quickly as her fear was overcome by sheer excitement. The two young researchers began the methodical preparations required to enter the Level 4 facility which lay just beyond the massive security doors. Manny handed her a sealed package containing a blue spacesuit-like garment; a standard, self-contained, Positive Pressure Protective Suit used by the CDC and the U.S. Army to work in Level 4 environments. As its name implied, the suit had its own air supply and provided the wearer with a positive pressure atmosphere that served the dual purpose of providing oxygen and a high pressure barrier to keep contaminants out. If the suit were to suffer a puncture, then the air inside of the suit would be forced out by the positive pressure. The rush of pressurized air would not allow the lower pressure air of the exterior laboratory to come into the suit and potentially expose the wearer to whatever dangerous pathogen was in the laboratory.

After hooking up their air supply intake nozzles, Manny and Karen checked each other’s suits for signs of punctures; finding none, the pair walked through the security doors of the Level 4 lab. The sudden swoosh of the air that rushed by them from behind startled Karen and pushed her forward a step faster than she was willing to go. She fought off an alarming sense of panic as the air squeezed loudly through the closing doors behind them. She had never been particularly claustrophobic, but the knowledge that she was confined within a secure chamber designed to hold the deadliest of pathogens, was enough to make her think seriously about running out of the lab. 

Inside there stood a bank of large holographic displays which were integrated within the reinforced, shatterproof glass of the main laboratory. In front of the glass stood a small, metallic workbench with an inlaid, holographic keyboard. Manny pointed toward the displays and typed onto the workbench tabletop. The center display came to life showing a blank image. A small caption on the bottom of the image read,
‘zero magnification’
. He tapped another hologram keystroke and the blank screen now read
‘100x magnification’
. Again there was nothing.

“What am I looking for?” Karen turned her head to find Manny smiling.

He then tapped yet another keystroke,
‘1000x magnification’
; still nothing. Manny directed her attention again to the blank screen. “Do you see it yet?”

She looked back at the screen; still nothing, and then, a dot. Perhaps she was imagining it, but there in the center of the screen appeared a faint, gray dot no larger than a period. At this magnification she knew that it could be a pixel distortion of the camera or some electronic artifact. Manny tapped one last keystroke.
‘100,000x magnification’
and there for the first time she saw her: Lilith.

Her structure was so pristine, so natural, so biological, yet alien. The complexity of her design was hidden by her beauty. Her long elegant arms, six on each side, were held out like flowing tendrils, gliding in an invisible medium.

“That’s Lilith as we conceived her. Beautiful isn’t she?”

“Lilith, named after the Genesis Creator God’s first female creation?”

“Precisely.”

“Why not Eve? That would seem to be the more obvious choice.”

“Obvious yes, but very misleading. You see we didn’t have the proverbial rib to work from and she isn’t anyone’s subordinate. Dr. LaPierre and I created her from scratch. You could say, from filth and mud, like her namesake.” Manny typed away on the holographic keyboard and the displays all came to life.

Karen now looked upon five, light-blue, agar plates set on five petri dishes. On the top hemisphere of the plates appeared a visible mass labeled
‘tumor cells’
. Each plate was labeled one through five and with a corresponding cancer. The first read: ‘
breast cancer
’, two: ‘
melanoma
’, three: ‘
pancreatic cancer
’, four: ‘
lung cancer
’ and five: ‘
colon cancer
’. The images sprang to life simultaneously as a disembodied hand pipetted an invisible substance onto the bottom hemisphere of the substrate. The video began to fast-forward quickly until a minute later a small, gray dot, barely visible against the light-blue, agar substrate, appeared in all five dishes.

“That dot represents about one million Lilicytes,” Manny informed Karen.

She watched as the disembodied hand reappeared on the screen and coaxed the little dot toward the tumor cells with a setting ladle. Manny fast-forwarded again and then something unexpected happened. The tumors in all five dishes began to shrink violently, collapsing from within as if sucked into the gravitational well of some unseen singularity. The controlled demolition continued as the tumors imploded until all that remained was the cellular waste of mixed proteins, lipids, and cytoplasm; a sort of primordial ooze of cellular biochemistry. The gray dot reappeared within the diffuse waste, though now it appeared to be three times larger than it had been.

Karen was just about to ask why, but then it dawned on her, and her discomfort was back with a vengeance. “Oh my God, Lilith replicates?” She turned back to Manny in disbelief.

“Yes she does.”

“But how, are the Lilicytes alive? Is Lilith alive?” she gasped.

“Yes, they are, and yes, she is. Like I told you before, Lilith, is a biosynthetic organism, the first of her kind. She’ll be the first of many, the mother of them all.” Manny exuded a confidence that Karen did not share. He continued, “Before I get into all of that, what do you think about the results?” He pointed his gloved hand toward the images.

“Miraculous!” Karen exclaimed.

“My word precisely,” Manny beamed.

“I’ve never seen a tumor, let alone five tumors, retreat so quickly with any kind of known treatment. What is the time frame of this scaled-up? Two weeks?”

“What you see here is 72 hours’ worth of treatment. Lilith effectively halts tumorigenesis almost immediately, usually within 12 to 24 hours. Tumor recession begins to occur shortly thereafter, anywhere within 48 hours to 96 hours depending on the type of cancer we are treating. Some cancers are trickier than others and have a higher rate of mutation which makes treatment a little more complex.”

“How do the Lilicytes work?”

“Well we designed them to attack cancer with a multi-pronged approach. They are both chemically active; in that they contain the specific gene mutations to attack what is known to be the twelve major mutation pathways of cancer, and they are biologically active; in that they inject their DNA into the target cancer cell, and then hijack the cell’s nucleus into creating thousands of copies of the original Lilicyte.”

“So it’s virulent in that way?”

“Yes. However, I prefer the term
ingenious
.”

“Semantics doctor,” Karen shot Manny a serious look. “If Lilith isn’t virulent then why the Level 4 facility?” Karen shrugged emphatically and her spacesuit crackled with the sound of crumpled plastic.

“Well that’s why you were so important to our efforts. Because of you, we won’t need these Level 4 facilities for long. Let me show you your contribution.” Manny typed a couple of keystrokes and the latex dimpled pads of his fingertips softly drubbed a beat on the stainless steel surface.

Karen returned her gaze to the displays which turned translucent momentarily and then there it was, her chrysalis, rotating against a white background in three-dimensional animation.

“It’s a thing of beauty. I can hardly believe that it’s so simple. It’s a perfect place for Lilith to pupate.” Karen turned to Manny who was smiling back at her. “I remembered that you have a fondness for butterflies, Karen, so I read up on them. For example I know that the term chrysalis is derived from the Greek word,
chrysos
, meaning gold, and I for one believe that we have just struck gold. He tapped another keystroke and the animation progressed. Now Lilith appeared on the screen as she had before. As the animation continued however, the chrysalis enveloped itself around Lilith as she floated in the white vacuum. “And here is where we bond Lilith to her chrysalis,” he explained. Lilith’s arms reached out toward the inner walls of the carbon-nanotube chrysalis and she held herself like a suspended gymnast. The chrysalis then collapsed around Lilith forming a snug fitting shelter.

“Your schematic was right. I took into account the bonding issue with the sp² bonds of the carbon-nanotubes and added an additional ethylene molecule at the terminus of each of Lilith’s arms in order to provide the strong bond required to attach her to the chrysalis itself.”

“Okay I understand that, and I have to admit that it is a good piece of engineering, but what is it functionally adding beyond a protective layer? From what I saw in the petri-dish experiments, Lilith seems to work just fine without the chrysalis.”

Manny’s tone turned somber. “Well let me make this admission. Lilith works really well against tumors in petri-dishes, but when we scaled up the experiments and moved into mice, we ran into a problem.” Images of red-eyed, albino mice filled the screens segregated by those labelled
‘control’
and those labeled
‘Lilicytes cancer (+)’; ‘Lilicytes cancer (-)’
. Manny brought up another video. The mice labeled, ‘
Lilicytes
’ were injected with Lilith while the control group remained undisturbed. The video sped forward and within seconds Karen understood the problem. Lilith was a killer. A minute passed by and two thirds of the mice lay dead; stopped suddenly in their tracks by an unseen culprit. “But why? Is Lilith toxic? Are the Lilicytes metabolizing into toxic byproducts within the body?” That was Karen’s only rationalization for what she was seeing.

Manny’s face worried her. “It’s not a problem of chemical toxicity. It’s more a question of biological function. We’ve always known that the Lilicytes have a strong affinity for one another. It appears to be a byproduct of their protein-coat’s design. We specifically designed the protein-coat to be pan infectious and because of the myriad of key sites that each Lilicyte has, it appears that they form weak bonds when they come into contact with one another inside the bloodstream. The bonding affinity of the metalloprotrein, hemoglobin, stimulates one of the key sites on the Lilicytes’ protein-coats. This causes the binding to take place and the process begins to snowball from there until a colony of Lilicytes is formed; that gray dot you saw previously. This isn’t an issue that we encountered in the petri-dish experiments and so we proceeded to the Phase II experiments in the mice. We were shocked when we first saw the fatal reactions that I just showed you.”

The video now showed the dissections of the mice brains. The gray dots of Lilicyte colonies were highlighted in false-color yellow.

“Your chrysalis however, will prevent this unwanted bonding in the bloodstream because the carbon-nanotubes are chemically and biologically inert. See I’ve already modeled them and put them through hundreds of thousands of simulations since you sent me the schematics. Look and see for yourself. There is no conceivable interaction, permutation, or folding-method that will cause the Lilicytes to prematurely bind to each other once they are
chrysalized
; for lack of a better term.”

Karen nodded. The results of the simulations looked positive. “When will you begin the synthesis of Lilith and the chrysalis?”

“I already have. It’s a pretty straightforward process, you know. I put a few thousand of the chrysalises into an ionic solution and ran a low current through it. This added a negative charge and heat to unfold them. I then added the Lilicytes to the solution and reversed the polarity. The majority of the Lilicytes bonded well with the chrysalises and I extracted those. I’ve wasted no time and have already started a new round of Phase II experiments. We should be seeing the results within the next 24 to 48 hours.”

Karen was alarmed at the pace of the experiments, but Manny’s cavalier attitude was more alarming. She had seen this kind of behavior before, in fact, she had experienced it herself. She called it
horse-to-barn syndrome
, where a researcher could get so close to his or her goal or desired result that they would forge ahead in a mindless pursuit of a predetermined outcome. It was a particularly disturbing sort of tunnel vision that transformed the most rational, evidence-based scientists into pyre-burning heretics. The outcome was usually disastrous for both the science and the scientist.

“Who’s reviewing your work? Dr. LaPierre?” Karen asked in as non-confrontational a manner as she could manage.

“Yes. He and I have been working on this project together. Though honestly, I haven’t shown him the chrysalis design quite yet, but I did advise him that you had come up with some promising leads. He’s going to be pleased. If it works out, as I believe that it will, I can see this going on to human trials in the very near future. That’s actually what I have been pushing Dr. LaPierre for. He’s so preoccupied nowadays heading all of BioSyn’s projects that he’s pretty much left me on my own to make this work. He’s got great faith in me. I believe that Lilith is actually at the forefront of BioSyn’s IPO discussions. They’ll probably go public next year.”