Mutant (9 page)
If we modify the genes of a plant or animal, there is abundant evidence that the altered genetic material will also pass to potential human viruses, bacteria, parasites, or insect tick vectors living on that host. There are also studies which suggest that ordinary animals ingesting such genetically altered plants might acquire these same man-made strands of DNA through the gut into their bloodstream. This is particularly worrisome, since it evokes a scenario where a so-called normal animal could introduce genetic vectors into any microorganisms residing in its gut or circulating throughout its body.
Steele immediately thought of animal species known to be reservoirs of human pathogens, such as cattle with TB, rodents with hantavirus, or deer carrying ticks loaded with the spirochete that causes Lyme disease. The idea of these lethal organisms having a DNA makeover gave him the creeps.
He scrolled further, skimming through the summaries of other scientific papers that supported these claims.
Ingested foreign DNA survives transiently in the gastrointestinal tract and enters the bloodstream; DNA ingested by mice reaches peripheral leukocytes, spleen, liver, and gonads via intestinal wall mucosa; we become what we eat.
Wait a minute, he thought. The implication here is that the DNA in what we ingest could end up as part of our own genetic structure. But if so, it’s been happening since the dawn of time. Why the fuss now? Reflexively, he began critiquing the article the way he would his own medical journals. Then he read the author’s real concern—how the vectors themselves could be changing an ancient phenomenon for the worse.
Until now, evolution and time have screened the DNA we’ve been exposed to. Genetically altered foods, on the other hand, subject our systems to man-made strands of nucleic acids that have never existed in nature, that are designed to jump species barriers, and that may have totally unknown long-term effects. In fact, these artificial vectors, meant to overrule existing natural barriers to horizontal gene transfer, may be sidestepping a system of checks and balances that has regulated such “jumps” in our favor for millions of years.
Totally absorbed now, he started poring over more recent publications, growing ever more uneasy. He first read that a group of scientists in Norway fed laboratory rats potatoes that had been genetically modified to produce lectin, a substance intended to increase the plant’s resistance to worms and insects. The rats lost weight, the lectin bound itself to their white cells, and their T-cell counts went up, a reaction suggesting some sort of immune response. The authors blamed it on the genetically modified food. Critics of the study claimed the rats might have lost weight and shown an immune response because they were malnourished, there having been no protein added to an exclusively starch diet. Both sides, however, suggested that further studies be done with better controls on all the variables before the product be released into the food chain.
What utterly flabbergasted Steele were the follow-up stories. The scientists who’d released the initial data lost their jobs, no one attempted to repeat the study, and the editor of the journal that had published the work became the target of heavy criticism by prominent spokespersons in the bioengineering industry. To her credit, she subsequently issued an eloquent rebuttal defending her decision
“to favor debate over the suppression of information.”
Right on, thought Steele, cheering the beleaguered woman for sticking to her guns.
Continuing to punch up articles, he soon found himself veering more and more into the political landscape of the issue. A broad trend in North America quickly became clear to him—the voice of commerce and industry had seized control of the debate.
“There is no established
proof that genetically modified foods are harmful to
human health,”
he saw quoted over and over by various experts with economic interests in the business.
“So
there is absolutely no justification for controls that might
restrict our right to trade in the product.”
Just like the tobacco industry used to say, thought Steele.
Some scientists, clearly a minority voice in this corner of the globe, gave the obvious reply,
“There hasn’t been
time yet to see what the side effects may be,”
but few public figures seemed to pay heed. One suggestion he found particularly ingenious appeared on the
Environment Watch
Web page for public radio.
Prominent geneticist and media personality Dr. Kathleen Sullivan suggests using polymerase chain reaction techniques, or PCR, to check the plant life around any lab using genetic vectors, to see if any contamination of the local environment has occurred.
Sounds like a good idea to me, he agreed.
Next, flashing ahead through a series of newspaper articles, he learned that both the Republicans and Democrats favored the economic prospects of bioengineering— each side wanted to develop the technology at home as well as export it around the planet—and that hundreds of billions of dollars were at stake. He also saw, not surprisingly, that the two parties received hefty contributions from all the players in the industry, the biggest names coughing up equal amounts to each side of the political equation. Skimming further, he began to realize that one company’s name dominated all the rest— Biofeed International.
Shoving back his chair and stretching the fatigue out of his back, he grabbed a pad and pencil to make notes as he thought over all that he’d read. He soon came to three conclusions. First, the United States appeared to be fighting tooth and nail to avoid tighter controls on the business of genetically modifying organisms and the commercialization of making genes jump the species barrier. Second, given the many examples he’d just seen of possible unintended consequences from the technology, the prospects for a significant mistake harmful to humans were staggering. Third, if a serious error ever did occur, there would be no undoing it or recalling the mistake, the way a company pulls a defective product or the Food and Drug Administration bans medication that turns out to have unexpected and dangerous side effects. Instead, the fault would be indelibly incorporated into the victim’s genome. Nor would it end with him or her, if reproductive tissues—ova and spermatocytes—were involved, and if the host lived long enough to reproduce offspring.
“Holy shit!” Steele uttered under his breath, incredulous that such a potential catastrophe for humankind had been unfolding in his own country and that he could, along with most everyone else it seemed, be completely oblivious to it. “You weren’t kidding, Greg. This stuff
is
scary.”
He glanced at the time indicated on the corner of the computer screen and was surprised to see that it was nearly two A.M. Four hours had slipped by without his noticing. Even his drink sat untouched where he’d left it. He hadn’t become so absorbed in anything since Luana died.
He picked up the brochure for the conference that Greg had left him. He immediately recognized the moderator’s name, Dr. Kathleen Sullivan, from the
Environment
Watch
page he’d read earlier. He also recalled having seen the woman’s TV program a few years ago and being suitably impressed by her imaginative thinking. I’ll look forward to talking with her, he thought, already having decided to attend. Only then did he notice the locale of the meeting—Hawaii.
He was about to switch off the computer when another title caught his attention:
Identification of a Brazil-Nut Allergen in Transgenic Soybeans.
The next time he looked up from his reading it was dawn.
“Dad?”
“Morning, Chet,” Steele greeted across the top of a steaming mug of coffee. Rather than go to bed, he’d showered, dressed, and, after solving the idiosyncrasies of Martha’s percolator, made enough brew to supply an ER shift. Seated at the kitchen table, waiting for his son to get up, he’d already sipped his way through a third of the pot.
The boy glanced at his watch and declared, “You’re awake early.” It sounded like an accusation.
Steele experienced the same giddy hesitation he often felt at the start of a resuscitation when, standing poised over the near-dead patient, he sized up what had to be done and readied himself for the feat to come. Except in ER he had a practiced technique to call upon, and in that shining instant he could always replace doubt with a plan before plunging into action. Facing his son in an attempt to reanimate their moribund relationship, he had only his instincts to fall back on, and they were rusted with disuse. “Actually I’ve been up all night,” he began. “Please sit down. I want to talk.”
Chet immediately furrowed his young brow. “Why? What’s the matter?” he demanded, continuing to stand.
Steele pursed his lips a few times, as if his mouth needed warming up to form the words he wanted to say. “ ‘What’s the matter’ is that I made you a promise in the hospital, and I’ve been slow to keep it. I want to apologize.”
The teenager deepened his frown, but remained silent. Oh, boy, thought Steele, wishing Martha would appear and coach him about how to do this. After all, wasn’t it her idea? “If you’ll let me, I really do want to be your daddy again.”
Chet recoiled from his side of the table, twisting up his face as if he’d just bitten into a lemon. “Da-ad!” he protested, managing to give the word two syllables. He shifted his weight restlessly from one leg to the other.
“It’s okay, son. I won’t embarrass you anymore. Just know that I love you, and I’ll try not to be such a jerk around here. If I am, give me a quick kick in the ass, will you?”
The strain in Chet’s features slowly dissolved into a look of disbelief. “Have you spent all night thinking up this corny, sugar-coated crap? Jesus!”
Ouch, thought Steele, feeling his frustration mount. “Come on, sit down,” he persisted, hoping to exert the same calming influence on his son that he could routinely cast over an entire ER in the worst of crises. “I admit I’m awkward at this. Maybe one reason it sounds so strange is that we haven’t really talked in a long time—”
“And who’s fault is that?” Chet snapped.
“Mine,” replied Steele softly, his gaze never wavering from his son.
The admission seemed to leave the boy at a loss for words. He flushed and then swallowed repeatedly, as if something got stuck in his throat.
“Your mother could put feelings into words,” continued Steele. “I suck at it, I admit. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try, even if we are hokey and clumsy at it. After all, you and I—we’re the only family each of us has—”
“Don’t you think I know all this!” Chet cried. “Jeeesus, you still treat me like a little kid. And it was Mom who made us a family—she knew how. You
never
will!” He angrily shouldered his schoolbag, grabbed a couple of yogurts from the refrigerator, and stomped out of the house.
“Jeeeesus!” muttered Steele, stretching out the profanity long enough to top his son by at least a syllable.
“You have it?” the man asked, the minute Morgan answered the phone.
“Yes, she delivered it safely last night, as soon as she got off the plane from Marseille.”
“And what’s the latest word on the police over there?”
“From what she reported, everything seems to be going our way. The authorities are treating it as if Pierre Gaston simply ran off. His landlady confirmed that he’d been seeing a rather glamorous-looking woman over the last year. You know the French—they are assuming that it’s an affair of the heart and that he’s in hiding somewhere to avoid an angry husband.”
“What if they find the body?”
“That, I’m assured, is highly unlikely.”
The caller thought this over in silence. “Still, it was an all too risky operation, in any case,” he said after a moment. “We can’t afford any more moves like that. Tell your ‘messenger’ to advise her boss.”
“I’m not telling that woman anything. Some of her crew described to me how she actually offed Gaston. She may be a looker, but she enjoys what she does a little too much for my liking. Besides, she had a message for you.”
“What’s that?”
“Her boss is still impatient.”
Chapter 6
Five Weeks Later, Tuesday, February 29, 2000, 1:00 A.M.
Morgan felt his stomach lurch to the back of his throat as the helicopter tipped forward and plunged down into the darkness, throwing him against his harness. “Shit! I told you, no cowboy crap,” he yelled into the microphone of his headset.
The man beside him replied by whipping the joystick left and slamming the craft through a turn that would have done a roller coaster proud. Just as abruptly, he pulled up, flashing a grin in the gloom of the cockpit and sending the maneuverable unlit craft skimming over the tops of what should be their target, a field of two-week-old feed corn. He flipped a switch, and a spotlight from under the fuselage illuminated sprouts barely inches high laid out in long tightly knit rows resembling braids not fifteen feet beneath them. Hitting the release for the specially adapted spray tanks bolted to the underside of the fuselage, he lowered a pair of fourteen-foot nozzles that trailed under them like the legs of a giant insect, brushing the tops of the fledgling plants as they went. After peering repeatedly out his side window with his night goggles, he said through the headset radio, “I can’t see anything visible streaming out behind us. It’s like we’re not dropping a load at all. What is this stuff?”
Morgan, busily swallowing to keep from throwing up, indicated he couldn’t reply for the moment. Waiting for his stomach to settle, he studied his illicitly acquired map of Biofeed’s massive farming operation along the Red River in southern Oklahoma and fretted that they might not be in the right place. The document clearly indicated the acreage where a new fast-growing feed corn had been planted, but he’d no idea if the yahoo beside him had followed the coordinates properly. Not having thought to provide himself with the same night-vision gear the pilot wore, he could see precious little outside the windows to help him get his bearings, especially since they’d timed the flight to occur in the maximum darkness with a minimum of moonlight.
When his stomach seemed calm enough that he could talk without gagging, he considered his words carefully. In planning tonight’s operation, he’d decided to keep all the technical explanations as close to the truth as possible, to make sure the man at the stick understood enough detail not to take any disastrous shortcuts that would blow the whole mission. “They’re microscopic gold particles shot out at extremely high velocity, designed to pierce the waxy surface of the plant’s foliage and allow access of what comes next.”
“Won’t the farmworkers see the holes?”
“Not with the naked eye.”
“And the part that comes next—the stuff in the tank car?”
“That’s an industrial secret.”
“Hey, I don’t have to haul what I don’t know.”
Morgan pretended to mull over whether to entrust him with the information. “It’s a new kind of insecticide and fertilizer,” he lied, hoping he had just the right amount of reluctance in his voice. “That’s all I can tell you, except that it’s no more dangerous than the usual organic phosphates you deal with. Use the same precautions, and you’ll be all right.”
That seemed to satisfy him, for he returned his attention to the hoses below.
Morgan sat in silence, staring into the night, uncomfortably aware of how close they were to the ground as they skimmed along. While scouting the site last fall, he’d hung out in a lot of cafés asking farmers about which crop duster had the most experience and the least fear of flying low. The search brought him to Mike Butkis, the bald, tattooed middle-aged daredevil at the controls by his side.
“I’ve flown all terrains in every copter known to man, from gun ships in Vietnam to the little mosquitoes used by drug lords and munitions runners in the jungles of South America,” he’d boasted at their first meeting.
Could be our man, Morgan had thought, buying him a beer. “We’re testing new products for Biofeed International all across the southern states,” he told the pilot by way of explaining what had to be done. “Except it’s what scientists call a double blind trial. We have to apply the substances in secret to specified fields at night. That way evaluators trying to identify noticeable differences between treated and untreated crops at the end of the growing season won’t know beforehand which is which, and will render an unbiased judgment.”
Butkis hadn’t seemed to care. “How much?” he drawled, downing his drink. Within minutes he agreed to a huge retainer that bought both his services and a promise that he’d keep his mouth shut.
Morgan continued to stare into the blackness ahead, gripping the armrests each time a tendril of mist hurtled at him out of the night. He felt no more at ease than when they first started, and kept expecting a building or tree to loom up in their path, despite knowing that Butkis’s view was nearly clear as day. “Next time you get me a pair of those goggles as well,” he ordered the pilot through the microphone. “It’s nerve-racking, not being able to see a goddamn thing.”
“Oh, my God! A house!” shrieked Butkis, lurching them upward a few feet with a sharp jerk on the controls.
Morgan’s heart did the bunny thump inside his chest, until he heard Butkis’s cackling laugh in his headset and realized it had been a prank. “You shithead! That’s not funny!” he screamed.
A few hours later they’d finished preparing the fields to be sprayed and landed by the isolated rail siding on which the tank car rested. Butkis, wearing the industrial gas mask and protective rubber clothing he usually donned when handling insecticides, attached the appropriate hoses and began pumping the contents of the railway car to the containers on the helicopter. Even though the machine could heft three hundred gallons at a time and spray up to thirty gallons a minute, Morgan had calculated it would still take ten nights before they covered all the acreage to be done here.
In his briefcase he carried the telephone numbers of the six pilots whom he’d recruited in addition to Butkis. They were standing by, waiting for his word on how tonight’s first mission went before beginning identical operations elsewhere in the country. A half dozen fully loaded railcars like this one were already in position near Biofeed sites all over the southern United States, and every week Agrenomics International sent another on its way.
Minutes later he and Butkis were once more flying across the surface of the field they’d just left. “That’s more like it,” the pilot commented as he activated the spray while peering through the side windows. “This stuff I can see.”
Morgan sat stark still. Until now he’d been preoccupied with the logistics of pulling off their scheme, the dangers of getting caught, or the physical risks to themselves from making a mistake with what they were using. But now that he was releasing the first of their vectors— putting it irretrievably into the food chain—he became drenched in a cold sweat at the enormity of what he’d set in motion.
Not that he felt he’d suddenly discovered a conscience or experienced late-found guilt. Surely he had enough greed in him and sufficient desire for payback to overcome that kind of handicap. No, he attributed this to what he presumed a first-time killer would feel seconds after the act, that in all eternity there’d be no taking back what he’d just done. Except in this case he’d unleashed the first genetic weapon of mass destruction ever used.
He tried to drive out any thought of what would be happening below, but his mind kept racing through a past briefing session where one of the “client’s” surviving technicians had zealously explained it all too well. “The naked vectors carrying the viral genes, delivered in a spray of lipid particles to keep them intact, will soon penetrate the tiny holes that the previous bombardment had produced in the cell walls of the corn seedlings. By that time these cells will have mounted an injury response, which includes the release of ligases, enzymes specialized in cutting and pasting strands of the plant’s DNA as part of its repair mechanism. Except in this case, the enzymes will also cut and paste genes from the invader.
“By morning fragments of the vectors and their special cargo will be inside the nuclei of cells in the plant, ready to enter their host’s genetic machinery. Here they will be read, copied, and passed on to newly formed cells as the seedlings grow, thereby creating what we call a genetic mosaic. By mid-May this new crop, already altered to mature quickly, will have produced seed and be ready for harvest months ahead of the regular feed corn. According to our inside information, Biofeed intends to promote it commercially as a fast germinator suitable for a second planting in the late spring. Farmers will undoubtedly find the prospect of doubling their yield in a season attractive and put the seeds in the ground. No one will be aware that the majority of kernels are also carrying a deadly genetic message that they will pass to the next generation of plants. By the end of summer, when the second crop matures, it will become feed not just to farm animals, but to scavengers as well—rodents, birds, even insects. We’re betting that in at least one of these creatures our passenger will find what it needs to survive, establishing itself in an American host where it will replicate—just as it once found a living haven in Africa, and, over two millennia ago, we think, in Athens. Then the dying will start, except this time, it will be in the heartland of America.”
“And what is this American host where it will get a foothold?” he’d asked, skeptical that the entire spiel might be more of the boastful rhetoric these people kept resorting to.
“That knowledge is our most closely guarded secret— only a handful of our leaders know it—and this is the beauty of the plan. No one on the planet besides them, not even at your all-powerful CDC in Atlanta, has ever been able to discover what this host is—despite their testing a thousand animal candidates.”
“And how have you succeeded where the CDC failed?”
“Read the history of the organism. Research with it is so deadly that only a dozen facilities in the world are equipped to handle it, and only then within strict limits because of the extreme hazards involved. As a result of this temerity, the most lethal organism on the face of the earth also remains the most mysterious—its pathogenicity poorly understood, the living reservoirs where it hides between attacks unknown, and its mechanism of entry into primates an unsolved puzzle. All of which suits our purposes.”
“You still haven’t explained how you identified the host.”
“We had far more devoted workers—virologists and geneticists willing to pay the ultimate price, not only to acquire the secrets of this perfect killer, but to identify the portion of its genetic code that produces its lethal toxins and encrypt it into a highly infective vector. Besides that, they managed to fit the hidden genes with timers and triggers by using genetic regulators—promoters and transposons, they called them. In effect, the code from the virus will only activate and be completely expressed when it ends up in the presence of an enzyme unique to its natural hosts, thereby assuring it won’t inadvertently interfere with the growth of the feed corn. But as soon as it arrives in the gut of an animal it could thrive in— arthropod or vertebrate—it will turn on, penetrate that host’s cells, start replicating, and pour out its poisons.”
“It sounds like a lot of empty gobbledygook to me. How do I know you’ve done any of this?”
“Look,” the technician had instructed, switching on a video monitor.
Morgan shuddered in the windy confines of the cockpit, trying to bury all memory of what he had seen next. But the grainy images replayed themselves in his head anyway, as vividly as when he’d first viewed them, except they’d since become so much a part of his nightmares that he recalled them the way he dreamed—in black and white. Intended to show the genius of what their hero geneticists had developed in that faraway place, before U.S. planes bombed them and their lab to hell, the tape documented the test trials those so-called scientists had conducted and filmed. Scenes flickered before his eyes of men, women, and children squatting to shit in their jail cells, their skin covered with dark blotches while blood streamed from their noses, mouths, and rectums. Some of them stared back at the camera with incredulous looks on their faces, as if to say they couldn’t yet believe the misery that had befallen them. Others moaned and writhed on the ground, stealing furtive glances at the camera, their eyes dull, black, and imploring, making it seem that even in their final hours they clung to the hope that someone could release them from their torment. Still others seemed to have accepted their doom, lying motionless amid their filth, occasionally blinking and looking emptily into space. Their blank expressions hung off them as flaccid as loose skin.
For the most advanced cases only their labored breathing signaled they remained alive. Bewildered children stood beside their dying parents and screamed unheeded while stretching out their tiny arms in a futile plea to be comforted. One such child, a naked little boy smeared with dark streaks of his and his mother’s mess, stopped prodding the unresponsive woman’s chest and tottered toward the camera. As he wailed and reached his hands through the bars to be picked up, the man filming him coldly intoned, “The major abdominal organs—liver, spleen, and to some extent the kidneys—liquefy in a matter of days. . . .”
Butkis once more banked the craft through a hard turn and sent them skimming back toward the tank car for another load. Through a break in the clouds the moon made a brief appearance and cast its shimmering light over the wet young leaves they’d just sprayed, turning the entire field silver. “Pretty, isn’t it?” the pilot commented, then threw back his head and sang, “Ohhhhhklahoma, where we drug the corn to the sky . . .”