Next: A Novel (8 page)

SCIENTISTS SEE A BAN ON RESEARCH

The current American administration has said that embryonic stem cells can be taken from existing research lines, but not from new embryos. Scientists regard existing lines as inadequate, and thus view the ruling a de facto ban on research. That’s why they are going to private centers to carry out their research, without federal grants.

But in the end, the real problem isn’t simply a lack of stem cells. It’s the fact that in order to produce therapeutic effects, scientists need each person to have his or her own pluripotent stem cells. This would allow us to regrow an organ, or to repair damage from injury or disease, or to undo paralysis. This represents the great dream. No one is able to perform these therapeutic miracles now. No one even has an inkling how it might be done. But it requires the cells.

Now, for newborns, you can collect umbilical cord blood and freeze it, and people are doing that with their newborns. But what about adults? Where will we get pluripotent stem cells?

That’s the big question.

TOWARD THE THERAPEUTIC DREAM

All we adults have left is adult stem cells, which can make only one kind of tissue. But what if there were a way to convert adult stem cells back into embryonic stem cells? Such a procedure would enable every adult to have a ready source of his or her own embryonic stem cells. That would make the therapeutic dream possible.

Well, it turns out that youcan reverse adult stem cells, but only if you insert them into an egg.

Something within the egg unwinds the differentiation and converts the adult stem cell back into an embryonic stem cell. This is good news, but it is vastly more difficult to do with human cells.

And if the method could be made to work in human beings, it would require an enormous supply of human egg cells. That makes the procedure controversial again.

So scientists are looking for other ways to make adult cells pluripotent. It is a worldwide effort.

A researcher in Shanghai has been injecting human stem cells into chicken eggs, with mixed results—while others cluck in disapproval. It’s not clear now whether such procedures will work.

It’s equally unclear whether the stem cell dream—transplants without rejection, spinal cord injuries repaired, and so on—will come true. Advocates have made dishonest claims, and media speculation has been fantastical for years. People with serious illnesses have been led to believe a cure is just around the corner. Sadly, this is not true. Working therapeutic approaches lie many years in the future, perhaps decades. Many thoughtful scientists have said, in private, that we won’t know whether stem cell therapy will work until 2050. They point out that it took forty years from the time Watson and Crick decoded the gene until human gene therapy began.

A SCANDAL SHOCKS THE WORLD

It was in the context of feverish hope and hype that Korean biochemist Hwang Woo-Suk announced in 2004 that he had successfully created a human embryonic stem cell from an adult cell by somatic nuclear transfer—injection into a human egg. Hwang was a famous workaholic, spending eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, in the lab. Hwang’s exciting report was published in March 2005 inScience magazine. Researchers from around the world flocked to Korea. Human stem cell treatment seemed suddenly on the verge of reality. Hwang was a hero in Korea, and appointed to head a new World Stem Cell Hub, financed by the Korean government.

But in November 2005, an American collaborator in Pittsburgh announced that he was ending his association with Hwang. And then one of Hwang’s co-workers revealed that Hwang had obtained eggs illegally, from women who worked in his lab.

By December 2005, Seoul National University announced that Hwang’s cell lines were a fabrication, as were his papers in Science. Science retracted the papers. Hwang now faces criminal charges. There the matter stands.

PERILS OF “MEDIA HYPE”

“What lessons can be drawn from this?” asked Professor McKeown. “First, in a media-saturated world, persistent hype lends unwarranted credulity to the wildest claims. For years the media have touted stem cell research as the coming miracle. So when somebody announced that the miracle had arrived, he was believed. Does that imply there is a danger in media hype? You bet.

Because not only does it raise cruel hopes among the ill, it affects scientists, too. They start to believe the miracle is around the corner—even though they should know better.

“What can we do about media hype? It would stop in a week, if scientific institutions wanted that. They don’t. They love the hype. They know it brings grants. So that won’t change. Yale, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins promote hype just as much as Exxon or Ford. So do individual researchers at those institutions. And increasingly, researchers and universities are all commercially motivated, just like corporations. So whenever you hear a scientist claim that his statements have been exaggerated, or taken out of context, just ask him if he has written a letter of protest to the editor. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he hasn’t.

“Next lesson: Peer review. All of Hwang’s papers in Science were peer-reviewed. If we ever needed evidence that peer review is an empty ritual, this episode provides it. Hwang made extraordinary claims. He did not provide extraordinary evidence. Many studies have shown that peer review does not improve the quality of scientific papers. Scientists themselves know it doesn’t work. Yet the public still regards it as a sign of quality, and says, ‘This paper was peer-reviewed,’ or ‘This paper was not peer-reviewed,’ as if that meant something. It doesn’t.

“Next, the journals themselves. Where was the firm hand of the editor of Science ? Remember that the journal Science is a big enterprise—115 people work on that magazine. Yet gross fraud, including photographs altered with Adobe Photoshop, were not detected. And Photoshop is widely known as a major tool of scientific fraud. Yet the magazine had no way to detect it.

“Not that Science is unique in being fooled. Fraudulent research has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, where authors withheld critical information about Vioxx heart attacks; in the Lancet, where a report about drugs and oral cancer was entirely fabricated—in that one, 250 people in the patient database had the same birth date! That might have been a clue.

Medical fraud is more than a scandal, it’s a public health threat. Yet it continues.”

THE COST OF FRAUD

“The cost of such fraud is enormous,” McKeown said, “estimated at thirty billion dollars annually, probably three times that. Fraud in science is not rare, and it’s not limited to fringe players. The most respected researchers and institutions have been caught with faked data. Even Francis Collins, the head of NIH’s Human Genome Project, was listed as co-author on five faked papers that had to be withdrawn.

“The ultimate lesson is that science isn’t special—at least not anymore. Maybe back when Einstein talked to Niels Bohr, and there were only a few dozen important workers in every field.

But there are now three million researchers in America. It’s no longer a calling, it’s a career.

Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other. Its practitioners aren’t saints, they’re human beings, and they do what human beings do—lie, cheat, steal from one another, sue, hide data, fake data, overstate their own importance, and denigrate opposing views unfairly. That’s human nature. It isn’t going to change.”

CH008

In the BioGenanimal lab, Tom Weller was going down the line of cages with Josh Winkler, who was dispensing doses of gene-laced virus to the rats. It was their daily routine. Tom’s cell phone rang.

Josh gave him a look. Josh was his senior. Josh could take calls at work, but Tom couldn’t.

Weller stripped off one rubber glove and pulled the phone from his pocket.

“Hello?”

“Tom.”

It was his mother. “Hi, Mom. I’m at work now.”

Josh gave him another look.

“Can I call you back?”

“Your dad had a car accident last night,” she said. “And…he died.”

“What?”He felt suddenly dizzy. Tom leaned against the rat cages, took a shallow breath. Now Josh was giving him a concerned look. “What happened?”

“His car hit an overpass around midnight,” his mother said. “They took him to Long Beach Memorial Hospital, but he died early this morning.”

“Oh God. Are you at home?” Tom said. “You want me to come over? Does Rachel know?”

“I just got off the phone.”

“Okay, I’ll come over,” he said.

“Tom, I hate to ask you this,” she said, “but…”

“You want me to tell Lisa?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t seem to reach her.” Lisa was the black sheep of the family. The youngest child, just turned twenty. Lisa hadn’t talked to her mother in years. “Do you know where she is these days, Tom?”

“I think so,” he said. “She called a few weeks ago.”

“To ask for money?”

“No, just to give me her address. She’s in Torrance.”

“I can’t reach her,” his mother said.

“I’ll go,” he said.

“Tell her the funeral is Thursday, if she wants to come.”

“I’ll tell her.”

He flipped the phone shut and turned to Josh. Josh was looking concerned and sympathetic.

“What was it?”

“My father died.”

“I’m really sorry…”

“Car crash, last night. I need to go tell my sister.”

“You have to leave now?”

“I’ll stop by the office on my way out and send Sandy in.”

“Sandy can’t do this. He doesn’t know the routine—”

“Josh,” he said, “I have to go.”

Traffic was heavy on the 405. It took almost an hour before he found himself in front of a ratty apartment building on South Acre in Torrance, pushing the buzzer for apartment 38. The building stood close to the freeway; the roar of traffic was constant.

He knew Lisa worked nights, but it was now ten o’clock in the morning. She might be awake.

Sure enough, the buzzer sounded, and he opened the door. The lobby smelled strongly of cat piss. The elevator didn’t work, so he took the stairs to the third floor, stepping around plastic sacks of garbage. A dog had broken one sack open, and the contents spilled down a couple of steps.

He stopped in front of apartment 38, pushed the doorbell. “Just a fucking minute,” his sister called. He waited. Eventually, she opened the door.

She was wearing a bathrobe. Her short black hair was pulled back. She looked upset. “The bitch called,” she said.

“Mom?”

“She woke me up, the bitch.” She turned, went back into the apartment. He followed her. “I thought you were the liquor delivery.”

The apartment was a mess. Lisa padded into the kitchen, and poked around the pans and dishes stacked in the sink, found a coffee cup. She rinsed it out. “You want coffee?”

He shook his head. “Shit, Lise,” he said. “This place is a pigsty.”

“I work nights, you know that.”

She had never cared about her surroundings. Even as a child, her room was always a mess. She just didn’t seem to notice. Now Tom looked through the greasy drapes of the kitchen window at the traffic crawling past on the 405. “So. How’s work going?”

“It’s House of Pancakes. How do you think it’s going? Same every fucking night.”

“What did Mom say?”

“She wanted to know if I was coming to the funeral.”

“What’d you say?”

“I told her to fuck off. Why should I go? He wasn’t my father.”

Tom sighed. This was a long-standing argument within the family. Lisa believed she was not John Weller’s daughter. “You don’t think so, either,” she said to Tom.

“Yeah, I do.”

“You just say whatever Mom wants you to say.” She fished out a cigarette butt from a heaping ashtray, and bent over the stove to light it from the burner. “Was he drunk when he crashed?”

“I don’t know.”

“I bet he was shitfaced. Or on those steroids he used, for his bodybuilding.”

Tom’s father had been a bodybuilder. He took it up later in life, and even competed in amateur contests. “Dad didn’t use steroids.”

“Oh sure, Tom. I used to look in his bathroom. He had needles.”

“Okay, so you didn’t like him.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “He wasn’t my father. I don’t care about any of it.”

“Mom always said that he was your father, that you were just saying it, because you didn’t like him.”

“Well, guess what? We can settle it, once and for all.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, a paternity test.”

“Lisa,” he said. “Don’t start this.”

“I’m not starting. I’m finishing.”

“Don’t. Promise me you won’t do this. Come on. Dad’s dead, Mom’s upset, promise me.”

“You are a chickenshit pussy, you know that?” That was when he saw she was near tears.

He put his arms around her, and she began to cry. He just held her, feeling her body shake. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

After her brother had gone, she heated a cup of coffee in the microwave, then sat down at the kitchenette table by the phone. She dialed Information. She got the number for the hospital. A moment later, she heard the receptionist say, “Long Beach Memorial.”

“I want to talk to the morgue,” she said.

“I’m sorry. The morgue is at the County Coroner’s Office. Would you like that number?”

“Someone in my family just died at your hospital. Where would his body be now?”

“One moment please, I will connect you to pathology.”

Four days later, her mother called back. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, going down to the hospital and asking for blood from your father.”

“He’s not my father.”

“Lisa. Don’t you ever get tired of this game?”

“No, and he’s not my father, because the genetic tests came back negative. It says right here”—

she reached for the printed sheet—“that there is less than one chance in 2.9 million that John J.

Weller is my father.”

“What genetic test?”

“I had a genetic test done.”

“You’re so full of shit.”

“No, Mom. You’re the one who’s full of shit. John Weller’s not my father, and the test proves it.I always knew it. ”