Babel

19

T he following morning everyone in the office seemed to be reading the Herald when Kathy arrived. Bren tossed her his copy as she walked in and asked what was going on.

‘This should stir the pot,’ he said. ‘Does Brock know the editor or something?’

Kathy caught the front page headline, ‘ POLICE PROBE UNIVERSITY STAFF ’, and thought oh-oh. But the front page was only a sampler for what lay inside. It reported that Scotland Yard detectives had begun reinterviewing staff at UCLE in connection with the murder of Max Springer, and in particular those staff in the Division of Science and Technology with international and Islamic connections, with the unstated implication that they were hunting for accomplices of the assumed murderer Abu Khadra. It ended with references to further articles inside; Academic strife, page 3; Science feature, page 7; Editorial, page 10. It seemed as if Clare Hancock had managed to take over the whole issue with her story.

It was her name against the Academic strife report, which gave a detailed account of the long-running and increasingly savage feud between Max Springer and Richard Haygill, including Springer’s ‘Dr Mengele’ jibe in the University Senate and culminating in quotations taken from his letter to the paper before he died. The article described these as coming from a document that had come into the hands of the newspaper that it had passed on to the police, and Kathy guessed that it was a measure of Clare Hancock’s faith that there was a bigger story behind all this that she’d been able to persuade her editor to use it. The quotes included Springer’s descriptions of UCLE as ‘an outstanding leader in whoredom’, and of Haygill as ‘Svengali-like’, as well as the prophetic final sentence, ‘Those who speak out against tyranny must offer their very lives to the cause’. Against these tirades, the repeated ‘no comment’ responses of both UCLE and Haygill were made to sound evasive and guilty, and allowed the reporter to come to the conclusion that the whole debacle must point to a deeper malaise at UCLE, to the failure of its administration to manage the affair properly, and to the possibility that both the university and CAB-Tech’s director had something to hide.

The Science feature on page 7, titled ‘ STRUGGLING TO CONTROL THE GENETIC GENIE ’ and written by the paper’s science correspondent, took a different approach. This focused on Max Springer’s accusations that CAB-Tech’s research work was unethical and beyond the control of the university or any other responsible body. It gave the familiar discussion of fears about the implications of genetic engineering a particular slant by looking at the way research companies operating in more than one country might evade ethical controls on their experiments and procedures. As a possible illustration of this, it named CAB-Tech’s BRCA4 protocol as one that had raised concerns among UK regulators. Kathy wondered where they had got that from.

The editorial pulled together these different themes by proposing a Royal Commission into the regulation of multi-national genetic research organisations, as well as an inquiry into the management of