Dead End

Two

Richard Parnell’s reassigned research area was directly in line with the vice president’s office, which Parnell supposed was intended to be intimidating but wasn’t. He was far more interested in the newly arrived equipment, everything he’d requested without a single budgetary challenge. Which was what he told Russell Benn at their first meeting after his transfer.

‘Glad you’re satisfied,’ said the other man, the voice seeming to come from deep within him.

Parnell at once discerned the resentment. ‘I’d like to think we’re going to get on together.’

‘So would I.’

‘Why don’t we establish our parameters right now?’

‘Why don’t we?’ echoed Benn.

He was pushing against a closed door, thought Parnell. ‘I’m here to head up a new pharmacogenomics division, right?’

The black scientist nodded.

‘That involves me – or the people who are going to join me – employing what was discovered during the genome project to drug development. Which is your division, so we’re going to have to work pretty closely together, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘You really think you can make a contribution genetically to what we do here?’ demanded Benn.

‘You accept that more than ninety per cent of the drugs produced – drugs we produce – are only effective upon between thirty to fifty per cent of the people for whom they’re prescribed!’

‘I’ve heard the figures. I think they’re debatable.’

‘And you’ve heard of single-nucleotide polymorphisms?’

‘Genetically matching a person to the most efficacious drug? Sure I’ve heard of it.’

‘But aren’t impressed by it?’ challenged Parnell.

‘I’m waiting to be convinced.’

‘ Abacavir,’ threw back Parnell, at once.

‘OK,’ conceded the other man. ‘So, genetically it has been established that abacavir is a drug that could, potentially, be fatal to about five per cent of HIV sufferers in AIDS treatment.’

‘And brings out violent skin reaction, rashes, in those to whom it isn’t fatal?’ persisted Parnell.

‘I’ve read the findings and the stats.’

‘Scientifically accepted findings and statistics,’ insisted Parnell. ‘Like there’s general scientific acceptance that single nucleotide polymorphisms could not only test people’s vulnerability to a particular drug’s side effects but also whether or not it will work at all.’

‘You want coffee?’ the other man invited suddenly, making a vague movement to a percolator on a side table upon which several mugs, all loyally marked with the Dubette logo, were laid out in readiness.

Parnell recognized it as a gesture. ‘Coffee would be good.’

‘You know your stuff,’ said Benn, as he poured.

‘You were testing me!’ accused Parnell.

‘Wasn’t that what you were doing with me?’

‘No!’ denied Parnell. ‘I was trying to build a bridge for both of us to cross.’

‘Seems to me you’re arguing against superbug resistance?’

The awkward bastard was still testing, Parnell decided. ‘I think – and intend to prove – that pharmacogenomics could become successful enough to reduce antibiotic resistance or rejection.’

The other scientist fixed him with a direct stare, unspeaking for several moments. Then he said: ‘Am I hearing what you’re saying?’

‘It’s a self-defeating ladder, developing stronger antibiotics when resistance makes useless those that already exist. Making cocktails of drugs, a lot of the constituents of which are totally ineffective and can even be harmful, is bad medicine. The logic can only be the build-up of even greater resistance which in turn needs even greater – stronger – antibiotics. It’s happened worldwide with methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus. We’re breeding our own superbugs from superbugs, not eradicating anything.’

‘Eradicating?’ picked out Benn, at once.

‘Isn’t eventual eradication the focus of medical science?’ frowned Parnell.

‘ Medical science,’ heavily qualified Benn. ‘Our focus is pharmaceutical research and developing and improving drugs to combat known diseases.’

‘Aren’t they allied?’

‘I suppose that’s a point of view,’ allowed the section director, doubtfully.

‘It’s always been mine.’

‘You haven’t yet been to a company seminar, have you?’ asked Russell Benn.

‘Not yet,’ said Parnell.

‘There’s one soon. You’ll find it interesting.’

‘I am finding this conversation interesting,’ said Parnell, directly. ‘Interesting as well as confusing.’

‘Did you know that years ago tyre manufacturers perfected a tyre that never wears out: if they were fitted to cars and trucks they’d last the lifetime of the vehicle.’

‘No, I didn’t know that,’ encouraged Parnell, who did, but wanted the analogy expanded.

‘Planned obsolescence,’ declared Benn.

‘Yes,’ said Parnell.

‘I think you’re right,’ declared Benn, on another tangent. ‘I think there could be work we could do together.’

‘There can’t be any doubt: we’re virtually the left and right hand, each having to know what the other’s doing and how we can each realistically decide how to complement the other, towards a successful development.’ He’d gone straight from Cambridge University into the rarefied atmosphere of pure medical research, Parnell reminded himself. But he wasn’t in any rarefied atmosphere any longer. He was in the real, hard-headed commercial world now. How difficult would the adjustment be?

‘Hi!’

Parnell looked up from Science Today, beside his unseen, stabbed-at lunch, to the dark-haired girl smiling down upon him. ‘Hi.’

‘This seat taken?’

‘Help yourself.’ He stood politely, taking her tray as she unloaded the sandwich and a pickle, the same choice he’d made. He saw there were several alternative empty tables throughout the commissary.

‘My name’s Rebecca.’

‘I know,’ said Parnell. The ID tag hanging from her neck chain matched the nameplate on her white laboratory coat, both reading ‘Rebecca Lang.’

‘And I know that you’re Richard Parnell,’ she said, reading his identification.

‘Name badges, one of the great American innovations,’ acknowledged Parnell. He closed the journal.

‘You don’t have to do that – stop reading, I mean.’

‘Of course I do.’ He sliced his sandwich, salt beef on rye, more easily to eat.

‘Now I feel uncomfortable.’ She bit into her sandwich without cutting it.

‘No, you don’t.’

She smiled again, her teeth a tribute to attentive dentistry and teenage torture. Confident that she didn’t need any more facial help, Rebecca wore only a light lipstick, pale pink like her nail colouring. ‘All right, so I don’t. Want to know a secret?’

‘Sure.’ Parnell heard his own word and thought it sounded American. An early resolution was that he wouldn’t let himself relapse into any idiom. It was one of several preconceptions.

She nodded generally around the restaurant. ‘It was a bet, who got to talk to you first.’

‘Talk to me first!’

‘The mysterious and famous foreigner publicly known for his work on the genome project!’

‘And you won?’

‘I’m here talking to you, so I guess I did.’

‘I’m English, which is hardly mysterious. And a lot of people are known for what they did on the genome project. It was an international effort, involving many people.’

Rebecca nodded to the closed magazine. ‘It’s you everyone wrote about.’

‘What’s your prize?’ Parnell wished he could go back to Science Today.

‘Who knows?’ It wasn’t a coquettish remark.

‘What section are you in?’ If he had to talk, it might as well be professional.

‘Back of the bus stuff, co-ordinating and cross-referencing overseas research with what we’re doing here, where it’s applicable. Flagging up stuff that might be worthwhile our pursuing further, concentrating upon.’

‘I’d say that makes you a pretty important person, too.’

She sniggered. ‘There are a lot of units. I don’t do it all by myself!’

‘Any breakthroughs?’

The girl hesitated. ‘Not yet. Ever hopeful.’

‘Still quite a responsibility for someone who considers themself at the back of the bus.’

‘There’s a line manager checking me and a section head checking him. It’s all very structured. Haven’t you appreciated everything’s run here to a tightly ordered and controlled set of rules?’

‘I’m beginning to get the idea.’

‘I told you my secret. Now tell me yours.’

Parnell looked blankly at her. ‘I don’t know what you’re asking.’

‘How come you got shifted so quickly from the back of the bus?’

Parnell no longer regretted putting his magazine aside, trying to separate the discordant echoes of this exchange from the earlier one with Russell Benn. ‘How can you imagine there’s something secret about it, just like that?’ He snapped his fingers.

‘Everything’s very structured,’ she emphasized again. ‘You were given your space but you moved it.’

‘It was temporary,’ avoided Parnell.

Rebecca regarded him doubtfully over her coffee mug, her sandwich abandoned half eaten. ‘You’re at the heart of the Spider’s Web now. That’s where the real research is.’

‘And where I want – and need – to be to fulfil my appointment and justify the creation of the new department,’ said Parnell.

‘ You want to be,’ she isolated, at once.

‘Where I have to be,’ Parnell reiterated.

‘You really think genetics could bring about miracles?’

‘No,’ Parnell immediately answered. ‘I think it’s an avenue with medical benefits that has to be explored, to discover what its engineering can achieve.’ And I’m going to be among the first to achieve it, he promised himself.

‘I don’t think he’s our sort of team player,’ judged Russell Benn.

‘It’ll take time,’ predicted Dwight Newton. ‘In time he’ll learn – or come to accept – the way things work here.’

‘I’m not so sure.’

‘Keep a tight handle on things, Russ. On him the tightest of all. You think there’s anything I’ve missed, you come tell me right away. I don’t want any disruption to the smooth way things always work here.’

‘I know you don’t,’ said the black scientist. ‘But he’s got a proven track record. I’ve got an odd feeling, an instinct, that professionally he’ll be useful.’

‘Sufficiently useful to put up with his attitude problem?’

‘Arrogance is an irritation, not a cause for censure,’ said Benn. ‘I’m suggesting we let things run their way for a while, to discover for ourselves how good he really is.’

‘That’s what we’ve got to decide,’ agreed Newton. ‘Just how good he is.’

‘And how amenable he can be made to commercial reality,’ came in Benn, on a familiar cue.