Micro

Chapter 2

Biosciences Building 18 October, 3:00 p.m.

Returning to the lab, they experienced that familiar environment as suddenly mundane, old-fashioned. It felt crowded, too. The tensions in the lab had been simmering for a long time: Rick Hutter and Karen King had despised each other from the day they had arrived; Erika Moll had brought trouble to the group with her choice of lovers; and, like so many grad students everywhere, they were rivals. And they were tired of the work. It seemed they all felt that way, and there was a long silence as they each returned to their lab benches and resumed work in a desultory way. Peter took his milking beaker off the ice block, labeled it, and put it on his shelf of the refrigerator. He noticed something rattling around with the change in his pocket, and, idly, he took the object out. It was the little thing he’d found in his brother’s rented Ferrari. He flicked it across the bench surface. It spun.

Amar Singh, the plant biologist, was watching. “What’s that?”

“Oh. It broke off my brother’s car. Some part. I thought it would scratch the leather.”

“Could I see—?”

“Sure.” It was a little larger than his thumbnail. “Here,” Peter said, without looking at it closely.

Amar put it in the flat palm of his hand, and squinted at it. “This doesn’t look like a car part to me.”

“No?”

“No. I’d say it’s an airplane.”

Peter stared. It was so small he couldn’t really make out details, but now that he looked closely, it did indeed appear to be a tiny airplane. Like something from a model kit, the kind of kits he’d made as a boy. Maybe a fighter jet to glue onto an aircraft carrier. But if so, it was like no fighter jet he had ever seen. This one had a blunted nose, an open seat, no canopy, and a boxy rear with tiny stubby flanges: no real wings to speak of.

“Do you mind…”

Amar was already heading for the big magnifying glass by his workbench. He put the object under the glass, and turned it carefully. “This is quite fantastic,” he said.

Peter pushed his head in to look. Under magnification, the airplane—or whatever it was—appeared exquisitely beautiful, rich with detail. The cockpit had amazingly intricate controls, so minute it was hard to imagine how they had been carved. Amar was thinking the same thing.

“Perhaps laser lithography,” he said, “the same way they do computer chips.”

“But is it an airplane?”

“I doubt it. No method of propulsion. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just some kind of model.”

“A model?” Peter said.

“Perhaps you should ask your brother,” Amar said, drifting back to his workbench.

Peter reached Eric on his cell phone. He heard loud voices in the background. “Where are you?” Peter said.

“Memorial Drive. They love us at MIT. They understand what we’re talking about.”

Peter described the small object he had found.

“You really shouldn’t have that,” Eric said. “It’s proprietary.”

“But what is it?”

“Actually, it’s a test,” his brother said. “One of the first tests of our robotic technology. It’s a robot.”

“It looks like it has a cockpit, with a little chair and instruments, like someone would sit there…”

“No, no, what you’re seeing is the slot to hold the micro-power-pack and control package. So we can run it remotely. I’m telling you, Peter, it’s a bot. One of the first proofs of concept of our ability to miniaturize beyond anything previously known. I was going to show it to you if we had time, but—listen, I’d prefer you keep that little device to yourself, at least for now.”

“Sure, okay.” No point in telling him about Amar.

“Bring it with you when you come to visit us,” Eric said, “in Hawaii.”

The head of the lab, Ray Hough, came in and spent the rest of the day in his office, reviewing papers. By general agreement it was considered poor form for the graduate students to discuss other jobs while Professor Hough was present. So around four o’clock they all met at Lucy’s Deli on Mass Ave. As they crowded around a couple of small tables, a lively discussion ensued. Rick Hutter continued to argue that the university was the only place where one could engage in ethical research. But nobody really listened to him; they were more concerned with the claims that Vin Drake had made. “He was good,” Jenny Linn said, “but it was a sales pitch.”

“Yes,” Amar Singh said, “but at least one part of it was true. He’s right that discoveries do follow new tools. If those guys have the equivalent of a new kind of microscope, or a new PCR-type technique, then they’re going to make a lot of discoveries quickly.”

“But could it really be the best research environment in the world?” Jenny Linn said.

“We can see for ourselves,” Erika Moll said. “They said they’d pay airfare.”

“How’s Hawaii this time of year?” Jenny said.

“I can’t believe you guys are buying into this,” Rick said.

“It’s always good,” Karen King said. “I did my tae kwon do training in Kona. Wonderful.” Karen was a martial arts devotee, and had already changed into a sweat suit for her evening workout.

“I overheard the CFO say they’re hiring a hundred people before the end of the year,” Erika Moll said, trying to steer the conversation away from Karen and Rick.

“Is that supposed to scare us or entice us?”

“Or both?” Amar Singh said.

“Do we have any idea what this new technology is they claim to have?” Erika said. “Do you know, Peter?”

“From a career standpoint,” Rick Hutter said, “you’d be very foolish not to get your PhD first.”

“I have no idea,” Peter said. He glanced at Amar, who said nothing, just nodded silently.

“Frankly, I’m curious to see their facility,” Jenny said.

“So am I,” Amar said.

“I looked at their website,” Karen King said. “Nanigen MicroTech. It says they make specialized robots at the micro- and nano-scale. That’s millimeters down to thousandths of a millimeter. They have drawings of robots that look like they’re about four or five millimeters long—maybe a quarter of an inch. And then some that are half that, maybe two millimeters. The robots seem very detailed. No explanation how they could be made.”

Amar was staring at Peter. Peter said nothing.

“Your brother hasn’t talked to you about this, Peter?” Jenny asked.

“No, this has been his secret.”

“Well,” Karen King continued, “I don’t know what they mean by nano-scale robots. That would be less than the thickness of a human hair. Nobody can fabricate at those dimensions. You’d have to be able to construct a robot atom by atom, and nobody can do that.”

“But they say they can?” Rick said. “It’s corporate bullshit.”

“Those cars aren’t bullshit.”

“Those cars are rented.”

“I have to get to class,” Karen King said, standing up from the table. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. Nanigen has kept a very low profile, but there are a few brief references in some business sites, going back about a year. They got close to a billion dollars in funding from a consortium put together by Davros Venture Capital—”

“A billion!”

“Yeah. And that consortium is primarily composed of international drug companies.”

“Drug companies?” Jenny Linn frowned. “Why would they be interested in micro-bots?”

“The plot thickens,” Rick said. “Big Pharma behind the curtain.”

“Maybe they expect new delivery systems?” Amar said.

“Nah, they have that already, with nano-spheres. They don’t need to spend a billion dollars on that. They must be expecting new drugs.”

“But how…” Erika shook her head, puzzled.

“There’s more,” Karen King said, “from the business websites. Not long after they got the funding, Nanigen was challenged by another micro-robotic company in Palo Alto, saying Nanigen had made false representations to raise money and they didn’t really have the technology they said they did. This other company was also developing microscopic robots.”

“Uh-huh…”

“What happened?”

“The threatened lawsuit was withdrawn. The Palo Alto company declared bankruptcy. And that was the end, except the head of their company was quoted as saying Nanigen did have the technology, after all.”

“So you think this is real?” Rick said.

“I think I’m late for class,” Karen said.

“I think it’s real,” Jenny Linn said. “And I’m going to Hawaii to see for myself.”

“I am, too,” Amar said.

“I don’t believe this,” Rick Hutter said.

Peter walked down Mass Avenue with Karen King toward Central Square. It was late afternoon, but the sun still felt warm. Karen carried her gym bag in one hand, keeping the other hand free.

“Rick gives me a pain,” she said. “He acts like he’s being ethical when he’s really just lazy.”

“How do you mean?”

“Staying in the university is safe,” Karen said. “A nice life, comfortable and safe. Except he won’t admit that. Do me a favor,” she added, “and walk on the other side of me, okay?”

Peter moved to Karen’s left side. “Why?”

“So my hand is free.”

Peter looked at her right hand. She held her car keys in her fist, the key shaft protruding from between her knuckles like a knife blade. Hanging from the key chain was a canister of pepper spray, close to her wrist.

Peter couldn’t help smiling. “You think we’re at risk here?”

“The world is a dangerous place.”

“Mass Ave? At five in the afternoon?” They were in the heart of Cambridge.

“Colleges don’t report the actual number of rapes in their communities,” Karen said. “It’s bad publicity. Wealthy alumni won’t send their daughters.”

He kept looking at her clenched fist, the key poking out. “What will you do with the keys you’re holding that way?”

“Straight hit to the windpipe. Instant crippling pain, maybe puncture the trachea. If that doesn’t take him down, spray full in the face close-range. Kick down hard on the kneecap, break it if you can. By then he’s down, and he’s not going anywhere.”

She was serious, almost grim. Peter suppressed an urge to laugh. The street before them was familiar, mundane. People were getting off work, heading home for dinner. They passed a harried-looking professor in a wrinkled corduroy jacket, clutching a stack of blue exam papers, followed by a little old lady with a walker. A group of joggers up ahead.

Karen reached into her purse, pulled out a small folded knife, flipped open the thick serrated blade. “Got my Spyderco knife, I can gut a bastard if it comes to that.” She glanced up, saw his expression. “You think I’m ridiculous, don’t you?”

“No,” he said. “It’s just—you’d really gut someone with a knife?”

“Listen,” she said. “My half-sister is a lawyer in Baltimore. She’s walking to her car in the garage, two o’clock in the afternoon, and she’s attacked by some guy. Knocked down, hits the concrete, loses consciousness, beaten and raped. When she comes to, she has retrograde amnesia, she can’t remember anything about the attacker, how it happened, what he looks like. Nothing. One day in the hospital and they send her home.

“So there’s a guy in the firm, a partner, he has scratches on his throat, and she thinks maybe it’s him. Some guy in her own firm, followed her out and raped her. But she doesn’t remember, she can’t be sure. And she’s just so uncomfortable. Eventually she leaves the firm, moves to DC, has to start again at a lower-paying job.” Karen held up her fist. “All because she didn’t carry her keys like this. She was too nice to protect herself. Bullshit.”

Peter was trying to imagine whether Karen King would really stab someone with the key, or gut them with a knife. He had the uneasy feeling that she would. In a university setting, where so many people just talked, it seemed she was ready for action.

They came to the storefront martial arts studio, the windows papered over. He could hear shouts in unison from inside. “Well, this is my class,” she said. “I’ll see you later. But listen: if you talk to your brother, ask him why drug companies put up so much money for micro-botics, okay? I’m curious.” And she went through the swinging door, into the class.

Peter returned to the lab that evening. He had to feed the cobra every three days, and he usually did it at night, since cobras were by nature nocturnal. It was eight p.m., and the lab lights were low, when he lowered a squirming white rat into the cage and slid the glass shut. The rat scampered to the far side of the cage, and froze. Only its nose twitched. Slowly the snake turned, uncoiled, and faced the rat.

“I hate to see that,” Rick Hutter said. He had come up behind Peter.

“Why?”

“So cruel.”

“Everybody’s got to eat, Rick.”

The cobra struck, burying its fangs deep in the rat’s body. The rat shivered, stayed on its feet, then collapsed. “That’s why I’m a vegetarian,” Rick said.

“You don’t think plants have feelings?” Peter said.

“Don’t start,” Rick said. “You and Jenny.” Jen’s research involved communication among plants and insects via pheromones, chemicals released by organisms to trigger responses. The field had made enormous advances over the last twenty years. Jenny insisted that plants had to be seen as active, intelligent creatures, little different from animals. And Jenny enjoyed annoying Rick. “It’s ridiculous,” Rick said to Peter. “Peas and beans don’t have feelings.”

“Of course not,” Peter answered, with a smile. “It’s because you’ve already killed the plant—heartlessly dispatched it for your own selfish meal. You just pretend the plant didn’t scream in agony when you killed it, because you don’t want to face the consequences of your cold-blooded plant murder.”

“Absurd.”

“Speciesism,” Peter said. “And you know it.” He was smiling, but there was truth to what he was saying. Peter was surprised to see that Erika was in the lab, and so was Jenny. Few of the graduate students worked at night. What was going on?

Erika Moll stood at a dissecting board, carefully cutting open a black beetle. Erika was a coleopterist, meaning an entomologist with a special interest in beetles. As she said, that was a conversation-stopper at cocktail parties. (“What do you do?” “I study beetles.”) But, in fact, beetles were very important to the ecosystem. A quarter of all known species were beetles. Years ago, a reporter had asked the famed biologist J. B. S. Haldane what could be deduced about the Creator from the creation, and Haldane had answered, “He has an inordinate fondness for beetles.”

“What have you got there?” Peter said to Erika.

“This is a bombardier beetle,” she said. “One of the Australian Pheropsophus that sprays so effectively.”

As she spoke, she returned to her dissection, shifting her body so she was touching his. It seemed to be an accidental contact; she gave no indication that she had even noticed. But she was a notorious flirt. “What’s special about this bombardier?” Peter said.

Bombardier beetles got their name from their ability to fire a hot, noxious spray in any direction from a rotating turret at the tip of their abdomen. The spray was sufficiently unpleasant that it stopped toads and birds from eating them, and it was toxic enough to kill smaller insects immediately. How bombardier beetles accomplished this had been studied since the early 1900s, and by now the mechanism was well understood.

“The beetles produce boiling-hot benzoquinone spray,” she explained, “which they make from precursors stored in the body. They have two sacs in the rear of the abdomen—I’m cutting them open now, there, you see them? The first sac contains the precursor hydroquinone along with the oxidant, hydrogen peroxide. The second sac is a rigid chamber, and contains enzymes, catalases, and peroxidases. When the beetle is attacked, it muscularly squeezes the contents of the first sac into the second, where all the ingredients combine to produce an explosive blast of benzoquinone spray.”

“And this particular beetle?”

“It adds something more to its armamentarium,” she said. “It also produces a ketone, 2-tridecanone. The ketone has repellent properties, but it also acts as a surfactant, a wetting agent that accelerates the spread of the benzoquinone. I want to know where the ketone is made.” She rested her hand lightly on his arm for a moment.

Peter said, “You don’t think the beetle makes it?”

“Not necessarily, no. It might have taken on bacteria, and let the bacteria make the ketone for it.” That was a fairly common event in nature. Making chemicals for defense consumed energy, and if an animal could incorporate bacteria to do the work on its behalf, so much the better.

“This ketone is found elsewhere?” Peter said. That would suggest it was of external bacterial origin.

“In several caterpillars, yes.”

“By the way,” he said, “why are you working so late?”

“We all are.”

“Because?”

“I don’t want to fall behind,” she said, “and I assume I’ll be gone next week. In Hawaii.”

Jenny Linn held a stopwatch while she watched a complex apparatus: leafy plants under one large flask were being eaten by caterpillars, while an air hose connected the first flask to three more flasks, each with more plants but no caterpillars. A small pump controlled air flow among the flasks.

“We already know the basic situation,” she said. “There are 300,000 known species of plants in the world, and 900,000 species of insects, and many of them eat plants. Why haven’t all the plants vanished, chewed down to the ground? Because all plants long ago evolved defenses against insects that attack them. Animals can run away from predators, but plants can’t. So they have evolved chemical warfare. Plants produce their own pesticides, or they generate toxins to make their leaves taste bad, or they release volatile chemicals that attract the insect’s predators. And sometimes they release chemicals that signal other plants to make their leaves more toxic, less edible. Inter-plant communications, that’s what we are measuring here.”

The caterpillars eating the plants in the first flask caused the release of a chemical, a plant hormone, that would be carried to the other flasks. The other plants would increase their production of nicotinic acid. “I’m looking to measure the rate of response,” she said. “That’s why I have three flasks. I’ll be cutting leaves from various places to measure nicotinic acid levels in them, but as soon as I cut a leaf from the next plant…”

“That plant will act like it’s under attack, and it will release more volatiles.”

“Right. So the flasks are kept separate. We know the response is relatively rapid, a matter of minutes.” She pointed to a box to one side. “I measure the volatiles with ultra high-speed gas chromatography, and the leaf extraction is straightforward.” She glanced at her stopwatch. “And now if you’ll excuse me…”

She lifted the first flask, and began cutting leaves from base upward, setting each aside in careful order.

“Hey, hey, hey, what is going on here?” Danny Minot entered the lab, waving his hands. Red-faced and rotund, he was dressed in a tweed sport coat with elbow patches, a rep tie, and baggy slacks, and looked for all the world like an establishment English professor. Which was not far wrong. Minot was getting a doctorate in science studies, a melange of psychology and sociology, with liberal doses of French postmodernism thrown in. He had degrees in biochemistry and comparative literature, but the comparative literature had won out; he quoted Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others who believed that there was no objective truth, only the truth that’s established by power. Minot was here in the lab to complete a thesis on “scientific linguistic codes and paradigm transformation.” In practice it meant he made a pest of himself, bothering people, recording conversations with the other grad students as they did their work.

They all despised him. There were frequent discussions about why Ray Hough had let him in the lab in the first place. Finally somebody asked Ray about it, and he said, “He’s my wife’s cousin. And nobody else would take him.”

“Come on, people,” Minot said, “nobody works this late in this lab, and here you all are.” Waving his hands again.

Jenny snorted disdainfully. “Hand-waver.”

“I heard that,” Minot said. “Meaning what?”

Jenny turned her back on him.

“Meaning what? Don’t turn your back on me.”

Peter went over to Danny. “A hand-waver,” he said, “is somebody who hasn’t worked out his ideas and can’t defend them. So when he presents at a colloquium, and he comes to the parts he hasn’t worked out, he starts waving his hands and talking fast. Like the way someone waves their hands and says, ‘Et cetera, et cetera.’ In science, hand-waving means you don’t have the goods.”

“Not what I am doing here,” Minot said, waving his hand. “The semiotics are completely garbled.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But as Derrida said, techno-translation is so difficult. I am attempting to indicate all of you in a gestural mode of inclusiveness. What’s going on?”

“Don’t tell him,” Rick said, “or he’ll want to come.”

“Of course I want to come,” Minot said. “I am the chronicler of life in this lab. I must come. Where are you going?”

Peter briefly told him the entire story.

“Oh yes, I am definitely coming. The intersection of science and commerce? The corruption of golden youth? Oh definitely—I’ll be there.”

Peter was getting a cup of coffee from the machine in the corner of the lab when Erika walked over. “What are you doing later?”

“I don’t know, why?”

“I thought maybe I could stop by tonight.”

She was staring right at him. Something about the directness of her manner put him off. “I don’t know, Erika,” he said, “I might be working here late.” Thinking: I haven’t seen you for three weeks, since the last time.

“I’m almost finished, myself,” she said. “And it’s only nine o’clock.”

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“It doesn’t appeal to you, my offer?” She was still staring at him, scanning his face.

“I thought you were seeing Amar.”

“I like Amar, very much. He is very intelligent. I like you too. I always have.”

“Maybe we’ll talk later,” he said, pouring milk in his coffee, and moving away so quickly that it spilled a little.

“I hope so,” she said.

“Trouble with your coffee?” Rick Hutter said, glancing up at Peter and grinning. Under a halogen lamp, Rick was holding a rat upside down, measuring its swollen rear paw with a small caliper.

“No,” Peter said, “I was just, uh, surprised at how hot it was.”

“Uh-huh. I’d say, surprisingly hot.”

“Is that a carageenen prep?” Peter said, changing the subject. Carageenen was the usual method to produce edema in the paw of a lab animal. It was a standardized animal model for edema, employed in labs around the world to study inflammation.

“Correct,” Rick said. “I injected carageenen, making the paw swollen. Then I wrapped the foot in an extract from the bark of Himatanthus sucuuba, a medium-size rain-forest tree, and now we are—hopefully—demonstrating its anti-inflammatory properties. I already demonstrated it for the tree’s latex. Himatanthus is an extremely versatile tree, it heals wounds and cures ulcers. The shamans in Costa Rica say this tree also has antibiotic, anti-fever, anti-cancer, and anti-parasite qualities, but I haven’t tested those claims yet. Certainly the bark extract has reduced this rat’s swelling remarkably fast.”

“You determined what chemicals are responsible for the anti-inflammatory response?”

“Researchers in Brazil attribute it to alpha-amyrin cinnamate and other cinnamate compounds, but I haven’t verified that yet.” Rick finished measuring the rat, set it down in the cage, and typed in a measurement and time in his laptop. “Tell you one thing, though: extracts from the tree appear to be completely nontoxic. One day you might even be able to give this to pregnant women. Huh, look at that.” He pointed to the rat as it moved around the cage. “It’s not limping at all anymore.”

Peter slapped him on the back. “Better be careful,” he said, “or you’ll have some pharmaceutical company beating you to your results.”

“Hey, I’m not worried. If those guys were really in the business of developing drugs, they’d already be working on this tree,” Rick said. “But why should they take the risk? Let the American taxpayer fund the research, let some graduate student spend months to make the discovery, and then they swoop in and buy it up from the university. And then they sell our discovery back to us, at full price. Sweet deal, huh?” He was starting to wind up for one of his tirades. “I tell you, these Goddamned pharma—”

“Rick,” Peter said, “I’ve got to go.”

“Oh sure, yeah. Nobody wants to hear it, I know.”

“I have to spin down my naja venom.”

“No problem.” Rick hesitated, glanced over his shoulder at Erika. “Listen, it’s none of my business—”

“That’s right, it’s not—”

“But I hate to see a good guy like you fall into the clutches of somebody who is…well…Anyway, you met my friend Jorge, who does computer science at MIT? If you want to know what’s really going on with Erika, call this number—” he handed Peter a card—“and Jorge will access her phone records, including voice and text messages, and you can find out the truth about her, uh, promiscuous ways.”

“Is that legal?”

“No. But it’s damn useful.”

“Thanks anyway,” Peter said, “but—”

“No, no, keep it,” Rick insisted.

“I won’t use it.”

“You never know,” Rick said. “Phone records don’t lie.”

“Okay.” It was easier to keep the card than argue. He slipped it in his pocket.

“By the way,” Rick said, “about your brother…”

“What about him?”

“You think he’s on the level?”

“About his company?”

“Yeah, Nanigen.”

“I think so,” Peter said. “But to be honest I don’t know a lot about it.”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“He’s been pretty secretive about the whole thing.”

“But you think it’s innovative?”

Yes, I think it’s innovative, Peter thought, peering through the scanning microscope. He was looking again at the white pebble, or micro-bot, or whatever the thing was. Trying to account for his brother’s explanation that it wasn’t a cockpit but just a slot for a micro-power-pack, or a control unit. It didn’t look like a slot for anything. It looked like a seat facing a tiny, highly detailed control panel.

He was still puzzling over this when he became aware that the lab around him had become absolutely silent. He looked up, and saw that the microscope was also displaying on a large flat-panel screen mounted on the wall. Everybody in the lab was staring at it.

“What the hell is that?” Rick said.

“I don’t know.” Peter flicked off the monitor. “And we’re not going to find out, unless we go to Hawaii.”