Polar Quest

51

Dominique Martineau parked her BMW behind a nondescript two-story brick building and entered through an unmarked door in the rear. The building, constructed in the 1850s, had originally been a bakery. Vielogic had acquired it six years earlier and transformed the lower floor into retail shops and the upper into Martineau’s private research facility.

Off the second-floor landing, Martineau entered an empty room that served as a vestibule for her lab and walked up to a flush stainless-steel door. She placed her hand on a glass plate mounted on the wall beside the door. The device scanned her palm and compared the unique configuration of her hand to data it already had on file. It found a match and unlocked the door.

Inside the outer gowning room she removed her clothing, stepped into the air lock, and closed the door. The air lock was dark for a few seconds, then her body was bathed in ultraviolet light to kill any microbes present on her skin and hair.

Martineau’s heart always beat faster as she stood nude waiting in the air lock, though not for any sense of nervous modesty. She often thought this was how the shamans and high priests of old felt as they performed their purification rituals before entering their sacred places — the anticipation of an encounter with the magical and mysterious. Like those ancient seekers, Martineau cleansed herself of impurities, though her ritual was more a matter of pragmatism than piety.

When the decontamination cycle ended, the inner door released and Martineau entered and walked past a shower stall and lavatory. She ripped open a hermetically sealed bag and pulled out the disposable surgical scrubs and booties. She completed her wardrobe with a hair net, surgical mask, and a pair of latex gloves.

Through the final door, Martineau entered her sanctum sanctorum. The lab was a mix of whites and cool blues — calm, thoughtful colors — and the only sounds heard within its walls were the dull humming of the refrigerators and cryogenic freezers and the white noise of air being stripped of microscopic contaminants as it flowed through high-efficiency particulate filters.

Martineau stepped over to a lab bench and, using a pipette, extracted a small amount of fluid from a glass beaken. She placed a droplet on the slide tray and peered though the eyepiece of the microscope at her work in progress. The sample teemed with newly formed stem cells, each completely identical, each capable of developing into any specific type of cell in the body.

Martineau extracted a larger sample from the beaker and inserted the fluid into an SG machine. SG stood for spermatogenesis, the process by which the male of a species creates spermatozoa. The SG machine was designed to artificially reproduce mammal sperm and seminal fluid from a sampling of genetic material. Its counterpart, the OV machine, created viable ova for in vitro fertilization.

Both machines evolved from Martineau’s research in cellular mechanics and were initially designed to extend profitable bloodlines in horses and other livestock and to reestablish endangered and recently extinct species. The technology also held the promise of helping infertile couples produce biological offspring.

In an extrapolation of the SG machine’s potential, Martineau once submitted a proposal to Lafitte to produce a biological daughter of a lesbian couple, fabricating sperm with one of the women’s DNA. She even toyed with the idea of building an ovum from a man’s genetic material. The fertilized egg would require a donor womb, but for the first time a man would be the biological mother of the child. The more Martineau grew to understand the intricate inner workings of cells, the more godlike power she felt over the mechanics of life.

In other avenues of her research, Martineau pushed the limits in coaxing undifferentiated cells into becoming different parts of the body. She grew skin, muscle, and nerve cells in dishes, and was making progress with internal organs and bone marrow.

All of Martineau’s machines were in the early testing phase, still years away from government approval for commercial use. The one critical element she still lacked was speed. The time it took to read the entire length of the human genome had dropped from a decade, to three years, to now just under a year — but for Martineau this was still far too long.

Vielogic’s eventual acquisition of UGene promised to cut the time it took to read a person’s genome down to a matter of days. Such speed would allow Vielogic to custom-tailor pharmaceuticals to individual needs — an innovation that would shake the rest of the drug industry like a violent earthquake.

Martineau opened the door of her lab freezer and retrieved a test tube. Inside, the clear Tris-EDTA solution remained liquid, preserving the delicate strands of DNA she’d painstakingly extracted the previous day. Since her return from the U.S., she had begun retrieving DNA samples from the sweat left by Nolan Kilkenny during his visit to the Level 4 lab in New Jersey. Her work was nearly complete.