The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 13

Paul’s mycology lab operated as part of the University of Maryland, located inside the notoriously traffic-heavy Washington, DC, beltway. We took the train to the College Park station, which dropped us only a few minutes’ walk from his building.

“You have to promise not to tell anyone what I show you,” he said, for what seemed like the tenth time.

“I’ve got it,” I said. “I told you I wouldn’t, and I won’t. I don’t want to tell your secrets. I just want to know you’re okay.”

He laughed, though it sounded a little forced to me. “I’m better than okay,” he said.

The lab was in the Plant Sciences building, a newly built red-brick facility with white trim. I smirked at the “Plant Sciences” sign, remembering various times Paul had complained that Fungi was a kingdom in its own right, with over a hundred thousand distinct species, and deserved a building of its own.

Paul let us in with his ID card, a security check that seemed ludicrously minimal now that I was accustomed to daily trips in and out of Fort Meade. The painted cinderblock halls echoed like my memories of high school. He unlocked a door labeled Chaverri Mycology Lab, and I followed him in.

It was antiseptically neat. Microscopes stood aligned on the table with laser precision, at right angles to the computers, which were as white and clean as everything else in the lab. Rows of small plastic drawers decorated the counters, each meticulously labeled, behind Bunsen burners and Erlenmeyer flasks and other items I vaguely remembered from chemistry class. Under one counter was a large device I didn’t recognize that looked like a washing machine. On a central table sat rows of petri dishes, also labeled, but with less careful handwriting. I leaned over and peered at them, making out phrases like “Brain Heart Infusion Agar (BHIA), 5% sheep’s blood” and “Cornmeal Glucose Sucrose Yeast Extract Agar.”

Paul grinned. “The sheep’s blood is for primary isolation and cultivation,” he said. “I move it to the cornmeal to encourage sporulation.”

I peered at the dish. A white splotch in the center bloomed outward, like mold on a piece of bread. A pattern of what looked like millions of tiny filaments spread toward the edges of the dish, shifting in color from white to a greenish brown.

“So this is it?”

Paul nodded. “At the hospital, Dr. Chu said it was paracoccidioidomycosis. That would mean an infection with the Paracoccidioides brasiliensis fungus. And while this lovely specimen certainly shares some similarities, I can now state with confidence that that’s not what it is.”

“No? What is it, then?”

“Something new. Not that ‘new’ is all that unusual. You could send a five-year-old into the Amazon with a bucket, and he’d come back with a dozen unclassified species. But as far as fungal species thriving in human hosts, there’s nothing in the literature about this little guy.”

I ran my eyes along the rows of petri dishes, all of which seemed to be versions of the same specimen cultivated in different agar solutions. Some of them had multiple dark-colored stains, while others seemed hardly to have grown at all.

“It’s trimorphic,” he said, excitement evident in his voice. “Depending on the temperature and nature of its host, it can transition among three different forms: a single-celled yeast that buds to reproduce, or two different multicellular filamentous forms.”

“Is that rare?”

“No, not all that unusual, actually. There’s a common blood infection that’s trimorphic. Paracoccidioides brasiliensis is dimorphic, as are a number of other pathogenic species. The ability to transform morphologies is what makes them so hard to kill and so potentially life-threatening. I suspect this species could survive in just about any host, plant or animal.”

“So… is this where you explain why you haven’t been taking your medication?”

“Let me show you something else first.”

He logged into one of the computers, which was fitted with a pair of large flat-screen monitors. After a few moments of poking through the filesystem, he brought up a collection of grainy black-and-white images that reminded me of prenatal sonograms.

“These are my lungs two days after I came home from the hospital,” he said. I didn’t really know what I was looking at, but he pointed out the major features. “These wheel shapes are lesions in the lung wall. That’s the yeast form. Then it transitions to a filamentous morphology, sending out mycelia between the cells.”

“Preventing you from breathing.”

“Well, indirectly. My immune system attacks the fungus, causing all sorts of fluid buildup, and that prevents me from breathing.”

“I’m not seeing how this makes not taking your medicine an attractive option.”

“Patience.” He flipped to the next image. “This is my lungs two weeks later.”

“No more wheels,” I said.

“Right. The yeast form is gone. No more immune attacks, no more fluid.”

“Because of the medicine?”

He shrugged. “That probably sped the process along. But the other form, the filamentous morphology, is still there. Look.” He flipped to the next image, which showed the lung tissue at a closer magnification. “See all the mycelia?”

“You mean all those little lines? That’s the fungus?”

“It’s thriving. Insinuating itself into all the spaces between the cells, sometimes tapping them for nutrients.”

“It’s a parasite, then. It’s living inside you. Eating you.”

Paul rolled his eyes. “You have more cells of gut bacteria inside you than you have cells of you. Don’t get queasy about a little foreign life.”

“The bacteria is supposed to be there. It’s helpful. Necessary, even. This is an infection. Are you intentionally letting it grow inside you just to study it? Isn’t there some kind of, I don’t know, code of ethics that frowns on that sort of thing?”

Paul leaned back and interlaced his fingers behind his head. “On the contrary. Self-experimentation has a long and storied history that has led to some important discoveries. Werner Forssmann won a Nobel Prize for threading the first cardiac catheter into his own heart. Barry Marshall earned a Nobel for proving—through self-experimentation—that Helicobacter pylori was the cause of gastric ulcers.”

I gave him my best skeptical look. “And wasn’t there a guy who drank cholera?”

“There was! Max von Pettenkofer. He wanted to prove his theory that cholera spread through the air, not through fluid contact. He was… um… wrong.”

I let that hang in the air for a few moments without answering.

“Let’s skip to the finale, then,” he said, and cycled through a series of images until he found the one he was looking for. The last image was a rotating, three-dimensional color map of something I couldn’t identify.

“This is the frontal lobe of my cerebellum,” Paul said.

“Wait. Your brain? How are you getting these images?”

“It’s from a PET scan.”

“Isn’t that expensive? When Dad gets one, they cost a thousand dollars a pop.”

“A guy on the third floor is doing research on new tomography techniques. I told him I’d be a test subject in exchange for the results.”

“Okay. And you found what? That the fungus is in your brain, too?”

“Yup. But in a good way.”

I stared at him, expecting him to break out laughing and gloat about how far he’d strung me along. He looked back at me, totally serious. Finally, I said, “How can fungus possibly be in your brain in a good way?”

He manipulated the image with a mouse, diving in and rotating to focus on particular features. “You can see how the mycelia have grown up through everything.” His face was alight with excitement. “They follow the paths of the neurons, tangling themselves through the whole structure.”

I was horrified. “Isn’t that how you get meningitis?”

He gestured, indicating his head. “No inflammation. No pain, no confusion. In fact, I’ve scored top marks on every intelligence test I’ve taken. The mycelia actually increase the efficiency of the neurotransmitters. Not only that, but there are certain portions of my brain they’ve remapped, keeping the same functionality with increased efficiency.”

“Remapped,” I said.

“Yes. The brain, amazing as it is, forms neural pathways organically, so they can be inefficient. Think of it like defragmenting your hard drive. You can fit a lot more in there if you reorder a bit.”

“How do you know it’s keeping the same functionality?”

He laughed. “You were always the cautious one. I guess I don’t know, when it comes down to it, but that’s why I’m studying myself so carefully. You’ll notice that I haven’t published my findings yet. I’m not going to claim success until I’m pretty sure it’s not going to hurt anyone.”

“Except yourself.”

“Except myself. But that’s a risk I’m allowed to take. And so far it’s nothing short of miraculous. I can hold reams of complex data in my head, even graph it without a computer. I just think about it, and I can see it in my mind. Connections just come to me. I’m having eureka moments twice a day. Yes, the long-term effects are unknown. There’s going to be a firestorm of controversy once I publish—calls for government regulations, studies galore, and more controversy on the internet than for child vaccinations. But it works, Neil.”

Despite my misgivings, I found myself catching his excitement. He certainly knew a lot more about the subject than I did, and if he thought it was safe… though, how could he know? It wasn’t like anyone had studied this before. I didn’t want my brother to be another footnote in the history of ill-advised self-experimentation.

“What about Maisie?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them.

His face fell. “What about her? She died of the initial infection. Drowned, essentially, in the blood and fluids caused by her body’s immune response.” His voice was neutral, but the rigidness in his jaw told me he was angry.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just meant, if you want other people to benefit from this parasite—”

“There are risks. I admit that. But they can be minimized. Instead of inhaling spores, a cultivated form could be injected or taken orally. Perhaps along with a dose of antifungals to slow the initial growth.”

“Does this have anything to do with Neuritol?” I asked.

He frowned. “You mean that smart drug your friend’s granddaughter overdosed on?”

I nodded.

“That’s interesting,” he said. “I don’t know much about it. Does it have a fungal component?”

I made a mental note to find out. “And what about all these indigenous Einsteins popping up out of the rainforest?”

Paul stood up from the computer chair and stretched. “Hard to say. It seems unlikely that Maisie and I would be the only people in all of Brazil to be infected. On the other hand, there’s no mention of such a case anywhere in the literature. So either it’s very rare, and we happened to stumble on it, or it’s a very new strain, in which case we could see a lot more cases.”

“Thanks for showing me all this,” I said.

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re not going to tell anyone, are you? I’m trusting you with this. Not a word to anyone until I publish.”

I held two fingers up, scout’s honor. “I won’t tell anyone. But there are a few people I want you to tell.”

“I’m not going to report myself to any ethics board, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Not at all. I want to introduce you to my friends at the NSA.”