The Guac Bug

In the Lab

They were waiting as Thomas walked into the conference room. Gruen, of course. And Ben Blake, the chief chemist, and a young woman with intense dark eyes and sunken cheeks whom he had seen in the lab but whose name he did not know. Gruen introduced him to Dr. Lacey, bioanalyst.

“Mary,” she said.

“Quentin.”

In the center of the table lay two pieces of black rock, each half the size of a coffee mug.

“It’s your meteorite,” Gruen explained. “Net weight, about 3½ pounds. Ben?”

“It’s definitely from Mars, Quentin,” said the scientist. “We’ve done a lot of work on it. Walter thought we should have this meeting before we publish.”

Thomas eyed the two pieces thoughtfully. “Yes… quite right.” He frowned. “Mars?” The word hung there.

Gruen smiled. “I didn’t believe it myself at first. Actually, it’s in good company.”

Blake said, “Counting this one, there are now at least fourteen Martian meteorites in our museums. The five-kilo rock returned last year by Pathfinder Five—‘PV’—is of course the current standard. Before that, it was the four-pound meteorite found in the Allan Hills of Antarctica in 1984—ALH 84001. Our little prize is geologically and chemically quite similar to PV and ALH 84001. PV and our rock were thrown high into the Martian air by a tremendous meteoric impact some fifteen million years ago. They were already four billion years old when that happened. PV fell back to the planet’s surface but our rock was hurled into an escape orbit. It circled the sun for fifteen million years and was exposed to cosmic rays that modified its surface in characteristic ways. We can calculate the time it spent in space by radiometric dating. Some minor gravitational perturbation—maybe a passing asteroid—knocked it out of solar orbit, and so, Quentin, last year it hitched a ride on your auto.” He handed Thomas a pair of plastic gloves. “Go ahead, pick it up. Either piece, both… You can’t hurt them.”

Thomas snapped the gloves on and picked up one of the pieces. It was black on the outer surface, but a mottled gray where the diamond saw had sliced through. Obviously, some sort of internal irregularities. Pores? he wondered. He looked up questioningly at Blake.

“We’ll start with the easy stuff,” said the chemist. “As you know, both PV and ALH 84001 have properties that strongly suggest life. Our rock has all these. Number one, the tiny globules of carbonate. We have similar chemistry on our own planet: creatures in Earth oceans take in carbon dioxide from the air and likewise convert it to carbonates. Second—within those globules, we find PAH’s—polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, such as are produced by living organisms when they decay. Third, within the globules, we find two kinds of magnetic minerals, iron oxide and iron sulfide—components of certain Earth bacteria. Fourth—the rims of the globules contain structures suggesting that microbacteria had once lived there.”

Thomas peered closely at the shard. “Suggestive…”

Blake said, “True, but at the outset, we must point out that each and every one of these four characteristics could have been produced inorganically, without the aid of any kind of life. However, we believed it practically impossible that all four could have been produced simultaneously inorganically, and in the same locus. And with that thought in mind, we investigated further.” He paused, looked over at Gruen, who nodded.

The chemist continued. “So far, nothing really different from PV or ALH 84001. However…

Here his voice shifted into a dead laconic monotone, which Thomas sensed was an attempt to conceal excitement. “However, there’s one very big difference. We recovered a viable life form from our rock. When we sawed open the rock we found a colony of something—microcells in an internal fissure. Apparently the colony was sufficiently deep inside to resist destruction by heat, and was chilled so quickly by the cold of space that it was preserved intact. Recall, ordinarily when DNA ages, it tends to break into small pieces, about one to two hundred base pairs. That didn’t happen here.”

Thomas thought back. DNA had been recovered from insects and vertebrates of a hundred million years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth. But he knew both PV and ALH 84001 were supposed to be over four billion years old. His eyes suddenly widened. “But—from Mars? Do you realize—?”

Gruen’s mouth tightened in a half-smile. “Yes indeed. Life on Mars. But do we dare announce what we have? When the news gets out, the media all over the world will explode. Our labs would be in total disarray overnight. Oh, we know the full story will come out sooner or later, but right now we believe the publicity would seriously damage our research. We need more time. At the moment we think the Martian microorganism is useful, very useful. But is that the whole story? Can it also be deadly? Is there a downside? We don’t think so, but we don’t want to identify the source until we know more.”

The lawyer nodded. “Makes sense.”

Blake said, “Meanwhile our culture vats are working twenty-four hours a day. We now have several kilos of the product. We’re preparing a paper for Science—no mention of Mars.”

Thomas frowned. “Careful. .. premature disclosure could screw up your patent program.”

“No patent,” Gruen firmly. “We’re dedicating it to the public.”

Thomas raised his eyebrows. “No patent? It’s just an academic curiosity? No commercial possibilities?”

“We’re not certain,” Gruen said. “But if it does what we think, it will be very useful indeed. And that’s why we want it to be freely available to the public. Ben?”

“Watch this,” Blake said. The lights dimmed. The screen on the opposite wall lit up. “A little drama recorded by the electron microscope. The blob in the lower right is a T-cell, one of the most important cells of the human immune system. Thirty minutes earlier we infected that cell with a Bis virus, which we assume is now in the process of integrating itself into the DNA of the cell and taking over command of the cell machinery. Now watch the upper left-hand comer.”

At the mention of “Bis” the lawyer sat up straight. On the day the World Health Organization announced that HIV-vaccine was a success, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta announced the outbreak of 37 cases of what was tentatively styled HIV-Bis, or Bis for short, followed the next month by thirty deaths. Like HIV, Bis attacked the immune system and thereby destroyed the body’s defenses against the so-called opportunistic diseases, which then moved in and killed.

“Bis? Ah!” The lawyer noted a tiny blob moving in slow zigzags toward the right of the screen. It stopped, seemed to pulse and vibrate for a moment, then it headed straight for the infected cell.

“Your new bug?” said Thomas.

Gruen nodded.

The little creature hit the cell surface, paused, moved slowly along the surface, stopped.

“That’s the exact spot where the Bis virus went in,” Blake said.

“How does your boy know?” Thomas asked.

“Not sure, but we think Bis may have left traces of its sheath membrane dangling on the T-cell’s hydrophilic surface. We can’t detect it, but it’s evidently a red flag to our guy. We call him Anti-Bis, incidentally.”

Anti-Bis vanished.

The act seemed instantaneous, and Thomas started. “That was fast!”

“Wait—” said Blake. With his laser pointer he indicated to a second tiny disc on the screen. It was moving steadily toward the infected T-cell.

“Another Anti-Bis?” muttered Thomas.

“And still two more,” said Blake, pointing with the laser, “They are all going in, right behind number one.”

“Good God,” whispered Thomas. “They hunt in packs?”

“Like wolves, or wild dogs.”

Scary, thought Thomas.

The invaded cell began to shudder. It bulged, contracted, vibrated.

“If you could hear it,” Gruen said, “it would sound like World War III. They’re tearing the cell’s viral component into little pieces. When they finish that, they go after any toxins in the cell that the virus may have had time to make.”

“And then what?” said Thomas.

“After they clean up inside,” said Gruen, “they all divide. From what we can tell, one stays inside, guarding the cell against future invasion. The rest crawl out again and go looking for free-floating virus and for more infected cells.”

“But what if Mr. Bis mutates?”

“That’s where it really gets interesting,” said Blake. “Bis’s mutation is in response to a chemical signal in the blood or wherever Bis is hiding. Maybe Bis smells his mortal enemy, like the rabbit scenting the stalking coyote. He quickly transposes a couple of his RNA codons. Ordinarily this would conceal him from certain cells in our immune system. It’s almost as though it’s an act of intelligence, but of course it isn’t—it’s simply a non-volitional chemical response. And it doesn’t work Anti is ahead of him. He mutates certain codons in his own nucleid strand, and Mr. Bis is once again highly visible, and helpless. Look.” The chemist changed the slide and a luminous image shone on the far wall.

“Here’s our Anti-Bis, enlarged at thirty thousand.”

Thomas squinted at a throbbing sphere with a double wall and an internal cylinder. “Looks a lot like HIV.”

“In general appearance, yes, but that’s all. Mary?”

Mary Lacey said, “We’ve often wondered about the very first life on Earth—the protocell—how it was formed, what it looked like. Anti-Bis gives us the answer. Our earliest visible evidence on Earth is the stromatolites, stony columns formed by early bacteria, at least three and a half billion years ago. They lived on carbon dioxide, they had no nucleus, and were probably photosynthetic. We believe those life forms had evolved from even earlier forms that left no record. Our ancestral protocell most likely came into existence at least four billion years ago, probably under conditions quite similar to those that generated our Martian friend. All that was needed was hot water, ammonia, ultraviolet light from lightning, carbon dioxide, maybe energy such as the sun, or electrical energy from lightning.”

She paused, looked around the table. Thomas thought at first she was just checking to see whether they were paying attention, but then he saw the faraway look in her eyes, and it seemed to him just then that she might be some prehistoric priestess standing on the edge of an ancient scum-crusted tidal pool, and she would lift her arms, and utter magic words, and life would begin.

She continued. “The raw materials were there. The ammonia and carbon dioxide reacted to form amino acids, urea, purines, pyrimidines, with phosphates coming in from abounding minerals. All the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle were present, jostling around, trying to hook up in the proper order. This finally happened, and probably by accident. It may have taken several million years for it to happen, but time was no problem. And finally life did indeed happen: click click click. The right pieces slammed together in that submicroscopic world, the nucleic acids joined hands, and we had the protocell.”

Thomas looked around him covertly. Gruen and Blake surely knew all this, but they were leaning forward, as rapt as he.

Dr. Lacey said, “How does this protocell differ from other purine: pyrimidine assemblies?”

“For one thing, it’s ravenous. But it’s particular. It grabs up uracil, adenine, cytosine, guanine, but it does this in a certain picky order, and suddenly it finds it is making long polymeric strings. It spits them out as a copy of itself. That’s how it replicates. And if it can’t find free-floating molecules to gobble up, it attacks clusters and groups, anything not exactly like itself.”

She focused on the lawyer, like a teacher boring in on a dull student. “Our ancestral protocell was a killer, Quentin, and it wasn’t even yet a cell with a protective shell and all sorts of goodies inside, stuff to make spiders, elephants, Homo Sapiens. Here on Earth that came soon enough. On Mars, though, the seas dried up, the atmosphere blew away, and everything stalled. Until now.”

Okay, Mary, he thought, I believe.

Gruen said, “All living things use the same genetic code. Hence it would appear that all life arose from a common ancestor. And here he is, Quentin, Anti-Bis: your great-great-great granddaddy, vicious, savage, hungry as a bear coming out of hibernation.”

“If he’s so mean and nasty,” Thomas said, “why doesn’t he attack every cell in sight?”

“Each of our cells wears a white hat,” Mary Lacey explained, “An ‘MHC’—major histoincompatibility complex. We condition Anti to our specific MHC’s before he goes to work. Like explaining to guard dogs who the good guys are.”

“So now what?” asked Thomas.

“Our obvious goal is Bis,” said Gruen. “Maybe we’ve finally found the cure. But of course Anti has never been tried on real people. We have to set up test protocols with FDA. Terminal Bis patients have to join the program. It could be a total flop. And even before we get to that, we want to make more tests in glass.”

Thomas frowned. “The rock is already public knowledge, and the microlife you found soon will be.”

“That’s fine, Quentin,” Gruen said calmly. “We’re dedicating it to the public. Anybody can make it.”

Somehow this did not surprise the lawyer. He shrugged. “Bis is a twenty billion a year market, and you’re giving Anti away? Why, Walter?”

“Basically, for ego reasons, I guess. And maybe a little guilt. Bis treatment is presently running well over ten thousand dollars per person per year, and it’s not really very effective. That’s just for the medicine. You pay that or you die a lot sooner. The things that worked for HIV are useless for Bis. It’s like starting over, and if Anti-Bis works, and is controlled by the drug industry, its price will go through the roof. Industry will get rich, but a lot of people won’t be able to afford the program. Of course a lot of the cost will be picked up by insurance. But a lot won’t be. A great many people won’t be able to afford the medicine. Without medication they die quicker, sometimes in two or three years after infection. But if Anti-Bis works, Quentin, inability to pay won’t cost your life. With everybody able to make Anti, it’ll cost about the same as diet pills.”

Thomas pondered this. True, Bis medication was presently a multi-billion dollar a year industry, with at least half-a-dozen major suppliers, even though nothing really worked. Are they going to sit idly by while Walter Gruen tosses Anti into the public domain? “Suppose,” he said, “someone else gets the patent?”

“How could they?” asked Blake. “We’re first.”

“We are, aren’t we?” said Gruen. “First?” But there was uncertain edge in his voice.

Thomas’s eyebrows arched. “Are you? Someday you may have to prove it. You ought to at least get your records in order.”

“Such as?” asked Blake.

“For starters, right away deposit a culture at American Type Culture Collection—ATCC, in Rockville, and give them a full enabling written description on how to process the specimen. They’ll preserve Anti in liquid nitrogen and they’ll make samples available to anyone who asks. That should at least give you a legal date for a public disclosure.”

As he drove home, the lawyer kept thinking… idealism… the willingness to forego immense profits in order to save lives… magnificent idea… and a little insane. It violated human nature. Say Anti-Bis works. What will a man pay for his life? His wife’s? His child’s? Every cent he has, all he can borrow. And Walter Gruen wanted no part of the deadly bargain. Fine, Walter, but how about your competition? Twenty billion dollars are breathing hot down your idealistic neck. For all you know somebody out there is planning right now how to jerk the rug out from under you and shatter your pretty dreams. Somebody out there will try to get a patent… the patent, and blow you to hell. God love you, Walter, it’s good you own your own company. The board of directors of any public corporation would have fired you long ago!