The Viral Epiphany (13 page)

“You already have a place to go? That’s incredible!” Shaylin said.
 
“Where?”

 
“Ireland.” Stephen said with a look of triumph in his eyes. “We’re going to Ireland!”

Fourteen

           
Dan Quinn sat on a bench in Cork City’s Fitzgerald Park watching the dark and rapidly flowing waters of the
River Lee
.
 
A large, white swan glided past on the current searching the water for a meal while it kept a wary eye on an enormous seal that swam slowly along the opposite bank.
 
A few hundred yards upstream two teenage boys jumped into the river from the “Shaky Bridge” and Dan heard the resounding splash a second later. On the shore in front of him, a group of boaters were tying up their brightly colored rowboats, having half-drifted and half-rowed here from far upstream of the Lee Fields.
 
The ocean was at low tide on this pleasantly warm day and the river, tidal at this stage of its journey, would continue flowing out to sea for a few more hours. The park was crowded with hundreds of students, tourists, and office workers enjoying their lunches in the delightful combination of the warm, radiant sun and cool, refreshing breezes.
 

Lunch in the park was becoming a daily habit for Dan. It gave him an opportunity to think without the distractions of the campus across the Western Road, and like most days now, he often thought about Sheila.

Since their meeting at the Café Glucksman two years ago they had developed a closer working relationship and now it had progressed beyond that.
 
It wasn’t that he had forgotten Aisling.
 
He couldn’t.
 
She would always be a part of him, but he knew he had to let her go.
 
Aisling, if anyone, had known that life goes on and it must be embraced as it goes.
 
He knew she would approve of Sheila and that she would also be laughing softly at his present predicament. Sheila, with her long red hair, sparkling green eyes, absolutely brilliant mind, and slender, athletic build was still an enigma to him.

She had a deep and encyclopedic knowledge about many abstruse topics, but then, almost quirkily, it seemed she sometimes knew almost nothing about the most ordinary things.
 
Only yesterday she had told him she had never learned to play card games and that she had never, in her entire life, placed a bet at one of the Paddy Power bookmakers.
 
She didn’t even know how to place a bet.
 
It was amazing.

He watched the boaters climb up the riverbank and begin walking towards the Riverview Café.
 
She can be extremely flexible and understanding sometimes and then, other times, she just defiantly defends her ground against all arguments,
he thought.
She puts as much trust in her intuition as she does in her reasoning ability!
 
And yet, she’s seldom wrong…
He liked her a lot; he just didn’t understand her.

           
He took a deep breath and looked away from the river’s waters.
 
He hadn’t come here today only to lose himself in the magic of the river or to meditate about Sheila. He reached down and picked up the draft thesis he had taken along and opened it to the title page.
 
The author, his graduate student Brendan MacDonnell, had been working on his project since Dan had received the mammoth tissue sample about two years ago. He smiled slightly as he read the title,
The Perfect Disease: A Possible Cause of the Extinction of Certain Mammalian Species.
 
Brendan had frequently consulted Dan during
the course of his work, but Dan had also given him a great amount of freedom to pursue his own direction.
 
Brendan had essentially done this work on his own, with very little direct oversight from Dan. He was now interested to see whether Brendan’s theory about the extinction of the species had been borne out by any evidence in the tissue sample.
 
Brendan had taken a huge risk in making this a thesis project, but he had had a hunch and he believed in it.
Have to give him credit for that
, Dan thought.

           
He turned to the first page of the abstract at the beginning of the document and began reading:

…the cell structure and components, including the nuclear DNA, retrieved from the Siberian mammoth proved to be remarkably intact.
 
This provided the opportunity to study a statistically significant number of individual cells in the search for the hypothesized viral material.
 
The cytoplasm of over 10,000 cells was analyzed using a Thermo Scientific, Model TS-120, mass spectrometer. It was determined that, in this individual mammoth, the cytoplasm of nearly eighty percent of the cells had been infected with foreign DNA…

           
As Dan continued reading the thesis a shiny, black Mercedes Benz C-350 Sport Sedan parked outside the main administration building on campus and two men, both dressed in black business suits, got out and walked to the main entrance.
 
They were in their mid-twenties and both appeared to have muscular builds that their expensive suit coats could not quite conceal.
 
After entering the building they stopped for a moment to read the room directory information and then proceeded to the second floor office of the secretary for the Dean of the Department of Biological Sciences.
 
The taller of the two introduced himself.

           
“Good afternoon ma’am, my name is John Church.”

           
“Good afternoon, Mr. Church,” she replied,
 
“you are very welcome to the Department of Biological Sciences.
 
You must be American from the sound of your accent!
 
Texas maybe?
 
How may I help you?”

           
“Thank you, ma’am. My colleague and I are interested in speaking with a member of your teaching staff.
 
His name is Daniel Quinn.
 
I believe he is a professor here.”

           
“Professor Quinn?
 
Oh, do you have an appointment?
 
I don’t recall seeing your name in the computer.
 
Let me just check for you.
 
I’m afraid you will need one, you see. Our faculty have quite full schedules, and they all insist on appointments. I’m very sorry to tell you that.
 
I’m sure you understand.”

The secretary turned to her computer and opened up the appointments schedule file.
 
“Let’s see…Church …Church… Perhaps I overlooked it.”

           
John Church glanced at his companion and then quickly replied, “Oh no, don’t bother checking.
 
I’m sorry we don’t have an appointment. We just arrived from the United States and we really do have some urgent, but very private business, we need to conduct with the professor.
  
Perhaps you could make an exception?”

           
“An exception? Oh.
 
Well, I don’t really know.
 
Well, not me, not really.
 
I’m not authorized for those sorts of things, I’m sorry to say.
 
If you don’t mind I’ll just check with the Dean.
 
Would that be all right?
 
Now you young men just wait here.
  
I won’t be a minute. Why don’t you have a seat? Would you like some tea?”

           
“No ma’am.
 
Thank you,” John said. The two men remained standing.

           
“Yes, of course. You wouldn’t be drinking tea I suppose, now would you? All right then.
 
Make yourselves comfortable now.”
 
She got up from her desk and walked into the office behind her while the two men continued to stand at her desk.

           
While the men waited impatiently in the office, Dan, only a quarter mile away, had lost all track of time and was now completely engrossed in Brendan’s thesis.
 
As he had expected, the young man had done a fine job of methodically examining the tissue sample and searching for clues that might validate his theory.
 
However, he had gone far beyond that.
 
He had completed a detailed analysis of the mammoth’s tissue and had even compared some of the mammoth’s DNA structures to that of modern elephants.
 
He had then gone on to draw a very interesting conclusion.

           
Dan skipped from the general abstract to the very detailed section of the thesis concerned with the composition of the mammoth’s nuclear DNA.
 
The abstract had summarized the astounding discovery that Brendan had made but Dan now wanted to see the details for himself.
 
Brendan had made use of the nuclear DNA material to perform DNA sequencing of the mammoth genome. He had then compared it with the genome of modern day elephants whose DNA had already been sequenced by a team of Japanese experts.
 
Dan looked at the reference and saw that his old university classmate, Stephen Itagaki, had led the team.

           
As expected, most of the DNA structures were quite similar to that of modern elephants.
 
However, there was also a significant surprise that had been revealed by Brendan’s work.
 
A completely unknown set of genetic code, unlike anything found in elephants had been found within one of the mammoth’s chromosomes.
 
Brendan had compared this strange nuclear DNA with the viral DNA that he had observed in the cell cytoplasm and found that there was a perfect match.

           
“A retrovirus!” Dan said aloud.
 
He was completely awed by the result.
 
His student, essentially on his own, had taken a sample of tissue almost 10,000 years old and had found the clue that pointed to the cause, not only of this particular animal’s death, but perhaps also to the extinction of the entire mammoth species.
 
A retrovirus,
he said again to himself, shaking his head in disbelief, just
like HIV.
 
It hid in the nuclear DNA and masqueraded as a legitimate piece of the animal’s own DNA so the immune system never responded to it!
 
This is truly amazing. Brendan will certainly have made a name for himself after this is published…

           
He put the thesis down for a moment and looked at his watch.
 
It was nearly 2 pm, time to start walking back to his office. He started putting the thesis document back in his briefcase when he felt a firm hand on his shoulder.

           
“Dan?”
 
He quickly turned around.

           
“Oh!” he said, completely surprised. “Sheila!
 
It’s so nice to see you!
 
But what are you doing here? It’s not like you to wander away from the campus during the middle of the day.
 
I thought I was the only one in the department who had that habit!”

           
“Well, maybe you’ve taught me something.” she said with a laugh and a bright smile. “You’re not leaving now, are you?
 
I just got here! There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

           
“Sure, but first I have something so astonishing that you won’t believe it.”

           
“Really?” she said.
 
“What is it?”

           
“Brendan found a retrovirus in the mammoth tissue!
 
It was a massive infection too!”

           
“A retrovirus? Wow!
 
So his hypothesis may well be true!”

           
“Yes!”

           
“I’m so happy for Brendan,” she said smiling warmly at Dan.

           
“His theory has given me an idea for my own work on the nonlinear mathematics of biological processes. I think we can use one of the nonlinear transforms I have discovered to use the genetic code for the retrovirus and make a dynamic model: a functioning virtual virus in our supercomputer. We could learn a lot about the progression of viral forms of life by comparing this ancient virus to modern viruses.”

           
Sheila nodded in assent as she thought about his concept.
 
“This could be a major step forward in our understanding of life forms in general, Dan. What a great idea!
 
I’ll have to tell you about my own progress with the mammoth DNA code – you know – environmental interaction with DNA leading to evolutionary change?”