World without Cats (24 page)

19
 

Noah briefed Stanaland on his work in Atlanta. “Bollocks,” the director cried out on learning the CDC would not be making the vaccine.

Noah was startled. Until then, he had never heard the director raise his voice.

The two scientists considered producing the vaccine right there at CSUCI, but they lacked a fermentor of sufficient capacity. The largest one on campus held up to on hundred liters but they needed at least a five hundred liter vat, the sort used for industrial processes such as the manufacture of antibiotics.

“Why don’t you look into the possibility of industrial participation,” Stanaland suggested. “There would be money in it if they could get a vaccine out fast enough to do any good. Meanwhile, I’ll phone my contacts at the NIH to see if we can get federal funding.”

Noah phoned Clonigen, the biotechnology giant located up the hill from the institute. He arranged to meet with the vice president for research the next day. Noah stayed up all night preparing his presentation. He would emphasize the humanitarian and public-relations benefit to the company of manufacturing a vaccine against FHF. Noah had once met the VP at a seminar on cloning vectors held at CSUCI. He recalled Evelyn Parker as a no-nonsense professional.

When he was shown into her office, Parker waited until after they had exchanged pleasantries to say, “We last met––what was it––about a year and half ago?”

Noah nodded.

“So you have an idea for an FHF vaccine?”

“It’s more than an idea,” he said. “I’ve just returned from the CDC in Atlanta where I had several strains of
E. coli
constructed that synthesize FHF envelope proteins.” He explained that the CDC was unable to produce the vaccine, owing to budgetary constraints. It would take a large commercial company such as Clonigen to do the job. He played up the publicity angle.
I hope she’s buying it,
he thought.

“We do have the capability, but, you realize, don’t you, that the workup of a project of that magnitude would take at least a year? It wouldn’t be a profitable venture for the company.”

“But …”

She didn’t allow Noah to voice his argument. “By the time significant quantities of an FHF vaccine were produced, checked and then shipped to various parts of the world for use, there wouldn’t be many cats left to immunize. I’m sorry, Noah. Clonigen is hurting from the recession just as everyone else is. It would be imprudent for us to take on a project like this with so little probability of a positive result. You don’t even know if the vaccine will be effective.”

As he drove down the hill back to the university, Noah pondered his predicament.
Catch-22 in spades. To get them to manufacture the vaccine, I have to show that it will work. To show that it’ll work, I need vaccine. This is crazy!

With Vera’s help, Noah began contacting other major pharmaceutical companies. One after another, they declined to take on the task.

Stanaland failed in his attempt to get funding from the NIH. He was told that there was no way to provide funding outside the formal procedure of grant-application and approval, a process that could take up to a year. Besides, the current recession, signaled two years earlier with a 920-point drop in the Dow, showed no sign of remission. The NIH was operating on a budget down 30 percent from the prior year and had no funds to spare.

Stanaland phoned both California senators in Washington. Anita Hernandez, the senator from Salinas, whose political claim to fame was that she was an aggressive animal rights advocate, would not even speak to him because the institute had received so much negative media coverage of its use of animals in experimentation. Furthermore, there was still a suspicion that FHF had somehow been generated there, even though the CDC had shown beyond doubt that this wasn’t so. The other senator, Francis Prentice, could not be reached; he was in the hospital, recovering from an emergency appendectomy.

Vera couldn’t sleep. She poked Noah and said, “Okay, the fermentor at the institute isn’t large enough. But wouldn’t it be better to start making some vaccine, even if it’s just a little at a time?”

“Hmmph?”

Vera shook him. “Hey, don’t fall asleep on me! I said, why can’t you start making vaccine a little at a time at the university? I’d think that even a small amount would be better than none at all. We could start immunizing a few cats.”

Noah rubbed his eyes. Now awake, he said, “Yeah, I suppose so.” He turned to face Vera. “But here’s the problem. From one fermentor run, we would get less than a gram of FHF envelope proteins. In order to use it on cats, it would have to be freed of bacterial proteins. Otherwise, the cats inoculated with it could die from endotoxin poisoning. By the time the vaccine was purified, there would be only about two tenths of a gram left. That would be enough to inoculate only two or three cats, and that does not take into account any booster shots. A single fermentor run costs about three hundred dollars. We simply cannot afford to run it to immunize a few cats, not even knowing if the vaccine will work.”

“It’s got to work,” Vera responded, more in hope than conviction. She was silent a moment. “It’s always money … the root of all evil, but the
sine qua non.
All those big companies care about is profits. It’s enough to make one turn to socialism. Those giant companies—whoa, wait a minute. I wonder if a smaller company might get involved.”

“What smaller company?” asked Noah.

“I recall a small one in Davis, near the university. They manufacture vitamin B-12 by growing
E. coli
in large fermentors. The bacteria make the vitamin, and then it’s purified by chemical procedures. Why didn’t I think of it before?”

Noah, now fully awake, asked, “What’s the name of the company?”

“Uh … oh, hell. I’ll think of it in a minute. It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

Noah turned toward her. “Well, stick out your tongue. Let me see.”

Vera did and let forth with a loud, sloppy raspberry. Noah grabbed her and they wrestled playfully. In a moment they were making love in earnest.

Shortly after they had climaxed, Vera gasped, “Ferm–”

“Hungh?” Noah grunted.

“Fe … Ferma … Fermi … Fermentacorp!” Vera shouted. She cried out again, “Fermentacorp! Fermentacorp!”

A quiet while later, after Noah had disengaged himself, Vera glanced over and saw that he was gazing at her expectantly. She tried to stifle a laugh, but it came out anyway. “Fermentacorp,” she blurted between giggles. “That’s the company in Davis that has the large fermentors.”

“Oh. I thought it was some sort of sexual incantation. Maybe a fertility rite or something.”

She grinned, a glint in her eye. “Oh, I’m sufficiently fertile without any help, thank you.”

“How do you know? Have you ever been pregnant?”

“I am pregnant.”
Oh my God! I wasn’t ready to tell him. How’s he going to react?

Noah got up on one elbow and gazed at Vera open-mouthed. “You … you … why didn’t you tell me?”

Vera took his free hand in hers. “I … I was waiting for the right moment. I guess this is it. I was afraid it might upset you.”

Noah shook his head slowly from side to side. “Upset me?” he said at last. “My God! I’m delighted. Well, I guess I’m delighted. I’m more in shock. Good shock. Uh, when? Did you miss a period? Do you …”

Vera put a finger to his lips to shush him. “I missed a period, so I did a home test. It was positive. Then I went out and got a different brand and did a second test. I am undeniably, absolutely, without any doubt whatsoever, incontrovertibly, with child, gravid and pregnant.”

Noah cocked his head. “I thought you were on the pill.”

“I ran out. I thought I was close to my period. I thought it was safe. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s okay, really.” Noah smiled. “Some medical professional you are. You’re supposed to know better than that.”

Vera nodded. “Yeah, I know. Does that mean you would rather not have a child? We need to talk about this. If you think having a baby would complicate our lives, we can have it aborted.” She put her two hands on his cheeks and looked him in the eye. “For my part, I would like to have a child … raise a child … be a mother. You know, all that conventional motherhood stuff.”

“Abortion is out of the question. I look forward to being a father.” He smiled sheepishly. “Well, I suppose we should get married.”

Vera took a deep breath and again looked into Noah’s eyes. “We don’t have to, just because I’m pregnant. I am perfectly capable of raising a child alone. Many single women do, you know.”

Noah declared, “If I were pressured to marry, I probably wouldn’t. I want to marry you because I love you. I would have asked you eventually anyway. Will you marry me? Now? Tomorrow? That is, if your schedule permits.”

“Oh, you … Dr. Chamberlin, I would be very happy to become your wife.”

The next day Vera telephoned Fermentacorp and spoke with the company’s president, a man named Brock P. Osborne. At first he was as cool to the idea of producing a vaccine for feline hemorrhagic fever, as had been the officers of the larger companies. But Vera pointed out the publicity benefit and persuaded him to meet with her and Noah.

On a Friday early in November, Noah and Vera left Camarillo before dawn and drove to Davis, where they met with Brock Osborne. Not at all like Noah’s preconceived image of a company president, Osborne—“Call me Brock, please”—was thirty-something, tieless, jean-clad, and quite open and friendly with them. After showing them around the plant where several of the giant fermentors were in operation, Osborne expressed reservations about Fermentacorp’s ability to make the vaccine.

Osborne sat facing Noah and Vera. “Tell me,” he said, “when
E. coli
synthesizes these envelope proteins, do they get secreted into the growth medium, or do they stay inside the cells?”

“They remain with the cells,” Noah answered. “We will have to harvest the bacteria, break open the cells, and purify the envelope proteins from the cell extracts.”

Osborne shook his head. “Whew, that’s a big job. I guess we could handle most of it here but we would have to shut down some of our other operations for a time. I suppose we have enough B-12 to last until spring. But we’d have to hire personnel familiar with vaccine production. There’s quality control, sterility checks, assays. It seems like a real long shot. This is not a big enough company that we can afford to gamble on R&D like, say, an Abbott Laboratories.”

“I understand, Brock,” said Vera, “but couldn’t you prepare one fermentor batch of vaccine? That should provide enough to test on about twenty or so cats. If it works, well, then we would have demonstrated a market and you could sell all the vaccine you can make.”

“But, Vera,” Noah protested, “it might take months before we knew whether the vaccine was effective or not.”

Vera glared at Noah, her eyes saying,
Shut up, will you?

Osborne caught the glance and chuckled. “It’s all right, Vera. I’m not naive, you know. I’m well aware of the time frame of FHF infections and of vaccine testing. My own cat died of FHF about three months ago. If I weren’t a cat guy, I suppose I’d have turned you down when you phoned me. But, damn, my wife and I miss that cat. I would like to have another some day. So, let’s go for it.”

By late November, the first batch of vaccine was ready. There was enough to immunize about twenty-five cats. Vera, despite bouts of morning sickness, assumed responsibility for the injections. She placed classified ads in several Southern California newspapers soliciting cats for the test. The ads emphasized that there would be no charge, but that success was not guaranteed.

She received four hundred and thirty calls within a week. Jane Brennan took most of the calls and dutifully recorded all relevant information about each cat—its location, the name and address of its owner, state of health, and when it could be brought in for immunization. Vera turned down about three hundred of the applicants whose cats were already in advanced stages of FHF. At random, she then selected thirty in various regions of Southern California, Arizona, and one in Western Nevada for the trial.

On the last day of the month, anxious owners formed a line outside the clinic. Some held small animal carriers, others had their pets nestled in their arms. They engaged in spirited conversation; the common theme was one of hope and, for some, prayer. Vera had each owner sign a release absolving Fermentacorp and the molecular-biology institute at CSUCI from responsibility in the event that the cat died after exposure to FHF.

“Okay, let’s do it,” said Vera. “Kal, you do the injections.”

“No problem,” Kal replied. Before he injected the cats, Kal took a small sample of blood from each and smeared it on a microscope slide for Vera to examine. They noticed that one of the animals was obviously ill, but immunized it anyway. Vera hadn’t the heart to turn down the young redheaded girl who cradled the skinny tortoiseshell in her arms. After they had been inoculated, the cats were kept at Vera’s clinic, where they could be cared for and watched for any signs of illness.

Vera treated the blood smears with Wright’s stain. When she examined the slides, without exception, they all showed the typical picture of FHF—high numbers of leukocytes but a low proportion of lymphocytes.

“The question now,” she said to Noah later that day, “is whether the vaccine can work after a cat is already infected with the virus.”

“I suppose, if the animal can make antibodies faster than its immune system is compromised by the virus, the answer is yes. Otherwise, no. It may depend on how long ago the cats became infected. It’s a lot like AIDS. There is no way of knowing when the infection occurred.”

During the second week in December, the tortoiseshell was the first of the injected cats to die. Vera phoned the little redheaded girl, the cat’s mistress, to break the news. The child did not blame Vera, who had explained to her that it might not work. Vera had suspected that it was too late for the pet, anyway.