Micro

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“Speciesism,” Peter said. “And you know it.” He was smiling, but there was truth to what he was saying. Peter was surprised to see that Erika was in the lab, and so was Jenny. Few of the graduate students worked at night. What was going on?

Erika Moll stood at a dissecting board, carefully cutting open a black beetle. Erika was a coleopterist, meaning an entomologist with a special interest in beetles. As she said, that was a conversation-stopper at cocktail parties. (“What do you do?” “I study beetles.”) But, in fact, beetles were very important to the ecosystem. A quarter of all known species were beetles. Years ago, a reporter had asked the famed biologist J. B. S. Haldane what could be deduced about the Creator from the creation, and Haldane had answered, “He has an inordinate fondness for beetles.”

“What have you got there?” Peter said to Erika.

“This is a bombardier beetle,” she said. “One of the Australian Pheropsophus that sprays so effectively.”

As she spoke, she returned to her dissection, shifting her body so she was touching his. It seemed to be an accidental contact; she gave no indication that she had even noticed. But she was a notorious flirt. “What’s special about this bombardier?” Peter said.

Bombardier beetles got their name from their ability to fire a hot, noxious spray in any direction from a rotating turret at the tip of their abdomen. The spray was sufficiently unpleasant that it stopped toads and birds from eating them, and it was toxic enough to kill smaller insects immediately. How bombardier beetles accomplished this had been studied since the early 1900s, and by now the mechanism was well understood.

“The beetles produce boiling-hot benzoquinone spray,” she explained, “which they make from precursors stored in the body. They have two sacs in the rear of the abdomen—I’m cutting them open now, there, you see them? The first sac contains the precursor hydroquinone along with the oxidant, hydrogen peroxide. The second sac is a rigid chamber, and contains enzymes, catalases, and peroxidases. When the beetle is attacked, it muscularly squeezes the contents of the first sac into the second, where all the ingredients combine to produce an explosive blast of benzoquinone spray.”

“And this particular beetle?”

“It adds something more to its armamentarium,” she said. “It also produces a ketone, 2-tridecanone. The ketone has repellent properties, but it also acts as a surfactant, a wetting agent that accelerates the spread of the benzoquinone. I want to know where the ketone is made.” She rested her hand lightly on his arm for a moment.

Peter said, “You don’t think the beetle makes it?”

“Not necessarily, no. It might have taken on bacteria, and let the bacteria make the ketone for it.” That was a fairly common event in nature. Making chemicals for defense consumed energy, and if an animal could incorporate bacteria to do the work on its behalf, so much the better.

“This ketone is found elsewhere?” Peter said. That would suggest it was of external bacterial origin.

“In several caterpillars, yes.”

“By the way,” he said, “why are you working so late?”

“We all are.”

“Because?”

“I don’t want to fall behind,” she said, “and I assume I’ll be gone next week. In Hawaii.”

Jenny Linn held a stopwatch while she watched a complex apparatus: leafy plants under one large flask were being eaten by caterpillars, while an air hose connected the first flask to three more flasks, each with more plants but no caterpillars. A small pump controlled air flow among the flasks.

“We already know the basic situation,” she said. “There are 300,000 known species of plants in the world, and 900,000 species of insects, and many of them eat plants. Why haven’t all the plants vanished, chewed down to the ground? Because all plants long ago evolved defenses against insects that attack them. Animals can run away from predators, but plants can’t. So they have evolved chemical warfare. Plants produce their own pesticides, or they generate toxins to make their leaves taste bad, or they release volatile chemicals that attract the insect’s predators. And sometimes they release chemicals that signal other plants to make their leaves more toxic, less edible. Inter-plant communications, that’s what we are measuring here.”

The caterpillars eating the plants in the first flask caused the release of a chemical, a plant hormone, that would be carried to the other flasks. The other plants would increase their production of nicotinic acid. “I’m looking to measure the rate of response,” she said. “That’s why I have three flasks. I’ll be cutting leaves from various places to measure nicotinic acid levels in them, but as soon as I cut a leaf from the next plant…”

“That plant will act like it’s under attack, and it will release more volatiles.”

“Right. So the flasks are kept separate. We know the response is relatively rapid, a matter of minutes.” She pointed to a box to one side. “I measure the volatiles with ultra high-speed gas chromatography, and the leaf extraction is straightforward.” She glanced at her stopwatch. “And now if you’ll excuse me…”

She lifted the first flask, and began cutting leaves from base upward, setting each aside in careful order.

“Hey, hey, hey, what is going on here?” Danny Minot entered the lab, waving his hands. Red-faced and rotund, he was dressed in a tweed sport coat with elbow patches, a rep tie, and baggy slacks, and looked for all the world like an establishment English professor. Which was not far wrong. Minot was getting a doctorate in science studies, a mélange of psychology and sociology, with liberal doses of French postmodernism thrown in. He had degrees in biochemistry and comparative literature, but the comparative literature had won out; he quoted Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others who believed that there was no objective truth, only the truth that’s established by power. Minot was here in the lab to complete a thesis on “scientific linguistic codes and paradigm transformation.” In practice it meant he made a pest of himself, bothering people, recording conversations with the other grad students as they did their work.

They all despised him. There were frequent discussions about why Ray Hough had let him in the lab in the first place. Finally somebody asked Ray about it, and he said, “He’s my wife’s cousin. And nobody else would take him.”

“Come on, people,” Minot said, “nobody works this late in this lab, and here you all are.” Waving his hands again.

Jenny snorted disdainfully. “Hand-waver.”

“I heard that,” Minot said. “Meaning what?”

Jenny turned her back on him.

“Meaning what? Don’t turn your back on me.”

Peter went over to Danny. “A hand-waver,” he said, “is somebody who hasn’t worked out his ideas and can’t defend them. So when he presents at a colloquium, and he comes to the parts he hasn’t worked out, he starts waving his hands and talking fast. Like the way someone waves their hands and says, ‘Et cetera, et cetera.’ In science, hand-waving means you don’t have the goods.”

“Not what I am doing here,” Minot said, waving his hand. “The semiotics are completely garbled.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But as Derrida said, techno-translation is so difficult. I am attempting to indicate all of you in a gestural mode of inclusiveness. What’s going on?”

“Don’t tell him,” Rick said, “or he’ll want to come.”

“Of course I want to come,” Minot said. “I am the chronicler of life in this lab. I must come. Where are you going?”

Peter briefly told him the entire story.

“Oh yes, I am definitely coming. The intersection of science and commerce? The corruption of golden youth? Oh definitely—I’ll be there.”

Peter was getting a cup of coffee from the machine in the corner of the lab when Erika walked over. “What are you doing later?”

“I don’t know, why?”

“I thought maybe I could stop by tonight.”

She was staring right at him. Something about the directness of her manner put him off. “I don’t know, Erika,” he said, “I might be working here late.” Thinking: I haven’t seen you for three weeks, since the last time.

“I’m almost finished, myself,” she said. “And it’s only nine o’clock.”

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“It doesn’t appeal to you, my offer?” She was still staring at him, scanning his face.

“I thought you were seeing Amar.”

“I like Amar, very much. He is very intelligent. I like you too. I always have.”

“Maybe we’ll talk later,” he said, pouring milk in his coffee, and moving away so quickly that it spilled a little.

“I hope so,” she said.

“Trouble with your coffee?” Rick Hutter said, glancing up at Peter and grinning. Under a halogen lamp, Rick was holding a rat upside down, measuring its swollen rear paw with a small caliper.

“No,” Peter said, “I was just, uh, surprised at how hot it was.”

“Uh-huh. I’d say, surprisingly hot.”

“Is that a carageenen prep?” Peter said, changing the subject. Carageenen was the usual method to produce edema in the paw of a lab animal. It was a standardized animal model for edema, employed in labs around the world to study inflammation.

“Correct,” Rick said. “I injected carageenen, making the paw swollen. Then I wrapped the foot in an extract from the bark of Himatanthus sucuuba, a medium-size rain-forest tree, and now we are—hopefully—demonstrating its anti-inflammatory properties. I already demonstrated it for the tree’s latex. Himatanthus is an extremely versatile tree, it heals wounds and cures ulcers. The shamans in Costa Rica say this tree also has antibiotic, anti-fever, anti-cancer, and anti-parasite qualities, but I haven’t tested those claims yet. Certainly the bark extract has reduced this rat’s swelling remarkably fast.”

“You determined what chemicals are responsible for the anti-inflammatory response?”

“Researchers in Brazil attribute it to alpha-amyrin cinnamate and other cinnamate compounds, but I haven’t verified that yet.” Rick finished measuring the rat, set it down in the cage, and typed in a measurement and time in his laptop. “Tell you one thing, though: extracts from the tree appear to be completely nontoxic. One day you might even be able to give this to pregnant women. Huh, look at that.” He pointed to the rat as it moved around the cage. “It’s not limping at all anymore.”

Peter slapped him on the back. “Better be careful,” he said, “or you’ll have some pharmaceutical company beating you to your results.”

“Hey, I’m not worried. If those guys were really in the business of developing drugs, they’d already be working on this tree,” Rick said. “But why should they take the risk? Let the American taxpayer fund the research, let some graduate student spend months to make the discovery, and then they swoop in and buy it up from the university. And then they sell our discovery back to us, at full price. Sweet deal, huh?” He was starting to wind up for one of his tirades. “I tell you, these Goddamned pharma—”

“Rick,” Peter said, “I’ve got to go.”

“Oh sure, yeah. Nobody wants to hear it, I know.”

“I have to spin down my naja venom.”

“No problem.” Rick hesitated, glanced over his shoulder at Erika. “Listen, it’s none of my business—”

“That’s right, it’s not—”

“But I hate to see a good guy like you fall into the clutches of somebody who is…well…Anyway, you met my friend Jorge, who does computer science at MIT? If you want to know what’s really going on with Erika, call this number—” he handed Peter a card—“and Jorge will access her phone records, including voice and text messages, and you can find out the truth about her, uh, promiscuous ways.”

“Is that legal?”

“No. But it’s damn useful.”

“Thanks anyway,” Peter said, “but—”

“No, no, keep it,” Rick insisted.

“I won’t use it.”

“You never know,” Rick said. “Phone records don’t lie.”

“Okay.” It was easier to keep the card than argue. He slipped it in his pocket.

“By the way,” Rick said, “about your brother…”

“What about him?”

“You think he’s on the level?”

“About his company?”

“Yeah, Nanigen.”

“I think so,” Peter said. “But to be honest I don’t know a lot about it.”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“He’s been pretty secretive about the whole thing.”

“But you think it’s innovative?”

Yes, I think it’s innovative, Peter thought, peering through the scanning microscope. He was looking again at the white pebble, or micro-bot, or whatever the thing was. Trying to account for his brother’s explanation that it wasn’t a cockpit but just a slot for a micro-power-pack, or a control unit. It didn’t look like a slot for anything. It looked like a seat facing a tiny, highly detailed control panel.

He was still puzzling over this when he became aware that the lab around him had become absolutely silent. He looked up, and saw that the microscope was also displaying on a large flat-panel screen mounted on the wall. Everybody in the lab was staring at it.

“What the hell is that?” Rick said.

“I don’t know.” Peter flicked off the monitor. “And we’re not going to find out, unless we go to Hawaii.”