"Baroque Cycle 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

Leo shook his head. “How the hell did they get away with that?”

“The CBAs are kind of round and furry.”

“What are you saying, they’re bred to hide artifacts?”

“No.”

“It’s an artifact!”

“Well, it’s useless, anyway.”

An artifact was what they called an experimental result that was specific to the methodology of the experiment, but not illustrating anything beyond that. A kind of accident or false result, and in a few celebrated cases, part of a deliberate hoax.

So Brian was trying to be careful using the word. It was possible that it was no worse than a real result that happened to be generated in a way that made it useless for their particular purposes. Trying to turn things that people have learned about biological processes into medicines led to that sort of result. It happened all the time, and all those experimental results were not necessarily artifacts. They just weren’t useful facts.

Not yet, anyway. That’s why there were so many experiments, and so many stages to the human trials that had to be so carefully conducted; so many double blind studies, held with as many patients as possible, to get good statistical data. Hundreds of Swedish nurses, all with the same habits, studied for half a century—but these kinds of powerful long-term studies were very rarely possible. Never, when the substances being tested were brand-new—literally, in the sense that they were still under patent and had brand names different from their scientific appellations.

So all the little baby biotechs, and all the start-up pharmaceuticals, paid for the best stage-one studies they could afford. They scoured the literature, and ran experiments on computers and lab samples, and then on mice or other lab animals, hunting for data that could be put through a reliable analysis that would tell them something about how a potential new medicine worked in people. Then the human trials.

It was usually a matter of two to ten years of work, costing anywhere up to five hundred million dollars, though naturally cheaper was better. Longer and more expensive than that, and the new drug or method would almost certainly be abandoned; the money would run out, and the scientists involved would by necessity move on to something else.

In this case, however, where Leo was dealing with a method that Derek Gaspar had bought for fifty-one million dollars, there could be no stage-one human trials. They would be impossible. “No one’s gonna let themselves be blown up like a balloon! Blown up like a goddamn bike tire! Your kidneys would get swamped or some kind of edema would kill you.”

“We’re going to have to tell Derek the bad news.”

“Derek is not going to like it.”

“Not going to like it! Fifty-one million dollars? He’s going to hate it!”

“Think about blowing that much money. What an idiot he is.”

“Is it worse to have a scientist who is a bad businessman as your CEO, or a businessman who is a bad scientist?”

“What about when they’re both?”

They sat around the bench looking at the mice cages and the rolls of data sheets. A Dilbert cartoon mocked them as it peeled away from the end of the counter. It was a sign of something deep that this lab had Dilberts taped to the walls rather than Far Sides.

“An in-person meeting for this particular communication is contraindicated,” said Brian.

“No shit,” Leo said.

Marta snorted. “You can’t get a meeting with him anyway.”

“Ha ha.” But Leo was far enough out on the periphery of Torrey Pines Generique’s power structure that getting a meeting with Derek was indeed difficult.

“It’s true,” Marta insisted. “You might as well be trying to schedule a doctor’s appointment.”

“Which is stupid,” Brian pointed out. “The company is totally dependent on what happens in this lab.”

“Not totally,” Leo said.

“Yes it is! But that’s not what the business schools teach these guys. The lab is just another place of production. Management tells production what to produce, and the place of production produces it. Input from the agency of production would be wrong.”

“Like the assembly line choosing what to make,” Marta said.

“Right. Thus the idiocy of business management theory in our time.”

“I’ll send him an e-mail,” Leo decided.

 

So Leo sent Derek an e-mail concerning what Brian and Marta persisted in calling the exploding mice problem. Derek (according to reports they heard later) swelled up like one of their experimental subjects. It appeared he had been IVed with two quarts of genetically engineered righteous indignation.

“It’s in the literature!” he was reported to have shouted at Dr. Sam Houston, his vice president in charge of research and development. “It was in The Journal of Immunology, there were two papers that were peer-reviewed, they got a patent for it! I went out there to Maryland and checked it all out myself! It worked there, damn it. So make it work here.”

“‘Make it work’?” Marta said when she heard this story. “You see what I mean?”

“Well, you know,” Leo said grimly. “That’s the tech in biotech, right?”

“Hmmm,” Brian said, interested despite himself.

After all, the manipulations of gene and cell that they made were hardly ever done “just to find things out,” though they did that too. They were done to accomplish certain things inside the cell, and hopefully later, inside a living body. Biotechnology, bio techno logos; the word on how to put the tool into the living organism. Genetic engineering meant designing and building something new inside a body’s DNA, to effect something in the metabolism.

They had done the genetics; now it was time for the engineering.

So Leo and Brian and Marta, and the rest of Leo’s lab, and some people from labs elsewhere in the building, began to work on this problem. Sometimes at the end of a day, when the sun was breaking sideways through gaps in the clouds out to sea, shining weakly in the tinted windows and illuminating their faces as they sat around two desks covered by reprints and offprints, they would talk over the issues involved, and compare their most recent results, and try to make sense of the problem. Sometimes one of them would stand up and use the whiteboard to sketch out some diagram illustrating his or her conception of what was going on, down there forever below the level of their physical senses. The rest would comment, and drink coffee, and think it over.

For a while they considered assumptions the original experimenters had made:

“Maybe the flushing dose doesn’t have to be that high.”

“Maybe the solution could be stronger, they seem to have topped out kind of low.”

“But that’s because of what happens to the…”

“See, the group at UW found that out when they were working on…”

“Yeah that’s right. Shit.”

“The thing is, it does work, when you do everything they did. I mean the transference will happen in vitro, and in mice.”

“What about drawing blood, treating it and then putting it back in?”

“Or hepatocytes?”

“Uptake is in blood.”

“What we need is to package the inserts with a ligand that is really specific for the target cells. If we could find that specificity, out of all the possible proteins, without going through all the rigamarole of trial and error…”