by A. J. Thomas

One of science’s more potentially dangerous projects in recent years has been the genetic experimentation conducted with viruses on E coli bacteria. This controversial recombinant DNA research posed the threat of possibly letting loose on the world a lethal, mutant strain of virus, unwittingly created in the laboratory. The following account, “ leaked ” to us by an anonymous source, concerns the experimental cultivation of a giant virus (macrophage) in a test tube. The implications of worldwide consequences are similar to those raised by the detractors of recombinant DNA research projects. We hope someone in a position to crack the cover-up will see this in time.

Illustrated by Elinor Mavor

Colin C. Dahlquist Institute of Immunology Maidenberg University Willseyville, NY 13864

Dear Mr. Bernhard:

Enclosed is a letter which I found while sifting through the rubble of the immunology lab, here at the University. Poor Jerry. His letter, with its deadly warning, never reached its destination. I was on vacation when this debacle occurred and have not been able to get a coherent explanation from any of the survivors. Security is at a maximum and all are afraid to talk. The contents of the letter are so outre that it would be well nigh impossible to present it as fact to the scientific community. Thus, I have sent it to your magazine in hopes of publication. Whereas most readers will take it as a story and nothing more, the proper authorities may hear of it and so be warned and notified.

Thank you for your anticipated attention to my request.

Sincerely,

Alma Jo Williams

P.S. I am requesting that you change certain names. No sense in alarming the general public!

From: Dr. Jeremy Flinders

Colin C. Dahlquist Institute of Immunology

Maidenberg University

Willseyville, NY 13864

To: Dr. Steven Persson Chairman

Department of Biochemistry Midland Park College Midland Park, NJ 07432

Dear Steve,

A thousand pardons for reneging on the seminar at the last minute. However, I heard that Rosenblatt did a marvelous job, much better than I could have done, considering the circumstances. It was imperative that I remain at the lab, due to an unfortunate incident concerning one of my graduate students, of which you must not be aware.

Luckily, and I say this with grim irony, the campus police and our local gendarmes feel that his disappearance is due to intoxication and that his remains will be found at the bottom of one of the local ravines after the snow and ice melt. Sometimes the bodies of such unfortunate students are never found, or are found months later in the lake where the waters have carried them.

Such will not be the case with Cory Jenkins and I feel that I owe you both an explanation and a warning.

I’m sure you remember Cory. He was the sullen young man in the dirty lab coat who upset the AquaSol bottle, thus spilling the “hot” scintillation fluid on the laboratory floor at the time of the Institute Conference. To be sure, the microcurie count wasn’t too high, but Janet Davies and Hugh Dykeman got it on their shoes and Radiation Safety insisted on taking those as well. Good thing Janet has that great sense of humor. She borrowed a pair of clean rubber unit boots (size 12’s mind you, and she must wear a size 3 shoe if even that) and actually wore them while giving her presentation, after a few appropriate remarks about “hot feet.”

Although Cory showed traces of genius, his appearance and behavior belied it. We all tried to overlook his secretive behavior and his antisocialness, because his research really showed promise. He is one of the few students I have ever had who had actually done a conscientious, thorough literature review before beginning his research, instead of during and while writing his thesis. His style of writing was clear and concise. Every experiment which he intended to perform was written up in advance, designating how much of various reagents, tissue culture fluid, animals and glassware would be needed and what he expected to find, and why.

Of course, we all know that experimental procedures have a tendency to be unpredictable, but Cory never took that into consideration, thereby causing himself needless frustration, and ultimately costing him his life.

His work concerned the effects of different agents on lymphocyte transformations and macrophage chemotaxis. As you well know, certain agents such as Concavaline A and phytohemagglutinin will stimulate lymphocytes to begin mitosis. This is measured by the uptake of H^3-thymidine into the cell and subsequent counting thereof in the liquid scintillation counter. This went well. The macrophage portion of his research gave him setbacks, but he managed to work them through. We thought everything was well and that this would be an uneventful if stimulating bit of degree work. We were wrong!

Cory got his hands on an abstract of a paper from some obscure journal, concerning the growth and maintenance of macrophages in tissue culture. This in itself was unusual, because although macrophages can be kept viable for several weeks in the appropriate media, they normally do not divide. Oh, there are specialized techniques such as hybridization of macrophage with tissue culture cell lines through the judicious use of certain viruses and the use of cloning techniques which will produce a sheet of cells. These cells will not respond to chemotactic stimulation nor will they become phagocytic.

Well, Cory became obsessed with this problem. Since the techniques for his main research project were now quite routine, he induced Carl, my technician, to work on them, just giving him the instructions as to what was to be added, etc., while he pursued the wily macrophage into tissue culture.

I will not recount the frustration and anger and short-tempered retorts that have filled the lab these past few months. Everyone suffered. The glassware was not clean enough, the chemicals not pure enough, the CO^2 incubator didn’t have the proper mixture of gases, the temperatures fluctuated too much, etc., etc. He not only enraged Carl, who is very long-suffering, but estranged his fellow graduate students, and alienated all of the other maintenance people. He swore at the animal technicians, snapped at the other faculty members and even became short-tempered with the director. Frankly, I was surprised that Krastner took it, but I think he felt that if Cory could pull this macrophage thing off, it would bring honor and glory to the Institute and a plethora of grants from NIH.

Then about a month ago, Cory calmed down. I asked him how things were going and he said, “O.K.” He mentioned a new chemical, thiotimoline, I believe, that he had gotten from some firm called ASMOF. Well, he mumbles like you wouldn’t believe, anyway, so I think that is what he said. I’d never heard of the company, probably one of those obscure places that specializes in esoterica. He said that this stuff, thiotimoline, somehow activated the macrophages to form a giant multinucleated cell in vitro, and the resulting giant cell behaved in vitro the same way it behaved in vivo; i.e. responding to chemotatic stimulation and phagocytizing foreign bodies. He said that there was evidence that the cells would even divide in vitro, but hadn’t been able to check this out yet.

He scrounged up some of those old, large Favinski bottles from our store room, because he said that the Roux bottles were not big enough. These are like the Roux, but are much larger, and have square shoulders on them instead of the rounded shoulders of the Roux. These particular bottles use at least 500 ml of media, so you know that

they are good size.

This last episode was around Thanksgiving. Reagan and I went to the Chicago meeting where I fully expected to see you. I was given the dual news that one of your cows objected to having her corpus luteum removed and did a number on your front teeth, and also that I was expected to speak before your group after the holidays.

When I returned, all seemed well and Cory was immersed in the cultivation of the giant cells. At first he used filter papers dipped in various solutions which were then inserted into the bottles and the rapidity of motion to it or avoidance of it was measured. He spent hours with ruler and stopwatch, measuring and timing the responses of his pets.

Then he tried bits of tissue with the appropriate chemicals and the giant cells seemed to like these even better. Some of the technicians would lay small bets on the various bottles and finally some wag got around to naming them. Facetious warnings were posted concerning the fact that off-track betting was not yet legal in this county. It was Christmas time, and Cory’s success seemed to fit in with the general joy of the season. Even Krastner deigned to enter the lab to see what Cory had wrought. He grimaced when he saw the labeled bottles: Speedy, Invictus, Destroyer, Uncle Duke and Cora Belle, and then congratulated Cory, who bestowed one of his rare smiles upon us. He then put the macrophages through their paces. Krastner grew more and more expansive and was positively beaming when he left the lab. He even invited Larry and myself down for a bit of Christmas cheer.

Well, the University was generous and gave an extra day off so after the Christmas Party, everyone headed home. Madge and I spent a quiet Christmas as all three kids were laid up with strep throats (which kept the relatives away in droves).

I guess it was just as well that I was the one who found the mess, and not one of the other students. The building guards were used to the lab lights being on all night, and they rarely looked in the door, as we are the last rooms at the end of the corridor. Cory had no car and was too cheap to buy a secondhand bike, so there was no sign that anything was amiss. He lived alone, apparently had no friends here to speak of and the rest of the occupants of his building had left for the holidays, so no one noticed beforehand that he was missing.

It was two days after Christmas when I went to my office, early in the morning. I wouldn’t have even done that except that I needed to get things prepared for my talk. When I opened the fire door to our corridor, I noticed a faint aroma, like overaged tissue cultures, which grew stronger as I walked towards the lab. The lab door was ajar so I thought to get to my office through the lab instead of using my key to open up the door. The odor was very strong by then, and I immediately thought of the Pavinski bottles.

Cory probably went home and left them sitting out on the counter instead of putting them back in the CO^2 incubator. God, would he be furious when he returned to find his pets nothing but a sheet of decomposing slime! So I thought as I pushed on the half-opened door and strode in, automatically turning to the left and entering the doorway to my office. It wasn’t until I turned my head to the right to look at the bulletin board on the wall that I saw something on the floor with my peripheral vision. I turned and looked — and was glad that I had not eaten breakfast!

There was not much left of Cory, except for his skeleton and his clothes. What remained lay in a puddle of decomposing fluids and liquefying tissue. He was covered with a semi-transparent film. The resemblance to an amniotic sac was uncanny. I began to walk over to the remains when the crunch of glass under my feet became audible. I looked at the floor and saw the remains of some of the bottles. Two of them, uncorked, were still on the lab bench, a dry grayish film surrounding them. The remains of the other three bottles were all over the floor. The stench of rotting flesh assailed my nostrils.

I panicked and ran. It is hard for me to admit this, but it is true. My mad flight was stopped only by the back side entrance, which was locked. I leaned against the door and tried to compose myself. The fact that the door was locked meant that the animal caretakers had not come in yet. Thus I was alone in the building — no, not quite alone! What was I to do!

The rest is a merciful blur. Eventually, I got Krastner to come in. God, I’ve never seen the man so shaken.

The decision of final disposal was reached after much soul-searching. After the public uproar over the DNA-recombinant research (which resulted in the Molecular Biology wing being stormed and sacked) we felt that total secrecy was in order. The pity and horror of that scene was that the proposals were still on paper. No research had even been implemented yet! It boggles the imagination as to what might occur if the public found a real example of “science gone astray.”

We finally decided to put the remains in the incinerator, thus destroying all contamination. No one saw us do this thing. There should be no problem of identification as the pit was half full of other experimental specimens. We both cleaned and disinfected the laboratory.

Later, Krastner brought me into his office and revived me with a couple of shots of good brandy. We tried to reconstruct the tragedy from the evidence in the lab. It now appears that Cory had come back to the lab after the Christmas Party. I remember that he had been quite drunk at the time, but then everyone was a bit tipsy. He must have been adding media or something to the bottles, as the bungs for the bottles were lined up neatly on the counter. The thiotimoline bottle was lying on the counter, as if it had spilt. He may have gotten some of that or the tissue culture media on himself and as usual wiped his hands on his clothes, in lieu of his lab coat. Then he probably slipped in the stuff on the floor, tried to grab for the counter and clumsily knocked some of the bottles on the floor. He must have hit his head and knocked himself out. The giant cells, “scenting” the media, or whatever, oozed out of the broken and intact bottles and that was the end. There was no struggling involved and he must have died of suffocation when the cell sheet flowed over his head.

After cleaning up, we searched his desk and drawers and found his lab note book. When you come, you can read it. I don’t trust the mail.

It was Krastner’s idea for me to contact you concerning this matter, primarily because of our long close friendship and because of your influence on the scientific community. He felt that writing the whole episode on paper would act as a catharsis for my guilt. And I do feel very guilty! 1 should have paid more attention to what was happening. Because of many little things, we have lost a young man who might have made some meaningful contribution to society. By God, Krastner showed what he was made of, and I for one have found this seemingly cold man does have compassionate depths that none of us could have imagined. I will never forget this, regardless of what our professional relationship may bring in the future.

The main thing is that the catalyst for this action must have been the thiotimoline, as it is the only new reagent that was added to the regular media (according to Cory’s notes). We searched all of our catalogs and over the past weeks have tried to locate the company, ASMOF, which is the outlet. The police were most cooperative and allowed us to go through Cory’s personal effects, but to no avail. There is no record of where he sent for this stuff and we are not sure if the name of the company is correct. As I mentioned before, he had a tendency to mumble.

Steve, if you value the progress of science as much as the rest of us, please use your influence to help us track down ASMOF and wherever the source of thiotimoline may be found. That stuff can be very dangerous, especially in the wrong hands.

Hoping to see you soon.

In Haste,

Jeremy ·