Death in the Pines (14 page)

“So that term, gene-jumping,” I said. “Can you explain it?” A waitress was approaching.

“It doesn't mean anything.”

“Humor me. Lunch is on me.”

Jerry shrugged. “I'll try. But if you want, you can ask at the paper and they'll give you an article I wrote about it last year. I think that might be what put the notion into Grandpa's head to begin with.”

I nodded, not mentioning that I had the article in the brown envelope sitting on the seat beside me.

We ordered sandwiches—he asked for his usual—and as the waitress walked away, I said, “Give me the quick version.”

He cracked his knuckles. “You know what genes are?”

“They carry DNA,” I said. “They're why my eyes are brown, that kind of thing?”

“Yeah, in a quick-and-dirty way, that's right. Actually, though, they don't carry DNA, they're made of it. And DNA is just long chains of amino acids on a rail of sugar. They carry the code of life in clusters called chromosomes. They have a kind of blueprint for everything that makes you you. Not just people, but every other living thing.”

“So how do they jump?”

His expression intensified. “That's where it gets … interesting. You know how
E. coli
has become a problem in the states?”

“Bacteria, isn't it? Causes hamburger recalls?”

“That's it. It's
Escherichia coli,
but scientists abbreviate it.” His mouth quirked. “Like
T. rex. E. coli
is just a normal bug found in the gut of almost all mammals, most vertebrates. It's fecal bacteria because you find it in shit. Researchers love the bug because it's ubiquitous, reproduces quickly, is hard to kill accidentally, and it grows in just about any medium. It's a large cell, too, easy to isolate.”

His voice had risen with his enthusiasm. The waitress brought our sandwiches and drinks, another cup of coffee for me, water for him, and he grew quiet again. I prodded him: “You talk like a science major.”

“Because that's what I am. I've taken my time about it, burned out once, then started back to grad school. I'm ABD now at UVM, microbiology.” Reading my inquisitive look, he
explained, “All But Dissertation. Just shy of a PhD. Of course, that means I've got work to do. I thought I'd have the degree by now, but my advisor kept quibbling with my proposal. He thought he knew more about my subject than I did.” He took a bite of his sandwich. “He didn't,” he said, the words muffled.

“That stopped your progress to the degree?”

“You could say so. But Dr. Summers died last summer. I'll probably sign up for a new advisor next fall and finally finish up.” He sipped his water. “Anyway,
E. coli
has been around throughout human history. Our meat animals have it in their guts, because it helps them to break down and digest nutrients. Now something weird has happened in the last twenty years. It's started to kill people.”

“Mind if I ask you a question?”

He shrugged.

“What the hell kind of sandwich is that?”

He looked at it in surprise. “Tofu Reuben.”

“You're joking.”

“No, Donna—the waitress—knows it's my standard order. Lots of people in this town are vegetarians. You can substitute tofu for any meat on the menu.”

“Sounds like my kind of town,” I said.

Jerry munched his mock Reuben. “Anyhow, let me tell you about the change in
E. coli
. Bacteria can mutate quickly. They change their genes in response to their environment. A hundred thousand generations of bacteria can grow during the lifespan of a single cow, and the bugs evolve much faster than we do. Well, in terms of generations it may be similar, but in real time, it's much shorter.”

He waggled part of his sandwich at me. “Now, as the bacteria adapt, they rewrite their genetic code, see? The bits of DNA rearrange to give new blueprints. In the 1960s and '70s,
dairymen began putting antibiotics into cattle feed to prevent diseases like mastitis. It worked great. Cows thrived, lived longer, fattened faster, produced more milk. By the '80s practically every milk cow in the country got antibiotics in her feed.

“But the antibiotics were changing the
E. coli,
killing off the weaker strains. The stronger ones mutated new defenses against the antibiotics. I don't mean it was a conscious thing. Bacteria don't think. But millions of mutations happen all the time. Almost all are bad ones and the bacteria die. But when a useful mutation does occur, that gives the mutated organism an edge and it grows like crazy, taking the place of the others that are weakened or killed. Clear so far?”

“Darwin 101,” I said.

“Right. Now, one of the mutated strains,
E. coli
0157:H7, changed in a way that made it not only more resistant to antibiotics but that also caused it to produce toxins as part of its metabolism. Bacteria eat and poop just like we do, and the poop from this little bugger causes people to get diarrhea, headaches, high fever, kidney failure, blood poisoning. It kills people.”

“That's the one that causes the food recalls?”

“Yeah, meat and any other food that gets contaminated because cows are in the area. Fruit juices have been contaminated with it, unpasteurized milk, lots of stuff. It's actually all over the place in the food processing industry now.”

“All that because people fed antibiotics to cattle?”

“Hard to say for certain, but that's the most likely reason. But what's really cool is that if you introduce that mutated strain of
E. coli
into a medium with other strains, the genetic material from the mutant can jump into the others. They quickly become just as virulent. The jump actually comes from even smaller parasites, a type of virus that infects bacteria and nothing else.”

“‘Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,'” I quoted. “‘And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.'”

“Heard it,” said Jerry, unimpressed, pushing away his empty plate. “Anyway, the parasites, the viruses, are called bacteriophages. They can carry the genes from one bacterium to all the others.” He spread his fingers. “Imagine that Superman was real. He comes along, shakes your hand, and instead of catching the common cold from him, you discover you can fly and bullets bounce off you. That's how dramatic the change is. It happens all the time in nature, especially with bacteria and fungi.”

“So there're more and more nasty diseases loose in the world.”

“More and more that are resistant to antibiotics.”

“All right. What in the world does this have to do with Caleb Benson?”

“I have no earthly idea. If Grandpa was talking about that, he was off on some wild goose chase of his own. Benson has nothing to do with cattle.”

“He has a lot to do with timber. Do genes jump in forests?”

“Unlikely to be significant. Trees grow so slowly, not like a bacterium.”

“Other plants?”

“Look, go to the newspaper office and ask them to dig up the story I did on this three years ago. But in a nutshell, back in the '70s scientists figured out how to recode DNA without hybridization, without crossbreeding. We could simply extract it, recode it, and then insert it in a plant or animal. Even take genes from one life form and put them into a totally different one. Use a virus, or just inject it with something called a gene gun.”

“Genetic engineering.”

“Right. Say there's a gene that controls the fertility of a seed. If a scientist can turn that gene off, the plant is sterile.
If he could go a step further and figure out how to set that gene so its normal state is off but it can turn on if you feed the plant a certain chemical, one your company manufactured and patented, then you could control the fertility of a crop plant.”

“I've read of something called Terminator Seeds.”

“Yeah, it's more complex than that, but in the same arena. It's a way of making sure farmers can't use seeds unless they buy from you, because only you have the chemical to make the seeds fertile.”

“Didn't the government stop that?”

“Put it on hold. Too much publicity, and scientists were concerned about the gene jumping into the wild by crosspollination. One company put a gene into soybeans and corn to make the plants resistant to their herbicide, so farmers could spray and kill the weeds without killing the crops. But the gene jumped from the food crops into weeds that were closely enough related to react to soybean and corn pollen. The result was superweeds, created accidentally, the same way we created a virulent kind of
E. coli
accidentally.”

“But if a plant can fight off a chemical, that just makes it stronger,” I said. “I don't see how that can endanger a forest. Could a forest be taken over by superweeds?”

“No,” he said flatly. “I can't imagine any kind of genetic engineering that would endanger a forest.” His enthusiasm had ebbed. He turned and beckoned the waitress. She came over with an empty coffee cup and a small metal pot of steaming water. Jerry took a plastic bag from his shirt pocket and dumped some brown dust into his cup. It had a strange, musty smell. He poured the hot water on it. “My tonic,” he said. “Helps the digestion, good for the blood.”

“Herbs?”

“And Chinese mushrooms.” He stirred and sipped the tea, rolling it in his mouth as though it were a fine wine before swallowing. “Want to try some?”

“I'll pass, thanks.”

“Most people are afraid to try something new.” He took another appreciative drink. “OK, back to genetic engineering. Here's something I'm researching, getting ready to write about. Last year a company found the gene that controls how fast grasses grow. They found a way to flip its switch so grass will slow down to grow at approximately one-tenth its normal rate. Now they can sell you grass seed that will grow so slowly that you only need to mow twice a season.”

“Sounds ideal for golf courses.”

“But if it jumps, then the weed grasses that control erosion, that provide food for rabbits and deer, grow one-tenth as fast as they should, and a whole ecosystem is thrown out of balance. Worse, wheat, rice, rye, barley, oats, all these are related to the grass on your lawn. Most food grains are overbred, overweight grass seeds. If their growth slowed, the seeds wouldn't mature and the world would starve. Half the food in the world comes directly from grass seeds—we call them grains—or indirectly, from animals fed on those seeds.”

“And what's being done about that?”

“It's being debated, but the whole system is so interbred that nothing much can be done politically. Here in Vermont, everyone's flipped out because so many dairy farms use rBGH, a synthetic growth hormone that contributes to milk production. Now, the
r
in rBGH stands for ‘recombinant,' meaning it's genetically engineered. BGH is ‘bovine growth hormone.' It makes cows grow faster. The human equivalent determines whether a fetus becomes a dwarf or a seven-foot-tall NBA star.”

“Does the bovine version affect humans?”

“Government says no, but some researchers and scientists, especially in Europe, disagree. They have real concerns it may be linked to breast cancer or other types of hormone-mediated cancers.”

“Has that been proven?”

“No. Human studies are difficult. You can't just give a group of women rBGH and see if they get cancer. That's illegal and unethical—unless you arrange to drop it into their food or water supply and follow it for thirty years to see what happens. We did that with DDT, and effectively we're doing it now with rBGH.”

He moved his cup around on the table as if he were playing with a model car. “Vermont now has the second highest breast cancer rate in the United States.” He laughed, a bitter sound that reminded me Jeremiah's daughter had died of cancer. “Could be coincidence, they say.”

“And Vermonters know that?”

“Sure, it's been in the papers. That's why organic farmers want to label their milk as rBGH-free, why Ben and Jerry wanted to label their products the same way. But close to twenty-five years ago now the FDA rode into town and wrote up a policy. Now if you mention rBGH at all on your label, you have to say something nice about it, like it's the same as natural hormones. And you can't say anything negative about it, or even question the whole idea of hormone-spiked cows.”

“Speak no ill of big business.”

“And this is among the biggest. Over half the food crops in the US are now genetically modified. Practically all the domestic beef and chicken are laced with hormones, pesticides, antibiotics. It's an unholy mess, and the government won't do a damn thing about it because they don't represent the people
but the corporations that pay for their junkets and finance their campaigns. That's all in my article in the paper.”

“So. Do you think your grandfather's death was engineered by a big company?”

Jerry shook his head. “I don't see a connection. As far as I'm concerned, this is just stuff I like to write about. And Grandpa seemed interested in it.”

“And not long ago Jeremiah was upset about Caleb Benson and talking about gene-jumping.”

“I really don't think there's anything there,” Jerry said, again in that depressed, listless voice. “Grandpa just had a burr under his saddle, that's all. I can't see how any of this could've had anything to do with the car that hit him.” He sighed. “I might as well tell you, this morning I called Benson's business to ask if they knew anything about Grandpa contacting Benson. I got passed around to a PR man who said he didn't know what I was talking about, and that was that.” He flicked a finger at the very small remnant of his sandwich he hadn't finished. “Odds are the soy that this tofu is made from is genetically modified. Almost all American soy is.”

“But no forests.”