Nano (6 page)

5.

PIA’S APARTMENT, BOULDER, COLORADO

SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 2013, 3:30
P.M.

Pia sat on her couch, going over a copy of the same results Mariel and Berman had just seen while George took a shower. The results were certainly favorable, enough so that she anticipated she’d soon be encouraged if not forced to return to the flagellum conundrum, and her mind wandered to it. Her intuition told her that it was not going to be as easy to solve as the biocompatibility problem. As she had explained to George, the flagellum issue was more of a mechanical problem, and she thought the solution would have to be mechanical, too. Pia had developed a clear picture in her mind of the battle that would take place in the body between the bacteria and her beloved nanorobots.

“What’s the figure again, ten to the minus nine?” George’s question disturbed Pia’s concentration. George might as well have clashed cymbals together, and Pia literally jumped at the intrusion. In the eighteen months she’d been in Boulder, Pia had never had company in her apartment.

Pia shot a quick glance over to see George standing in the doorway, loosely wrapped in her only large bath towel. She’d put out a hand towel, of which she had several, and apparently it wasn’t adequate. Pia had a thing about her space and her stuff. In foster care she’d always had to fight for both.

“A nanometer is what size?” George continued.

“Yes, that’s right, a billionth of a meter,” Pia responded. She closed her eyes and counted to ten. She found the towel issue irritating; she was irritated he was there at all. What the hell was she going to do with him until Tuesday?

“I was really blown away when you described the relationship of a nanometer to a meter being the equivalent of a marble to the size of the earth. And when you said human fingernails grow at a rate of a nanometer a second. I really have an appreciation of how small a nanometer really is.”

“I’m glad,” Pia said with a hint of sarcasm that was lost on George.

“Before today I really didn’t know anything about nanotechnology. And you say in a few years, fifteen percent of everything manufactured will use nanotechnology in some form or fashion?”

“Maybe within three years. In 2011 nanotechnology had already spiked to over fifty billion dollars a year worldwide. Now it is around seventy billion.”

“And who’s regulating it?’

Pia drummed her fingers absently on the arm of the couch. Social and political issues about nanotechnology didn’t interest her. For her it was all science, extraordinarily promising science.

“I don’t know, George. I don’t think there’s any real regulation. I mean, who cares whether tennis racket frames are lighter and stronger. I certainly don’t.”

“I’m thinking more about those nanoparticles you mentioned in the car on the way back from Nano: the buckyballs and nanotubes. As small as they are, I imagine they’d be absorbed through the lungs, maybe even through the skin. Seems to me that health and environmental issues should be considered, especially if they are as stable as you described.”

“You’re probably right,” Pia conceded, but her mind was already back on the flagellum issue. A mechanical solution was beginning to germinate in her mind.

“And the microbivores that you are working with. Are they safe do you think?”

Pia rolled her eyes as her incipient creative thoughts fled from her consciousness under George’s persistent questioning. “Proving microbivores safe is what I’ve been doing for the last eighteen months.”

“Not really. So far you’re just making sure they are immunologically inert. That doesn’t mean they are safe, necessarily. What if they begin doing something you don’t expect, like chewing through capillaries or eating red blood cells? I mean, the way you have described these things, they might turn out to be insatiable, miniature great white sharks.” George chuckled at what he thought was a humorous metaphor. He vigorously dried his hair, pretending to be unaware of his nakedness.

“As I already told you, they will be specifically targeted to bacteria, viruses, fungi, and hopefully bad proteins. They are not going to go wild. Each microbivore has multiple backup systems like a jet plane, and they can be turned on and turned off from outside the body using ultrasound signals. You have an overactive imagination. You’ve seen too many bad disaster movies.”

“What about these buckyballs and nanotubes just wafting out of Nano’s labs and floating off with the wind. Has anybody thought of that?”

“All the labs at Nano involved with medical nanotechnology are the equivalent of level-three biosafety labs, the same as those at Columbia when we were working with the salmonella grown in space. Actually the equipment here is newer than what we had at Columbia. Look, we are at the beginning of safety studies for microbivores, and they are going to be exhaustive. Otherwise, we won’t get FDA approval. Rest assured, when microbivores are made available as a treatment, they will have been proven beyond any doubt to be perfectly safe.”

Pia’s mention of the lab at Columbia did little to reassure George. Pia’s mentor had died as a result of radiation poisoning in his level-three lab. In George’s mind, labs doing cutting-edge research were dangerous. He watched as Pia returned her attention to the papers she was holding. It was amazing to him that she could look so good despite still being dressed in her jogging clothes with her hair having been blown around in the car. For the first time, he noticed that she had cut off a few inches. As he stood there admiring her, he could barely stand being so close and not touching her. Just when he was considering walking over to the couch, Pia’s iPhone buzzed, claiming her attention and yanking George back to reality.

“Why don’t you finish up in the bathroom and get dressed,” said Pia without looking up. It was yet another text message from Zachary Berman. “I want to shower, too, and change out of my running gear.” Berman had already sent three messages in the last twenty minutes, each a permutation of the other, asking her to call ASAP. Pia sighed. George’s presence was not going to deter Berman as she’d hoped but rather inflame him. Each text message was progressively more demanding.

Pia regretted anew having those few dinners with Berman. She should have known better because she had heard rumors about his reputation and that he was married. She thought the rumors were sour grapes on behalf of some women who saw him as a spectacular catch. Dining with him several times, she had enjoyed herself. He had been all business, talking about his wish to succeed with medical nanotechnology and its promise of dealing with cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Although he didn’t elaborate, nor did Pia question, he alluded to the fact that his interests had sprung from personal experience.

During those first casual dinners, Pia thought he seemed different from other men she’d had to deal with. There had been no come-on whatsoever. The closest he’d come to anything personal was to talk about her interest in research and how appreciative he was that she had been willing to put off her residency training and getting her PhD to come to Boulder and help with their microbivores program, which he thought was going to put Nano on the map.

A couple of more friendly dinners followed, but then, out of the blue, the presents started coming. First flowers, then expensive wine, chocolates and jewelry, culminating in the car. Other than the flowers, which couldn’t be returned, the only gift Pia kept was the VW she’d talked herself into accepting, and even that, she recognized, would have to go. The last time they had met privately, Pia had to fend off her boss, who told her how smitten he was with her, after trying to push his way into her apartment. Pia had managed to extricate herself without having to resort to her expertise in martial arts.

She was more than adept at tae kwon do, which she had learned at the Hudson Valley Academy for Girls, a derelict institution where she had been incarcerated in the name of foster care. That last evening with Berman, she was proud of the way she’d handled the situation while leaving her inebriated boss’s dignity intact. That had been a week before he had left on his trip to China, and now he was back, trying to contact her, whether she had a gentleman visitor or not.

“What do you want to do this afternoon?”

“I was going to take a nap,” Pia said. She was suddenly exhausted after her near all-nighter that had only ended that morning. She resolved to ignore Berman’s text, as she had the three previous ones. Pia was sure Berman wanted to quiz her about George. And she knew George was dying to ask her more about Berman. Perhaps it was best to let them both think what they wanted, and allow both of their imaginations to run wild. And a couple of hours’ sleep really would do her a world of good and give her a bit of perspective. Sunday was a day that was meant to be taken a little easy.

6.

NANO, LLC, BOULDER, COLORADO

SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 2013, 6:04
P.M.

The man had been in this strange place only a few hours when he was hauled out of a deep sleep, given athletic gear to put on, and led to the room he was standing in now. A countryman of his, but not one who had accompanied the four of them on the plane ride, was reassuring him that everything was fine; they just needed him to run a couple of tests on a stationary bicycle. The man in the suit seemed friendly enough but didn’t offer any explanations of where they were. His accent suggested he was from a different province from his own.

The cyclist looked around the brightly lit room, at the bike, and at the shelves lined with banks of equipment with flashing lights. Where he was exactly, he had no idea. All he knew is that it was somewhere in the United States. Four Westerners in medical scrubs, hoods, and face masks stood around checking the equipment. They looked like the man who had given the four of them an injection soon after they arrived. One of the masked figures said something, and it was time to get on the bike.

•   •   •

“W
E HAVE THE BIKE
set to the same parameters as this morning’s ride,” a Westerner said.

“That’s right. This is the control. We need to see if this morning’s incident was an anomaly or whether there is a systemic issue,” said another. He was the leader, so he indicated to the Chinese official that it was time to start. Through a translator, the official explained to the cyclist that he would feel the bike speed up and slow down and he had to keep up with it, that was all. They were monitoring the effects of the exercise on his body.

“Tell him he has nothing to worry about,” the leader said, and one of the other masked figures in the room shot him a look.

“Let’s hope not,” the leader said under his breath.

The cyclist started pedaling. He had noticed that the bike’s rear wheel was encased in equipment, and now he knew why. The machine was speeding up and he exerted himself to keep up with it. He had cycled before, but this seemed easier than he remembered. If this was to be the extent of the work they were going to have to do, he could cope with it easily. He wasn’t out of breath in the slightest.

“Okay, where are we on the run?” the leader asked after a few minutes.

“Coming up to the crisis point.” The translator had been asked to leave the room before the test began. The cyclist’s vital signs looked good. Perhaps this morning was just an accident, after all.

What the cyclist was feeling was something close to exhilaration. He willed the machine to test him harder—this was too easy! He looked at the faces of the people watching him and was glad to see they looked pleased. He would surely have a good chance of freedom if he gave these people what they wanted.

As the resistance increased, the cyclist pushed even harder—he felt free, almost, until in an instant he felt as if a hand were clamped around his throat. He yelled out and pawed at the oxygen mask he was wearing.

The medics and technicians all started yelling at once. The vital signs were way off—it looked as if the man’s heart had failed. The leader observed the chaos playing out in front of him but made no effort to intervene. It was the same event. He was already thinking what he was going to tell his boss. The event that morning had not been an anomaly. It was a real problem that would have to be addressed.

7.

VALLEY SPRINGS ASSISTED LIVING, LOUISVILLE, COLORADO

SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 2013, 7:15
P.M.

The woman drinking her tea had no idea who he was. He knew it, and it no longer surprised him or even upset him very much.
If there is a Creator,
the man thought,
he has a very bleak sense of humor.
This was not the way human beings should back out of life.

He had gotten used to the procedure he went through before he saw her, but the necessity for it still eluded him. While he waited in the lounge of the assisted-living home, a young male nurse made preparations for the visit, tidying the woman’s room, making sure she was comfortable and properly dressed, and making two cups of the wretched tea, one of which would sit on its coaster by his chair, untouched.
What did all this matter?
the man thought.
I don’t much care how she looks, and if there’s any embarrassment, she won’t remember anyway.

Zachary Berman looked at his mother, who was staring out of the ground-floor window of her one-room home. There was a tree outside with a bird feeder, and at the best times of year, she sat here all day and watched the birds fly up and feed and squabble over where they would stand on their perches. She put the teacup back on the saucer and looked at her son. Zachary reached behind him and took a picture frame off the bureau that had stood in their New Jersey home for years. It was too big for this room, but Zachary thought it was a good idea to have as many reminders of home as possible. That was before she was completely lost to the world.

The frame held ten small pictures. There was one of his mom and dad on their wedding day; of Zachary and Jonathan as kids; of the next generation of couples and their own children. Zachary held the frame out to his mother and pointed out a picture of his brother.

“This is Jonathan, Susan. Do you remember Jonathan? He was about ten when this picture was taken. I remember that day very well.”

“Why do you remember?” she asked. Zachary no longer maintained that Susan was his mother, or Eli his father, as both these notions upset her terribly. Eli was someone she obviously guarded somewhere safe in her mind.

“I remember it because I took the photograph. We went up to the Poconos in the spring to look at a camp. I borrowed the camera and took the picture. See how he’s smiling? Jonathan always loved that picture, it was his favorite.”

“How do you know it was his favorite?”

“He told me, Susan.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s after seven, why?”

“Well, what day is it, dammit?”

“It’s Sunday, Susan.”

“My program’s coming on. At seven.” Susan resumed her watch of the darkened inner courtyard. “I better not miss it.”

The nurse appeared at the door. “How does she seem?” he asked.

“She’s the same as she was several weeks ago, or so she seems to me. Have you noticed any change?”

“She’s getting very agitated, and more frequently,” the nurse said. “There’s a show on TV she’s fixated on seeing, but we can’t figure out what it is. You know she tried to get out through the fire escape last week. It’s such a shame there’s nothing we can really do for her.”

Berman was surprised at the young man’s candor, but he was right. Alzheimer’s had a death grip on his mother and her brain was wasting away, and with it her personality, everything that made her Susan Berman. To all intents and purposes, that person had been erased and replaced by this horribly reduced version of her, one who would soon lose the ability to control any bodily functions as the brain proceeded to shut down completely. His mother was now less functional than a small child, but that wasn’t precisely the right analogy for her. Berman thought she was less capable than even that.

Thanks to his extensive research, Berman knew what was happening to his mother. Her brain was a collection of neurons or nerve cells that passed information from one to another. Thoughts, ideas, memories, such as the ability to recognize her surviving son—all these could be described by chemical or electrical interactions among nerve cells. In some people like Susan, these interactions started to become interrupted, blocked by abnormalities called amyloid plaques, made up of a protein called beta-amyloid, or by neurofibrillary tangles, also caused by misplaced proteins called tau. In each case, the hard proteins built up to such a degree that they blocked neuron transmission, killing the brain one neuron at a time. When tau proteins performed their proper function, they physically assisted in the feeding and maintenance of the neuron, but under certain conditions, the tau came together like strands of thread, to disrupt and destroy the microtubules that made up the structure of the neuron.

Berman shuddered, unable to avoid the horror of imagining himself sitting where his mother was now. Although the home was clean and well run, it still reeked of old, incapacitated people, of urine and God knows what else. He hated to see his mother like this and hated to be in such a depressing place, but still he came, despite his mother’s not recognizing him or even remembering he’d been there.

As he watched his mother, he felt a rising sense of anxiety that he had to speed up the work with the microbivores. They had to be available if and when he started a downhill course, maybe even before that happened. Each day when he couldn’t remember some fact or figure, he worried that it was starting. A few hours earlier, while he was on the plane, he couldn’t remember the name of his favorite movie actor. It hadn’t been until he’d gotten back to his office at Nano that the name Tom Hanks came to him out of the blue and relieved his anxiety.

Berman believed that the microbivores were going to be the answer since they had the theoretical ability to work within the brain, identifying and destroying rogue tau proteins and beta-amyloidal plaque. But if his team followed the typical development path, they were looking at years of work and a huge amount of fund-raising that had been taxing his creativity. But now he had a source. He just had to make sure the spigot stayed open, meaning he needed results.

“Who are you?” Susan suddenly challenged. “What are you doing in my room? Get out of here.” Her voice had risen to a shout, bringing the nurse in at a run.

Zachary said nothing during this short tirade. It had happened in the past, and nothing he had said on those occasions comforted her. She needed the nurse, whom she recognized on some level. He quieted her down, and she went back to watching the birds.

After his initial success in nonmedical nanotechnology, Berman had invested heavily and hired the best minds he could afford to move the company into the medical realm, particularly after the breakthroughs they’d managed in molecular manufacturing. It had been Berman’s idea to mimic the way living cells used ribosomes to manufacture proteins that had put Nano way ahead of the competition in the molecular manufacturing nanorobot arena. With his continued urging, the first product of this method was the Nano microbivore, which had been theoretically designed more than a decade previously.

At the same time the microbivore molecular manufacturing project was under way, Berman launched a private investigation of Alzheimer’s disease. More than a few of the scientists Berman had hired at Nano were working on diagnostic tests for Alzheimer’s with the idea that the earlier the protein buildup could be detected, the better chance doctors had of slowing the spread of the disease. It stood to reason. It was around that time that Berman had allowed himself to be secretly tested for the predictive gene, which only served to heighten his general anxiety.

As the light began to fade outside the window of his mother’s room, Berman slowly got to his feet. He truly hated coming to visit her. In a strange way he thought it was disrespectful to her as a person. Inwardly he suspected that if she knew how she was going to end up, she’d be the first to tell him not to come but rather to remember how she had been as a loving mother.

Without trying to say good-bye, Zachary descended the long hall toward the lobby of the facility, breathing shallowly to avoid the smell. He was disgusted, and hated himself for it, knowing as he did how tenuous the threads of nerve fibers were that separated his mental state from that of his mother’s.

Berman emerged into the gathering gloom as the sun had settled behind the mountains to the west. Darkness fell rather quickly as he walked across the lawn and the parking area on his way to his Aston Martin.

With the engine purring under the hood, Berman checked his watch again. It was time to go back to the lab and find out what it was that Stevens, the investigative leader on the Chinese study, who had texted him yet again, wanted to talk to him about so urgently. It sounded ominous, and Berman did not like surprises. Pulling out onto the road, Berman laid a strip of rubber as a defiant adolescent gesture.