Spiral

With great fanfare, he pulled a Plexiglas box from his pocket, the size of a pack of cigarettes. He held the plastic box up for Becraft to see. It was filled with computer circuitry and complex miniature piping, like a tiny factory. “Meet NEWTON,” he said. “It is acronym. Stands for Needle Electrowetting Technique for Oligonucleotide Nanogenotyping.”

Becraft shook his head. “Come again?”

“Have you ever seen BSL-4 diagnostic lab? Where they handle the most dangerous pathogens? They are monstrosities, with air locks and doors and pressure suits. It is like working at the bottom of ocean. There are maybe ten in the entire country. Even a small one costs tens of millions.

“This,” he said as he tapped the box, “can replace them. Squeeze a BSL-4 lab down to a room six inches long, four inches wide, and two inches tall. Less than a thousand dollars, total cost.”

Vlad picked up a glass slide. He handed it to Becraft. “Spit,” he said.

“On the slide? Why?”

“Humor me.”

Becraft spit on the slide. Vlad took it and placed it under a microscope hooked up to a video monitor. “Let’s say I worry you have smallpox virus. What do I do? I have you spit on slide. Then I put NEWTON to work.”

Vlad put the NEWTON box near the glass slide, then took out a laser pointer and his BlackBerry and started working the keys. As they watched, a little door opened on the front of the NEWTON box. A Crawler skittered out and ran across the table. Becraft took a half-step back.

“It’s controlled by microwave signal,” Jake said. “Basically like a cellphone, but working at a different frequency.” Vlad aimed the laser pointer at the Crawler. A red dot appeared on the table. The Crawler sensed the beam, ran sideways toward it. It followed the red dot as Vlad moved the beam along the table.

Becraft watched, amazed. “It’s following the light?”

“The heat,” Jake said. “The Crawler has a bolometric heat sensor. It can even pick up the thermal signal given off by your hand.”

Vlad led the Crawler across the Formica bench, up and onto the glass slide. Then he hit a key on his BlackBerry and the Crawler stopped.

The Crawler’s image filled the monitor, enlarged fifty times. The Crawler was supping at Becraft’s spittle like a deer at a stream.

“There you go,” Vlad said. “The Crawler has sample. Now we just send it home.” With his BlackBerry and the laser pointer, he led it back to the box. The door opened, and in it went. “If this were real threat, we could be doing this from the next room. Or next state.”

Vlad picked up the box, placed it under the microscope. “Now it gets interesting.” They watched on the monitor as the Crawler walked in and regurgitated the droplet back up out of its proboscis, creating a cloudy spherical orb of liquid on a transparent piece of plastic. The Crawler retreated to the corner of the box.

Vlad pushed a button, and the droplet was sucked in, down into a tiny tube, disappearing into an array of tiny channels. “Preprocessing,” Vlad said. “Separating DNA from drool.” A minute later, the droplet reappeared on what looked like a shiny field of silver grass, clearer now. Underneath the grass, the outlines of electronic circuitry were dimly visible.

“Our test sample,” Vlad said, gesturing to the nearly perfect orb on the screen. “Droplet is sitting on special computer chip. The surface is array of tiny vertical needles etched in silicon. Each less than one hundred nanometers in diameter. The needles are hydrophobic-water hates them-so droplet floats on surface.”

“It looks like it’s glowing,” Becraft said.

“Fluorescence,” Vlad said. “Dye molecules are in droplet that stick to DNA. Make it glow.”

Vlad adjusted the microscope, and the image zoomed out; the field of grass became a perfectly square miniature lawn. Next to the lawn was a label-fifteen letters etched in silicon: AAACGACTTACGTAT. Vlad zoomed out farther to reveal an array of square lawns, each labeled by a different set of fifteen letters but always a combination of A,C,T, and G, the letters of the genetic alphabet.

Vlad worked his BlackBerry, and the droplet suddenly flattened, penetrating down into the field of needles. “With simple voltage pulse, I make the water droplet stick itself on needles.”

“Vlad the Impaler,” Jake said.

Vlad glanced at Becraft. “He thinks he is clever.” He hit a key on his BlackBerry. “Okay-up!” The droplet was once again a perfect sphere on top of the needles.

“I don’t get it,” Becraft said. “What does this have to do with detecting a biopathogen?”