The Laptev Virus

“What was your control?” asked Rhonda. Sarah had been about to ask the same question, and as she listened, time seemed to stand still for her. She was concentrating on what was being said. Many people thought that being an investigator involved many exciting moments such as these, with stimulating and intriguing information showing up, almost unbidden, and researchers leaping to great conclusions with little or no effort.

However, the truth was much more mundane. The vast majority of the time it took long, hard hours, days, weeks, months and years, and even then, more often than not, little progress was made. Experiments which seemed like they would shed a great deal of light on the situation often gave results which instead, opened up several more paths of questioning. And that’s when these experiments actually worked. All too often experiments failed when something went wrong with one of the apparatuses, or one of the ingredients in the cultivars, or, frustratingly, when the microorganisms just didn’t grow and behave as expected. Then the scientist had to go back to the beginning, painstakingly checking each and every step, and repeating perhaps months of experimental work. It was arduous and wearisome and every small step forward was questioned and examined lest there were problems with the controls or interpretation of the data. Thus conversations such as these were a rare treat indeed.

“We used two different controls, just in case: ocean water at the pH it was a hundred years ago and plain water. Both do a worse job of priming the virus capsid, and afterwards, when it actually makes contact with the cells, the virus takes a lot longer to infect them or does not infect them at all. So our conclusion is that the ocean water at today’s pH is doing something to the viral capsid to make it both more likely to become airborne as well as more permeable so it will be taken up more easily by the host cell,” said Drew, his long fingers fiddling with one of the buttons on his lab coat.

“The next thing we did,” said Tally, “was to test if perhaps part of the reason that the virus was becoming more active was due to the change in pH. So we exposed the virus to different weak acids to see if they acted on the capsid.”

She tapped some keys on her laptop and pulled up another Excel worksheet filled with data. Then she scrolled down until she had several graphs on the screen. “Here, can everyone see this?” she asked, hovering the mouse’s arrow over the graph that she was indicating.

Angela and Rhonda leaned in.

“We exposed the virus to different concentrations of Formic acid, Acetic acid, and Trichloroacetic acid. They did make the capsid more permeable, but not to a significant degree. So our conclusion for now is that it’s not just the acidity that’s having an effect on the virus, but also other components in the sea water,” said Tally, using the arrow to trace the various curves outlined in the graph. The curves were in different colors, each representing one of the different acids and the buffer that they had used as the control.

Rhonda and Angela nodded as they inspected the different concentrations of acid that Tally and Drew had used. Sarah realized her team must have surrendered their weekends to be able to have so many results to discuss. She felt proud of them for their perseverance, though she would definitely have to keep her promise about insisting that everyone take some time off after they finished the work on the Laptev virus.

“Just out of curiosity, anything on the radioactive waste that Shane mentioned?” asked Sarah, turning to look at Shane.

Emile scratched his head and spoke first. “Well, we can’t really say. There’s certainly a huge amount of it up in the Arctic Ocean. Shane did some research…”

“Yes,” said Shane who had started to raise his hand again, then caught himself and quickly lowered it. Sarah could tell he was excited to have something to contribute, and for her part, she just hoped he would keep it appropriate. “There are lots of submarines with uranium still sealed in their reactors—at least we hope they are still sealed. There are also quite a few nuclear dumps in the Kara Sea, which is right next to the Laptev Sea, just east of it. It’s crazy how much sh… I mean,” Shane said, blushing, “there’s tons of radioactive material there. I had no idea it was so much.”

“And Russ said that there are several oil companies planning to drill there, in the Kara Sea, I mean, in the near future. It’s quite a remote region, but you never know. It would be just their luck to go to drill and end up disturbing one of those toxic reservoirs,” said Drew.

Sarah saw Angela’s face darken at the mention of other oil companies. Obviously Drew’s comment had hit a sore spot. Then Oscar leaned over and whispered something to Angela. She shook her head and said in a soft voice, “No, we’re not going into the Kara Sea.”