The Laptev Virus

She stared at the tables and graphs for about fifteen minutes, but the data didn’t seem to be pointing to any immediate conclusions. She shook her head and closed her eyes. If only there was more information about the Laptev virus in the first place. Good scientists always stood on the shoulders of other good scientists. If there was more data available, she might be able to make a link, some connection that would tip the scales in the learning process. She opened another browser and typed a few words into a search engine when suddenly there was a knock at her office door. For a second she imagined that it was Rhonda, coming to tell her some more bad news, but then Emile opened the office door and peeked around the edge of it.

“Come on in,” said Sarah with more good humor than she felt, and then seeing his sagging shoulders and the look of distress on his face as he grasped his notebook tightly, she quietly asked what the matter was.

Emile cleared his throat and said, “I’m afraid we have some really bad news.”

Sarah reached for the lid of her laptop and lowered it, giving Emile her full attention. “What is it?” she asked, her voice cracking slightly and her heart pounding loudly in her chest as various scenarios flashed in quick succession across her mind. Had one of the investigators become ill with the Laptev virus? That was the worst-case scenario and it had played in the back of her mind and haunted her dreams nearly every night since the investigations began. She absolutely dreaded the thought of having any of her team become ill, or worse.

In an attempt to assuage her fears she had asked that the Environmental Health and Safety Department of the university re-examine all of the protective equipment before her team began working with the virus, and she had called for regular inspections at intervals that were more frequent than those recommended by the manufacturer. She had also continued to stress the importance of safety habits at every turn. She didn’t want to take any chances and she preferred to have her team angry or bored with her repetitions rather than ever feel remorse that she could have done more.

“I’m sorry but I think you’d better come have a look at the mice results. I think there’s been some sort of a mistake and…” Emile didn’t finish his thought.

Sarah’s pulse settled a bit. At least no one was injured. But what had gone wrong with the experiments? Why was he looking so upset? She stifled the tirade of questions which began to flood her mind.

“I’ve got your data pulled up,” said Sarah, raising the lid of her laptop.

Emile approached her desk and quickly found a graph that she had not yet inspected.

“You see, I just created another graph while I was analyzing the data,” he said, pointing to some brightly colored lines with a capped pen that he removed from his lab coat. “So if you look here and here. These mice should, in theory, have the exact same reaction to the invading virus as these guys over here, but as you can see, their reactions are quite different.”

Sarah inspected the data, her eyes darting back and forth across the page as comprehension dawned upon her. Yes, the disparity between the groups was tremendous. It was definitely not an expected result.

“So these mice have had different treatments? Did they get different batches of virus?”

Emile shook his head. “They had different dosages, yes, but all from the same batch.”

Sarah clicked between the two graphs again, trying to see if there could be an explanation. “Maybe the quantities that they received were inaccurately recorded?”

“No, that’s the thing. Even within groups that had the same quantity, the results are mixed up. They all had the same batch of virus. Their reactions should be… more predictable, and they are clearly not. This group here, for example, had a high dosage of virus, and that group there had a miniscule dosage. And look what’s happened.”

Sarah shook her head. “But, that’s not possible,” she said. “These over here with the high dosage have all survived and these that hardly got any virus are almost all dead. Are you sure the groups weren’t mislabeled?”

Emile shook his head while he bit the inside of his cheeks. “We did the experiments in triplicate and there were two people checking. The labels are correct.”

“Maybe the mice were switched somehow,” she said, still refusing to believe the results in front of her eyes.

“No. At first we thought maybe the vivarium had given us the wrong mice, you know, maybe they had mixed them up and given us ones with some mutation built in or something, so we asked them to double check and eventually we asked them for all their paperwork.”

“And?” said Sarah, desperately trying to come up with a rational explanation. Perhaps the mice had some sort of mutation which would make their immune system weaker, and they would not be able to defend themselves as well from an infection?