The Laptev Virus

Finally, she could bear it no longer. She ripped off her lab coat, threw it on the chair, grabbed her purse and hobbled out of the building with as much dignity as she could muster. She needed to get out and get some fresh air.

As soon as she stepped outside she was met with the wall of heat and humidity that lay over Houston in July. It had rained earlier in the day, but the scant precipitation had immediately evaporated and the entire city had become a sauna. Sarah had grown up in Reno, Nevada, where it was hot much of the year, but never this humid.

She took a halting breath, reminding herself that people in other parts of the world paid to have experiences such as this one, albeit while sitting in cramped little wooden rooms, for periods not exceeding twenty minutes and wearing only a towel. Still, after the bone chilling winters she had endured in Chicago working on her post-doc, she had vowed to never again complain about the heat.

She knew that she could not go far with her leg, so she headed in the direction of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, which was only a couple of blocks away. As she entered the building, the soothing coolness of strong air conditioning greeted her, instantly cooling the rivulets of sweat that had begun to flow all over her body. She took the escalator down to the café and ordered a large black currant iced tea. She sat there for a long time, thinking.

The slow, though painful walk had been good for her, forcing her to concentrate on something else instead of thinking about the mice. The results just didn’t make sense. They were all control mice, so why would they react in such a different manner to the same stimulus? And what were those infuriating purple dots doing on the brain tissue slides?

As she sat thinking, periodic waves of despair would wash up and roll over her. It was disheartening to lose the time. But, research in general was frustrating, she reminded herself. Sometimes years of work could be lost or wasted when things went wrong. Tropical Storm Allison, which inundated Houston with surprising ferocity in 2001, had destroyed thousands of genetically engineered mice and laboratory animals and some researchers lost their life’s work. So, in comparison, this was not more than a blip.

Setbacks were inevitable. She knew that. She had known that and still it had caught her by surprise when it had happened to her.

She remembered a friend of hers from graduate school who had done his research in the history department, spending countless hours a day in the library, gathering material for his thesis. However, when he was done for the day or the week, he would close his books and walk away. She remembered feeling slightly envious because things didn’t work that way with living organisms. One could never take the entire weekend off if a culture was growing. But, truth be told, she loved a good challenge, and there was no comparing how much more interesting it was to work with living organisms than with indecipherable writings in old books.

Living organisms. That’s exactly what had gone wrong. The mice were not living. Or rather, some were thriving, and others were dying too quickly. What on earth was happening? As she sipped the last few drops of tea, now greatly watered down by the melting ice cubes, she returned to that question. There had to be a way to get to the bottom of it, and perhaps the answer would shed light on where the research needed to go afterwards. Yes. Now that she thought about it, frequently the most frustrating results led to new breakthroughs. It was probably too much to hope for right now, but even this realization went a long way toward making her feel better.

She looked at her now empty glass. The café, decorated with fake palm trees, was still fairly empty. All around her the bright blue tables were covered with crumbs and the sweat rings from glasses that had been filled with ice. Two waiters, joking in Spanish with each other, were making their way methodically down the rows of tables, disinfecting and cleaning them. As she watched, she noticed that although each worker was using the same type of cleaning spray and presumably the same kinds of cleaning cloths, the tables did not look the same when they finished wiping them. As she wondered idly about this, a new thought occurred to her.

She looked at her watch and realized that over an hour had elapsed as she had sat there, thinking. She got up and gathered herself for the walk back to the lab. She was in a better mood now that she had just thought of a new idea.

CHAPTER 15