The Laptev Virus

She reached her office and sat down behind her desk. She glanced at her watch and realized it was after 1:00 pm, much later than her usual lunch time. As if on cue, her stomach grumbled. She reached for her thermos bag and fished out its contents.

As she sat munching on her apple, she once again pulled up Emile’s charts of the mice and began reviewing them. Her conversation with Kevin and Molly from yesterday kept circulating in her mind, now in the forefront, now further behind, but never entirely out of sight. It seemed plausible that Molly’s mouse—what had she called it? Opus? Strange name. It was likely that Opus had become infected with Toxoplasmosis when it had interacted with the kittens, and then it had shared the infection with the other mice when she brought him back to the vivarium. Mice were gregarious, Sarah thought, and Molly was probably right in that it had most likely missed its friends in the lab.

But to bring it back like that, without permission, and then get it mixed up and leave it overnight? What a tremendous blunder!

Well, there was nothing for it now. At least, she repeated to herself for the tenth time, at least they had gotten to the bottom of it. They would have to test all of the mice they had not yet used from that room in the vivarium. C12. That was the room where Molly worked. Were there enough mice from other rooms to begin the trials with the Laptev virus again soon? And meanwhile all of the mice that they had used, all of the ones still living, would need to be destroyed. They should begin with a clean slate.

Sarah scrolled through more tables and found a new one that had just been uploaded that morning by Tally. In this one the mice were tracked by their numbers, the ones on their ear tags. She was about to click to another screen when something made her stop. She looked at the table again. The mice were labeled, ‘C12-229, C8-456, C12-237, C12-241, C8-514’, and so on.

It was clear that the C12 and C8 prefixes came from the rooms in which the mice had been housed, while the second part of the label identified each particular mouse. Sarah stared at the numbers in the columns and once again something niggled in the back of her mind. There was something that she was missing.

“Look carefully, Sarah,” she said to herself in a low voice. What was it that she wasn’t seeing? What question should she be asking that she wasn’t asking? For research, she knew, wasn’t just about getting data, it was about seeing patterns and figuring things out from the data in front of you.

Sarah allowed her mind to wander briefly. She remembered learning about Alexander Fleming, the man who had discovered the antibiotic, penicillin. It was in the late 1920s, and he had not been looking for it. He was doing an altogether different experiment with pathogenic bacteria, and one of his plates had become contaminated with a mold.

Contaminated. The word set off a little ripple in her thoughts.

When other scientists working with bacteria had had mold contaminations, for they were ubiquitous, they had thrown away their experiments. But instead of despairing at losing his work, Fleming had scrutinized at the contamination on his plates and observed a clear halo around the wavy, green pastille of a mold colony.

Contamination.

The fact that the halo was clear meant that there were no bacteria growing there as there otherwise should have been, for he had seeded the entire plate evenly. Then he had asked why there were no bacteria growing near the mold colony. Could it be, perhaps, that the mold was secreting an invisible toxin, something that killed life? An anti-biotic?

He had then isolated the clear part of the agar from the halo around the mold colony and had extracted this poison, this antibiotic, and sure enough, it had worked against the bacteria he was testing, Streptococcus pyogenes, which causes strep throat. With still a further leap of imagination, faith, and genius, Dr. Fleming had taken some of that poison that was killing the bacteria, that antibiotic, which had come from a mold named Penicillium chrysogenum. He thus named it penicillin, and administered it to a little boy suffering from strep throat, a vicious disease that often took the lives of its victims. Would this poison also kill the bacteria inside the boy, without harming him?

Contamination. Antibiotic. Sarah looked at her computer and flipped back to the charts, scanning the graphs once again. Suddenly, one set in particular caught her attention. These graphs were plots of the number of mice still alive after they had been infected with the virus. As was expected, most mice had died from the Laptev virus, but there was a group which did not die.

Contamination.