[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
the digestion of some foods. Because it was common, familiar, easily isolated,
and easy to grow in cultures, it was one of the primary organisms used in
early recombinant DNA research."
Several of them looked surprised. "I thought all that was discontinued after
the Cambridge and
Lim-itov disasters," someone said.
She nodded. "True. It's dynamite with an un-stable fuse. Anything done in that
department runs the danger of creating an artificial mutant strain that could
cause a horrible plague. Both here and in the Soviet Union such things
occurred more than a dec-ade ago, and that ended any real research into the
subject except in computer models."
"But the technology exists," Edelman said. "It could be done by anyone who
knew how."
"That's true," she admitted. "But nobody would do it without tremendous
safeguards. Even a fanat-ical group wouldn't run the risk of
self-contamina-tion. Bacteria do not recognize rank or social posi-tion.
You'd need a lab setup that cost tens of millions of dollars at the very
Page 21
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
least, and a scientific team capable of handling the risks as well."
"So you're saying, Davis put in, "that no place short of a
government or perhaps a major
"
university lab could do it?"
She nodded agreement. "Yes, and even the uni-versity lab would be
government supported.
They're the only ones with the money."
"Just what's involved in this recombinant DNA thing?" Jake Edelman wanted to
know. "I'm no biologist." He felt a little better when he saw a number of
other heads nod almost imperceptibly.
They didn't know, either they just didn't have the guts to admit that they
didn't.
She sighed. "I'll do the best I can. A short course in molecular biology is a
tough order, though.
Let's start by saying that we're all made up of trillions of living cells. All
organisms are made up of one or more of these cells. And, in a given organism,
like a human being, all the cells are from the division of a single cell. You
started off the product of one sperm with half a set of genes that
penetrated an egg with the other half, creating a single, primal cell. That
single cell duplicated in your mother's womb over and over again. As it
did, the cells changed.
"As far back as the 1940s," she continued, "it was found that the
culprit was an odd double-spiraled compound called deoxyribonucleic acid,
or DNA for short. The stuff is made up of four chemicals, and these are strung
together in long chains inside each cell, the chains the order of
the chemicals telling the specific cell its place, order, and
function in the developing organism. It becomes a hair cell, or a tooth
cell, or a nail or part of the lung. Back in 1961 Dr.
Marshall Nirenberg of the National In-stitutes of Health, of which
NDCC and this center are components, showed how it worked. You string
together a series of DNA molecules, use a dash of protein as a period, and
drop the thing into a soup of RNA, a compound related to DNA, and
amino acids, the building blocks of all life. The DNA gives the orders, the
RNA takes them, goes to work on the amino acids, and builds a protein molecule
to specifications. All of the instructions necessary to build and maintain
you were in the DNA of that original cell created by the union of sperm and
egg."
He nodded. "I understand that. I read about the cloning experiments at
Harvard. But what's this re-combinant stuff?"
Sandra O'Connell sighed. "Well, once we knew how to read the code, the next
step was to write it. Original experiments used
Escherichia coli, a one-celled animal. DNA from one was chopped up as was DNA
from another. The chopped DNA was placed in an amino acid solution, and the
DNA
chains from different bacteria combined and built new organisms with
differing characteristics.
Pretty soon scientists isolated DNA molecules with specific instructions
and were able to insert those in place of the originals."
"A build-it-yourself bacteria," Edelman said dry-ly. "A living erector set."
She chuckled. "I guess you can say that. But the lab conditions had to be
rigidly controlled. The organism takes well to man, and the lab strain,
being artificially grown in sterile conditions, was particu-larly
susceptible to mutation to having its DNA changed by outside forces, like
cosmic rays and oth-er radiation always present. There was always the danger
of producing a carcinogenic organism a germ, in other words, that would be a
new and dead-ly disease."
"And that happened in two separate sets of experi-ments," General Davis put
Page 22
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
in. "Just a few little bac-teria, ever so tiny, got through imperfections in
the labs both here and in the USSR. Maybe it happened a lot of other times,
but these two were lulus, and they happened within a year of each other the
re-sult of, I guess, too much research on the stuff when no initial disasters
happened.
Somebody got careless, and nineteen thousand died in Cambridge and Boston, and
almost as many in Limitov. That scared hell out of the people and leaders of
all the govern-ments. There was a quick conference, the Treaty of Basel
was signed, and that was it. No more active recombinant
DNA experiments without the consent of all the signatories."
"But somebody's done it anyway," Jake Edelman pointed out.
Sandra O'Connell nodded. "Yes, somebody has. And I would guess that it would
have to be in a lab totally isolated and perhaps deeply buried. Served by a
closed staff that contained no leaks, not to the scientific community, not to
anyone."
"Such an installation would have to be a major one, staffed by major people,"
the intelligence direc-tor pointed out. "I don't see how something on that
scale could be set up without leaks. We might not know what they were doing,
but we'd know they were doing something, and be able to infer what it was by
the installation and personnel, particularly matching what we now know about
this stuff to the intelligence involved. So far nothing."
Jake Edelman shifted uneasily. "Now, Bart, that'd be true if it were, say,
Russia or China or one of their satellites, maybe even France or one of the
other powers. But suppose it was, say, the
Central African Empire or maybe Paraguay? If Bhutan had the Bomb but didn't
test it, would you really know it until they did?"
The CIA man shrugged. "I don't know, Jake. But if it were a third world
country not on our questionable list, why pick on us? Besides,
they'd still have to have their own nationals highly trained in
molecular biology, which means here or in one of the major powers. We've
already run those through. A few mi-nor question marks, yes, but nobody
unaccounted for that I would invest millions in."
"Which brings us back to Go," General Davis pointed out. "Now, what do we do
about it?"
"Well, here's what we do know," Edelman re-sponded. "First, someone,
unknown, is manufac-turing a disease and, using international terrorists,
anarchists, and overage radicals looking for a cause, is testing it out on
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]