“Lots of problems, no doubt about it,” Voight said, trading jars and peering at the older specimen. “God sets up little checkpoints in every pregnancy. These two did not make the grade.” He looked upward significantly. “Back to Heaven’s nursery.”
Dicken did not know whether Voight was expressing heartfelt philosophy or a more typical medical cynicism. He compared the cold beaker and the room-temperature jar. Both fetuses at twelve weeks, very similar.
“Can I take this one?” he asked, lifting the cold beaker.
“What, and rob our med students?” Voight shrugged. “Sign for it, call it a loan to CDC, shouldn’t be a problem.” He looked at the jar again. “Something significant?”
“Maybe,” Dicken said. He felt a little creep of sadness and excitement. Voight gave him a more secure jar and a small cardboard box, cotton, a piece of ice in a sealed plastic bag to keep the specimen cold. They transferred the specimen quickly with a pair of wooden tongue depressors, and Dicken sealed the box with packing tape.
“If you get any more like these, let me know immediately, okay?” Dicken asked.
“Sure.” In the elevator, Voight asked him, “You look a little funny. Is there something I might like to know about early, some little clue to help me better serve the public?”
Dicken knew he had kept his face deadpan, so he smiled at Voight and shook his head. “Keep track of all miscarriages,” Dicken said, “Especially this type. Any correlation with Herod’s flu would be dandy.”
Voight curled his lip, disappointed. “Nothing official yet?”
“Not yet,” Dicken said. “I’m working on a real long shot.”
15
Boston
The spaghetti and pizza dinner with Saul’s old colleagues from MIT was going very well. Saul had flown in to Boston that afternoon, and they had gathered at Pagliacci. Talk early in the evening in the dark old Italian restaurant ranged from mathematical analysis of the human genome to a chaotic predictor for dataflow systole and diastole on the Internet.
Kaye filled up on breadsticks and green peppers even before her lasagna arrived. Saul picked at a piece of buttered bread.
One of MIT’s celebrities, Dr. Drew Miller, showed up at nine o’clock, unpredictable as always, to listen and throw in a few comments about the hot topic of bacterial community action. Saul listened intently to the legendary researcher, an expert on artificial intelligence and self-organizing systems. Miller changed seats several times, and finally tapped the shoulder of Saul’s old roommate, Derry Jacobs. Jacobs grinned, got up to find another seat, and Miller placed himself beside Kaye. He picked up a breadstick from Jacobs’s plate, stared at her with wide, childlike eyes, pursed his lips, and said, “You’ve really pissed off the old gradualists.”
“Me?” Kaye asked, laughing. “Why?”
“Ernst Mayr’s kids are sweating ice cubes, if they’ve got any sense. Dawkins is beside himself. I’ve been telling them for months that all that was needed was another link in the chain, and we’d have a feedback loop.”
Gradualism was the belief that evolution proceeded in small moves, mutations accumulating over tens of thousands or even millions of years, usually detrimental to the individual. Beneficial mutations were selected for by conferring an advantage and increasing opportunities to gather resources and reproduce. Ernst Mayr had been a brilliant spokesman for this belief. Richard Dawkins had eloquently argued the case for the modern synthesis of Darwinism, as well as describing the so-called selfish gene.
Saul heard this and got up to stand behind Kaye, leaning over the table to hear what Miller had to say. “You think SHEVA gives us a loop?” he asked.
“Yes. Complete circle of communication between individuals in a population, outside of sex. Our equivalent of plasmids in bacteria, but of course more like phages.”
“Drew, SHEVA only has eighty kb and thirty genes,” Saul said. “Can’t carry much information.”
She and Saul had already gone over this territory before she had published her article in Virology. They had spoken to nobody about their particular theories. Kaye found herself a little surprised that Miller should be bringing this up. He was not known as a progressive.
“They don’t need to carry all the information,” Miller said. “All they need to carry is an authorization code. A key. We still don’t know all the things SHEVA does.”
Kaye glanced at Saul, then said, “Tell us what you’ve been thinking, Dr. Miller.”
“Call me Drew, please. It’s really not my field of endeavor, Kaye.”
“It’s not like you to be cagey, Drew,” Saul said. “And we know you’re not humble.”
Miller grinned from ear to ear. “Well, I think you suspect something already. I’m sure your wife does. I’ve read your papers on transposable elements.”
Kaye sipped from her almost-empty glass of water. “We can never be sure what to say to whom,” she murmured. “We might either offend or give away the farm.”
“Don’t worry about original thinking,” Miller said. “Someone out there is always ahead of you, but they usually haven’t done the work. It’s someone who’s working all the time who will make the discovery. You do good work and write good papers, and this is a big jump.”
“We’re not sure it’s the big jump though,” Kaye said. “It may just be an anomaly.”
“I don’t want to push anybody into a Nobel prize,” Miller said, “but SHEVA isn’t really a disease-causing organism. Doesn’t make evolutionary sense for something to hide this long in the human genome, and then express just to cause a mild flu. SHEVA is really just a kind of mobile genetic element, isn’t it? A promoter?”
Kaye thought of the talk with Judith about the symptoms that SHEVA could cause.
Miller was perfectly willing to continue talking over her silence. “Everyone thinks that viruses, and in particular retro-viruses, could be evolutionary messengers or triggers, or just random goads,” Miller said. “Ever since it was found that some viruses carry snippets of genetic material from host to host. I just think there are a couple of questions you should ask yourselves, if you haven’t already. What does SHEVA trigger? Let’s say gradualism is dead. We get bursts of adaptive speciation whenever a niche opens up — new continents, a meteor clears out the old species. It happens fast, in less than ten thousand years; good old punctuated equilibrium. But there’s a real problem. Where is all this proposed evolutionary change stored?”
“An excellent question,” Kaye said.
Miller’s eyes sparkled. “You’ve been thinking about this?”
“Who hasn’t?” Kaye said. “I’ve been thinking about virus and retrovirus as contributors to genomic novelty. But it comes down to the same thing. So maybe there’s a master biological computer in each species, a processor of some sort that tots up possible beneficial mutations. It makes decisions about what, where, and when something will change…Makes guesses, if you will, based on success rates from past evolutionary experience.”
“What triggers a change?”
“We know that stress-related hormones can affect expression of genes. This evolutionary library of possible new forms…”
Miller grinned broadly. “Go on,” he prompted.
“Responds to stress-produced hormones,” Kaye continued. “If enough organisms are under stress, they exchange signals, reach a kind of quorum, and this triggers a genetic algorithm that compares sources of stress with a list of adaptations, evolutionary responses.”
“Evolution evolving,” Saul said. “The species with an adaptive computer can change more rapidly and more efficiently than hackneyed old species that don’t control and select their mutations, that rely on randomness.”
Miller nodded. “Good. Much more efficient than just allowing any old mutation to be expressed and probably destroy an individual or damage a population. Let’s say this adaptive genetic computer, this evolutionary processor, only allows certain kinds of mutations to be used. Individuals store the results of the processor’s work — which would, I assume, be…” Miller looked at Kaye for help, waggling his hand.