Part 15 (2/2)
”They won't. They're not the blogging type. I'll explain it all to them.”
In front of them a pigtailed girl of Irish descent blocked a goal and a cheer rose from the sidelines.
”This thing cannot be done at work. You would need to find a lab.”
”A lab. Sure.”
”Purchase a Promega kit. Rent water baths, a centrifuge, an incubator. I will give you a list. I will come by with the vector. This will take your nights.”
Shane glanced down at Nicholas. ”That's okay.”
”I would need a postdoc.” Prajuk coughed and spit something phlegmy onto the gra.s.s. ”Also, we will need to build a mouse.”
”A mouse?”
”A knockout mouse. We knock one of its genes out through breeding, so it is nonfunctioning. And we use it for testing. This thing will take some time to deliver.”
”How much time would all this take?”
”A month or two to set up. Three, four months, once we start.”
Against his chest, Nicholas squirmed uncomfortably. Shane reached into his pocket for the bottle, which Nicholas was now somehow able to gasp with one small hand, like a hipster chugging a forty.
Prajuk turned and caught his eye intensely. ”Can you live with this, Shane?”
”With saving this baby's life? Yes, absolutely.”
”With not telling the parents of other very sick babies that you have a treatment for their disease?”
Shane caught his breath. He recognized this question immediately as the thing he had been ducking.
”Because this is the situation. There are ten thousand people with alpha-one ant.i.trypsin deficiency. Many of them are also infants. But I can only produce enough treatment for this girl. There will be no ma.s.s production. If you think that you would post about this on some message board and start a frenzy in that community, then we cannot proceed.”
Shane's chest constricted painfully, and he s.h.i.+fted.
”See, now you are in the position in which Anthony finds himself every day. Anthony must bypa.s.s a community of ten thousand people to try to save a million. You must bypa.s.s ten thousand people to try to save one.”
”Uh-huh,” Shane said.
”You and the baby's parents would also need to understand the risk of harm.”
”I thought there are no side effects?”
”We do not have the time or money for ten years of trials. I am certain that it is safe, because this protein underwent intensive trials as part of the Airifan studies. But there is always an opportunity for surprise when it comes to the body. It is a small percentage, but the opportunity for toxicity exists.”
”I'll talk to them about all of this.”
”One last thing. If I partic.i.p.ate in this, you can no longer think about applying for an orphan grant.”
”Why?”
”A grant application makes this a matter of record, and I will not partic.i.p.ate in it.”
”That's how I was going to fund it.”
”I a.s.sume you have lobbyists to speed up grant approval at the NIH? I hope you have a better plan than that.”
Nervously Shane asked, ”If I paid for it myself, how much would it cost?”
”Renting a lab, and the equipment? Ten, maybe fifteen thousand.” He raised his eyes. ”The mouse is more expensive.”
”Start to finish.”
”Maybe a hundred thousand dollars.”
Shane felt fevered. In front of them a determined young Chinese girl kicked a soccer ball into the goal, and parents erupted on the sidelines. Above, the sky was as azure as G.o.d must have first planned it.
Shane squeezed his son's small hand. The salt.w.a.ter swelled the air until he thought that it might burst.
9.
Walking into work, Caleb ran into Ed O'Neil, struggling happily with an enormous roll of posters.
”The Gay and Lesbian Alliance ordered twenty oversized. I was printing 'til midnight.” He added awkwardly, ”They're pretty neat.”
Caleb smiled in as friendly a manner as he knew.
For the next four hours, he paced around the store, making his constant small movements. At eleven, Enrique, the mailman, opened the front door. Enrique liked to brag that he was paid to get the best lower-body workout imaginable.
”I guess that seems pretty crazy to you, right?” he told Caleb, sorting bills into the open honeycombs. ”Walking all around in the snow all day and liking it?”
Caleb wondered what Enrique would say about his night runs in total darkness and subzero wind.
”You got yourself a letter,” Enrique said, handing him a white envelope.
Caleb hesitated. The envelope possessed a preprinted return address with an orange logo: Helixia. He abandoned Enrique and walked to the back office, shutting the door behind him. He was shaking. Four months of waiting. It bothered him, how much this meant to him.
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