As Daniel watched Stephanie’s artful manipulations, he marveled at what he and she had been able to accomplish in the week and a half since his assault by the thug from Boston. Luckily, his physical injuries had healed and were for the most part a mere memory, save for some residual tenderness along his right cheekbone and the now yellow-and-green remainder of his resolving shiner. Unfortunately, Daniel still struggled with the psychological damage. Burned into the retina of his mind and appearing in recurrent nightmares was an image looming over him of the hulking attacker’s huge head, small ears, and bulbous features. Most disturbing was the man’s crooked smile and cruel, beady eyes. Even after eleven days, Daniel still suffered repetitive nightmares of that awful face and the feeling of utter defenseless vulnerability it engendered.
In the daytime, Daniel had fared considerably better than during sleep. As he and Stephanie had discussed immediately after the episode, they had made it a point to stay together practically like Siamese twins and not leave the hotel grounds, except to go to the Wingate Clinic. As it turned out, such a plan was hardly an imposition, since they had spent sunup to after sundown in the laboratory each and every day. There, Megan Finnigan was most helpful, providing them with a small office in addition to their own laboratory bench. Having room to spread out their paperwork and flow sheets was a godsend and a boon to their efficiency. Even Paul Saunders had helped by acting true to his word and producing ten fresh human oocytes twelve hours after they had been requested.
At first, there had been a convenient division of labor between Daniel and Stephanie. Her job initially was to work with the fibroblast culture sent by Peter. She got it thawed and growing with only minor glitches. Concurrently, Daniel attacked the buffered solution containing the shroud sample. After a single pass through the PCR machine to magnify the DNA present in the fluid, Daniel determined the contained DNA was primate and probably human, although decidedly fragmented, as he had expected.
Following a purification trick using microscopic glass beads, Daniel ran the isolated shroud DNA fragments through the PCR several more times before utilizing his dopaminergic gene probes. He was immediately successful, but with only parts of the required genes, a situation that required sequencing the gaps. After several sixteen-hour days, Daniel succeeded in attaching the appropriate fragments with nucleotide ligases to form the genes. At that point, he was ready for Ashley Butler’s fibroblasts, which by then Stephanie conveniently had available.
HTSR was the next step, and it went practically without a hitch. Having developed the procedure, Daniel was intimately aware of its subtleties and pitfalls, but under his sure hand, the enzymes and viral vectors worked perfectly, and he soon had a number of the fibroblasts ready. The only problem had been Paul Saunders, who had insisted on shadowing Daniel’s every move and frequently got in the way. Paul unabashedly admitted that he planned to add the technique to the Wingate’s stem-cell therapy regimen, with the idea of charging the patients significantly more. Daniel doggedly tried to ignore him and bit his tongue to keep from ordering the quack out of his own laboratory, but it was difficult.
Once the HTSR had been completed, Daniel thought they were ready to do the nuclear transfer, but Stephanie had surprised him with the suggestion that they also transfect the HTSR-altered cell with an ecdysone construct, meaning several combined genes, capable of creating a unique nonhuman surface antigen on the ultimate treatment cells. Stephanie had argued that if there was ever a need or an interest to visualize the treatment cells within Butler’s brain after the implant, it could be done with ease, since the treatment cells would have an antigen that none of Butler’s other trillion cells had. Daniel had been impressed with the idea and had agreed to the additional step, especially after Stephanie told him she’d had the foresight to ask Peter to send the construct and its viral vector down from their Cambridge laboratory along with the Butler tissue culture. Daniel and Stephanie had used the same technique when they’d successfully treated the mice afflicted by Parkinson’s, and it had been a valuable addition to the protocol.
“I always use the micromanipulator for this step,” Stephanie said, pulling Daniel back from his musings. The pipette containing Butler’s altered fibroblast pierced the oocyte’s envelope without piercing the underlying cell membrane.
“I have trouble with this part too,” Daniel admitted. He watched as Stephanie injected the relatively tiny fibroblast into the space between the egg’s cell membrane and its comparatively thick outer covering. The pipette then disappeared from view.
“The trick is to approach the oocyte’s envelope tangentially,” Stephanie said. “Otherwise, you can inadvertently enter the cell.”
“That makes sense.”
“Well, I’d say that looks just dandy,” Stephanie said, after viewing her handiwork. The appropriately granular enucleated egg cell and the comparatively tiny fibroblast were locked in an intimate embrace within the oocyte’s envelope. “Time for the fusion process and then the activation.”
Stephanie pulled away from the microscope’s eyepieces and extracted the petri dish from beneath the microscope’s objective. Slipping off her stool, she walked over to the fusion chamber, where she would subject the paired cells to a brief shock of electricity to fuse them.
Daniel watched her go. Along with the recurrent nightmares subsequent to his beating by the Castiglianos’ henchman, Daniel struggled with other psychological sequelae from the experience. During the first few days, he had experienced continuous anxiety and fear that the man would reappear, despite what Daniel had reassuringly told Stephanie immediately after the event. It was also despite what the hotel did after Daniel had informed the administration of what had happened. To his credit, the hotel manager had voluntarily stationed a security person within Daniel and Stephanie’s building for a week. Every night, the man had accompanied Daniel and Stephanie back to their room after they’d finished their dinner in the hotel’s Courtyard Terrace restaurant, and the intimidatingly large individual had remained on guard in the hall until Daniel and Stephanie departed for the Wingate Clinic in the morning.
As Daniel’s fear abated during the passing days, his anger at the event waxed, and a significant amount of the anger was redirected toward Stephanie. Although she had apologized and had been sincerely sympathetic initially, Daniel fumed at her lingering doubt about her family’s role in the event. She hadn’t said as much directly, but Daniel had gotten that sense from indirect comments. With such a screwed-up family and lack of judgment in dealing with them, Daniel couldn’t help but question whether Stephanie would be too much of a liability over the long haul.
Stephanie’s self-righteousness was also a problem. Even though she’d promised not to make waves with the Wingate people, she was constantly doing so with inappropriate comments about their supposed stem-cell therapy and even inappropriate questioning of the young, pregnant Bahamian women who worked at the clinic, which was an extremely sensitive issue with Paul Saunders. On top of that, she was embarrassingly dismissive of Spencer Wingate. Daniel recognized that the man was being progressively forward in expressing his social interest in Stephanie, a fact that might have been influenced by Daniel’s passivity in the face of Spencer’s comments, yet there were less rude ways for her to handle the situation than she was choosing. It irked Daniel to no end that Stephanie just couldn’t seem to understand that her behavior was potentially jeopardizing everything. If she and Daniel got kicked out, all bets were off.