I said. 'Our problem is that the theft of information, as such, is not illegal in this country. Suppose I stole a sheet of paper from your lab, say, and I was caught. I'd be found guilty of the theft of a piece of paper worth one penny, and I'd suffer the appropriate penalty. The fact that written on that paper was some formula worth a million quid wouldn't count.' Her voice rose. 'But that's silly.' 'I agree,' I said. 'Do you want to hear something really silly? A few years ago a chap was caught tapping a post office line. The only charge they could get him on was the theft of a quantity of electricity, the property of the Postmaster-General. It was about a millionth of a watt.' Penny laughed, and I said, 'Anyway, that's my job, and it doesn't seem all that heinous to me.' 'Nor to me, now you've explained it. But where did Daddy come into this?' I said, 'You may not realize how important a man your father was. The catalysts he was developing were revolutionizing the economics of the oil industry and helping the economics of the country. When a man like that goes missing we want to know if anyone has been putting pressure on him, and why. Of course, if he's just running away from a shrewish wife then it's his affair, and we drop it. That's happened before.' 'And what conclusions did you come to about Daddy?' 'At first we tied it in with the attack on Gillian,' I said. 'But that's a dead end; we know Mayberry was a loner. As it is, as far as the department could make out, your father was living quietly in Stockholm and apparently taking an extended holiday. There's nothing we could do about that.' 'No,' said Penny. 'We're not yet a police state. What's being done now?' I shrugged. 'The committee of brains at the top has decided to drop the matter.' 'I see.' She stared into the fire for a long time, then shook her head. 'But you'll have to give me time, Malcolm. Let me go to America. I'd like to get away from here and think. I'd like to…'
I held up my hand. 'Point taken-no further argument. Change of subject. What were you doing in Scotland?' I was damned glad to change the subject; I'd been shaving the truth a bit too finely. 'Oh, that Acting as adviser in the reconstruction of a laboratory. It's been worrying me because they're only willing to go up to P3 and I'm recommending P4. I was arguing it out with Lumsden this morning and he thinks I'm a bit… well, paranoiac about it.' 'You've lost me,' I said. 'What's P3? To say nothing of P4.' 'Oh, I forgot.' She waved her hand at the room. 'I was so used to talking things out here with Daddy that I'd forgotten you're a layman.' She looked at me doubtfully.
'It's a bit technical,' she warned. 'That's all right. Mine is a technical job." 'I suppose I'd better start with the big row,' she said. 'An American geneticist called Paul Berg…' It seemed that Berg blew the whistle. He thought the geneticists were diddling around with the gene in the same way the physicist had diddled around with the atom in the '20s and '30s, and the potential hazards were even more horrendous. He pointed out some of them. It seems that the favourite laboratory animal of the geneticists is a bacterium called Escherichia coli and it is the most studied organism on earth-more is known about E. coli than about any other living thing. It was natural that this creature be used for genetic experimentation. 'There's only one snag about that,' said Penny. 'E. coli is a natural inhabitant of the human gut, and I don't mean by ones and twos-I mean by the million. So if you start tinkering around with E. coli you're doing something potentially dangerous.' 'For example?' I asked. 'You remember Lummy's example of genetic transfer from Rhizobium to make an improved wheat. I said we'd have to be careful not to transfer another, more dangerous, gene. Now, consider this. Supposing you incorporated into E. coli, accidentally or on purpose, the gene specifying the male hormone, testosterone. And supposing that strain of E. coli escaped from the laboratory and entered the human population. It would inhabit the digestive tracts of women, too, you know. They might start growing beards and stop having babies.'
'Christ!' I said. 'It would be a catastrophe.' 'Berg and some of his concerned friends called an international conference at Asilomar in California in 1975. It was well attended by the world's geneticists but there was much controversy. Gradually a policy was hammered out involving the concept of biological containment. Certain dangerous experiments were to be banned pending the development of a strain of E. coli unable to survive outside the laboratory and unable to colonize the human gut. The specification laid down was that the survival rate of the new strain should not be more than one in a thousand million.' I smiled. 'That sounds like certainty.' 'It's not,' said Penny soberly, 'considering the numbers of E. coli around, but it's close. I think that was the most important conference in the history of science. For the first time scientists had got together to police themselves without having restrictions thrust upon them. I think at the back of all our minds was the bad example set by the atomic physicists.' 'Fifteen months later the development of the new strain was announced by the University of Alabama.' Penny laughed. 'A writer in New Scientist put it very well. He called it "the world's first creature designed to choose death over liberty".' I said slowly, 'The first creature designed… That's a frightening concept.' 'In a way-but we've been designing creatures for a long time. You don't suppose the modern dairy cow is as nature intended it to be?' 'Maybe, but this strikes me as being qualitatively different. It's one thing to guide evolution and quite another to bypass it.' 'You're right,' she said. 'Sooner or later there'll be some hack or graduate student who will go ahead with a bright idea without taking the time to study the consequences of what he's doing. There'll be a bad mistake made one day-but not if I can help it. And that brings us to Scotland.'
'How?' 'What I've just described is biological containment. There's also physical containment to keep the bugs from escaping. Laboratories are classified from P1 to P4. P1 is the standard microbiological lab;
P4 is the other extreme-the whole of the lab is under negative air pressure, there are air locks, showers inside and out, changes of clothing, special pressurized suits-all that kind of thing.' 'And you're running into trouble with your recommendations in Scotland?'
'They're upranking an existing P2 lab. In view of what they want to do I'm recommending P4, but they'll only go to P3. The trouble is that a P4 lab is dreadfully expensive, not only in the building, but in the run ning and maintenance.' 'Are there no statutory regulations?' 'Not in this field; it's too new. If they were working with recognized pathogens then, yes-there are regulations. But they'll be working with good old E. coli, a harmless bacterium. You have about a couple of hundred million of them in your digestive tract right now. They'll stay harmless, too, until some fool transfers the wrong gene.' She sighed. 'All we have are guidelines, not laws.' 'Sounds a bit like my job-not enough laws.' She ruefully agreed, and our talk turned to other things. Just before I left she said, 'Malcolm; I want you to know that I think you're being very patient with me-patient and thoughtful. I'm not the vapouring sort of female, and I usually don't have much trouble in making up my mind; but events have been getting on top of me recently.' 'Not to worry,' I said lightly. 'I can wait.'
'And then there's Gillian,' she said. 'It may have been silly of me but I was worrying about her even before all this happened. She's never been too attractive to men and she looked like turning into an old maid; which would have been a pity because she'd make someone a marvellous wife. But now-' she shook her head '-I don't think there's a chance for her with that face.' 'I wouldn't worry about that, either,' I advised. 'Michaelis has a fond eye for her.' I laughed.