Clinical trials were expensive; prostituting themselves was a necessary evil when they needed to come up with another five hundred million. To get that kind of money they would have to produce more concrete results, of course, and eventually demonstrate the new compound's effectiveness in another subject.
But from the looks of this latest video, they were well on their way to something truly special.
"Hmmm . . ." Cruz flipped through pages. She noted something else that excited her a great deal. "Expression is tight as a drum. PSI-526 blood levels jumped over three hundred percent by half an hour after dosing, and then we dialed it back down to almost nothing. That's very good."
"Talk dirty to me, my dear," Steven Berger said, smiling up at her from his seat on one of the bucket chairs. " 'Tight as a drum.' I love it." His thick head of white hair was very carefully groomed today, and he had an extra bounce in his step. He had insisted on coming here, even though he didn't have much to offer in terms of expertise. He simply wanted to be a witness to their future. Here was a man who was motivated by greed, and had no problem letting everyone know it. And yet he held a certain poetic sense of the moment in history.
Berger certainly had a reason to be giddy with their recent success, even if he didn't understand the technical details. Structure-based drug design was always a slow process; much of the work done under the microscope and through computer-assisted modeling, and potential molecules had to be tested, tweaked, and tested again. It was necessary to identify and validate the drug target using functional genomics, chemical genetics, and proteomics, and it required an encyclopedic knowledge of biology, chemistry, and genetics.
But the potential payoff was huge. The purpose was to throw out the old hit-or-miss way of drug discovery in favor of the intelligent and informed design of synthetics. If you studied the structure of a protein carefully enough, you could create a molecule that bound very tightly and selectively to its target, thus creating more potent and effective results.
Designing a drug that would tightly control the psi gene's expression was essential, of course. It was no good to just turn the gene on and let it go like a runaway train. They had already seen what could happen without an effective "off" switch, and the accident and the deaths that resulted from it had forced them to shut down testing for nearly a year. The next attempt had yielded a compound that, along with the other drugs she had received as a precautionary measure, had caused a nearly complete catatonic state. The new compound had brought her out of it, and so far it looked like a winner.
But this was only the first step, and Cruz knew it. The psi gene was carried naturally by one in approximately five hundred thousand people in the world, as far as they had been able to estimate. There were markers to help identify them, but it was still a very small pool. To create something truly revolutionary, they needed to take the next leap forward. They needed to be able to deliver that gene into the general population.
Cruz stepped closer to the observation window. With the lights off inside the adjoining room, she could see nothing clearly now except her reflection. But she knew what lay beyond the specially coated glass. It was, in essence, their safety valve, constructed shortly after the fire incident. Wave energy interacts with various forms of matter that absorbs it, reflects it, or passes it through. This was why they had lined the testing room with a material that first absorbed that energy and then served to disperse it.
The whole thing was perfectly contained. And they had several other rooms just like it, along with better equipment and more space, at a facility in Alabama. Empty now, and waiting for them to arrive.
"You want dirty talk, imagine this," she said, studying the mirror images of her own ice-blue eyes, her nose, the rather sensual curve of her lips. "A stripped adeno-associated virus is loaded with the cloned psi gene and a transcription factor. This is injected into anyone you like; a construction worker, scientist, doctor, member of the U.S. Marine Corps, perhaps. The virus acts as a gene delivery vehicle into muscle cells, where it waits in a dormant state, until we decide to 'turn it on.' We do this using a small-molecule drug that activates the transcription factor, and which can be taken orally. The level of gene expression depends on the amount of the small-molecule drug administered, giving us complete control over the result."
"I don't know exactly what you just said, but I liked it." Berger sat up in his chair. "Evan, did you get all of that?"
Cruz turned to Wasserman, who had paled visibly. "Exogenously regulated expression of a transferred gene," he said. "Can you really do it?"
"U Penn researchers did it years ago with erythropoietin," Cruz said. "They demonstrated sustained and precisely controlled expression in rhesus monkeys over a period of months, with only one injection to deliver the gene. The regulating drug was in oral form, a simple pill, dial it up, dial it down. Easy as pie."
"Incredible," Wasserman said. "But you can't do that in this case. You know what it will mean. A member of the Marine Corps? You're talking about a weapon." He turned to Berger with his hands out and palms up in a gesture of supplication. "Steven, you can't be serious."
"Why not? Every single person in the world would kill to have an ability like this. The military applications alone are limitless. And we'll be the only ones able to give it to them. At a fairly hefty price, of course."
"No, no, no." Wasserman moaned. He shook his head. Beads of sweat had broken out across his brow. He looked ill. "Listen to me. You haven't been here when it's been let loose, you haven't seen all of what she can do. You haven't seen her lose control."
"We've seen the tapes."
"That's not the same!" Wasserman shouted. The sound was deafening in the cramped space. "I was there, I saw the damage firsthand. I saw those men die, I heard their skin crackling, for God's sake. What if that kind of power fell into the wrong hands? It could make the atom bomb look like a firecracker."
"Hold on now," Berger said. He was still smiling, trying to placate. "The system we're talking about is very tightly regulated, that's the beauty of it--"
"I won't let you do it," Wasserman said. "This has gone far enough. I can't let. . . my own--feelings--" He stopped. "I found her," he said. "I earned her trust the first time around. Don't forget that."
"And without our help, you would have been moldering away in an adjunct position at the local community college by now," Cruz said. "A place like this, there's a lot of overhead. We've bankrolled you for too long, let you have your way, working everything from your own location. It's a wonder anything's been accomplished at all."
"All right, Phillipa." Berger waved his hand. "Let's not get carried away here. . . ."
A knock came at the door. Wasserman's eye twitched frantically. He swiped at a trickle of sweat rolling down his cheek. "Come in," he said.
"Sorry to interrupt," the big orderly who stuck his head in said. "But we've spotted the woman you asked about coming in at the gate."
Wasserman blinked. "She's here now?"
"May already be inside."
"All right. Thank you. Please take her directly to my office to wait for me."
The orderly left. All three of them stood in silence, considering each other, each realizing something irrevocable had happened and not sure where to go next.
"This conversation isn't over," Wasserman said finally. "I have to see to something important. I'll be right back."
After the door closed, Cruz and Berger exchanged a look. It had happened a bit more abruptly than they might have liked, Cruz thought, but it was time now. In fact, it was past due. They had made all the progress they could with her here, and Wasserman was a liability.