Quinn swallowed. "Experimental?"
He laughed. "You say that as if we're mad scientists, Miss Cleary. All the patients here on Fifth are experimental subjects. They or their families have applied to come here. There's even a waiting list."
"For experimental treatment?"
"Every new drug and every therapeutic advance such as Dr. Alston's semi-synthetic skin grafts goes through exhaustive testing on mice and dogs and monkeys before it's even considered for use in a human being. And once all that testing has been reviewed by the FDA and found suitably safe, then it's tested in human volunteers. Very carefully tested."
Quinn glanced through the window. "But these—"
"Are all volunteers. Or have been given over to our care by their families. You hear about new AIDS drugs being tested. Who do you think they're tested on? AIDS victims. And cholesterol-lowering agents. Who are they tested on? People with high cholesterol. And on whom else can you test new skin grafts but burn victims? Here Dr. Alston and his staff have taken on the toughest burn cases, the ones who've been failed by conventional therapy." He moved up to the window and stared into the ward. His voice softened. "And for the residents of Ward C, The Ingraham is their last, best hope."
"Why the colored patches?" Quinn asked.
"Color coding for different strains of Dr. Alston's grafts. You see, he takes samples of a patient's healthy skin—and on some of these poor devils that's not easy to find—and grows sheets of new cells in cultures. Then he coats the micromesh he's synthesized with the patient's own DNA. The body's immune system does not react against it's own DNA, therefore there's no rejection of the mesh. The skin cells in the mesh begin to multiply, and soon you've got a patch of healthy skin. It's worked wonders in the animal studies. He's maybe two years away from approval by the FDA."
Quinn almost wished she were working for Dr. Alston. Dr. Emerson seemed to be reading her mind.
"I never told you, but your duties in my department will have an impact on the burn patients."
Quinn pointed through the window. "You mean—?"
He gestured down the hall. "Let me show you my lab and things will be clearer."
The prospect of dealing with real live patients pumped up Quinn's already soaring excitement as she accompanied Dr. Emerson down the hall. She followed him past the nurses station and through a narrow doorway.
"Not very glamorous, I'm afraid," he said. "But here's the front section of my little domain."
A small room, its walls lined with desks and computer terminals. A middle-aged woman was hunched over a keyboard, typing madly.
"Alice," Dr. Emerson said, touching her on the shoulder. "This is Quinn Cleary, the student assistant I told you about."
Alice turned and extended her hand to Quinn. She looked about fifty; she wore no make-up, had gray-streaked hair, and unusually dry skin. But her smile was warm and welcoming.
"Am I glad to see you! Are you starting today?"
Quinn glanced at Dr. Emerson. "I'm not sure."
"You're on the payroll as of today," he said, "so you might as well."
"Great!" Alice said. "We're so backed up on data entry, you wouldn't believe! Take a seat and I'll—"
"I think I'll give her the tour first, Alice," Dr. Emerson said with a tolerant smile.
"Oh, right. Sure. Of course. Go ahead. I'll be here when you're through."
Dr. Emerson then led Quinn through a door at the rear of the office. Immediately she noticed a pungent odor. She sniffed.
"Still noticeable?" Dr. Emerson said.
"Something is."
"This used to be the vivarium. Lined with rat cages. But we moved the little fellows back down to the fourth floor. Not many left. We're long since past that stage." He gestured to the work stations where two technicians were measuring minute amounts of amber fluid into pipettes and inserting them into a wide assortment of autoanalytical machines. "This is where we used to sacrifice them. Now we've converted this area to analysis of the sera we draw from the patients."
"The Ward C patients?"
"Yes."
Quinn's face must have reflected her confusion because Dr. Emerson nodded and motioned her back the way they had come.
"Follow me."
They passed Alice again, who turned and looked up at them expectantly.
"Not quite yet, Alice."
Quinn followed him out into the hall to the nurses station.
"Marguerite," he said to the slim, middle-aged, mocha-skinned nurse at the counter. Her black hair was pulled back into a tight bun; her light eye shadow emphasized her dark, penetrating eyes. "One of the 9574 vials, please."
The nurse reached behind her and plucked a two-ounce bottle from a pocket in the top of the medication cart. She handed it to Dr. Emerson, who in turn handed it to Quinn.
"This," he said, "is the reason Dr. Alston and I have our labs on the same floor. It's the new anesthetic I'm developing. We have no name for it yet, so we refer to it by its entry number in the log when we isolated it. This is the nine thousand five hundred and seventy-fourth compound we've registered at The Ingraham."
Quinn stared at the bottle of clear fluid in her hand. It looked like water.
"So many."
"We've sythesized tens of thousands, but we only register the ones we feel have might have human therapeutic potential."
"It's good?"
"Good?" His entire forehead lifted with his eyebrows. "It's wonderful. Works like a charm. And you know the best part?"
Quinn placed the bottle on the counter. "What?"
"It's non-toxic. That's because it's not a foreign chemical compound but a naturally-occurring neuroamine, secreted in minute amounts in the brainstem during REM sleep."
Quinn couldn't help but smile at him. His enthusiasm was catching. He was like a little boy talking about a rocket voyage to Mars. She didn't want to slow him down, so she prodded him on.
"Really?"
"Yes. You're paralyzed during dream sleep, you know. Oh, yes. Almost completely paralyzed. Otherwise you'd be talking, laughing, and generally thrashing all about in your dreams. Yet your eyes move. You've heard of rapid eye movements—REM sleep—of course. And your chest wall moves, allowing your lungs to breath. So what you've got is a selective paralysis, affecting all the skeletal muscles except the eyes, the intercostals, and the diaphragm. And of course, you're unconscious."
"It paralyzes," Quinn said. "I thought you said it was an anesthetic."
"It is. At higher doses it produces total anesthesia. I'm working on the mechanism for that now, but I do know it's active in the higher centers as well as the brainstem." The years seemed to drop away from him as his enthusiasm grew. "But do you understand what we've got here, Miss Cleary? A potent general anesthetic that causes complete paralysis but allows the patient to continue breathing on his own. The anesthesiologist won't have to intubate and ventilate the patient. It can be used in every kind of surgery except chest procedures; there's zero chance of allergic reaction because 9574 is a human neurohormone—everybody's got their own. And perhaps best of all, there's no post-anesthesia side effects. You come to in the recovery room like someone awakening from a nap." He put his hands on his hips and stared at the bottle like a proud parent. "So. Those are the properties of the neurohormone you'll be working with here. What do you think?"
"It sounds almost too good to be true."
"It does, doesn't it." He began gesturing excitedly with his hands. "But that's not the whole of it. It would be almost perfect with just those features, but it's also completely non-toxic. Its LD50—"