that circulates a blood-like solution into the kidney’s main artery and out its main vein. It’s connected by a cannula, or thin tube, from its ureter to a port where its urine output can be sampled. That’s one of the functions performed by the monitoring unit beneath the bath. All the data is collected in the mainframe so we can see how tiny fluctuations in conditions affect the kidney and its development.
“Each kidney will soon be implanted back into the same mouse that supplied the original fibroblasts. We’ve already done this twice with no rejection phenomena whatsoever.” With his hand, Rothman gestured toward another group of baths. “These vessels contain pancreases, which have quite different needs than kidneys. Initially we had more difficulty getting the organogenesis process to start than we had with the kidneys, but those initial reverses have been solved, and we are now doing equally well. With the pancreases, we have had to be very careful about the integrity of the connections with the pancreatic duct since the pancreatic secretions contain digestive enzymes. Initially some of our preparations digested themselves.”
“Have there been any problems with teratomas?” Pia asked. In contrast to the others, she did not feel intimidated by Rothman. She knew that teratomas, a kind of developmental tumor, were something feared by stem cell biologists.
For a moment Rothman faltered. He had not been expecting to be interrupted in his prepared remarks. Except for the sound of moving fluid emanating from all the organ baths, a brief silence reigned.
“No teratomas at all,” Yamamoto said, coming to his boss’s aid. He was well aware of his boss’s quirky personality.
As if he had forgotten the students’ and Yamamoto’s presence, Rothman’s attention diverted to the appearance of a small blinking light accompanied by a pinging noise coming from the control panel of one of the baths. Without a second’s thought or explanation, Rothman headed in its direction, slipping his goggles back on as he walked.
“That’s an alarm that some aspect of the bath’s parameters has started to change,” Yamamoto explained.
The students watched him go. Lesley and Will were awed at having been in the famous researcher’s presence and having survived without being belittled. Pia was impressed by the alarm: “What would have happened if no one had been in here to hear the alarm?”
“Not a problem,” Yamamoto said. “All information is followed in real time by the university’s mainframe, and Dr. Rothman and I have apps on our iPhones such that we would have been instantly alerted.”
“Earlier Dr. Rothman talked to me about a problem with the tissue culture fluid,” Pia said. “Was he referring to the fluid in these baths?”
“I’m sure he was,” Yamamoto said. “We’ve been having a continuing problem maintaining the correct pH balance. Did he ask you to look into the problem? Because if he did, it would be a great help. It’s not been a particularly big problem, but neither of us has had a chance to look into it. I know I’d feel a lot better if we could solve the issue.”
“I’ll give it my best,” Pia said. “The problem is I’m starting at ground zero. I’ve had no experience whatsoever with tissue culture.”
“That didn’t seem to bother you in relation to salmonella,” Yamamoto said.
Pia smiled behind her mask. She took Yamamoto’s comment as a compliment. “What about Lesley and Will? Maybe it would be appropriate for them to give me a hand.”
“That’s a great idea,” Yamamoto said. He looked at Lesley and Will. “How does that sound to you?”
Both students shrugged. “Sounds good,” they said in unison.
As they left the organ bath unit, Pia turned just before exiting. She looked back at Rothman tending to the bath. The pinging had stopped. Once again the thought of the mad scientist in his lair popped into her mind, and once again she shuddered. She’d visited the future in this room and was excited to become a part of it. At the same time she knew instinctively that there could be a dark side. Biological science was advancing almost too fast, and the problem with science is that it cannot be unlearned.
6.
GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT MARCH 1, 2011, 3:30 P.M.
Edmund Mathews went to answer the front door of his waterfront mansion in an extra- exclusive enclave of the already-exclusive Connecticut town of Greenwich. It was unusual that he was alone in the house, but his wife, Alice, had gone to the city with a girlfriend on a shopping expedition, and the au pair, Ellen, wasn’t back from school with Darius yet. There was no gardener on the grounds, no workman in the house, nor were there any painters, decorators, deliverymen, mechanics, cooks, or anyone else anywhere on the property. The $10 million house was quiet and unattended, just the way Edmund liked it.
Edmund opened the door and greeted Russell. His partner was a tall, lithe man with a sweep of blond hair tinged with gray. He was wearing tennis whites with a sweater thrown over his shoulders. For a man who was usually quite a dandy, he looked thoroughly bedraggled. When he wasn’t in a suit, Edmund preferred to wear old T- shirts and shorts, even in winter. He was thicker in the body than Russell, but not overweight, and he kept his hair short and neat with weekly trips to the barber in town.
Edmund could see that Russell had haphazardly parked his Aston Martin DB9 in the driveway and not over by any of the garages as Edmund preferred. The Aston Martin was a fine piece of automotive engineering but it was too ostentatious a machine for everyday use for Edmund’s taste. The garish crimson paint job only exacerbated the feeling. Edmund preferred the in-your-face statement he made in his black Escalade, but for driving enjoyment, he loved nothing better than taking his Morgan runabout on the back roads deep into Connecticut. His true pride and joy he drove only rarely: in his garage was a Ferrari 250 GTO that had cost him millions back in the days when that didn’t seem like such an extravagance.
“We’ve got a problem,” Russell said as he entered the atrium.
“So I gather. Let’s go into the kitchen,” said Edmund, who preferred to keep business discussions out of the house if he could help it. This was going to be one of those days he didn’t have any choice.
Russell and Edmund had both worked as derivative traders at Morgan Stanley. Edmund was one of the best traders there, agile and decisive and brilliantly able to find someone to take the other side of a position he was holding. He knew Russell had some limitations as a trader, but he had a quant’s mind that could calculate risk quickly, and Edmund could rely on him to tell him if something he was planning was feasible. Russell had seen the potential for making money in CDOs-collateralized debt obligations-exotic financial products that took advantage of the subprime mortgage market to create apparently risk-free investments that could make billions in profits for the company and tens of millions for the traders. With property prices on their seemingly unstoppable upward curve, the investments were safe as houses, as people in the know liked to say.
Eventually it turned out that many of the executives at the brokerages selling CDOs and at the financial institutions here and in Germany and Japan and elsewhere who bought them were completely ignorant of what a CDO actually was. They knew what asset-backed securities were, but the assets here were mortgage bonds packaged together and sliced up and sold in bundles. Many of the individual loans the bonds were backed by were subprime loans that would never be paid off, and only a few loans needed to fail before the whole package defaulted. It was inevitable that this would happen.
When Russell explained to Edmund precisely what the subprime loan crisis was going to mean to CDOs and other financial products and for the system as a whole, Edmund was unnerved and excited at the same time. He
