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“Yes,” Lisa admitted. “I have.”
“Did Miller ever mention it to you?”
“Only in a general way—long before the war that we aren’t supposed to call a war actually broke out. We always discussed ongoing developments, breaking news. I take it that we’re not just talking about the salvation of the banana republics?”
“What?” Smith was obviously telling the truth about not being a biologist. He probably didn’t even bother to read the science pages in the newspapers. The war effort really must be soaking up a lot of time and expertise, Lisa thought, if the Ministry has to put someone like Peter Grimmett Smith in charge of an investigation like this.
“One of the earliest applications of genetic modification was the production of so-called plantibodies and plantigens,” Lisa told the Ministry man. “Way back at the turn of the century, engineers began transplanting genes that produced antibodies and antigens into plants. A lot of the early experiments used tobacco and potatoes, because they were the best hosts for the mosaic viruses that were then the vectors of choice for ferrying DNA into plant cells. Attention soon switched to bananas because bananas are naturally packaged and eaten raw, so the fruit could be used as a carrier of antibody-cocktail oral vaccines. Genetically modified bananas helped wipe out most of the major tropical diseases between 2010 and 2025. That was when the phrase ‘packaged antibodies’ was first bandied about. It has slightly different co
“I don’t follow,” Smith confessed.
“You’re presumably familiar with the theoretical protocols of biological warfare,” Lisa said, although she was testing the limits of Smith’s ignorance, not making any such presumption. “Anyone pla
“Like most biological-warfare research, antibody packaging has a certain amount of general medical significance, but the main reason people have remained interested in it is that it might provide a way to disguise defensive measures taken in advance of biological warfare. At its most elementary, the idea is that a domestic population can be clandestinely immunized against a bioweapon by secreting antibodies in a locally distributed product that wouldn’t normally be suspected as a carrier.”
“And beyond the elementary?” Smith prompted.
“In theory, at least, there are more subtle ways to tackle the problem. You could, for instance, use surreptitious vectors to import dormant genes capable of producing antibodies into tissue cells that normally have nothing to do with the immune system, but that could—if and when necessary—be activated by a switching mechanism broadly similar to those that already exist to determine which genes are expressed in which kinds of tissues. Effectively, it’s a calculatedly cumbersome system, which splits the process of infection resistance in two. No antibodies show up in advance of the bioweapon’s launch, but as soon as it’s launched, the launchers can distribute the trigger to their own perso
“Isn’t that overcomplicated?” Smith asked dubiously.
“Of course it is,” Lisa agreed. “That’s the whole point of biowarfare. Sneaky is best. But if I were pla
“Morgan Miller was once an expert on retroviruses, I believe,” he said, abruptly changing tack.
“A long time ago,” Lisa agreed. “In the early years of the century, retroviruses were the vectors of choice for transforming animal eggs stripped from the ova of slaughtered livestock. Morgan’s search for an all-purpose transformer focused on that kind of carrier mechanism until 2010 or thereabouts, when anti-viral research moved into the next phase. Don’t be misled by the AIDS co
She didn’t expect an answer to the question and she didn’t get one.
“We have all his publications from that era, of course,” Smith said. “What we don’t know is how much work he did that was never written up.”
“All university staff wrote up everything they could in those days,” Lisa assured him. “Publication wasn’t just the currency of promotion back then—it was the high road to grant funding. The patent wars confused the situation, of course, but once the intellectual-property situation was clarified, he’d have put everything on the record that would go.”
“Including failed experiments?”
“There’s no such thing as a failed experiment,” Lisa told the MOD man wryly. “Those experiments also serve the cause; they merely confirm the null hypothesis. But everyone has runs that get fouled up and are quietly dropped from the record, and everyone has the kind of dull results that they always mean to write up when they’ve nothing better to do, but never quite get around to because something better always turns up in time. Then again, there are the incomplete sequences—sets of data that need a little something extra to cover all the angles and make them genuinely meaningful. Sometimes it’s so difficult to block off the last few holes in a story that doesn’t have much of a punch line anyway that it hardly seems worth the effort. So, yes—even though Morgan would have put everything on the record that was fit to be put, he probably had all kinds of results that never got that far, including sequences for all kinds of viral transformers—retros and every other kind of artificial we’ve classified. But the idea that any one of them might be a recipe for a powerful bioweapon, or a defense against one, is the stuff of crude melodrama. It Ed Burdillon was working on some new method of antibody packaging for you, and Morgan was helping him, I’d have to say that that’s far more likely to have attracted unwelcome attention than his old work on retroviruses.”
“I see,” Smith said unconvincingly. “You do understand, Dr. Friema
“Of course I do,” Lisa agreed, taking care not to sound too sarcastic.
“Could a defense mechanism of any kind that would fit under the rubric of antibody packaging be short-circuited? If an enemy knew how the antibodies were to be packaged, but didn’t know exactly what was to be included in the package, could the whole system be attacked? Could one, for instance, deploy a virus to attack an entire antibody-packaging system?”