Part VI
Open Questions
1
R
OBIN SAT
in the blue-carpeted hearing room of the NIH Appeal Board, and she saw that amateur night was over. The floor belonged to Houghton-Smith, and Borland, and Halbfinger, and Zouzoua. Philosophical declarations about truth and evidence, and political stands on public accountability, had all yielded to procedural arguments. The fact that the Secret Service analysts had no real scientific background, the fact that copies of their findings were withheld from the researchers' lawyers but freely given to Redfield's staff, the fact that ORIS's findings were leaked to
The New York Times
but mysteriously delayed from arriving in Boston, the fact that several pages of those findings were missing from the copies when they were finally mailed to Boston, due to what was termed a “clerical oversight”—these facts were the building blocks of Cliff's appeal. But, of course, there was more, as well. For Cliff's appeal hinged on discovery of Robin's character, Robin's motives. In the spring, the pressure had been on Cliff, but now the August heat had returned, and Robin was the one on trial.
How naïve and reckless she had been, trying to call Cliff to account. Hadn't Larry and Wendy warned her months ago not to get involved with ORIS? Hadn't they told her she would be the sacrificial lamb? ORIS had published its findings, but the conclusion of fraud was like a message scribed in sand. No final judgment, but an opening, instead, for resounding action, vicious attacks on Cliff's behalf. She watched the three distinguished scientists of the appeals board as they sat in patient judgment. They were an eminent physicist, an infectious disease specialist, and a high-ranking NIH administrator, a woman of color, with a degree in public health. All took notes, all listened intently to Tim Borland's slick, sophomoric voice.
“‘Probably a bad idea,'” Borland read aloud from his photocopy of Robin's diary. “‘But I let him—'”
“I'm sorry,” Robin's lawyer interrupted. “You've just asserted that your main concern is the course of events from January through May. This is an entry from the previous summer.”
“I think the background here is essential,” Borland countered, “if we are to understand exactly when and how Robin Decker turned against my client.”
“I disagree,” Laura Sabbatini shot back. “And I think you should reconsider what I believe is an extremely dangerous approach.”
“Dangerous for whom?” Borland asked.
But I let him kiss me,
Robin remembered, as the two lawyers argued, and the chair of the appeals board, the lively, balding, physicist, tried to mediate. Cliff would have a separate hearing. There was no one in the room but Robin and the two lawyers and the three distinguished scientists. That was quite enough. Together, they made up a quorum for humiliation. Even through all the arguments and interruptions, Robin heard her words exposed. She tried not to hear them, but she heard anyway. She knew exactly what she had written, and she could see precisely where Borland was going. He was following her up the stairs to her apartment.
“‘Let him kiss me and come up. We burnt the toast this morning and ran out of bread. Then we tried cereal and ran out of milk but he said he didn't really want to eat. . . .'”
Of course, she had always known this was coming. Of course, Laura was fighting Borland every step of the way. Robin had tried to steel herself, but in the end, there was really no way to prepare. And it was curious how sharp the pain was, how her own words cut. Who had she been then, when she'd let Cliff wrap himself around her? Who in the world had she been?
As whistle-blower, she had received her rewards, such as they were. She'd been asked to come to a major biology conference to participate in a panel on research ethics. She had been interviewed by
The Boston Globe
and photographed, standing rather nervously, on the brick steps in front of the Philpott Institute.
Tomas had clasped both her hands in his and congratulated her. “I knew you'd win,” he said. “And you know why? Because I never trusted Cliff, but I never said anything because you were together, you know? But the truth will set you free, right? I knew exactly how this would all turn out!”
“I've got the
Times
clipping plastered all over my refrigerator,” Nanette told Robin, and she wasn't talking about her fridge at home: she meant her great silver refrigerator at work—the one all the lab techs saw when they came to pick up media.
Billie had called Robin at home. In her breathy voice she told Robin she was finally leaving the institute to try to cleanse herself of the contaminants in the building, to devote more hours to the Cambridge Task Force on Sick Building Syndrome, and, most urgently, to pursue her claims against the Philpott full-time. “The fact that someone I know has succeeded in the face of all this corruption is very moving to me,” she told Robin. “I want you to know that. I realize we didn't work together very long, but you have been a major influence on me.”
“Really?” Robin asked. She hadn't meant to be impolite. The slightly horrified question just slipped out.
“Major,” Billie said. “In fact, when I wrote my letter of resignation, I cited you and your struggles as one of my primary inspirations.”
How strange the way success and failure contained each other. How close vindication and humiliation had proved. There had been a time when telling the truth seemed necessary, a drastic measure to survive in science. But her ideas and her understanding had been appropriated by others; her notion of professional survival, sadly misplaced. How could she have imagined herself free of Cliff? She was sure now the two of them would drown together. She had overcome him during the inquiry, but during this appeal she felt him pulling her under with even greater force.
Now she did her penance. Now she began to pay for what she'd done and said. Shouldn't she have considered the price of a scientific war such as she had waged? Shouldn't she have allowed for the fact that words were fungible?
She had insisted on questioning Cliff's character, and so, in some sense, despite all Laura's objections, it was natural for Cliff's lawyer to turn and question hers as well. She had begun exploring murky moral questions; should she have been surprised at the creatures that lashed out at her in the mud? At her own sharp sentences biting her back?
“‘Sometimes I wish him harm—physical harm,'” Borland read aloud.
And, of course, Laura Sabbatini objected again. She asked the distinguished panel to consider what was relevant to the appeal and what was not. She insisted that Borland confine himself to the scientific data. She noted that Borland had argued ORIS invaded his client's privacy, took notes out of context, and defamed his client's name, even while Borland indulged in exactly those tactics in his client's defense. Robin's lawyer objected and insisted, and succeeded in engaging the panel in a full discussion of the acceptable parameters of evidence in such a case. And Robin tried to sit up straight. She tried to look ahead at the appeal board, to study their professorial, kindly faces. “Do you want justice?” Akira had challenged her.
“Of course,” she'd said.
“Are you willing to suffer for it?”
What was justice? An official NIH report? An article in the newspaper? An ethics panel? That kind of justice seemed fleeting, vindication that went quickly out of date. She hardly knew what justice was anymore, but she was suffering.
Even as his lawyer sparred with Robin's in DC, Cliff was working in the animal facility, dissecting mice. He had sacrificed a new batch, and the rate of remission was still over sixty percent. Still, he was finding more and more recurrences. He stood before the dissecting table and studied the corpses before him and the numbers in his lab book. Hours slipped away and he kept working, plucking up loose skin with his tweezers, examining emerging tumors and then normal mammary glands.
Recurrence was an intriguing finding in itself. What did it mean about the interplay of virus and immune system and cancerous cells? How were cancer cells cropping up again? How might they regenerate after wholesale extermination? On the one hand, he was fascinated by the phenomenon. And on the other, he was almost out of his mind with anxiety. He had feared a viral outbreak in the colony. That would have been a terrible setback, but this was devastating. This wasn't just bad luck; this was the failure of R-7 itself.
He had been a talented but sloppy student. He'd excelled in high school, and even in college, relying more on memory and wit than understanding. It wasn't until graduate school that he began to dedicate himself fully to his work, and even then, he'd been flippant, taken each publication as his due, his beginner's luck as his just reward. Only with R-7 had he begun to learn what work was. He was careful now, dedicated almost to the exclusion of all else. How, then, could these experiments and these animals fail him when he had learned so much?
One by one, he opened up his animals and gazed inside. There were the mammary glands, the first pair almost up at the neck of each mouse. There were the red blood vessels threading through pink skin. A good many animals were still cancer free. He told himself the healthy ones were still in the majority. He had teased this pattern out himself until the results made sense and random observations resolved themselves into a profound design. But scientific designs were unforgiving; such schemes as his were hungry for more and yet more evidence, ravenous for facts. And what if his results were only temporary? He shuddered at the question. He had not appreciated research before, its value or its real heartbreak. How strange that even with all his animal work, and all the sacrifices, he'd never understood that this was life and death.
“Don't desert me now,” he whispered to the tiny corpses on the table.
On a crisp October afternoon, Sandy bounded into the office, fresh off the shuttle from DC, and declared, “We're winning.”
“Really?” Marion asked drily.
He waved her off. The lab was no longer on the defensive. The lawyers were prosecuting the appeal brilliantly. And so, naturally, Marion was unhappy.
“But you're
never
happy,” he pointed out.
She was complaining about the research time she'd lost to the appeal. She bemoaned every hour and every day away from the lab.
“But you always do,” he said.
“Sandy.” She spoke in such a voice that he stopped teasing, at least temporarily.
Chagrined, he saw how pale and tired she'd become. The inquiry and controversy had worn away at her. He had not shielded her well enough from the petty world outside.
“You're right,” he said. “You've lost too much time. You should be working. Let's not waste any more thought on this.”
“That's easy for you to say,” she murmured as she rose to walk down the hall.
“I mean it.” He opened the office door for her. “Go on.” He gave her a little push, as though to shoo her back into the lab. “Go back in there. I promise you, we won't even speak of the appeal again.”
“Don't make promises you can't keep,” she told him.
“How do you know whether or not I can keep my promises?”
“I think I know you pretty well,” she said.
“So don't always assume the worst.”
Then she kidded him, with a straight face. “The worst is usually a safe assumption.”
“Don't be safe,” he said, and he was perfectly serious, even though he was smiling. He spoke entirely from his heart. “Don't let all this political nonsense frighten you away.”
Still, she worried. The labs at Stanford and Cornell were not getting the results they'd been looking for with R-7. At Cornell, P. K. Agarwal had had some initial success, but nothing on the scale of Cliff's results. At Stanford, Richard Hughes had run into numerous technical problems with the virus, and concluded that the sample Cliff had sent had partly thawed in shipping. Cliff was preparing new samples for Hughes, and had spoken extensively to Agarwal on the phone about the correct methods and conditions for replicating the R-7 experiments. Of course, repeating experiments in different labs could not happen overnight. Marion had no right to hope for results just to assuage her own anxiety or impress the appeals board at NIH. She knew better than anyone that scientific results did not pop up on demand, and so she tried to suppress her longing for confirmation of Cliff's work.
But what if the troubles at Stanford and Cornell were not easily solved? These were not, in fact, the first attempts to reproduce his work, and the thought of Robin's failure haunted her. Of course, there had been extenuating circumstances. Robin had never been an impartial judge of Cliff's results. Marion deeply regretted setting Robin the task of replicating them. But how embarrassing, how potentially devastating, if two respected investigators at other institutions could not replicate Cliff's work either.
And then there were the recurrences. Ordinarily, she would have looked into a phenomenon like this with intense curiosity and undiluted pleasure. But now? Why now? Cliff had asked, and she had jumped on him for reacting so childishly. Still, privately, as more animals grew sick, she began to echo his foolish question. Why now, indeed? She could not help dreading another public disaster.
But Sandy was right; this was no way to think. She was a researcher, not a politician or a press agent. She could not allow the ORIS inquiry to creep further inside her. She walked down the corridor and looked into the lab where Prithwish was working with the two new postdocs, Mikiko and Nir. She peeked into the cold room and the lounge, and finally discovered Feng in the stockroom.
“I've got a job for you,” she told him.
He turned to her, surprised she'd go to the trouble of buttonholing him among the shelves of clear glassware.
“I want you to look into the new recurrences with Cliff,” she said.
He scarcely blinked.
“We need to understand what's going on with the recurring tumors,” she told him. “He's begun; he's working around the clock, but he's got his hands full. He's going to need help.”
“I'm sorry,” Feng said.
He'd answered so quietly that for several moments she didn't realize that he had refused her.