Reunion (23 page)

How wily are beliefs, the way they insinuate themselves so completely into your existence that you would no more question them than you would your heartbeat. You know they are there, you know they are essential, you pay them little mind. Helen had long believed in the goodness of science and the goodness of her own motives as a scientist; she had tucked these beliefs away while she settled down to work. But you need to keep your beliefs active, you need to dust them off regularly, and most particularly you need to debate them and their allegiances. It seemed to her now that her beliefs had become like a comfy old couch she would notice only if it were removed. Her beliefs – there was no avoiding it any longer – had shielded her from some of science's more sinister happenings.

There was a crunch of gravel as the minibus turned into the driveway of the conference centre. At the entrance stood a
welcoming committee of her colleagues, smiling and waving at the new arrivals. Helen gazed at these people, good scientists all of them, men and women with whom she had shared some of the best experiences of her life. These were her friends, she reminded herself, as she stepped out of the warm bus into the warmer embrace of her colleagues, not in the solid, unchanging, shared-past friendship of Jack, Ava and Connie, but with a more up-to-date, more immediate, more adaptable dynamic.

And despite her doubts, despite her fears, she was, she realised, exactly where she wanted to be.

She and the other newcomers were swept into the lobby. Soon they had separated into their usual groups – the cholera contingent, the salmonellas, the
E. colis
, her own shigella mob, and some general transgenic people, molecular free-floaters, who for the first time gravitated towards her group.

It was Heisenberg who said that ‘science is rooted in conversations'. Many a marriage has disintegrated because a scientist prefers discussing research with colleagues rather than the children's schooling with a spouse. When scientists get together they start talking where they left off at the last meeting, the last paper, the last email communication. The shigella group comprised Dory from the CDC in Atlanta, Maarten from Holland, Takeshi and Helen. Katarina from Russia was absent as her son was getting married and, despite her pleading, the young couple had refused to change their wedding date when it clashed with the meeting.

They immediately started discussing a recent outbreak of
Shigella sonnei
which had occurred simultaneously in a number of observant Jewish communities in North America. The contamination had been traced to a particular kosher ice-cream.

‘We did the typing at the CDC,' Dory said. ‘As well as ice-cream, there was a problem with a particular batch of kosher cheese.'

‘Same milk products obviously,' Helen said.

As it turned out, little was obvious about this outbreak.

‘Given the restricted food choices of orthodox Jews, it took only a few interviews to trace the problem to ice-cream,' Dory said. ‘We alerted the usual people, nothing out of the ordinary. And then just as we thought we were winding up, the security people arrived.'

‘So was the contamination intentional?' Takeshi asked. ‘Someone deliberately targeting Jews?'

‘The security guys pounded us with questions, they insisted on more tests, but no other related organisms showed up on the system. The men stayed for two weeks then they disappeared.' Dory hesitated before adding, ‘And we've heard nothing since.'

‘You did the work,' Helen spoke slowly, ‘but you've never been told whether the outbreaks were deliberate?'

Dory nodded. ‘That's right.'

There was a long pause while everyone waited for someone else to raise the issue of the elephant in the room – or rather, the laboratory.

Finally Helen spoke up. ‘How often does it happen that we do the science but are kept in the dark? And not just for outbreaks: there's also the issue of how our work is being used.'

There was a shifting of gaze, a shuffling of feet, a burrowing into a backpack, and in the silence Helen wondered how many of them had tossed in the ethical towel in order to do their science. How many even acknowledged what was happening
to scientific research? Many of her colleagues were funded through groups that made no attempt to hide their military affiliation, but it was the rare scientist who owned up to any restrictions or compromises. Yet it had been clear to her for some time that the balance between research freedom and central direction had disappeared. And it was no gentle altering of the scales, more like a seesaw when one of the riders gets off.

The silence was finally broken with the approach of an organiser who herded them towards reception.

Helen moved slowly, letting the others go before her. For twenty years she had done the science of her dreams. She had presided over a fabulously equipped laboratory within an internationally recognised centre; she had been supplied with abundant funds and seemingly abundant research freedom; her team had made several significant contributions to diarrhoea control and prevention. She had been travelling the main highway, no doubt about it, but she could no longer ignore that while she might have been the driver she wasn't navigating, nor did she own the vehicle. Her laboratory was no more hers than Fritz Haber's had proved to be his when in 1933 Hitler ‘Aryanised' the civil service, and Lenard and Stark, both Nobel Prize winners, had fostered ‘Aryan physics' (and if ever there was a warning to be wary of the Nobel it resided in the awards to these two men). Or five years later when Lise Meitner had been forced from her laboratory, more home to her than her tiny apartment, and certainly more home than Austria or Germany. Helen habitually thought of
her
laboratory. But it wasn't hers, not when politics guarded the door.

Her relationship to her work these past many years now seemed rather like a marriage in which one of the partners stays purely for love while the other, in addition to love, has other
more pragmatic reasons. And if now and then there is a vague hint of this, wouldn't you, the purely loving one be prepared to ignore or rationalise certain actions in order to maintain the marriage? In order to love in the way you have always wanted? Helen loved science. Whether working in her laboratory, writing up papers or gathered with the best scientists in the world she was – and this was no exaggeration – enraptured.

Some excellent scientists had already left research, including two from another division at her own centre, one for a community college, the other with more than forty publications to his credit to teach high school when no reputable laboratory or university would employ him – although what constituted reputable these days Helen no longer knew. These two scientists had cited political interference in their research and had lodged formal complaints. Within a short time they had found themselves frozen out of research funds and subsequently out of work.

Helen admired their stance, but at the same time she struggled with it. Never to enter a laboratory again, never to grapple with the mysteries of science, never again that blindingly beautiful moment of understanding. She had touched the very stuff of life; in moving genes around she actually changed life. And she found herself resenting those scientists who had taken a stand. No one wants to acknowledge they might be living in bad faith.

Back in their university days she, Jack and Ava had often debated the elements of a good and proper life, but back in those days there was little in their experience to test their beliefs. Now there was so much to lose. Helen wanted to do science and she wanted it to be the best science. But without acceptable ethical underpinnings, what exactly was the best
science and was it possible any more? She suspected that if she could turn a blind eye to the current situation, if she could just ignore the shadowy presences that were working the cogs and pulleys of science, she would.

She had hoped Australia would provide her with the opportunity to work far from military policy and defence force funds. But everyone in the Western world was so closely connected these days and the reach of the funding bodies so extensive – the frontiers of space were nothing in this scheme of things – that Australia was no more outside the mainstream than the Virginia–Maryland–DC biotechnology hub where her own centre was located. As for research freedom, the same pressures were applied in Australian laboratories as in the US. An Australian scientist she knew, an expert in renewable energies, had recently been transferred to a huge government-funded project aimed at making coal cleaner – and you didn't need to be a scientist to detect that oxymoron. He had been told by the director of his institute that it was in the national interest, and when he had questioned whether it was in the planet's interest he had been given short shrift: coal was Australia's largest export so the government's decision made sound economic sense. And if he didn't like the work, the director added, he could find another job.

Helen did not want to find herself in a similar position.

 

As soon as she was checked in, Helen crossed the lobby and exited through the doors directly opposite the main entrance. She needed time alone to settle herself, to silence the doubts, otherwise she risked wrecking the next four days.

She stepped outside on to a broad terrace and paused in the crisp white air. Stretching before her was a vast sloping lawn;
plush and green even in early winter, it was a typical example of the perfect American lawn that makes its English progenitor look shabby. Leading down to the cabins was a gravel path. Helen had walked several metres pulling her suitcase behind her before she noticed the cross-hatch pattern raked into the gravel. It was a geometric wonder. She stopped and looked back at the mess she had made. Off to one side stood an elderly African-American man with a rake in his hand. With an apologetic gesture she picked up her suitcase, stepped on to the lawn and hurried down the slope towards her cabin. At the door she glanced back; the man was already restoring the path.

She entered a spacious motel-style room with off-white walls, tweedy carpet and good lighting. Adjacent to one of the windows was a pale laminated desk with ergonomic chair and internet access. Off the main room was a bathroom, and out the front a small verandah enclosed by insect screens. Helen unpacked the essentials, the rest could remain in her suitcase. She sent a text to Luke telling him she had arrived, then grabbed her gloves and coat and went outside.

The clouds were smoothly grey, the temperature low enough for snow. Helen had lived more than half her life in countries with huge winter falls, but still she maintained the Australian wonder of snow. The grounds were large, and except for the lawns and paths, attractively unkempt – perhaps intentionally or maybe just the normal roughing-up of winter. For about sixty or seventy metres in front of her cabin the vegetation was ragged and sparse, then at the bottom of the slope it thickened into an impressionistic forest of evergreen and deciduous trees. Some of the larger trees were draped in a climbing plant that looked like lengths of organza. The woodland stretched away to the horizon.

She settled in a deckchair on the verandah and rested her head against the canvas; she hoped she might sleep. All these suspicions and dissatisfactions disconnected her from her usual self. She did not know how to think her way out of the dilemmas, to sort through personal desire on the one hand and personal ethics on the other. Never had she felt so confused nor quite so alone.

She had thought Jack, Ava and Connie would help. But it was as if each of them had accumulated so much life in their own separate spheres that even with the desire to help, and she did not for a moment doubt their desire, it was not particularly effective. As for speaking with her colleagues as she thought she might at this meeting, now she was here she was afraid of revealing problems that might be exclusively hers.

There was a fat slimy slug squirming on the boards of the verandah. Too cold, too old or just plain lost, it was going nowhere. Helen watched its futile twists and turns, its clueless head raised weakly to the chill air. The slug might just as well be frozen stiff for all the gains it was making; the slug might just as well be her.

She had risen to go inside when her attention was caught by a solitary figure emerging from the woods at the bottom of the slope. It was a large man, wearing one of those old-fashioned dark blue woollen jackets she associated with revolutionaries and on his head a cap which, as he drew closer, sharpened into a beret. He carried a wad of pages in one hand, the other hand was pushed deep into his pocket. His pace was a stroll; she could hear a faint singing through the still thin air.

He continued up the slope, passing only a few metres from her cabin. It was Fabian Möller, the keynote speaker at this meeting, so close but not seeing her, his voice quite clear now
in a bluesy riff that skittered over his tongue in a caramel-coloured tenor. Fabian Möller, a genius at moving genes around. Fabian Möller, the molecular scissors wizard and one of the giants in her field.

A great scientist, the blues, the possibility of snow: it was one of those perfect moments that only ever occur without planning. Helen was aware of being privileged to something private and special, enhanced by the voyeur's frisson of excitement. Enough of these seesawing moods, she told herself. She was at a professional meeting with the best in the world. For the next four days there would be only the rigours and pleasures of science.

2.

Möller's evening address was an exhilarating romp through recent advances in the manipulation of pathogen transmission and durability, followed by a more leisurely account of his own specific research in this area. He possessed that rare gift of showing how discoveries are made, of deconstructing both the inspirational connections and routine moves which produce new knowledge. He was, in short, the true
animateur des idées
. He would have been a riveting teacher, Helen found herself thinking, and such a shame he no longer taught in the classroom. Although none of them did any more.