Virus: The Day of Resurrection (23 page)

“What kind of biowar operations can cancer research be useful for, I wonder?” inserted the war minister, apparently interested now.

“ ‘Nucleic acid weaponry,’ your Excellency,” said Dr. Landon with just a touch of a scientist’s sense of superiority detectable in his voice. In his tone was a hapless desire to tell someone about the latest fruits of his labor. “The causes of cancer were unclear for a very long time, so the theory of cellular mutation and the contagion theory were battling it out against each other. The former is the theory that the cellular system itself undergoes a sudden, malignant mutation that makes the cell destructive to the body as a whole, causing it to multiply. The latter is the theory that some unknown contagion—a virus perhaps—causes the cell to mutate. We were able to cause cancer in animals by infecting them with things like polyomavirus and Rous sarcoma virus, but in humans, we couldn’t find any virus that caused cancer no matter how hard we tried. True, the virus called SV40 which monkeys get produces cancer in artificially cultured human adrenal gland cells. Once you get cancer, however, it’ll never get better on its own, so human trials were out of the question.” Dr. Landon pointed at his lips slightly.

“Nucleic acids, on the other hand—the genetic material that forms the core of a virus—are simple chemical substances, and it’s long been known that even in crystalline form, you can inoculate living cells with them to cause both the viral disease and the free production of new live viruses. Viruses are hard to preserve in a ‘living’ state because you have to keep providing them with a medium of living cells or they die right away. If they die, their nucleic acids break down and lose their potency. For that reason, even the nucleic acids alone are enough to be useful as biological weapons. Chemical toxins normally require a fixed amount to be lethal, and moreover, their effectiveness is not sustained. Take the examples of G-gas—the poison gas that’s been adopted as standard issue in every country starting with the Soviet Union and the USA—and carbamate, which the French use. On the point of the swiftness with which they take effect, a thirty-second exposure to a density of a hundred milligrams per cubic meter of air is one hundred percent fatal. A fierce potency to be sure, but with no communicability or ripple effect. But nucleic acids, on the other hand—if a few ounces of dry, beautiful crystals in a small, sealed bottle were to infect a living creature, the creature’s cells themselves would get sick and die, and even as this was happening, they would be producing new disease-carrying viruses in unlimited numbers. In other words, nucleic acids are self-replicating weapons.”

The air in the room had somehow become unpleasant and felt almost sticky. The rather shrill, high-pitched voice in which Dr. Landon spoke so enthusiastically was only exaggerating the gloomy atmosphere, but Landon himself seemed entirely unaware of this. It made the atmosphere in the room almost grotesque. Sir Lindner’s mouth was drawn down unhappily at both corners. If Major Grey was bothered, he didn’t show it. His eyes were like dull circles of graphite that only stared expressionlessly at Landon’s mouth.

Perhaps this man Dr. Landon has some sort of psychological defect
, War Minister Cronin thought suddenly as he stared at the doctor, who was still going on and on with his explanations enthusiastically. He had a gloomy, ghastly job whose aim was mass slaughter. Perhaps he had developed this defect during his long years of living like Hecate in
Macbeth
—gathering the vile, the obscene, and the accursed, and simmering them into deadly brews. War Minister Cronin had had some small involvement with the production of poison gas himself, during the Second World War, and knew of at least one case in which one of the on-site managers at a secret factory had become a cheerful eccentric. Or had it perhaps been an inborn defect that had allowed him to endure in work such as this for so long?

“Ah, poor Karlsky! I hated to lose that man!” Dr. Landon said suddenly, his voice a moan. “He was the top man when it came to this sort of thing.”

“Professor Karlsky had conducted research into this sort of thing?” Major Grey asked with a dull glint in his eyes.

“Yes, yes he had. When he was at the Max Planck Laboratory, he was a research assistant to the famous molecular geneticist Ludwig Leisener, who went missing in Vienna about four years ago. Anyway, since that time, Karlsky has been praised as a great genius. If he’d continued doing peaceful work, he would have surely won the Nobel Prize.”

“So what exactly was Professor Karlsky working on?”

“With Leisener, he was studying the chromosomes of cancer cells and applying that work to nucleic acid weaponry.” Dr. Landon glanced briefly in Director Lindner’s direction once more. Sir Lindner frowned and remained still.
It should be all right for him to talk a little more,
Sir Lindner thought. In front of the war minister.

“A nucleic acid weapon has only one weakness. Though it’s true that it’s ultimately just an unidentifiable acid when dissolved in water, once it infects the human body it begins to produce the original virus,” said Dr. Landon. To make sure his meaning was fully understood, he added, “Once it becomes a living virus, the nature of the weapon will in most cases be well understood by any well-equipped physicians who encounter it. Once they make a culture of it in a tissue sample, they can see it with an electron microscope. Once they’ve observed the condition of the patients and the shape of the virus by way of electron microscope, they will be able to determine what kind of virus they’re up against, and—well, virology is very much advanced nowadays, with stocks of vaccines for many kinds of contagious viruses being kept regularly on hand.

“The degree to which the symptoms will progress is also known somewhat, and it’s not as if there are no treatments available. The replication rates and the routes of infection are also mostly known, so even when patients start turning up, you can still stop the spread of the disease by quarantining them. However! What about cancer? In cases where cancer is caused by a virus, there are situations in which the virus itself disappears as soon as the healthy cells become cancerous. Moreover, a cancer caused by a virus will persist, as the virus itself dies off. However, in some cases, irradiating the cancerous cells with X-rays causes the
original
virus to be produced. I’m talking about Rubin and Temin’s famous experiment with the Rous sarcoma virus in 1963. Based on that, Professors Nishi from Kyoto University and Freeman from the University of California’s Viral Research Laboratory have used statistical methods to just recently put forth the theory that cancer is caused by a nucleic acid infection—an infection that doesn’t produce live viruses. This is now being pretty much borne out. What do you think this means for nucleic acid weapons?”

Though the other three men looked back at him gravely, their expressions revealed that they really had no idea.

“It was Professor Karlsky who first thought it might be possible to bypass the form of a contagion—that is to say, the live viruses—and produce replicating weapons of pure nucleic acid. And by coincidence, he was able to make exactly such a thing from a new contagion he had been ordered to study.”

“Which was that MM line of germs?” Major Grey asked.

“That’s right. I don’t know much about it, but they say it was sold to us after being stolen from some other country. Was it the Soviet Union? Or America?”

“That’s immaterial,” Major Grey replied.

“Well, whichever one it was, they say it was a germ collected in outer space, don’t they? Even the name our people gave the MM series reflects such an origin. The ‘MM’ does, after all, stand for ‘Martian Murderer.’ ”

Dr. Landon suddenly began to chuckle, but no matter how amusing the wordplay might have been, the sound of his laughter only made the mood of the place grow darker.

“That was quite an item, wasn’t it?” he continued. “Something bloody incredible that had been discovered in space! On the surface, they looked like nothing more than some ordinary kind of coccus—a lot like those golden staph bacteria that cause suppurative disease. However, in an earthlike environment, these things have a tremendous rate of replication, equivalent to hundreds of times that of a regular staphylococcus. And they have two very strange properties. In mammals—we tested them on marmots, hamsters, dogs, cats, and even monkeys and horses and cows—once they got into the respiratory system, the germs themselves dissolved in an incredibly short time, leaving nothing behind. Also, there’s the fact that when regular staphylococci are put together with MM series microbes, the regular germs acquire almost the same explosive rate of replication as the extraterrestrial ones.”

Dr. Landon paused briefly to catch his breath. Now he was beginning to whisper; it was the voice of a man unveiling terrible secrets. “Because of this latter phenomenon, Professor Karlsky first theorized that the MM series might be a sort of prophage. Do you know about prophages?”

The minister and Major Grey both shook their heads slightly.

“Well then, what about bacteriophages? Viruses range in size from twenty-one to three hundred millimicrons, and on average, they’re no larger than one hundredth the size of an ordinary bacterium. Yet among these tiny little viruses, there are some that will attach to regular germs and consume them. The most famous ones are the T
1
and T
2
viruses that consume bacteria in the large intestine. That’s why this kind of virus is called a ‘bacteriophage.’ However, among the germs, there are also those that are not consumed when infected by a bacteriophage, but instead just keep on replicating. Bacteriophages resemble syringes with big heads like rubber knobs on top. That’s where their nucleic acid—their genetic material—is held. There’s a tube attached like a tail, and the tip of that tube has a projection and a long thread like a tentacle. Using the thread, it feels its way around looking for prey—a germ—and then attaches to it. Then, using the projection at the tip of the tube, it makes a hole in the cell wall and injects the nucleic acid that’s inside its head. A rather unpleasant construction, much like the stinging cnidoblasts on a jellyfish’s tentacle.

“Anyway, the germ that has been injected with the phage’s nucleic acid suddenly begins acting strangely, sucking up all the nutrients it can from the surrounding environment. The chromosomes of the bacteria itself are mutated, and the bacteria begins to produce the phage’s nucleic acids all by itself. The metabolic processes that should have normally been used for the bacteria’s replication are diverted away from the production of new offspring and are instead spent on producing the nucleic acids of a completely separate invader, the phage. Then, after mass-producing the phage’s nucleic acids, the nucleic acids then start using the cell’s proteins to surround themselves with syringe-shaped sheaths just like those on the original phage. A single phage’s nucleic acid can create hundreds of new phages inside a bacteria, and the host bacteria from which the energy and material for maintaining itself has been stolen finally comes apart at the seams and dies. In the case of the T
2
phage, the time from nucleic acid injection until the bacteria bursts open releasing hundreds of new phages is only a mere
fifteen minutes
.”

Just once during this, Sir Lindner cleared his throat softly. Dr. Landon continued speaking, however, like a man possessed.

“Furthermore,” he said, “there are also cases in which a bacteria infected by the very same phage doesn’t replicate the phage nucleic acids and doesn’t burst open either. Instead, it just keeps on replicating as it normally would. When this happens, the phage nucleic acids don’t take apart the bacteria’s chromosomes, but instead insert themselves into the bacteria’s chromosomes, allowing the virus to hide there. Then, as the bacteria undergo many generations of replication, they transmit the phage nucleic acids to their children and grandchildren and so on. Then, if you expose the infected bacteria to some sort of stimulus—say X-rays or ultraviolet light, or to carcinogenic chemicals such as nitrogen mustard—the bacteria that had until that very moment been no different from healthy bacteria will suddenly burst open, and hundreds of phages will come pouring out. In other words, due to
genetic contamination,
these bacteria carry within themselves a factor for reproducing phages. Bacteria in such a condition are called lysogenic phages, or prophages.”

“So the MM series turned out to be one of these prophages, or whatever you call them?” asked the minister.

“Actually, they did not,” Dr. Landon said, eyes glistening. “The original culture base of the MM line was investigated again and again by electron microscope, but no virus was ever detected. Even so, when we filtered germ-free fluid from that culture base and transferred it to culture fluid with regular, terrestrial staphylococci, the cocci would suddenly show symptoms of MM type infection, and their rates of replication would begin to skyrocket. Karlsky, who had been doing cancer research under Dr. Leisener, realized what was happening the instant he saw it. You see, among cancers that are caused by viruses, there are cases where—even though the infectious virus completely disappeared once the cancer began—the germless filtered fluid extracted from the cancer cells can cause healthy cells to develop cancer. Because of this phenomenon, which he had observed in the carcinogenic LR12 virus discovered by Leisener, Karlsky dubbed this phenomenon ‘replicating nucleic acid infection.’ ” Dr. Landon paused for a moment to take another quick breath. “There are two ways to interpret the theory that cancer is caused by viruses. The first is that a life-form such as a virus—which can neither sustain nor reproduce itself alone, which lives as a parasite on living cells—must first come into existence by hijacking cellular replication mechanisms, and therefore cannot have come to exist unless living cells existed
first
. This is the Cellular Origin Hypothesis, which says it was only after the most primitive forms of life came into being that viruses were born out of chromosomal irregularities in the nuclei of ancient bacteria. The other theory is that when early, primordial life-forms—primitive, single-celled organisms—came into being, a kind of genetic devil-child developed in parallel. This is the Independent Entities Hypothesis.