Nano by Robin Cook Read Free Book Online Page A

stopped in front of a blank door protected by another iris scanner. She positioned herself, mostly her head, so that the sensor could scan her iris. A light over the door clicked green. George was about to follow suit when she restrained him. “You don’t have to do anything. This scanner is just to get the door open.”
    Once inside, George immediately thought of Professor Rothman’s lab back at Columbia, but this was larger and more modern. He heard the familiar low hum from the vent hoods and from the array of medical machinery dotted around the room.
    “Impressive,” George said.
    “It is. My boss keeps telling me there’s fifty million dollars’ worth of equipment in this lab alone.”
    “Your boss, this Zachary Berman guy?”
    “No, he’s the big boss. My direct boss is a woman named Mariel Spallek, who’s not my favorite person in the world.” Pia didn’t elaborate. She put down her backpack, picked up a ledger, and moved over to a central display console with readouts from all the biotech equipment. With a pencil Pia ticked off some boxes in the ledger and wrote in others.
    “Everything okay?”
    “Looks that way. My iPhone would have alerted me if something was amiss. But things are looking good. Until this series of experiments, we’d been having biocompatibility issues with the microbivores. Back when we first introduced them into our animal models, we were surprised to see some allergic reactions. Not a lot, but enough to be troublesome. When it comes to the mammals, especially the primates and humans, there cannot be any reaction. Initially we found that our subjects’ immune system could occasionally treat the microbivores as foreign invaders, which, of course, they are. Why we were surprised is because the surface of the microbivores is of diamondoid carbon, which is about as nonreactive and as smooth as can be. Are you following me?”
    “Yes, sure,” George said almost too quickly. Nonetheless, Pia kept talking.
    “What we deduced was that some molecules had adhered to the microbivore’s surface despite its presumed nonreactivity, leading to some level of immune response. I assume you remember all this from immunology in med school. Do you?”
    “Oh, yeah. Of course!” George said, hoping to hide the fact that he remembered little of what Pia was talking about. Pia’s retention of such minutiae always impressed him. Whenever she spoke about science, her face radiated a kind of passion. She also had no trouble maintaining eye contact, which she could not do in general conversation, especially conversation involving anything personal, like emotions.
    George nodded enthusiastically. He tried to think of an intelligent question, which wasn’t easy as close as they were standing together. He could smell her wonderful aroma. It was erotically intoxicating thanks to his memory of the few times they had had sex. “What kind of animals are you using as subjects for these studies?” he managed, even though his voice cracked.
    “A type of roundworm, but we will soon be moving to mammals, provided these subjects show no immune response, which so far seems to be the case. I’m not looking forward to working with mammals, as you can well imagine. I’m sure you remember my feelings about that.”
    George nodded again, knowingly.
    “If and when you get to injecting these microbivores into human subjects—into Will McKinley, for instance—how many microbivores would be involved?”
    “Somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred billion, about the same number of stars in the Milky Way.”
    George whistled. “How big a bolus would that be?”
    “It wouldn’t be big at all. About one cubic centimeter diluted in about five ccs of saline. It gives you another appreciation of how small these things are. Each one is less than half the size of a red blood cell.”
    “So this is what you have been working on for the last eighteen months, the biocompatibility of these microbivores?”
    “Yes.