Stolen Virus

CHAPTER 1-2

No problem avoiding those topics, Jason thought. Most students slept through the bovine medicine lectures anyway. He walked to the front of the lecture hall and stepped up to the podium. A bell rang, and the clatter and chatter of the junior veterinary class died down.

Jason turned on the microphone. “Good morning. Many of you know me from lab classes. For those who haven’t met me, I’m Jason Mitchell, a veterinarian and a graduate student in virology. Professor Schmidt asked me to give today’s lecture on bovine coronavirus, or BCV. I can also answer questions you have about next week’s exam.”

The students sat in groups depending on the type of medicine they expected to practice. The twelve budding cow doctors were in the first three rows of the center section, pens ready. Behind them and on the edges of the auditorium were eight students interested in swine medicine and four others who needed a good grade in something to pull up their grade point averages. They were paying attention but didn’t seem eager about it. Scattered around the rest of the hall were thirty-five students who had made it clear they never expected to look at a farm animal again. They were reading the paper, doing crossword puzzles, or Sudoku.

Jason pulled up his first slide and tried to keep his eyes on the students who were paying attention. Watching the others ignore him was too rough on his ego. “Bovine coronavirus, or BCV, is the most common virus infecting cattle. Few animals reach six months of age without being infected. All of you are familiar with the sometimes fatal diarrhea BCV causes in neonatal calves,” Jason said. He noticed two students sleeping in the back row. “Or at least you should be,” he added.

He talked for thirty-five minutes about BCV and the diarrheal diseases it caused in older cattle, ending with one of Paul’s favorite aphorisms: “In your future careers, remember that bovine coronavirus is a quasi-species, meaning it has a remarkably high rate of mutation. A highly mutable virus could give us a nasty surprise some day.”

He turned the projector off and asked if there were any questions.

A student sitting in the front asked, “Does BCV cause respiratory disease in cattle?”

“One published study suggested BCV can cause pneumonia. Attempts to replicate those results have failed. Dr. Ann Hartman and I . . .” Jason caught himself before he wandered into the forbidden topic. “Respiratory disease attributed to BCV will not be on the exam.”

A student sitting in the back put down her crossword puzzle and looked at Jason for the first time during the lecture. “Dr. Mitchell, was yours the study that put the Chinese graduate student in the hospital? How is he doing?”

Jason almost choked. “Joe, ah . . . was hospitalized with pneumonia. There’s no evidence his illness is related to the calf study.”

A student in the front row asked, “Wasn’t the sick student a recent arrival from China?”

Jason nodded. “Yes, he—”

“Is the SARS epidemic still going on there?” another student shouted. “Isn’t that a coronavirus too?”

Paul should have told these students what topics were out of bounds, Jason thought. “SARS is caused by a coronavirus, but I believe the epidemic is over.”

“What does SARS stand for?” someone asked.

“SARS stands for Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome,” Jason said, “but this class only covers coronaviruses of veterinary interest, not human disease. Can we get back to questions about today’s—”

“If the student just arrived from China, do you think he might have SARS? I heard there were sixty-seven cases of SARS and thirteen fatalities in Canada last year.”

Jason swallowed hard and wondered what the dean would say about these questions. “Anything I say would be speculation.”

A blonde in a tight sweater in the front row raised her hand. She was sitting with the students who planned to go into bovine practice, and Jason had seen her a few times in the cattle barn. She’s safe, Jason thought, and asked her if she had a question related to BCV in cattle.

“Based on sequencing of the viral genes, the North American strain of BCV is the closest known relative of the SARS virus. Isn’t it possible that a hybrid of BCV and the SARS virus could be produced if the student had SARS and was exposed to the BCV you gave to your calves?”

Sharp girl! Jason thought. That was probably the question Paul and the dean wanted to avoid. Perspiration on his forehead formed into large beads. He shuffled his notes and took a deep breath. “The two viruses are genetically similar, but this is not a lecture on SARS. The exam next week will be one-third of your final grade for this class. Are there any questions about the test?”

There were no more questions. A bell rang, and the class was over. Jason grabbed his notes and bolted for the exit. He took a hallway that slanted downward toward the Veterinary Teaching Hospital, and beyond that, the Vet Sciences building.

Three women from the class fell into step with him. A tall blonde woman on his left asked, “You didn’t answer the question about a hybrid virus, but isn’t that a possibility? It would explain the pneumonia we’ve heard your calves had.”

“Yeah,” a well-built brunette on his right said. “That’s the way they think HIV originated. A chimp that ate monkeys was infected by two RNA monkey viruses. The viruses combined and HIV was born.”

Jason looked past the brunette and saw salvation. “I don’t want to speculate. Excuse me,” he said, and dodged into a men’s room.

As Jason stood at a urinal, the door swung open and a lanky Pakistani student came in. He put his book bag by the sink.

“Harith, were there three students—women—standing outside in the hallway?” Jason asked. “They might look like they’re waiting for someone.”

“I didn’t notice any, but I’ll take a look. Did you want me to ask one of them to come in and shake it for you?” Harith grinned.

Jason glared at him. “Very funny. Please, just check for me, will you? I got sucked into saying things I shouldn’t have when I answered questions after my lecture. The three followed me down the hall, grilling me.”

Harith chuckled and poked his head out the door. “You are in luck. The hallway is empty.”

Harith bellied up to a urinal as Jason washed his hands. “Jason, my friend, how do you get into situations like this?” he asked, his eyes twinkling. “At home in Pakistan, no one ever stumbled into the troubles you do. We couldn’t even imagine them. If I can’t get a job in academia, I can support myself as a stand-up comic, just telling stories about you.”

Jason leaned his head against the wall between the paper towel dispensers. “Give me a break, Harith. This isn’t funny.”

“Your first lecture must have gone well. I heard students chattering about it.”

“They were interested in all the wrong things.” Jason cracked open the door and peeked into the hallway. It was still empty. “Thanks, Harith. Catch you later,” he said, heading for his office.

Jason unlocked the door to his tiny office and barely had time to sit at his desk before his pudgy officemate Mark walked in and told him Paul wanted to see him.

“You must have given a hell of a lecture,” Mark said. “I walked by a group of students who were talking about it. Even the dean seemed interested.”

“The dean? Aw, f**k!” Elbows on his desk, Jason held his head in his hands.

“Yeah. The dean was walking by when I passed a group of vet students hanging around a vending machine. He stopped when one of them said something about SARS. He was looking at a bulletin board, but I think he was eavesdropping.”

“I’ll be lucky if I’m not tossed out of school.”

“Why? Most of us can’t keep half the class awake for lectures on bovine medicine, but you had them talking about it in the hallways.”

“Paul told me not to discuss my last study, Joe, or SARS in my lecture. Those were the only things the class wanted to talk about.”

“Oh, they are talking,” Mark said. “And for once the chatter is about biology instead of sports.”

Jason shoved his chair away from his desk. “I better talk to Paul now or I’ll be talking to the dean later.”

He paused at the door and turned to Mark. “Don’t tell anybody what I said about Paul’s instructions, okay?”

“Got it. I won’t say a word.”

Halfway down the hall, Jason smacked himself in the forehead. The last time he’d asked Mark to keep something quiet, every graduate student in the department knew about it by lunch.

Paul’s office was in a second-floor corner of the Vet Sciences building. The office, with ten-foot ceilings and windows on two walls, was large compared to most. Rank and years of tenure had their rewards. The office door was open and Paul was sitting at his desk. He waved Jason in. “Close the door behind you, please.”

Jason cringed inwardly. He stepped into the office, shut the door behind him, and took a chair across the desk from Paul.

Paul looked over his reading glasses at Jason. “What in heaven’s name did you say about SARS and your study? A couple of students stopped me in the hall to ask if it’s true that Joe died of SARS, and whether you think he gave it to the calves. The dean called me to say he’d heard stories about a mutant super virus.”

Jason turned pale. “I tried not to mention Joe or SARS, but Christ, that’s all the class wanted to talk about. I didn’t make any statements other than to say we do not know.”

Paul nodded. The one constant in the life of a graduate advisor was that graduate students screwed up, each in their own way. Spreading rumors and gossip wasn’t Jason’s style. Jason was much more creative; his weakness—and his strength—was a tendency to generate reasonable sounding hypotheses based on skimpy data. That, and repair bills for expensive equipment.

“I thought it was something like that,” Paul said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell the dean what happened.”

“How is Joe doing?”

“He’s still in isolation. The hospital wouldn’t give me any information, and Joe isn’t in any shape to take phone calls. Scuttlebutt has it that investigators from the Center for Disease Control will visit us tomorrow.”

“The CDC? What should we expect from them?”

“I’m not sure. We’ve never had anything like this happen before.” Paul shifted in his chair. “Answer their questions, but for God’s sake, do not speculate.” He tapped a pencil on his desk for emphasis. “Stick to the facts. The people who should be nervous are the ones who allowed a sick kid to enter the United States from Hong Kong shortly after a SARS epidemic—an epidemic that started in Hong Kong.”

“Do you think they’ve heard about our study results?” Jason asked.

“If not, I’m sure they’ll ask. It was the CDC that identified BCV as a close relative of SARS.” Paul leaned back in his chair. “There is no evidence Joe’s illness was related to your study.” Paul paused a moment. “Unless there’s something you haven’t mentioned.”

“Joe had chills, I think he had diarrhea, and he was sweating the night we did the chores for the calves.”

Paul looked at Jason warily. “And?”

“I left the isolation room Joe was working in for a few minutes. There were dark brown fluid feces on the floor near the drain when I returned.”

Paul sat up in his chair with a jerk. “Not yellow? You’re sure they were brown?”

“Right. The feces weren’t from any milk-fed calves. It would have taken Joe several minutes to get out of his contaminated clothing and get to a toilet from that room. I think he took an emergency dump in the calf pen. That’s what I would have done if I’d been in his shoes.”

Paul began to speak slowly as realization dawned upon him. “If Joe had diarrhea in the calf pen, then the calves were exposed to whatever he has, and he was exposed to BCV.” Paul’s brow furrowed and he rubbed his chin. “That complicates things.”

“Yeah. We finally produced a pneumonia in calves with BCV, but if Joe has SARS, we could have had a BCV-SARS hybrid virus in the study. That would explain the respiratory disease the calves have.”

Paul cradled his chin in one hand. “God, I hope not. If Joe was infected with a hybrid virus, the CDC will see it as a potential biological weapon and bring in the FBI.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “You wouldn’t believe how complex our lives will get if that happens. You’d better put sequencing the virus from the calves at the top of your priorities. Order whatever molecular kits you need to speed up the work.”

Jason was surprised. Paul had lectured him about thrift yesterday, which usually meant that Paul had gone over budget and was in the red. This was embarrassingly common in the department. It seemed as though professors engrossed in their work were unable to do the simplest budgeting tasks. Whatever the reason, the kits that simplified lab work were fiendishly expensive. “Will our budget cover that?”

“Money isn’t an issue. The dean will find whatever funds we need. If this virus can cause a fatal pneumonia in people like it did in those calves, BioSafety Level 3 precautions are mandatory. Everything exposed to the samples must be autoclaved, incinerated, or disinfected by an approved protocol.”

“That could delay things. I’d better get busy.”

As Jason stood to leave, Paul said, “The dean wants an inventory of samples from the study and new padlocks on all the freezers you and Ann use to store your samples. I asked Ann to take care of it this morning. Check with her. She may need help.”