"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

rolls of the dice. One of them had to look promising enough to attract the capital that would allow it to
grow further. That was what they had been trying to accomplish for the five years of the company’s
existence, and the effort was just beginning to show results with these experiments. What they needed
now was to be able to insert their successfully tailored gene into the patient’s own cells, so that afterward
it would be the patient’s own body producing increased amounts of the needed proteins. If that worked,
there would be no immune response from the body’s immune system, and with the protein being
produced in therapeutic amounts, the patient would be not just helped, but cured.

Amazing.

But (and it was getting to be a big but) the problem of getting the altered DNA into living patients’ cells
hadn’t been solved. Leo and his people were not physiologists, and they hadn’t been able to do it. No
one had. Immune systems existed precisely to keep these sorts of intrusions from happening. Indeed, one
method of inserting the altered DNA into the body was to put it into a virus and give the patient a viral
infection, benign in its ultimate effects because the altered DNA reached its target. But since the body
fought viral infections, it was not a good solution. You didn’t want to compromise further the immune
systems of people who were already sick.

So, for a long time now they had been in the same boat as everyone else, chasing the Holy Grail of gene
therapy, a “targeted nonviral delivery system.” Any company that came up with such a system, and
patented it, would immediately have the method licensed for scores of procedures, and very likely one of
the big pharmaceuticals would buy the company, making everyone in it rich, and often still employed.
Over time the pharmaceutical might dismantle the acquisition, keeping only the method, but at that point
the start-up’s employees would be wealthy enough to laugh that off—retire and go surfing, or start up
another start-up and try to hit the jackpot again. At that point it would be more of a philanthropic hobby
than the cutthroat struggle to make a living that it often seemed before the big success arrived.

So the hunt for a targeted nonviral delivery system was most definitely on, in hundreds of labs around the
world. And now Derek had bought one of these labs. Leo stared at the new announcement on the
company website. Derek had to have bought it on spec, because if the method had been well-proven,
there was no way Derek would have been able to afford it. Some biotech firm even smaller than Torrey
Pines—Urtech, based in Bethesda, Maryland (Leo had never heard of it)—had convinced Derek that
they had found a way to deliver altered DNA into humans. Derek had made the purchase without
consulting Leo, his chief research scientist. His scientific advice had to have come from his vice president,
Dr. Sam Houston, an old friend and early partner. A man who had not done lab work in a decade.

So. It was true.

Leo sat at his desk, trying to relax his stomach. They would have to assimilate this new company, learn
their technique, test it. Ithad been patented, Leo noted, which meant they had it exclusively at this point,
as a kind of trade secret—a concept many working scientists had trouble accepting. A secret scientific
method? Was that not a contradiction in terms? Of course a patent was a matter of public record, and
eventually it would enter the public domain. So it wasn’t a trade secret in literal fact. But at this stage it
was secret enough. And it could not be a sure thing. There wasn’t much published about it, as far as Leo
could tell. Some papers in preparation, some papers submitted, one paper accepted—he would have to
check that one out as soon as possible—and a patent. Sometimes they awarded them so early. One or
two papers were all that supported the whole approach.

Secret science. “Goddamn it,” Leo said to his room. Derek had bought a pig in a poke. And Leo was
going to have to open the poke and poke around.