No news is good news until it’s not. After no updates from Deep Space Gateway about the pathogenicity tests that would clear Crimsy’s entry visa, Dr. Levitt emailed the crew.
“Any word? Everything okay?”
“Seems to be,” Hightower emailed back a few hours later.
“Seems?” Levitt asked.
“Still running tests. Hope to have good news soon.”
“Should it take this long?” she asked Dr. Shonstein.
“It might. You figure they’re running PCR and the genetics suite to check for virulence genes and disease markers. Then lab mice. Inoculation, airborne, oral transmission. And in double quadruple triplicate. ‘Exhaustive’ is the operable word.”
“Guess I’m just nervous,” Levitt said. “What if we can’t bring our little darlin’ home?”
“Then we study her up there, I guess,” Dr. Brando said, walking into Levitt’s office with an armload of books.
“Howdy stranger,” Shonstein said.
“Don’t remind me,” he said.
“That doesn’t sound good.”
He set the books on a table. “Melissa wants sole custody. I’m thinking of firing my lawyer. This is my family law reading material for the week.”
“Ah, Mike. I’m so sorry,” Levitt said. “How’s your daughter?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “The other night, I walked by her room. It sounded like she was having trouble breathing. I went in and she had the sheet pulled up so tightly over her head, I almost had to pry it off.” He put his hand on his forehead. “She is fearless. My Lexi is fearless. You should see her on the soccer field.”
Levitt took his hand and squeezed. “Hang in there.”
“We’re here if you need us,” Shonstein said. “You know that, right?”
“I might need character witnesses,” he said.
“You? Character witnesses?” Shonstein said.
Levitt’s cell buzzed with a message from Deep Space Gateway. She switched on speaker phone.
“Good news?” she said.
“Turn on your projector app,” Hightower replied. She touched the app and set the phone on her desk. A white mouse sniffing the air in the space station’s containment lab hovered above the phone.
“This is one of the mice we inoculated with Crimsococcus,” Hightower said. “This,” his voice cracked, “is what happened.”
A pile of white salt replaced the mouse. We looked at it in horror.
“That’s all.” Hightower stammered and hesitated. “That was left. Of Roxy.”
“The mouse?” Brando asked.
We heard some odd noises, like someone trying to restrain a sneeze.
“My esteemed partner in science is trying his best not to burst out laughing,” Captain Gillory said. “Roxy’s fine. I wish I could say as much for our supply of table salt.”
Shonstein snickered. Cool, stoic Shonstein. Then she laughed. We all laughed. Even Brando.
“So are we to conclude non-pathogenicity?” Levitt asked.
“Couple more tests,” Gillory said. “But so far, Crimsococcus halocryophilus is a complete disappointment on the global pandemic excitement scale.”
I LOVE using the Intuitype keyboard. They’ve added a bunch of new features including Cloud-based grammar and composition checks so sophisticated, you can be barely literate and still churn out War and Peace. It’s a keyboard with no keys nor images of keys, just a shiny rectangular onyx surface (or blue or purple or other custom color). I’m a terrible typist but I just put my fingers on the touchscreen in typical QWERTY fashion and start typing. The keyboard does the rest, which this morning means tabulating salt dosage data from our successful creation of the extremophile virus that infected and lit up Crimsy on Mars.
They found what tech writers called Intuitype’s “magic touch technology” in that treasure trove of specs, designs, and patents Steve Jobs left behind, in of all places a floor safe that could have been tossed with truckloads of demolition debris from a house he demolished eight months before he died. It was known as the Jackling House, named for the copper mining magnate who built it, and later “The House that Steve Jobs Hated” by historic preservationists who wanted to save it. Jobs bought it and lived there as a young man, then spent 10 years trying to get city approval to rip it down. Crews were excavating a sewer when they unearthed the safe, covered with concrete and mud. Execs and entertainers broke it open during a televised event—only Steve knew the combination—and in the most non-tech of print media that emerged—yellowing files, sticky notes, even the perfunctory napkin—found designs for the next-gen Jobsian gadgetry he may have planned to unveil in one of his famous black-sweatshirt, “just one more thing” presentations.
I heard a noise in the hallway and g0t up to check it out. Cute, strange guy, which could mean a few things: a subpoena for Dr. Brando. A reporter who either sneaked into the building or was sent by our guileless Public Information Officer (PIO) on the mistaken notion we were finally ready to talk. Or, as I was about to learn, University of Washington Legal Counsel, Intellectual Property Division.
“Dr. Levitt?” he asked me.
“Uh, no.” Flattery will get you lost around here. “I don’t think she’s in. Can I help you?”
He handed me a card. “Nathaniel Hawthorn, JD, MBA.”
I looked at it and smiled.
“Different spelling,” he said, suggesting he was a member of a club to which few people my age belonged: The Keepers of Obscure Literary Knowledge, like Dickens’ critique of lawyers and the correct spelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Novelist and author of The Scarlet Letter.
“I will get this to her,” I said. “Do you want her to call you?”
“That’s okay. I may just drop back by.” He looked down at his briefcase. “When is she usually in?”
“Mornings. Early. You could call or text.”
He smiled. “Six, seven?”
“Five.”
“Five,” he said reluctantly. “Okay.” He started to walk away. “Oh—I never got your name.”
“Jennifer,” I said. “Dr. Jennifer, some day. But right now, just Jennifer.”
He smiled, I thought bashfully. So cute.
“The best scientific papers and mathematical equations are brief, so in that spirit I’d like to publish a one or two pager in a place like Nature or Science ala Watson, Crick, and the double helix,” Dr. Levitt explained at our weekly staff meeting. “But we will assure full credit for our entire team,” she continued, in a sly reference to Rosalind Franklin, the scientist whose X-ray work revealed the “double helix” structure of DNA in all its revolutionary glory, but who received no share in the Nobel Prize three men—Watson, Crick, and another co-worker, Maurice Wilkins—took home. And no credit in their one-page 1953 Nature paper.
“I should hope we’d be a bit more egalitarian than the old norms,” Dr. Marcum said.
“What about the nitty-gritty?” Dr. Brando asked. “The details, our travails, my secret recipe for Crimsy’s saltwater taffy agar?”
“I have an idea, but I wanna put it to a vote,” Dr. Levitt said. “I’d like us to consider making Jennifer’s diss the primary compendium of the nitty gritty.”
As in, my dissertation, the novel to Dr. Levitt’s Cliff’s Notes.
“Interesting idea,” Dr. Marcum said.
“We can and should publish individual papers about our own contributions,” Levitt said. “I’m just concerned that we establish provenance quickly, via the one route that’s already well under way: her dissertation.”
“I have a question about that,” I said. “How do I cite everyone? Without publications to footnote?”
“You have some of mine already,” Marcum said. “My predictive algorithms, analysis of Hale’s work on microbial movement. Already published.”
“Why not oral testimony, papers in process?” Dr. Shonstein said. “We’ve got some not-ready-for-primetime stuff on the Arxiv,” a vast online repository of up-to-the-minute scientific findings Cornell University has maintained for decades.
“Notes on napkins?” Dr. Cooper said.
“Worked for Steve Jobs,” I said.
“Well, sort of,” Marcum said. “How many years have been spent litigating that stuff? All those pseudonymous patents and people claiming it was their handwriting tucked away in his ‘one more thing’ safe?”
“U-Dub has deep pockets, but it’s up to us to protect our reputations,” Dr. Levitt said.
I almost blurted out “University of Wisconsin?” then caught myself. U-Dub, as in UW, refers in these parts to the University of Washington.
“How much does the University own of our work?” Dr. Brando asked.
“One hundred and ten percent,” Dr. Shonstein said. “The ten percent is the pound of flesh they took after they tenured us.”
“Speak for yourself,” Brando said.
“That’s right,” Marcum said. “You’re still up to bat,” meaning Brando was not yet tenured.
“That reminds me,” I said. I slipped Nathaniel Hawthorn’s card out of my pocket and slid it across the table to Dr. Levitt. She looked at it.
“University lawyer. He say what he wanted?”
“To meet you in person,” I said.
“That can’t be good,” Brando said.
“I hate to be a Doctor Downer,” Dr. Shonstein said. “But has anyone considered the shit show that will inevitably follow the love fest after the first stories break?”
“As in?” Dr. Levitt asked.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No, seriously. I sometimes need to be slapped out of my reverie, naive as it often is.”
“As one who has received a major prize, I can attest that the glory of scientific discovery is not all blinding tidings,” Marcum said. “When people asked how it felt to win a Fields, I used terms like ‘gutted’ and ‘knackered.’ When the press obsessed over the fact that I was the first and only black recipient of such a prize, I reminded them that when he was alive, David Blackwell, the eminent Berkeley mathematician, had been far more deserving than I.”
“Wait til you win the Abel,” Dr. Levitt said. “Rumor has it you’re a sho0-in.” The Abel Prize is the other big math award. And it doesn’t require recipients be under forty, like the Fields does.
“Oh, madam P.I.—be careful what you wish upon I,” Dr. Marcum said. “By the way—Sara Goode’s the sho0-in, I hear.”
“What does ‘knackered’ mean?” Dr. Cooper asked.
“Life basically sucked,” Marcum said. “Then people started forgetting about it, I got some scrummy pay raises, and Dr. Levitt fell madly in love with my locks.”
“Correction. I fell in love with your keys,” Levitt said. She looked around. “Envy, jealousy, politics. What else?”
“Is there anything patentable about Crimsy?” Dr. Cooper asked. “I assume there must be.”
“Like what?” Brando asked.
“Like your one of-a-kind agar,” Cooper said. “Like our doctoral student’s BiolEyeT adaptation. Like Marcum’s algorithms.”
“Patented. Held by Cambridge and me,” he said. “Bollocks for earnings, however.”
“Crimsy can’t be patented. Or can she?” I asked.
“I think anything can be patented, given the right patent lawyer,” Dr. Shonstein said. “They patent genes, clones, the Human Genome, vaccines, kittens.”
“The cloned kitty controversy,” Marcum said.
“There’s certainly no prior art,” Brando said, referring to “prior art”—prior articles so similar to the article seeking patent protection as to render such protection moot, so the patent office doesn’t grant it. There was nothing similar to Crimsy, which might make her more patentable.
“Haven’t microbes been patented?”
“Yeah,” I said, scrolling through my phone. I brought up a 3D projection of some words from a decades-old Supreme Court brief. “The fact that micro-organisms are alive is without legal significance for the purpose of patent law.”
“That’s the Chakrabarty case,” Shonstein said. “He patented a bacterium, but only after genetically altering it so it could eat oil. Basically the modifications got the patent, not the germ.”
“We won’t be modifying Crimsy,” Dr. Levitt said.
“But still,” Cooper said. “The minute our bug lands, whole new areas of interstellar law will spring up overnight. Who knows what kind of claims will arise. Finders keepers, so keep your grubby corporate mitts off. Mars Unique, so therefore worthy of protection. So huge for mankind, maybe a bunch of countries go to war over it.”
“Remember what Salk said,” Shonstein added. “You can’t patent the Sun.” Jonas Salk was talking about the public significance of his polio vaccine. Too big to keep from The People.
Dr. Cooper threw up another quote on his cell projector whose words lingered above our conference table.
“A patent on a product of Nature would authorize the patent holder to exclude everyone from observing, characterizing or analyzing, by any means whatsoever, the product of Nature. This barrier is inherently insurmountable: one cannot study a product of Nature if one cannot legally possess it.” – Eric Lander, Harvard-M.I.T., Human Genome Project
“Chilling,” Brando said. “Keep law out of science.”
“Look what it’s done to families, right?” Marcum said.
“You got it.”
“Can you believe we’ve been able to keep the press out of this?” Levitt said.
“That’s good and bad,” Marcum said. “A wise Fields Medal recipient told me that if you win a Nobel or a Fields or a Pulitzer or an Oscar or whatever, but nobody hears the applause, did you really win anything?”
“I’ve never won anything,” Shonstein said. “Never been close to winning anything. So I wouldn’t know.”
“Nonsense, Rebecca,” Levitt said. “You’ve won so much grant funding I’ve lost count.”
“Somehow,” Shonstein said. “That never seems like a win. More like ‘thank God, a reprieve for another year.’ Relief my family won’t be homeless. You know—basic needs kinda stuff.”
“Grants are good. But credit is the coin of our realm and it’s been no small worry to me that we haven’t been able to build up much incremental credit via media, publication, or otherwise as MarsMicro has progressed,” Marcum said. “We’ve done everything virtually in the dark.”
“That’s the way NASA and SpaceTek want it,” Levitt said, the latter referring to the private company that launched MarsMicro for less than a third the cost NASA budgeted. “I’ve tried for a middle ground. Debated our Congressman for leeway. Stared down Hale to get off our case about making sure everything is perfect before publication. Listened to Rebecca arguing with JPL.” She looked at us. “Sorry. PTSD.”
“I get it,” Shonstein said. “I hate the politics, too.”
Everyone sat silently.
“Well—we’ve beat this topic to death for the day,” Levitt said. “I’ll talk to that lawyer. Maybe he’ll have some words of wisdom. Anyone have any specific questions for him?”
“Yes,” Dr,. Cooper said. “Will we have to own Crimsy to study it?”
Shonstein sighed and tapped the table with her pen.
“I’ll be sure to ask,” Levitt said. “We also need to vote. All in favor of making Jennifer’s dissertation our novel-length source for all things Crimsococcus, say ‘aye.’”
The ‘ayes’ carried. “Thank you,” I said. “What an amazing honor.” I teared and sniffled.
Brando squeezed my forearm and smiled.