MARCO HAD BEGUN RUNNING polyacrylamide gels as soon as Kevin left. He turned on an electrical current to separate the proteins in his experimental brews and prepared the equipment and reagents for his next steps. Two hours later, he switched off the current, peeled the slippery panels from their glass plates, bound them to nitrocellulose paper, and immersed the gels in electrophoresis trays. After another two hours, he bathed the blotted sheets in a series of monoclonal antibody solutions and washes. Six hours after starting, he was ready to add substrate for the final stain. Marco traversed the great laboratory, passing floor-to-ceiling windows, to a row of ventilated hoods. His only spectators were the redwood trees just outside, swaying in the breeze.
He envisaged blue bands about to emerge. Up to now he had been too subsumed with each step of the experiment—measuring reagents, manipulating gels, carefully timing each incubation and wash—to imagine how the blots would look. As he poured in substrate, the imminence of having evidence he could photograph and send to the journal editor thrilled him. He concentrated on the undulating sheets of paper, on where he wanted to see blue bands appear.
As he lifted each tray onto a rocker, he willed the bands to be in the locations he had predicted, visible proof of his hypothesis. Marco was on a roll. All the nitrocellulose sheets, so fragile they would crack like an egg shell if mishandled slightly, had peeled off the gels without a single tear. The photos would be impressive.
He saw the positive control columns first.
Perfecto, he thought, as a thick smudge flowered where his control protein ought to be. The negative control strip was pure white. Perfect again. Columns of blue bands appeared. Exactamente.
He was satisfied until he noticed the bands increased in size from left to right, not from right to left as he had expected.
“What? No! This can’t be. Unbelievable! Did I reverse the enzyme concentrations? Chíngame, que pendejo soy!”
Kevin arrived to find him crouched over a lab bench, head in hands.
“Uh-oh. What happened?”
“I don’t know. It’s all wrong, and I can’t figure out why. I remember exactly what I did yesterday when I loaded the gels. The tubes are still in the correct order. How I could have made a mistake?”
“What’s the problem?”
“The replicates with more enzyme shows less protein on the blot, not more.”
Kevin gave him a sympathetic pat.
“What did I do wrong?” Marco implored.
“You’re asking me?”
“Even a contaminant can’t explain these results. Maybe, if the enzyme I used acted on another molecule in the cell…which could have blocked the reaction…No, that’s ridiculous.”
Kevin had no idea what enzyme or blocking molecule Marco was talking about but felt he had to say something.
“Why’s it ridiculous?”
Marco gave him a dismissive frown. Then his eyes opened wide.
“Sangre de Cristo!” he shouted. “Of course, the new pathway the Cambridge people just found, it must be here, too. That’s the only possible explanation. You’re a genius, Kevin!”
Baffled and delighted, Kevin asked, “Can you tell me what we just discovered?”
In a cozy French restaurant on Russian Hill, Marco was elaborating, for the second time that evening, on what a breakthrough this was. His research focused on stem cells obtained from the earliest stage of a developing mouse embryo. A stem cell could proliferate indefinitely, and its progeny could mature into all the different kinds of cells that constitute an adult mouse—gut, brain, bone, skin, muscle, and more. In theory, a living, reproducing mouse could be grown from a single stem cell after Marco and his colleagues had altered its DNA. If feasible, such a technique could advance at warp speed the understanding of how genetics and disease interact.
Marco’s unexpected results suggested a new way for scientists to stimulate stem cell growth. He knew precisely what molecules to look for now in order to explain his findings. Before the entrees were served, he had envisioned a set of experiments to confirm his new hypothesis as well as assure his paper’s acceptance by the journal. Although Kevin was excited and amused, the terminology of cutting-edge cellular biology was hard to follow. Keeping up his end of the conversation was becoming tedious. He was glad to see Marco turn his attention from science to food.
Marco made quick work of his scallops. As a waitress emptied the rest of a Napa Valley chardonnay into his glass, he reached under her arm to pick at Kevin’s cassoulet. Kevin thought ruefully about Marco’s daily six mile run—the obvious reason he could eat voraciously and not gain weight. Kevin carefully watched his own diet, rarely had more than one drink, consistently took in fewer calories than Marco, yet still was twenty pounds overweight. Marco had been urging him for months to run with him, promising that he’d slow down to an easy jog. But Kevin hated exercise as much as he hated professional sports. Both were associated with his father’s auto repair shop—the heavy engine blocks and transmissions he had lugged around, the radio station always tuned to a game, the frozen bolts and scraped knuckles, the omnipresent black grease.
“I’m…what’s the term? I know, thunderstruck,” said Marco. “That’s an English word? It sounds German. I’m thunderstruck you can get food this good in America. And it’s not even expensive.”
“This isn’t cheap,” Kevin remonstrated.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart. My treat. It’s the least we can do for ourselves after our vacation day was so abruptly interrupted. See what I mean. That sounds German too.”
“I’m sorry, baby.”
“Don’t be sorry. You were a hero today. Didn’t Herb say how much it will help the cause?”
Marco pumped his fist and leaned back to study Kevin. He held up his wineglass.
“I’m so proud of you.”
Kevin laughed self-consciously.
He caressed Marco’s thigh under the table and asked, “Is this what…what being in love is?”
“Oh yes,” Marco answered, his eyes sparkling, “I think so. De veras, I do.”