Cottonmouth by Eric Yancy

Author:Eric Yancy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2021-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

23

Dr. Belinda torres was just finishing up her day when the call came in.

“Bee, its Al McGuire, how are you?”

“Al! How are you my friend?” With a slight Puerto Rican accent, her voice registered both pleasure and surprise. “I was so sorry to hear about your wife. I only met her once, but she seemed to be such a wonderful lady.” “She is,” replied Al.

“She really is.” It had been weeks, but Al refused to speak of Marnie in the past tense.

Dr. Torres noticed and felt a twinge of concern for her old friend. After a slight pause she regained her composure and asked, “¿Qué te trae a mi puerta?” Dr. Torres was not sure her old acquaintance remembered any of the Spanish she had taught him during their time working together, but the question seemed to lighten his mood.

He paused for a minute before haltingly responding, “Necesito un pequeño favor … and that’s as far as I can get in Spanish.”

They both laughed, and Al suddenly realized that he had not laughed in weeks.

Dr. Torres was a world-renowned virologist. Her work developing sequencing algorithms for viral identification was legendary, but only in the scientific community. When it came to public acclaim, her colleagues were always the ones to be rewarded. She and Al shared a bond in that way. They had gotten to know each other when they’d worked together at an institute one summer. The institute’s fellowships were sponsored by a scientific think tank, and places were granted by invitation only. Experts from both industry and academia were invited to present research and share cutting-edge theories for two weeks. Seated at the same luncheon table for one session, the two scientists had started a conversation. In a short time, they realized they had a lot in common. Both should have been department chairs but neither were. At the end of that luncheon where they figured out that they had both been subject to the same indignities, they dubbed the meal The Passed-over Meal. They kept that joke to themselves.

“You know my Marnie died of complications to the virus. I’m just trying to do some transmission testing. I know the major mechanism of spread is airborne, but I want to detect some possible levels of contamination that may not be airborne. So I just want you to test a few samples for me, run some PCRs on them, and see what you find. I could probably ask one of the guys here, but you know how they’re always prying. If I come up with a discovery, I want it to be dedicated to Marnie’s memory in the paper I write. I am specifically looking for viral fragments of the Q47cx virus. Beyond whether it is there, I want to know, if you find it, whether it’s the same in each sample.”

Dr. Torres was one of the original pioneers of polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, in which a tiny fragment of the genetic material is duplicated millions or billions of times for easier identification and study.

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