The Lethal Helix by Don Donaldson

Author:Don Donaldson
Language: ara, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BelleBooks
Published: 2013-11-17T16:00:00+00:00

20

JESSIE PICKED UP a Ketamine-anesthetized mouse and began taping it to the oak board she’d found in her garage.

After her meeting yesterday with Bruxton, she’d told Richard the good news, then gone to her computer and combed the prion literature looking for papers that might contain some technical hints on how to obtain the quickest test results. She’d taken a list of promising papers to the company library and located the full articles. The best advice she’d found was rather obvious: inject the test material into the animal’s brain.

She’d spent the morning rounding up the things she’d need and arranging them in the lab Bruxton had told her to use. Now, just twenty-four hours after this opportunity had presented itself, she was within minutes of making the first injection.

She wished there were some alternative to the use of animals to obtain the information she needed. But exposing the extract to cells in culture wouldn’t tell her enough. She had to see what, if any, neurologic effects were produced by the extracts. Only if the human illness was reproduced in her test animals would she know whether she had found the infectious agent.

The first strip of duct tape went across the animal’s snout. The second, she placed well behind its eyes so about half the head was exposed. She took the pinioned animal to the laminar flow hood and flicked off the UV light that had sterilized the work area. She placed the animal inside the hood on the stainless steel work surface, then went to the refrigerator and got the extracts she’d prepared from a small sample of the suspect meat and from a similar sample of meat she’d bought at a grocery.

She placed both extracts in the hood next to the sterile Hamilton syringes she’d use for the injection. Mice are notably resistant to bacterial infection. Even so, Jessie had sterilized everything she’d use, including the extracts, which she’d passed through a bacterial exclusion filter.

Her first objective was simply to prove that the meat was the source of the illness that had killed Richard’s patients. Once that was established, she could devise further experiments to clarify the nature of the causative agent. So in this first set of animals, she would inject six mice with an unmodified extract from the suspect meat, and six more with extract from the purchased meat.

She surveyed the contents of the hood to make sure everything she’d need was inside. Satisfied, she sat down, donned a jeweler’s headset with magnifying lenses, and reached for a cotton swab, which she dipped in 95% alcohol. After disinfecting the fur on the top of the animal’s head with the swab, she made a midline scalpel incision in the skin and pulled the edges back with tiny retractors. It took less than twenty seconds to bore through the bone to the animal’s brain using a Dremel Moto Tool in a procedure so bloodless she didn’t even need the battery-operated cautery pen she’d had standing by.

With a Hamilton syringe, she carefully injected a tenth of a microliter of extract into the mouse’s brain.

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