Rising Pressure, page 20
When she got back to her office, Martin was sitting in her rotating office chair, moving it back and forth while he read. She didn’t know how he did that without getting dizzy or sick. It made her dizzy just watching.
“I see you’ve made yourself at home, as usual. Could I have my seat back, please?”
Martin reluctantly pulled himself from the cushioned chair and sat down in one of the stationary chairs in her office. He barely pulled his eyes from the book when he moved, but somehow didn’t trip over anything in the process. He sat sideways in the chair with his legs draped over one of the arms. She shrugged and logged into her computer. She was just about to open her email when her phone rang.
“Hi Eleanor. What’s up?”
“I just saved the sequence into my folder. Did you want me to look through it or just leave it for you to analyze?”
Addison thought for a moment before answering. “Let’s both look it over and see if we find the same result.”
“Okay. I’ll let you know when I’m finished.” Eleanor responded, knowing that she wouldn’t get through it as quickly as her boss.
Addison had a shortcut on her desktop to the lab’s common folder, which allowed her to easily access each of the lab member’s sub-folders. She clicked it open and quickly found the sequence file that Eleanor had saved. She could copy the sequence into a program that came with their sequencer to have it screen for mutations. This was a much faster option than going through it base by base. The computer that Eleanor had in the lab also had the application installed. Addison knew that it was virtually impossible for them to get different results, but wanted someone else to review it with her nonetheless. Because the DNA sequence of the sodium channel was so long, it would take a few minutes for the program to scan through it. She looked through her emails while she waited for it to finish. The only relevant email she had was from Dr. Watt’s secretary reminding the department about the Thanksgiving meal on Wednesday. Addison deleted the rest of the messages and set a reminder in her phone to pick up a pumpkin pie from the deli on her way home the next day. She knew Ryan’s mom would happily make one for her, but hated to ask as she was also making most of the Thanksgiving meal for their family too. Her computer chirped with a notification. The program had finished analyzing the DNA sequence. She mentally crossed her fingers even though she wasn’t sure what she was hoping for.
The application identified one mutation in the sequence. Addison scrolled over to its location to see if the mutated base would cause a change in the amino acid sequence. Even though she had been working in biological research her entire adult life, she didn’t have all of the amino acid sequences memorized.
“Hey, Martin—”
“Yes, Mom?” He asked without taking his eyes off the page.
“Can you reach that yellow folder that’s on the shelf behind you?”
Martin stuck his finger in his book to mark his place and then turned around to look for the yellow folder. He passed it over to her.
“Thanks, Dude.” She said as she took it from him.
“What’s in the folder?”
“It has all the base code triplets for the twenty amino acids. I need to look one up.”
“Why wouldn’t you just Google it?”
“Because this is how I do it. Come here and look.” She waited for him to put his book down and come to her desk. “You like computer coding, so maybe this will be interesting to you. Each amino acid has two to six combinations of base pairs—the A-T-G-C letters that code for it. We ran a DNA sample through our sequencer over the weekend and it reported a mutation in one base. Just because a base is changed doesn’t mean that the amino acid will change.”
“Okay, that makes sense. Did yours change?”
“Well, the wild type—that’s the original sequence—has a triplet of AGG, which codes for arginine. Our new sequence reported GGG, which codes for?” She let him look through her printed list of codes to find the correct amino acid himself.
“Pro-line.” He said the second syllable with a long “i” sound.
“Pro-lean.” She corrected him.
“So, it is a mutation!”
“Yes, it certainly is.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“To be perfectly honest, Martin, I’m not sure. It answers one question but raises many more. Let me show you the difference between the two amino acids. We also have to look at where the amino acid is within the bigger structure of the channel. Arginine is a positive charged amino acid.”
“Like a proton?”
“Sort of like that. Some of the amino acids are positively charged, some are neutral, and some are negative.”
“What is proline?”
“Great question, my little scientist! Proline is neutral. It’s also a lot smaller than arginine.” She showed him the simple chemical structures that were also in her yellow folder.
“They look very different. Does the mutation make a big change?”
“It might. We’re just learning about it. I need to look some things up and see if I can find out some more about it before I can answer that question well. Why don’t you get back to your reading?”
“Okay, Mom. Thanks for the cool biology lesson.” She ruffled his hair and then turned back to her computer. She opened the publication database to see if the arginine-proline mutation was documented. Before she could type in her query, her phone rang again.
“Hi, Dr. Fischer, it’s Eleanor. I got a mutation in position 655. Looks like an A to a G.”
“I got the same, Eleanor. I was just showing Martin what it means. Let me know when Anthony gets in. I want to talk to him about it. This is obviously what is causing his troubles with his experiment. Hopefully, it will set his mind at ease that he hasn’t lost his touch or something.”
“Will do. Talk to you later.” Eleanor hung up. Addison went back to searching publications that cited a mutation in the sodium channel. She wasn’t familiar with this particular mutation, so she didn’t think it was one that had been well-studied. When Anthony arrived, she was going to have him look at the structure map of their channel to see where the mutation was located. She also needed him to set aside any of the DNA he had amplified with the mutation so that no one else inadvertently used it in their experiments. Ideally, she would like him to put it in a completely different box and clearly label it, but experience told her that he’d just put a red dot on it or something and move it to a corner of his box. She sighed and rolled her eyes. She would personally watch him move it out of his working box.
CHAPTER 62
When Laina finished dividing out her cells into new dishes, she returned to her desk to outline her experiment for the week. She was still on edge about Anthony’s results from lab meeting and wished she could secretly figure out if he had taken her construct. She knew Emmitt thought it was just a fluke of the lab, but he hadn’t seen the images. Laina was certain that the cretin had stolen some of her sample while she was out of the room. Proving it would blow their cover, so she had to figure out a way to get it back without arousing suspicion. She couldn’t stay late and look through all of his boxes. Nothing was labeled in any coherent manner, so she’d never know what to take from him. She figured that he must have taken a few microliters from her ice bucket, which was why she hadn’t realized anything was missing. It was possible that he’d used all of it after the last two weeks and didn’t have any left.
She had heard Emmitt mention that Anthony had a history of leaving his samples out overnight in an ice bucket. Maybe she could find a way to make it look as though he had been careless with reagents again. Still, she couldn’t do it herself because he would definitely deny being responsible for the loss. If they reviewed the building entrance history, her fob would reveal that she was the only one present when it happened. She needed to find someone else to sabotage the samples.
“You look deep in thought.” Anthony startled her.
“Oh! Hey! Sorry, I was trying to decide if I wanted to add any conditions to my experiment this week.” She lied. “How was your weekend?”
“It was okay. I’m still pretty frustrated by the results from the last two weeks. I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong.”
“Sorry to interrupt, dears. Anthony. Dr. Fischer asked that you call her.” Eleanor interjected.
Laina turned back to her computer while Anthony picked up the lab phone. She tried to eavesdrop on their conversation, but she could only partially hear what he was saying. After he hung up the phone, he logged into his computer and started typing. She wondered what Addison had asked him to do, but didn’t want to be nosey. Before she could come up with a reason to walk past his desk, she heard Addison coming down the hallway from her office. Laina grabbed her lab notebook so that she could use it as a screen to keep them from seeing her stare.
“Hey, Anthony—did you get the structure pulled up?” Addison asked as she walked over to his desk. He slid his chair over to the side so she could see the screen easily too. Laina wished she knew what they were discussing. Addison was pointing at the computer screen and gesturing with her hands while Anthony listened. Laina could only guess as to what she was saying to him. After a few minutes, they both got up and left the room. Laina wondered if she could casually eavesdrop in the hallway under the guise of answering a personal phone call. She decided it was worth a shot and grabbed her cell phone from her messenger bag. She couldn’t quite hear everything they were saying, but caught some of it.
“…samples you have left from when you amplified the DNA last. Label … Here, … work. …different box… so we don’t mix them up on accident. Then check with Juan to see if he has any wild type left from his last set of experiments. You can use that for the time being.”
Laina held her phone up to her ear and turned away from the doorway when she heard Addison’s steps coming toward the hallway. She made sure to speak up as Addison passed so that she knew Laina was on the phone. Based on what she had overheard, she wanted to run across the street and call Emmitt right then, but knew her hasty exit the previous Friday was already a bit suspicious. She would have to wait and call him in the evening.
Emmitt had told her over the weekend that he was granted permission to start recruiting volunteers for the drug trial, but had to keep specifics to a minimum since no start date had been announced yet. Each person interested in volunteering for the study had to undergo a DNA screening. The study would be done with a double-blind where neither the participant nor the doctor administering the drug therapy knew if they were getting a placebo or the real deal. However, Emmitt had made a special request that he be able to select all the participants based on their DNA screening results. He made the request saying that he was more familiar with the mutations of interest and agreed to only select volunteers that had the relevant mutations. It would be a very specified study, but then the gene therapy they were developing was for a specific group of people with specific mutations. The therapy wouldn’t be meaningful without the mutations that Emmitt had studied for the last two decades. On the one hand, Laina was surprised they were giving him so much control over their drug trial. She knew that he had a lot of connections in the world of scientific research and probably knew the right person to ask.
CHAPTER 63
When Addison got back to her office, Martin was seated in her office chair clicking around on her computer. He hadn’t even looked up when she entered the room. She knew that she had logged out before she left to meet with Anthony and gave Martin the side eye, knowing that he had hacked into her computer.
“Okay, little raccoon, confess. I know you hacked my password.”
“Mom! I didn’t hear you get back.” He looked at her with wide eyes.
“I take it you finished your reading for today?”
“Yeah, I put in my thirty minutes. By the way, your password is terrible. I got it on the first try.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I do love taking criticism from my favorite sixth grader, but what is wrong with my password? I followed all of the constraints that the university requires. The IT department gave it a strong rating.”
“You used your birthday for the number and your and dad’s initials for the letters. How is that considered strong?”
“I guess they didn’t realize that the master of all password breaking skills would ever be a risk to their system. What are you doing to my computer right now? This doesn’t look like Solitaire.”
“Okay. Do you remember when I was telling you about the new tracking program that had been discovered?”
She didn’t, but he talked about computers and video games so much, she figured he had mentioned it at some point. “More or less. Why?”
“I found one on your computer. Look.” He turned the monitor to face her and pointed at the screen.
“For the moment, let’s pretend like I’ve never used a computer before and I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She said, wondering what in the world he was trying to show her.
“It’s okay if you don’t remember, Mom. I found one of those tracker keys on your computer. The ones that people attach to emails without you realizing it. You open the attachment and the key gets added to your device without you realizing it. The file is hidden unless you know what to look for, so it’s virtually undetectable to the layperson.”
“And there’s one on my computer?! Surely our anti-virus software would have caught it.”
“No, Mom. The anti-virus software won’t find this because it doesn’t look like a normal virus or bug. It’s a completely different kind of code. I’m sure they will catch up and be able to find them soon, but it’s beyond all of the normal spam-ware and anti-virus firewalls. Do you want me to turn it off? I can do that, but I need to read some more about how to remove it before I try to do that.”
“I don’t know. Can you see when it was added? Was it added by someone with network access here, or is that not necessary?”
“It usually comes from an email, though someone could add it directly if they have access to your machine.”
“No one else has access to my office. Not even the custodial crew. We put our trash out for them to take on Tuesdays and Fridays, so they don’t have to enter the offices.” Addison racked her brain, wondering what attachment she had opened that had given some stranger access to her computer. Thankfully, she never did any online shopping from her work computer, so her credit card and bank information should still be secure. “I should probably let IT know about this, right?”
“Wouldn’t it be more interesting to find out where it came from first?!” Martin raised his eyebrows at her. “I can figure this out for you, Mom. This is a walk in the park.”
“I’m going to call your dad and see what he thinks. I really think I should call IT and alert them to this. What if it’s infected other computers in the department?”
“That’s not how it works, Mom. It only affects the computer where the download originated.”
She turned her head sideways in confusion. “What?”
“Okay. Someone sent you an email with an attachment. You opened the attachment and downloaded it. The key was hidden in your system. Now if you were to forward the email attachment to someone else, then it could also get into their system—but only if they downloaded the attachment too.”
Addison got her cell phone out of her purse and called Ryan. It went straight to voice mail. She didn’t really know what she wanted to say in the message, so she just hung up. She started to send a text but then realized the tracker could be on her phone too.
“Could this tracker thingy be on my phone too?”
“I haven’t read about them being designed for cell phones yet. I can look if you want me to.”
Addison handed him her phone and watched as he pulled flipped through various screens, occasionally searching for something on his iPad, then looking back at the phone. After a few minutes he gave it back to her.
“I can’t find anything on it, Mom. Either you didn’t open the attachment on your phone ever or it can’t embed into the operating system of a cell phone.”
“Okay. I’m going to text your dad in case he sees the missed call and gets worried.” She thumbed off a text saying that everything was fine, but she had a question to run by him when he had a minute.
“Do you want me to turn the key off? It’s not hard.”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. See if you can figure out when it showed up and maybe that will help me figure out where it came from in the first place.”
Addison sighed. She really didn’t have time to deal with people messing with her computer. What was she doing that was so interesting someone wanted to keep tabs on it? She immediately thought about the mysterious notes. Maybe whoever was sending the notes had found a way to watch her computer and keep tabs on Emmitt’s lab? She wasn’t sure if she should report this to Emmitt too. She didn’t have any intellectual property of his on her computer. The only things she had looked at from his lab were part of the public domain and accessible to anyone. Maybe she should call Emmitt and see if this had ever happened to him. She didn’t want to spook him out of continuing with the collaboration though. It had gotten off to a good start and could really give her lab a boost in the long term.
“Whoever made this really knows computer code. They’ve hidden the time stamp. I can probably still find it another way, but it will take me longer.” Martin told her.
“Let’s take a break from it for now. I’m not doing anything suspicious or illegal, so I can’t imagine that whoever is trying to eavesdrop on my work life is paying that close attention. I need to get some more work done before lunch. I’ll let you look some more tomorrow, okay?”
