Coronavirus: Chapter 1

Chapter 7

St. Paul Campus, 8:00 a.m. Tuesday, March 20

            Paul walked into Bill Thompson’s office at 8:30 the next morning. “Bill, we’ve got a problem.”

            Bill was munching a cheese Danish at his desk when Paul entered. He put his hand to his mouth, chewed rapidly and swallowed. “Yeah, I know. Ann and Jason are the two best grad students I can think of to work on it, though. That was lucky.”

            “That’s the problem. Ann came into my office as soon as I arrived this morning. She was crying and blubbering about something. I couldn’t follow most of what she said, but she made it clear that she will not work with Jason again. She doesn’t even want to be in the same room with him.”

            Bill put his coffee cup down and looked at Paul quizzically. “What? They were a couple before they moved here. The students in my group have a pool going on how long it’ll take them to figure out they might as well be married.” Bill sat back in his chair. “What the hell happened?”

            “Something about a book Ann found in Jason’s couch.” Paul took a chair on the other side of Bill’s desk. “Whatever it was, it really set her off. She’s refused to take calls from him—she said she threw her cell phone in the toilet after he tried to call her five times last night.”

            “Damn! That was a nice phone, too.” Bill rapped the eraser end of a pencil on his desk. “Ann’s about as level headed a student as I’ve had. What kind of book could do that?”

            “No idea.” Paul leaned forward in thought. “God, I hope it wasn’t kiddy porn or something else illegal.”

            “I can’t see that. Jason’s taste runs to well-developed women. He looks at what’s around—hell, all of us do in the summer—but I’ve never seen or heard anything to make me think he was playing the field.”

Paul put his hands on the arms of the chair and stood. He had arthritis in both knees and pushing off with his hands as he stood reduced the pain. “I hope Ann and Jason get this straightened out.” He put his hands on his hips in frustration. “It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. I guess I’d better start thinking of someone to act as a liaison between them. Every day is a new catastrophe—I’ve never had a project like this.”

 Bill was absently doodling with the pencil as he thought. “What you described is so out of character for Ann. She’s smart, rational, and normally emotionally stable. I wonder … do you think, I mean … could Ann be pregnant?”

Jason arrived at his lab in the basement. It was only twelve feet on a side and without windows. Because boiling is used to melt DNA to single strands and to prepare nutrient broth for growing bacteria, microbiology and molecular biology labs have a little in common with a kitchen. A black counter top, the lab bench, ran along two walls, supported by cabinets that looked, except for their fiberglass construction, as though they belonged in a kitchen. Similar cabinets hung from the walls above the bench and a small microwave oven sat on the bench in a corner.

A biosafety cabinet covered the third wall. It was a narrow stainless steel table on which both ends and back were enclosed in stainless steel panels that merged with a hood four feet above the table. A glass panel covered the front of the cabinet. It hung from the hood, coming within six inches of the table. The opening under the glass provided enough room for technicians to insert their hands and forearms into the cabinet to work. Filter-sterilized air circulated within the hood to assure that neither the work nor the worker was contaminated. All laboratory work on samples from the calf study had to be done in the cabinet.