Outlaw

“What if I were to tell you that genetic engineering is no longer a skill set relegated to an army of PhDs? Would that worry you?” She saw a few heads nod, but she zeroed in on the ones who still seemed skeptical. “Would you agree that in our lives, the greatest fear has been from a nuclear threat?” A few more heads nodded. “But we know that nobody can make nuclear material without first having access to specialized centrifuges, so we target those and restrict who has access. We sanction nations who try. We sign treaties.” More heads nod.

“There is nothing like that for biology.”

The heads stopped moving.

“In the early 2000s, graduate students were lauded for having completed an initial characterization of a single gene. In less than three years, graduate students were doing experiments on twenty to thirty thousand genes. All at once.”

She stepped away from the podium and reached behind her to turn on the microphone clipped to her blouse. “I can already hear many of you saying, ‘So what? What’s the big deal? Isn’t this the whole purpose of science? To understand pathogen genomes? Bacterial? Viral? Isn’t that a good thing?’

“In 2004, a group of mathematicians and engineers from MIT created a competition called iGEM — International Genetically Engineered Machine. The worldwide synthetic biology competition was initially aimed at undergraduate students but has since expanded to include high school students.” She paused to let that sink in. “What was initially five teams of thirty-one participants has grown to over three hundred and fifty teams and almost eight thousand participants.” Another pause. “Here are some of the top entrants from last year.”

Tan Lily walked back to the podium and picked up her notes. “Graduate students from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark created biodegradable fishing nets by combining spider silk — that has a comparable strength and flexibility to nylon — with mussel foot protein.” She flipped the page. “Undergraduate students from the University of Technology Eindhoven in the Netherlands tackled the challenges faced by over one million people affected by the inflammatory disorder ANCA-associated vasculitis. They created a Modular and Personalized Autoimmune Cell Therapy by engineering mammalian cells that detect the autoantibodies and subsequently produce the anti-inflammatory cytokine interleukin-ten, which results in suppression of the autoimmune response.”

She looked up and studied the crowd. “This is good, right? This is why we chose to go into science and medicine. This is why we are here right now.”

The lights dimmed and the screen lit up behind her, divided into quadrants with pictures of scientists in each. “Who can tell me what these scientists are working on?”

Not a single hand rose from the crowd.

“The exact same approach iGEM uses to encourage students to engineer genes for the benefit of our environment or to improve the human experience through therapeutics is being used… right now… to create devastating bioweapons. Everything we love about biology can be flipped.”

The lights came on again, and Tan Lily stood at the center of the stage, surveying the audience. The hushed murmur that had been present at the beginning of her lecture was gone. The crowd of doctors, researchers, faculty, and students was silent.

“My name is Dr. Tan Lily, and today I am going to talk to you about genetically engineered pathogens and how they pose the greatest risk to global security.” She paused. “Most importantly, I am going to talk to you about what we — the scientific community — can do to protect against it.”

8

Punky sat in her car in a parking lot off Gilman Drive, across the street from the Leichtag Biomedical Research facility. Her eyes were glued to the door as she waited for a sea of people to leave the auditorium following Dr. Tan Lily’s lecture. Punky still wasn’t sure what to make of the doctor, but there was no way she could ignore SUBLIME’s messages.

He was her best chance at finally uncovering KMART’s identity.

She leaned back in her Alcantara and Laguna leather seat and stared across the satin black — painted hood, wondering if she was going to be forced to return to the Southwest Field Office with her tail tucked between her legs. She had already pissed off Camron enough with her routine absences and going off on her own for what he thought amounted to a wild goose chase.

But, then again, she was the only special agent on his team who had prevented an operative from China’s Ministry of State Security from sinking an aircraft carrier. If she wanted to focus her energy on preventing something like that from happening again, she figured she had earned that right.

Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket, and she looked away from the door to see Camron’s name pop up on the caller ID. She took a deep breath, already fearing that he might clip her wings and recall her back to the office.

“Hey, Camron.”

“Did you find her?”