fic: Do No Harm 1/2
My sga_santa story:
Title: Do No Harm, 1/2
Written For: dr_dredd, who asked for "Carson. Lots and lots of him.... Nothing sappy, please. :-)" You, got it. There is nothing sappy here.
Rating: PG-13 for explicit biomedicine
Note: As my beta reader mandragora1 said: "Carson's actions would be unconscionable in our galaxy, but in Pegasus? I'm not sure what I'd do in their situation. I think you've caught that uncertainty well in this story." Thanks to her from me for helping me tighten this up, and thanks to her from you readers for her making me edit out 68% of the hard science.
Summary Converting the Wraith into humans was not an easy thing. Carson is challenged scientifically by the difficulty, ethically by the implications, and personally by an irascible biomedical genius. Carson Beckett, OMS (original male scientist), others.
Comment: My edit of my sga_santa pinch hit. I pulled out of the exchange because I knew work was going to suck around this time, and foolishly volunteered. I'm an idiot, because it fucked up my work life as I knew it would, being why I pulled out, but I'm glad of the story that resulted. The Dr. LeBlanc is a shameless self-insertion, although he's smarter than I am.
Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.The modern Hippocratic oath.
I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.
I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work.The ancient Hippocratic oath
"So," said Rodney, setting down his tray next to Carson, "I hear you have your own Kavanagh."
"No one is that bad," said Sheppard, sitting down across from them with his own lunch.
Carson didn't ask who they meant. No one but LeBlanc, who had created complaints in two days of arriving. "No, he's not that bad, but he's a pain in the arse. Doesn't care much for physicians, and doesn't think much of us as scientists."
"Well, who'd have thought I'd have a point of agreement with someone who's been compared to Kavanagh," said Rodney. "He's reasonably bright."
Carson glared at him, but the old argument had lost its sting. "I didn't know you thought that much of biochemists."
"He's more of a biophysicist," Rodney corrected, "at least according to his publication record. Plus, he's got a braid which is marginally less stupid than a ponytail. We didn't ask for him; he just showed up." At Carson's questioning look he said, "What? I'm head of science. I read everyone's CVs, and I interviewed him when he came on the Daedelus. Closer to true science, but still a little wet for my tastes."
They'd had the wet and dry science debate before. Carson wasn't biting. He was bothered because he hadn't read LeBlanc's curriculum vitae yet. And SGC had sent the man without any pre-approval from the Atlantis side? The level of interference from Milky Way was increasing, and he didn't like it.
He looked up from his musing. Sheppard was looking past them, but Carson couldn't know what had caught his eye without looking around, and he wasn't going to be that obvious. "Anyway," he said, "the wee bugger's on to something about the design of the retrovirus."
"That's good, right?" Sheppard said, looking back to them again.
"Aye, but I hate to give him the satisfaction. He's been looking at differences in the Wraith genome, comparing it with Iratus and human genes, and he's discovered there's a structure that's sensitive to the redox state.
"Can we have that in English?"
"He's figured out a possible reason why the last retrovirus didn't work right, and has ideas as to how to get around it." Carson sat back and sighed. "But the solution takes up too much of the artificial viral genome. If we use it, then we can't put in some of the other necessary genes."
Rodney said, "You have a data compression problem. I should be able to solve that."
"Rodney, have you even taken organic chemistry, much less biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology? I can't give you three advanced courses over lunch. Plus remedial organic."
"Fine. We'll do it in your office after," Rodney said impatiently.
Carson snapped back, "I've got patients to see, Rodney. Just because you lot haven't managed to break yourselves up lately doesn't mean anyone else hasn't."
"That may be true, but you've also got someone who is brilliant at data compression. Don't waste the resource. It's all a matter of storing information in a readable format, right?
"DNA's not ones and zeros, and the readout's bloody complicated."
"I'll leave that part to you. And if you've got patients, we can do it after dinner."
"Yeah," said Sheppard. "Not like you have a date or anything, Rodney." He looked over to Carson. "I mean, the MENSA group meets on Saturday nights, so that should tell you something."
Rodney colored. "It's not like we have real weekends here, do we?'
Carson cut off the banter. "All right, but I don't know if it'll do much good." Rodney was arrogant enough to think he could do anything. Carson half hoped he was right, and half hoped he'd fail, just to teach him a thing or two.
***
LeBlanc walked in as Carson was explaining transfer RNA to Rodney, drawing on the whiteboard. LeBlanc listened for a moment, then picked up a pen and started writing triplet DNA sequences from memory in a matrix that coordinated them with their amino acids. "It's not as simple as he's telling you. Plus, there are species differences in codon preference, and we've figured out that the Wraith and Iratus bugs also use some amino acids that aren't part of the canonical--."
"We were having a discussion here.," Carson interrupted. The cheek of the man! Carson shot him a look and held out his hand for the marker.
"Fine." LeBlanc capped the pen and handed it over. "You were only telling him half the story. Although why you're trying to drum the basics of a complex experimental science into the head of a mere observationalist, I don't know."
"Wait," said Rodney, who had ignored the insult. He was looking at the matrix on the white board. "This could be important. You can code for the same amino acid from several different words?"
"Yeah." LeBlanc looked at Carson. "Why is he interested in this stuff?"
"If it's a data compression problem, I can solve it," said Rodney. "I just have to know the parameters."
LeBlanc took off his glasses and put the earpiece between his teeth. "Use the other strand."
"What?"
"DNA has two strands. Coding strand, complementary strand. Put information on the complementary strand, turn them both into coding strands."
As soon as he'd said it, Carson realized that it was an obvious place to start. "That's brilliant."
He expected LeBlanc to preen at the compliment, but instead he got a disdainful look. "It's not my idea. Nature's been packing information on both strands of viral DNA for eons. Which you would know, if you were an actual virologist instead of playing one on TV. Stick to the scraped knees, Dr. Beckett."
LeBlanc stalked out toward the cell culture rooms.
"Charming fellow," said Rodney. "Is he right?"
Carson swallowed his irritation and nodded. "Aye, he is." Then he looked at Rodney. "He reminds me of someone else I know."
Rodney's attention was on the white board. "Oh?" he said absently. "Who's that?"
Carson let it go, and walked over to the shelf of CD ROM reference books. He selected one and handed it to Rodney Molecular Biology of the Gene. "You'll find the basic rules in here. If you have any questions--"
Rodney took the disc, still looking at the white board. "Yeah, I'll call you."
Carson shook his head. "I was about to say, call LeBlanc." He wasn't sure if they'd get on famously or be at each other's throats within five minutes. Would it be better to be a fly on the wall, or very far away? Would betting pool be good for morale? He stifled an inappropriate smile.
"Right. Okay, time to go study," Rodney answered, and left the room, holding the CD in one hand and bouncing it off the fingers of the other.
Carson went to the window, but it was dark and all he saw was his own reflection. He stood for a moment, wondering if he was overstepping. He had forgotten that some viruses use both strands, because everyone he worked with focused only on the coding strand for genetic engineering. They hadn't had someone like Rodney that could write a program to take both strands into account, which was too complicated for him to even attempt by hand.
He'd read LeBlanc's CV, and now he was surprised to find that he was so young. The man had left an endowed chair at Stanford to join the Stargate Program. He'd won the Lasker Prize, which meant he was on his way to a Nobel, and he had chosen to chuck it all to come to another Galaxy. Why? He moved to the door of the cell culture rooms, intending to ask. LeBlanc was seated at one of the biological safety cabinets, doing something with a lot of tiny test tubes.
"Dr. LeBlanc," he began.
"Not now. This enzyme is precious and it's not like I can order some from Invitrogen tomorrow if I screw this up because you're talking to me. Go away."
"Sorry," Carson said, the apology automatic, but sarcastic. He turned away, turned back, and then finally walked away, too angry to speak. He felt both as if he'd been rude for interrupting, and furious that the man thought he could dismiss the chief medical officer so abruptly. A couple of years of exposure to Rodney should have made him used to that kind of behavior, but he didn't like it. He put up with Rodney because he liked him.
It was late. He hung up his lab coat and went to his room. The Daedelus had brought a stack of medical journals on CD, plus Science and Nature and he skimmed through them for articles on gene therapy. For the first time in a couple of years, he didn't gloss over the sequence details.
***
"So, how's it going?" Sheppard set his tray down with Carson and Rodney.
Carson blinked and looked up from the napkin where Rodney had been doodling. "I think he's on to something, but I can't quite understand the maths."
Radek Zelenka took the fourth seat, and grabbed the napkin. He squinted at it, turned it the other direction, and looked over it at Rodney. "What is this? This is not physics."
"Everything is physics in the end," Rodney said, snatching back the napkin. "It just so happens I'm stretching my talents into the realm of molecular biology."
"Carson, you are not letting him into the biology labs, are you?" Radek asked, his eyes wide with exaggerated fear.
Carson nearly laughed at Radek's horror. "No, no. He's taking a unique approach to helping us create a better version of the retrovirus."
"To turn the Wraith into human?" Zelenka nodded, answering his own question. "What can Rodney do for that?"
Carson listened absently as Rodney explained the data packing problem, noting that he got it essentially correct. He glanced at Sheppard, who was staring off into space again, or at something across the mess.
"Biology was always too complicated for me," Zelenka said when Rodney finished. "Too many variables. Good luck with that."
"What do you mean biology is complicated?" Rodney asked.
Radek winked at Carson over Rodney's head. "I mean that it is. I was encouraged to study medicine when I entered school, but there was too much that I could not understand. Physics and engineering, they were easier. Mathematics and mechanics explained most things." Radek smiled, "Of course, when you get to wormhole physics and Bell's theorem, it approaches biology."
Carson watched as Rodney wound himself up for the argument with Radek, sputtering and nearly knocking over his drink. "How can you even say that?" he began, and then began the familiar litany of why physics was superior to biology, and especially to medicine.
Radek listened as he ate his lunch, and let the rant go uncontested until he had taken a bite of the greens and appeared to decide they weren't edible. Then he interrupted. "Rodney, you claim there is no math, no quantifiability to biology, but when you begin to understand how the brain works, the nature of the non-linearities are astounding. Each communication our brains requires no fewer than ten stochastic events."
Rodney looked at Radek, confused and scornful. "Quantifiability is not a word. Where do you get this stuff?"
Radek rose with his tray. "I read outside my field, Dr. McKay. You should try it."
As he walked away, Rodney looked at Carson, the same puzzled disdain on his face.
"Don't look at me," Carson said, trying to hold back a smile. He loved it when Radek managed to get to Rodney. "I don’t go reading physics journals."
Rodney shook his head for a moment, and took a bite of lunch. Carson chewed his own lunch slowly, thinking about what Radek had said. It made something in the back of his mind itch. He barely noticed as Rodney finished and left.
There was something almost coming together that applied to the retrovirus problem. "Non-linear dynamics," he said aloud.
"What?" Sheppard said.
Carson blinked and looked at Sheppard. "Just thinking. Something Radek said."
He didn't remember putting his tray away, but he must have, because he found himself back in the lab, looking at the white board. Someone had left some scribbles on it, and Carson rubbed them out them before starting to draw cartoons of molecular pathways, looking for points where the probabilities of interaction could be affected by changing the biochemistry in small ways. It was a completely different approach, and might get around some of the problems. He was almost finished when a voice startled him.
"What the hell are you doing?" LeBlanc came raging out of the cell culture rooms. "Why did you erase that? I wasn't finished. My damned timer went off and I had to move my experiment to the next stage. Working here."
LeBlanc's use of a classic Rodney phrase made it easy for Carson to say, "Pipe down. I've got an idea."
"Well I had one, too, and I wasn't finished working it out." He reached for a rubber, but Carson stepped between him and the board.
"If that's your only idea in the world, laddie, then you've got a problem."
LeBlanc's eyes narrowed behind his glasses. It would have been comical if it didn't make Carson want to punch him. Instead, Carson gestured at the board. "Maybe you can help me with this?" LeBlanc might be an annoyingly smug git, but he had some good ideas and Carson would take what he could get. Plus, a new problem was like catnip to people like LeBlanc.
"Walk me through what you've got so far."
To Carson's surprise, LeBlanc said nothing else, simply listened as he outlined his thoughts. At one point he took off his glasses and chewed the earpiece. "Well?" Carson asked, when he was finished.
LeBlanc picked up a marker, and drew the next two steps, the ones Carson had been about to draw when he was interrupted. "Right?"
Carson nodded. "That's what I was thinking."
"No self-respecting biochemist would have thought of this."
Carson felt his barely-suppressed annoyance rise again. "What? You don't think it will work?" he asked.
"Are you kidding? I'd bet a week that it'll work. It's brilliant. You're right. I'm wrong. I mean, my kludge would have worked, but this is much more elegant."
Carson wondered how could you bet time, then realized he'd just been paid a compliment. He looked at LeBlanc in disbelief.
LeBlanc looked at him. "Mind if I get started on this?"
"What?" Carson blinked.
"I want to get moving on this. It'll take a couple of days to make the mutations, and I'm going to want to make sure the changes in Kmax here and affinity constants there," he poked at places on the board, "are what we think they need to be." He paused. "So can I get started? Or do you want to do all the grunt work between scraped knees?"
"By all means," Carson said, bemused. "Get started."
***
"We're ready, Dr. Weir," Carson said into his headset. It had taken weeks to smooth things out, and the efforts of most of the biochemistry team in constructing the new virus. The Wraith strapped to the table snarled at him, and he could feel sweat between his shoulder blades and trickling down his chest. He swallowed, hoping no one could tell how frightened he was. He didn't know if he was more scared that it would work, or that it wouldn't.
"Go ahead, Dr. Beckett," said Weir's voice in his ear.
He might have got used to things like this in the Pegasus galaxy, but he wasn't sure that doing medical procedures under the eye of heavily armed soldiers, Marines who were aiming at him and his subject, should ever feel normal. He signaled to a Marine, chosen because he had a clue about basic field medicine and was built like an All Black rugby back. He held the struggling Wraith's arm as Carson found a blood vessel.
"Steady now," Carson said. "None of us wants an accidental needle stick." To the Wraith he said, "This shouldn't hurt." He felt a bit strange, trying to comfort the drone, but his beside manner was automatic.
The thing roared at him, but drones couldn't speak, and it wasn't clear how much they could communicate back to the hive.
Carson injected the retrovirus and stepped back.
"Well?" asked Sheppard.
"It's not instant, Colonel. We should know something in six to twelve hours. The transition could take up to a week."
"So in the mean time, Fido goes back in the cage?"
"Yes, for now, unless we need to move it to the informary. And if you don't mind me asking, why do you name the damn things?"
Sheppard shrugged. "Beats calling 'em, 'Hey you.'" He signaled to the Marines to take it back to the holding cell.
"You didn't give this one a human name," Carson said.
"Drones? Nah. Fido, Rex, Ginger."
"Ginger?" Sometimes Carson wondered how Sheppard's mind worked.
The colonel shrugged. "I knew a girl with an Irish Setter named Ginger." He followed the Marines out of the medical bay. Carson looked at the Marine who'd helped him, and shrugged.
"Think it will work, sir?"
"Don't call me sir," he said, a reflex. "I don't know." He sat down heavily on a chair, energy draining out of him and feeling uncomfortable in his damp scrubs. He needed a shower.
"Do you need me any more?"
"No. Off with you," Carson answered.
He watched the man's back as he left, and kept looking down the hall where they'd taken the drone. He felt like those classic physiologists from the seventeenth century, cutting the nerves to the heart and observing the change in rhythm, thinking they were being scientific when logical positivism was two centuries away. He didn't like the comparison.
This was an experiment, yes, but it wasn't research. It was desperation.
He blew out a sigh, scrubbed his hands through his hair, and went to his quarters, both annoyed and glad that the bottle of Glenlivet had run dry.
***
He stood over the corpse of the drone with Dr. Biro, tuning out her chirping, and thinking again of vivisected dogs. The Wraith had turned human, but had regressed back to Wraith, and he wasn't sure why. He had always hated autopsies, and was happy to leave them to Biro, who treated them like an amusing puzzle. This one was too important.
They opened the body, and he looked over the organs. He'd seen enough dead Wraith to know what was normal for them, and although the outward appearance was almost completely drone, the anatomy was an odd hybrid. He used a long set of forceps to pull up an organ in the area where the kidneys should have been, but were no more. He grabbed a saline bottle and rinsed off the Wraith version of blood. If he hadn't just pulled it from a Wraith, he would have though it looked like part of an adrenal gland, hypertrophied and somehow detached from the kidney.
"Got to learn something from failure, right?" asked Biro. "Let's freeze some tissues, especially bloods. LeBlanc wants to do microarray analysis." She pointed at the thing he'd picked up in the forceps. "Looks like you think it's important. What is it?"
"I don't know, and what are you on about? We don't have microarray equipment," Carson answered, feeling testy. "What are you going to do? Send samples back with the next trip from the Daedelus?"
"No. I thought you knew. LeBlanc brought his own laboratory."
"Are you telling me he has private resources that my people can't use?"
"He never said we couldn't use them,"
"Where are they." Carson felt himself stretching out the words. He was furious.
"I'm not sure. I think Dr. McKay gave him some space in an unused room."
Carson took a moment to re-focus on the corpse in front of him, to let go of the anger. Just who did LeBlanc think he was?
***
Carson walked up to where Rodney was working, hunched over his laptop. "Why does that wee bastard have his own lab?"
"Hmm?" Rodney looked up and took a minute to focus. "Oh, he brought it with him. SGC doesn't own any of it."
"How did this happen? And why did you okay it?"
"I didn't okay it. He arrived on the Daedelus with the paperwork equivalent of a note saying 'Please take care of my baby. He needs lots of space to grow. He has his own toys, and here's an extra fifty million to cover the inconvenience.'"
"What?!"
"He's paying his own freight."
Carson had trouble thinking about a person with fifty million dollars to spend. It was one thing when it was a facility budget, but to have that much as personal resources? So the man was intellectually arrogant, but he had the addition of wealth? No wonder he was such a wanker. "You said you interviewed him. Did you ask him why he was here? Do you know what he left?"
"An endowed chair, I believe. Do you have an actual question, or can I go back to work?"
"But did you ask him why?!" The frustration with McKay was all too familiar.
"Yes."
"What did he say?"
McKay turned away. "He wanted to boldly go where not very many biochemists had gone before. Now, can I please get back to this?" He put his hands on the keyboard, but didn't start typing.
"Aye," Carson sighed. "Just tell me were you put his lab."
It didn't take long to walk there, and the door opened on his signal. Carson stepped in and looked at benches covered with top end equipment, some of it whirring on its own, clearly robotic. LeBlanc sat in front of a large computer screen, his legs on the computer itself under the table. The keyboard was in his lap, and he didn't stop typing or look up.
"Come to find out my results? Give me a day or two. The first stages are still incubating."
"No," Carson said. "Believe it or not, I know how long a microarray experiment takes."
"So are you here to tell me to integrate this with the rest of biology?"
"Maybe. Care to tell me what this is about? Why someone riding as high as you would chuck it all to come out here?"
LeBlanc turned to look at Carson. "Why did you do it?"
Carson wasn't ready for the question. "I asked first."
LeBlanc shook his head. He gestured around the room. It was better outfitted than anything but the Ancient labs, and Carson would never have had approval from SGC for this much basic research equipment. LeBlanc said, "No, you tell me. Tell me why you're here, in this city and in this galaxy, and I'll explain this."
"How is that any of your concern?"
"It's as much my business as this lab is yours."
"This laboratory is certainly my concern! Dr. McKay's head of science, but biomedicine reports through me. Now why the hell are you here? I know what you left. Why?"
LeBlanc's expression did not change. "Indulge me, please."
Carson turned to leave, taking a deep breath to gather control, but when he let it out, he found himself thinking. Why was he here? He turned back to face the room and leaned on the door frame for a moment, gathering his thoughts.
He'd been working in an MRC lab and teaching medical students when he'd been approached by his government. He'd trained in surgery, but it didn't satisfy. Carson wasn't sure he could explain it. He had liked being a good doctor, and he could say without ego that he was an excellent surgeon, but it hadn't been enough. He wanted to know more about how it all worked. What were the cells doing when a wound healed. How did they know to replicate and crawl in there? Or how to stop? What makes a tumor happen when they don't stop? Gene therapy seemed obvious as a research field, like some kind of molecular surgery.
It was so easy back then. The stakes had been so low, and it was almost laughable how much pressure he thought he'd had back in Edinburgh. Pegasus had taught him the true meaning of pressure. LeBlanc waited, fingers still resting on the keys, but not moving. He looked tired.
"I read your work," LeBlanc said when Carson didn't answer. "Novel approach to gene therapy, but you were hampered by the British medical education system. Not enough basic science. They throw you right into a lab with kits to do the molecular biology, but you don't ever learn enough classical virology and biochemistry or even real physiology to know how it works. You were lucky with your ATA gene therapy."
Lucky? He didn't think so. Carson said, "How can you be so bloody rude? Just because you had money of your own to bring a lab here? Christ, if I didn't know it was impossible, I'd be wondering if you bought your Lasker Prize!" Carson stopped himself before he crossed his own lines. "I haven't exactly had kits out here on Atlantis, and I expect I know a mite more physiology than you. I work with your 'whole animals' every day. They're called people."
"Dr. Kildare, yes, and you're the McGyver of medicinal chemistry." LeBlanc's sneer was in place, but it didn't have enough energy behind it for his usual sting.
"What are you on about? You want my answer, or no?" Carson asked. "I can get Dr. Weir to explain this lab."
"You won't get the whole story from her." LeBlanc rubbed his eyes. "So how did you end up here?"
Carson gave in, deciding it was easier to give LeBlanc what he wanted if the man was ever going to explain why he was here. Quid pro quo. "I didn't even know I'd been tested for the gene, much less that I had it or that there were such things as Ancients. I was recruited to the Stargate Program."
"Why did you go?"
"What kills any cat? Curiosity. It meant taking on more medical duties and leaving the gene therapy research behind, but a lot of people are good at research. How many get the chance to learn that there's a whole galaxy of planets out there? Two galaxies, now." The question was somewhat pointed, but LeBlanc ignored him, raising his eyebrows and asking Carson to continue.
"I had enough lab time to work on the ATA gene. I isolated it, you might want to know, using microarray experiments. My lab did the preliminary work understanding the gene's function. That's how I met Rodney. He had me turning on equipment in his lab during spare time I didn't have, but he helped with my research into artificial ATA."
"Artificial ATA?" LeBlanc cocked his head. "You could have a portable on-switch for the rest of us. I take it the idea didn't work."
Carson enjoyed knowing something LeBlanc did not. "That's when we discovered the neural component."
LeBlanc looked at him for a long moment, and Carson could almost hear the wheels turning, and then he made the leap. "Your gene therapy is epigenetic, not integrated. It will wear off."
"Eventually," Carson said. "Maybe. It'll take decades, I think."
"Hmm. So how did you end up here?" LeBlanc seemed entirely unaware of just how annoyed Carson was.
Carson took a breath, feeling his jaw tighten. "Elizabeth Weir is very persuasive. So is Rodney. When I saw the technology in Antarctica, there was so much to be learned." He closed his eyes, remembering how the discovery the medical areas made it worth all the rest of the Ancient equipment they asked him to touch. Stepping through the stargate was the most frightening thing he'd ever done. His descent from the Ancients was a burden he would not have chosen, but he had to be here, even if it wasn't always comfortable. There wasn't any way he could say that, and not to this relative stranger. "Curiosity," Carson said again. It didn't begin to describe what he really felt.
"Fair enough," LeBlanc said, after a pause. "Curiosity works for me, too."
"But you don't just waltz up and ask to join a secret international program, even if you can buy your way in. How did you hear of it?"
"I came into my inheritance, and I was going to blow a lot of it going up with a Russian mission to the space station. I'd always wanted to go to space. I suppose I said things that caught someone's attention and they contacted me, asked if I'd be interested in xenobiology. I told them NASA's xenobiology program was a joke. Then they told me they weren't from NASA."
"But this lab?"
"I spent my own money on it. I said it was a condition of taking the job."
"What you just said? Elizabeth could have told me that. Why did you leave Stanford?"
"Would you believe me if I said I was bored?"
Carson didn't believe it, and he shook his head.
LeBlanc took a lanyard with a flash memory drive off his head. "Here."
Carson caught it. "What's this?"
"My medical records."
"I've got your medical records."
"No you don't. Now get out of here."
Carson looked at the device, and the implications annoyed him. "This is going to tell me you have some incurable illness, isn't it? Aren't you dramatic."
LeBlanc shrugged and turned back to his computer.
And then it hit him, and the words were out of Carson's mouth before he could stop himself. "I don't care how much money you gave the SGC, there's no way they'd let someone come here with a terminal disease and not tell the chief medical officer. You didn't tell them, did you? What the hell is it? And none of your dramatics."
"All this is yours when I go boom," LeBlanc said with a swing of his hand. "Now, unless you want to go look at that, I do have some Biacore data that you might find interesting."
"You've got a Biacore?" Even with all the Ancient technology, and some of that had uses he could not fathom, Carson missed Earth technology. And if he'd had one of those and microarrays for finding genetic variations, he might have been able to avoid killing half the population of Hoff. This was infuriating.
"How do you think I got that protein association data? Which, I might add, backed up your theories."
Carson walked over to LeBlanc, and handed him the drive. "You said you'd go boom. Whatever's wrong with you isn't chronic or slow."
LeBlanc picked it up, plugged it into a USB port on the key board, and in a few quick strokes called up an MRI image. "Picture's worth a thousand words."
Carson shut his eyes, but the image of the distorted artery deep in the brain wouldn't go away. "Aneurism."
"Yep."
Any attempt at a surgical repair would cause too much damage to the brain, and an aneurism like that could go at any time, rupturing the blood vessel and killing the patient. Carson pinched the bridge of his nose. He hated things he couldn't fix. He didn't like LeBlanc any better, but Carson felt in his gut the frustration of ineffectiveness. "Boom, indeed."
LeBlanc nodded, closing the file and removing the drive.
"So why this? Why not travel the world? You're in another galaxy and spend all your time in the lab." Carson couldn't understand it.
"What would you do?"
"I don't know. Spend time at home. See my mum, my family."
"Don't have those."
"Friends, then?"
Carson was surprised when LeBlanc laughed. "Not many people get where I was and have a social life, plus, I'm betting the complaints about me only stopped when I finally got this lab up and running and stopped working in the common areas."
He was right, but Carson said, "I got a complaint yesterday."
"I don't think I did anything yesterday."
"Dr. Turner was complaining that you don't go to the biochemistry group meeting."
"I thought she didn't want me there after I made Dr. Innskeep cry."
Carson had heard about that incident, but it wouldn't be good to coddle either of them. He didn't rein in his sarcasm. "Go interact with your colleagues once a week, and give them the benefit of your brilliance. You may have bought your way in for a private laboratory, but you report to Turner, and Turner reports to me. We can send you home." Carson would do it, too, even if LeBlanc was petty and took the equipment with him. He needed the research group to be a real group, despite the fact that they were all a bunch of chiefs and no Indians. "And try not to make them cry."
"I can't help it when they're stupid." He sounded like an eight-year-old.
Carson shook his head, then thought for a moment. "Would you be willing to move your lab if I told you we could make these instruments give you even more data? If you interface the Biacore with some of the Ancient scanning technology, you might get more complete data out of it."
LeBlanc looked away. "I've been ignoring the whole Ancient thing. I don't even take transporters."
"Oh, trust me," Carson said. "If we can get Radek to interface some of the Ancient equipment with some of this stuff, you'll have more data than even you can handle."
LeBlanc looked at him. Carson expected either an argument or enthusiastic agreement. What he got was a sigh. "All right. Let me finish this run."
***
Carson looked down at the body on the table. This one had lasted longer before reverting. Something wasn't right with the retrovirus, and he didn't think the problem was in the artificial genes themselves. There had to be something in the physiology that was causing the Wraith's Iratus genes to re-express. He and his team had been over the genetic structure, examined the blood chemistry at all stages, and mined the Ancient data banks for any relevant information.
The organs in this drone, which Sheppard had named Lassie, were more hybrid human than the previous experiment, but Carson wasn't sure that told him much. The strange adrenal gland-looking thing was there again. He cut it out, handed it to Dr. Biro and said, "Find out what this thing's secreting. What's the hormone profile, and match it up to the blood work if you can."
She took the tissue out of the room, leaving him to open the skull and see if the brain looked any different from last time.
***
"I need four more drones." At Sheppard's confused look, he clarified. "Not weapons. Wraith." Elizabeth's mouth tightened. He wasn't telling her what she wanted to hear.
"Four's going to be tough," Sheppard said. "It's hard enough to get one."
"What are you thinking, Carson," Elizabeth asked.
"I need to find out why they're reverting, and that means more than just blood work during the process." He swallowed. "I'm going to need to look at in-between time points. I've got scans, and I've tried to do some biopsies at the different stages, and there is a lot we can learn from the Ancient scanner, but--" He stopped and swallowed.
Elizabeth said, "You're talking vivisection, Carson."
He bit his lip and shook his head. "It's a fine point, I suppose, but no, they'll be dead."
"Why? Why aren't scanner data and biopsies enough?"
"There are some things you can't tell from scans. Plus, their insides change around a fair bit during the change, and I need to see things like color and texture."
"Eew," said Rodney.
"Well it's part of it. Also, I want to tag some of the Wraith organs with a tracking dye before injecting the virus, to learn what tissues go where. And--" He looked up, glanced around at all the faces. Elizabeth looked appalled, Sheppard and Teyla thoughtful, and Rodney seemed oblivious again, his attention on his tablet screen. "Four is the minimum for this experiment to mean anything."
"Hmm," Rodney said without looking up. "Can you get statistical relevance with just four?"
Carson was exasperated. "I don't even want to do four! But there's something we're missing, and I need more information. We've got some more work to do before the next version of the virus is ready."
"So that means we have time to get your lab rats while you're re-engineering the virus?"
Carson nodded again. The phrase lab rats brought home what he was about to do. He glanced at Elizabeth, and she kept her face pointed at the table. He said her name.
"What, yes?"
"Will you approve the mission?"
She nodded.
Part 2
Title: Do No Harm, 1/2
Written For: dr_dredd, who asked for "Carson. Lots and lots of him.... Nothing sappy, please. :-)" You, got it. There is nothing sappy here.
Rating: PG-13 for explicit biomedicine
Note: As my beta reader mandragora1 said: "Carson's actions would be unconscionable in our galaxy, but in Pegasus? I'm not sure what I'd do in their situation. I think you've caught that uncertainty well in this story." Thanks to her from me for helping me tighten this up, and thanks to her from you readers for her making me edit out 68% of the hard science.
Summary Converting the Wraith into humans was not an easy thing. Carson is challenged scientifically by the difficulty, ethically by the implications, and personally by an irascible biomedical genius. Carson Beckett, OMS (original male scientist), others.
Comment: My edit of my sga_santa pinch hit. I pulled out of the exchange because I knew work was going to suck around this time, and foolishly volunteered. I'm an idiot, because it fucked up my work life as I knew it would, being why I pulled out, but I'm glad of the story that resulted. The Dr. LeBlanc is a shameless self-insertion, although he's smarter than I am.
Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.The modern Hippocratic oath.
I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.
I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work.The ancient Hippocratic oath
"So," said Rodney, setting down his tray next to Carson, "I hear you have your own Kavanagh."
"No one is that bad," said Sheppard, sitting down across from them with his own lunch.
Carson didn't ask who they meant. No one but LeBlanc, who had created complaints in two days of arriving. "No, he's not that bad, but he's a pain in the arse. Doesn't care much for physicians, and doesn't think much of us as scientists."
"Well, who'd have thought I'd have a point of agreement with someone who's been compared to Kavanagh," said Rodney. "He's reasonably bright."
Carson glared at him, but the old argument had lost its sting. "I didn't know you thought that much of biochemists."
"He's more of a biophysicist," Rodney corrected, "at least according to his publication record. Plus, he's got a braid which is marginally less stupid than a ponytail. We didn't ask for him; he just showed up." At Carson's questioning look he said, "What? I'm head of science. I read everyone's CVs, and I interviewed him when he came on the Daedelus. Closer to true science, but still a little wet for my tastes."
They'd had the wet and dry science debate before. Carson wasn't biting. He was bothered because he hadn't read LeBlanc's curriculum vitae yet. And SGC had sent the man without any pre-approval from the Atlantis side? The level of interference from Milky Way was increasing, and he didn't like it.
He looked up from his musing. Sheppard was looking past them, but Carson couldn't know what had caught his eye without looking around, and he wasn't going to be that obvious. "Anyway," he said, "the wee bugger's on to something about the design of the retrovirus."
"That's good, right?" Sheppard said, looking back to them again.
"Aye, but I hate to give him the satisfaction. He's been looking at differences in the Wraith genome, comparing it with Iratus and human genes, and he's discovered there's a structure that's sensitive to the redox state.
"Can we have that in English?"
"He's figured out a possible reason why the last retrovirus didn't work right, and has ideas as to how to get around it." Carson sat back and sighed. "But the solution takes up too much of the artificial viral genome. If we use it, then we can't put in some of the other necessary genes."
Rodney said, "You have a data compression problem. I should be able to solve that."
"Rodney, have you even taken organic chemistry, much less biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology? I can't give you three advanced courses over lunch. Plus remedial organic."
"Fine. We'll do it in your office after," Rodney said impatiently.
Carson snapped back, "I've got patients to see, Rodney. Just because you lot haven't managed to break yourselves up lately doesn't mean anyone else hasn't."
"That may be true, but you've also got someone who is brilliant at data compression. Don't waste the resource. It's all a matter of storing information in a readable format, right?
"DNA's not ones and zeros, and the readout's bloody complicated."
"I'll leave that part to you. And if you've got patients, we can do it after dinner."
"Yeah," said Sheppard. "Not like you have a date or anything, Rodney." He looked over to Carson. "I mean, the MENSA group meets on Saturday nights, so that should tell you something."
Rodney colored. "It's not like we have real weekends here, do we?'
Carson cut off the banter. "All right, but I don't know if it'll do much good." Rodney was arrogant enough to think he could do anything. Carson half hoped he was right, and half hoped he'd fail, just to teach him a thing or two.
***
LeBlanc walked in as Carson was explaining transfer RNA to Rodney, drawing on the whiteboard. LeBlanc listened for a moment, then picked up a pen and started writing triplet DNA sequences from memory in a matrix that coordinated them with their amino acids. "It's not as simple as he's telling you. Plus, there are species differences in codon preference, and we've figured out that the Wraith and Iratus bugs also use some amino acids that aren't part of the canonical--."
"We were having a discussion here.," Carson interrupted. The cheek of the man! Carson shot him a look and held out his hand for the marker.
"Fine." LeBlanc capped the pen and handed it over. "You were only telling him half the story. Although why you're trying to drum the basics of a complex experimental science into the head of a mere observationalist, I don't know."
"Wait," said Rodney, who had ignored the insult. He was looking at the matrix on the white board. "This could be important. You can code for the same amino acid from several different words?"
"Yeah." LeBlanc looked at Carson. "Why is he interested in this stuff?"
"If it's a data compression problem, I can solve it," said Rodney. "I just have to know the parameters."
LeBlanc took off his glasses and put the earpiece between his teeth. "Use the other strand."
"What?"
"DNA has two strands. Coding strand, complementary strand. Put information on the complementary strand, turn them both into coding strands."
As soon as he'd said it, Carson realized that it was an obvious place to start. "That's brilliant."
He expected LeBlanc to preen at the compliment, but instead he got a disdainful look. "It's not my idea. Nature's been packing information on both strands of viral DNA for eons. Which you would know, if you were an actual virologist instead of playing one on TV. Stick to the scraped knees, Dr. Beckett."
LeBlanc stalked out toward the cell culture rooms.
"Charming fellow," said Rodney. "Is he right?"
Carson swallowed his irritation and nodded. "Aye, he is." Then he looked at Rodney. "He reminds me of someone else I know."
Rodney's attention was on the white board. "Oh?" he said absently. "Who's that?"
Carson let it go, and walked over to the shelf of CD ROM reference books. He selected one and handed it to Rodney Molecular Biology of the Gene. "You'll find the basic rules in here. If you have any questions--"
Rodney took the disc, still looking at the white board. "Yeah, I'll call you."
Carson shook his head. "I was about to say, call LeBlanc." He wasn't sure if they'd get on famously or be at each other's throats within five minutes. Would it be better to be a fly on the wall, or very far away? Would betting pool be good for morale? He stifled an inappropriate smile.
"Right. Okay, time to go study," Rodney answered, and left the room, holding the CD in one hand and bouncing it off the fingers of the other.
Carson went to the window, but it was dark and all he saw was his own reflection. He stood for a moment, wondering if he was overstepping. He had forgotten that some viruses use both strands, because everyone he worked with focused only on the coding strand for genetic engineering. They hadn't had someone like Rodney that could write a program to take both strands into account, which was too complicated for him to even attempt by hand.
He'd read LeBlanc's CV, and now he was surprised to find that he was so young. The man had left an endowed chair at Stanford to join the Stargate Program. He'd won the Lasker Prize, which meant he was on his way to a Nobel, and he had chosen to chuck it all to come to another Galaxy. Why? He moved to the door of the cell culture rooms, intending to ask. LeBlanc was seated at one of the biological safety cabinets, doing something with a lot of tiny test tubes.
"Dr. LeBlanc," he began.
"Not now. This enzyme is precious and it's not like I can order some from Invitrogen tomorrow if I screw this up because you're talking to me. Go away."
"Sorry," Carson said, the apology automatic, but sarcastic. He turned away, turned back, and then finally walked away, too angry to speak. He felt both as if he'd been rude for interrupting, and furious that the man thought he could dismiss the chief medical officer so abruptly. A couple of years of exposure to Rodney should have made him used to that kind of behavior, but he didn't like it. He put up with Rodney because he liked him.
It was late. He hung up his lab coat and went to his room. The Daedelus had brought a stack of medical journals on CD, plus Science and Nature and he skimmed through them for articles on gene therapy. For the first time in a couple of years, he didn't gloss over the sequence details.
***
"So, how's it going?" Sheppard set his tray down with Carson and Rodney.
Carson blinked and looked up from the napkin where Rodney had been doodling. "I think he's on to something, but I can't quite understand the maths."
Radek Zelenka took the fourth seat, and grabbed the napkin. He squinted at it, turned it the other direction, and looked over it at Rodney. "What is this? This is not physics."
"Everything is physics in the end," Rodney said, snatching back the napkin. "It just so happens I'm stretching my talents into the realm of molecular biology."
"Carson, you are not letting him into the biology labs, are you?" Radek asked, his eyes wide with exaggerated fear.
Carson nearly laughed at Radek's horror. "No, no. He's taking a unique approach to helping us create a better version of the retrovirus."
"To turn the Wraith into human?" Zelenka nodded, answering his own question. "What can Rodney do for that?"
Carson listened absently as Rodney explained the data packing problem, noting that he got it essentially correct. He glanced at Sheppard, who was staring off into space again, or at something across the mess.
"Biology was always too complicated for me," Zelenka said when Rodney finished. "Too many variables. Good luck with that."
"What do you mean biology is complicated?" Rodney asked.
Radek winked at Carson over Rodney's head. "I mean that it is. I was encouraged to study medicine when I entered school, but there was too much that I could not understand. Physics and engineering, they were easier. Mathematics and mechanics explained most things." Radek smiled, "Of course, when you get to wormhole physics and Bell's theorem, it approaches biology."
Carson watched as Rodney wound himself up for the argument with Radek, sputtering and nearly knocking over his drink. "How can you even say that?" he began, and then began the familiar litany of why physics was superior to biology, and especially to medicine.
Radek listened as he ate his lunch, and let the rant go uncontested until he had taken a bite of the greens and appeared to decide they weren't edible. Then he interrupted. "Rodney, you claim there is no math, no quantifiability to biology, but when you begin to understand how the brain works, the nature of the non-linearities are astounding. Each communication our brains requires no fewer than ten stochastic events."
Rodney looked at Radek, confused and scornful. "Quantifiability is not a word. Where do you get this stuff?"
Radek rose with his tray. "I read outside my field, Dr. McKay. You should try it."
As he walked away, Rodney looked at Carson, the same puzzled disdain on his face.
"Don't look at me," Carson said, trying to hold back a smile. He loved it when Radek managed to get to Rodney. "I don’t go reading physics journals."
Rodney shook his head for a moment, and took a bite of lunch. Carson chewed his own lunch slowly, thinking about what Radek had said. It made something in the back of his mind itch. He barely noticed as Rodney finished and left.
There was something almost coming together that applied to the retrovirus problem. "Non-linear dynamics," he said aloud.
"What?" Sheppard said.
Carson blinked and looked at Sheppard. "Just thinking. Something Radek said."
He didn't remember putting his tray away, but he must have, because he found himself back in the lab, looking at the white board. Someone had left some scribbles on it, and Carson rubbed them out them before starting to draw cartoons of molecular pathways, looking for points where the probabilities of interaction could be affected by changing the biochemistry in small ways. It was a completely different approach, and might get around some of the problems. He was almost finished when a voice startled him.
"What the hell are you doing?" LeBlanc came raging out of the cell culture rooms. "Why did you erase that? I wasn't finished. My damned timer went off and I had to move my experiment to the next stage. Working here."
LeBlanc's use of a classic Rodney phrase made it easy for Carson to say, "Pipe down. I've got an idea."
"Well I had one, too, and I wasn't finished working it out." He reached for a rubber, but Carson stepped between him and the board.
"If that's your only idea in the world, laddie, then you've got a problem."
LeBlanc's eyes narrowed behind his glasses. It would have been comical if it didn't make Carson want to punch him. Instead, Carson gestured at the board. "Maybe you can help me with this?" LeBlanc might be an annoyingly smug git, but he had some good ideas and Carson would take what he could get. Plus, a new problem was like catnip to people like LeBlanc.
"Walk me through what you've got so far."
To Carson's surprise, LeBlanc said nothing else, simply listened as he outlined his thoughts. At one point he took off his glasses and chewed the earpiece. "Well?" Carson asked, when he was finished.
LeBlanc picked up a marker, and drew the next two steps, the ones Carson had been about to draw when he was interrupted. "Right?"
Carson nodded. "That's what I was thinking."
"No self-respecting biochemist would have thought of this."
Carson felt his barely-suppressed annoyance rise again. "What? You don't think it will work?" he asked.
"Are you kidding? I'd bet a week that it'll work. It's brilliant. You're right. I'm wrong. I mean, my kludge would have worked, but this is much more elegant."
Carson wondered how could you bet time, then realized he'd just been paid a compliment. He looked at LeBlanc in disbelief.
LeBlanc looked at him. "Mind if I get started on this?"
"What?" Carson blinked.
"I want to get moving on this. It'll take a couple of days to make the mutations, and I'm going to want to make sure the changes in Kmax here and affinity constants there," he poked at places on the board, "are what we think they need to be." He paused. "So can I get started? Or do you want to do all the grunt work between scraped knees?"
"By all means," Carson said, bemused. "Get started."
***
"We're ready, Dr. Weir," Carson said into his headset. It had taken weeks to smooth things out, and the efforts of most of the biochemistry team in constructing the new virus. The Wraith strapped to the table snarled at him, and he could feel sweat between his shoulder blades and trickling down his chest. He swallowed, hoping no one could tell how frightened he was. He didn't know if he was more scared that it would work, or that it wouldn't.
"Go ahead, Dr. Beckett," said Weir's voice in his ear.
He might have got used to things like this in the Pegasus galaxy, but he wasn't sure that doing medical procedures under the eye of heavily armed soldiers, Marines who were aiming at him and his subject, should ever feel normal. He signaled to a Marine, chosen because he had a clue about basic field medicine and was built like an All Black rugby back. He held the struggling Wraith's arm as Carson found a blood vessel.
"Steady now," Carson said. "None of us wants an accidental needle stick." To the Wraith he said, "This shouldn't hurt." He felt a bit strange, trying to comfort the drone, but his beside manner was automatic.
The thing roared at him, but drones couldn't speak, and it wasn't clear how much they could communicate back to the hive.
Carson injected the retrovirus and stepped back.
"Well?" asked Sheppard.
"It's not instant, Colonel. We should know something in six to twelve hours. The transition could take up to a week."
"So in the mean time, Fido goes back in the cage?"
"Yes, for now, unless we need to move it to the informary. And if you don't mind me asking, why do you name the damn things?"
Sheppard shrugged. "Beats calling 'em, 'Hey you.'" He signaled to the Marines to take it back to the holding cell.
"You didn't give this one a human name," Carson said.
"Drones? Nah. Fido, Rex, Ginger."
"Ginger?" Sometimes Carson wondered how Sheppard's mind worked.
The colonel shrugged. "I knew a girl with an Irish Setter named Ginger." He followed the Marines out of the medical bay. Carson looked at the Marine who'd helped him, and shrugged.
"Think it will work, sir?"
"Don't call me sir," he said, a reflex. "I don't know." He sat down heavily on a chair, energy draining out of him and feeling uncomfortable in his damp scrubs. He needed a shower.
"Do you need me any more?"
"No. Off with you," Carson answered.
He watched the man's back as he left, and kept looking down the hall where they'd taken the drone. He felt like those classic physiologists from the seventeenth century, cutting the nerves to the heart and observing the change in rhythm, thinking they were being scientific when logical positivism was two centuries away. He didn't like the comparison.
This was an experiment, yes, but it wasn't research. It was desperation.
He blew out a sigh, scrubbed his hands through his hair, and went to his quarters, both annoyed and glad that the bottle of Glenlivet had run dry.
***
He stood over the corpse of the drone with Dr. Biro, tuning out her chirping, and thinking again of vivisected dogs. The Wraith had turned human, but had regressed back to Wraith, and he wasn't sure why. He had always hated autopsies, and was happy to leave them to Biro, who treated them like an amusing puzzle. This one was too important.
They opened the body, and he looked over the organs. He'd seen enough dead Wraith to know what was normal for them, and although the outward appearance was almost completely drone, the anatomy was an odd hybrid. He used a long set of forceps to pull up an organ in the area where the kidneys should have been, but were no more. He grabbed a saline bottle and rinsed off the Wraith version of blood. If he hadn't just pulled it from a Wraith, he would have though it looked like part of an adrenal gland, hypertrophied and somehow detached from the kidney.
"Got to learn something from failure, right?" asked Biro. "Let's freeze some tissues, especially bloods. LeBlanc wants to do microarray analysis." She pointed at the thing he'd picked up in the forceps. "Looks like you think it's important. What is it?"
"I don't know, and what are you on about? We don't have microarray equipment," Carson answered, feeling testy. "What are you going to do? Send samples back with the next trip from the Daedelus?"
"No. I thought you knew. LeBlanc brought his own laboratory."
"Are you telling me he has private resources that my people can't use?"
"He never said we couldn't use them,"
"Where are they." Carson felt himself stretching out the words. He was furious.
"I'm not sure. I think Dr. McKay gave him some space in an unused room."
Carson took a moment to re-focus on the corpse in front of him, to let go of the anger. Just who did LeBlanc think he was?
***
Carson walked up to where Rodney was working, hunched over his laptop. "Why does that wee bastard have his own lab?"
"Hmm?" Rodney looked up and took a minute to focus. "Oh, he brought it with him. SGC doesn't own any of it."
"How did this happen? And why did you okay it?"
"I didn't okay it. He arrived on the Daedelus with the paperwork equivalent of a note saying 'Please take care of my baby. He needs lots of space to grow. He has his own toys, and here's an extra fifty million to cover the inconvenience.'"
"What?!"
"He's paying his own freight."
Carson had trouble thinking about a person with fifty million dollars to spend. It was one thing when it was a facility budget, but to have that much as personal resources? So the man was intellectually arrogant, but he had the addition of wealth? No wonder he was such a wanker. "You said you interviewed him. Did you ask him why he was here? Do you know what he left?"
"An endowed chair, I believe. Do you have an actual question, or can I go back to work?"
"But did you ask him why?!" The frustration with McKay was all too familiar.
"Yes."
"What did he say?"
McKay turned away. "He wanted to boldly go where not very many biochemists had gone before. Now, can I please get back to this?" He put his hands on the keyboard, but didn't start typing.
"Aye," Carson sighed. "Just tell me were you put his lab."
It didn't take long to walk there, and the door opened on his signal. Carson stepped in and looked at benches covered with top end equipment, some of it whirring on its own, clearly robotic. LeBlanc sat in front of a large computer screen, his legs on the computer itself under the table. The keyboard was in his lap, and he didn't stop typing or look up.
"Come to find out my results? Give me a day or two. The first stages are still incubating."
"No," Carson said. "Believe it or not, I know how long a microarray experiment takes."
"So are you here to tell me to integrate this with the rest of biology?"
"Maybe. Care to tell me what this is about? Why someone riding as high as you would chuck it all to come out here?"
LeBlanc turned to look at Carson. "Why did you do it?"
Carson wasn't ready for the question. "I asked first."
LeBlanc shook his head. He gestured around the room. It was better outfitted than anything but the Ancient labs, and Carson would never have had approval from SGC for this much basic research equipment. LeBlanc said, "No, you tell me. Tell me why you're here, in this city and in this galaxy, and I'll explain this."
"How is that any of your concern?"
"It's as much my business as this lab is yours."
"This laboratory is certainly my concern! Dr. McKay's head of science, but biomedicine reports through me. Now why the hell are you here? I know what you left. Why?"
LeBlanc's expression did not change. "Indulge me, please."
Carson turned to leave, taking a deep breath to gather control, but when he let it out, he found himself thinking. Why was he here? He turned back to face the room and leaned on the door frame for a moment, gathering his thoughts.
He'd been working in an MRC lab and teaching medical students when he'd been approached by his government. He'd trained in surgery, but it didn't satisfy. Carson wasn't sure he could explain it. He had liked being a good doctor, and he could say without ego that he was an excellent surgeon, but it hadn't been enough. He wanted to know more about how it all worked. What were the cells doing when a wound healed. How did they know to replicate and crawl in there? Or how to stop? What makes a tumor happen when they don't stop? Gene therapy seemed obvious as a research field, like some kind of molecular surgery.
It was so easy back then. The stakes had been so low, and it was almost laughable how much pressure he thought he'd had back in Edinburgh. Pegasus had taught him the true meaning of pressure. LeBlanc waited, fingers still resting on the keys, but not moving. He looked tired.
"I read your work," LeBlanc said when Carson didn't answer. "Novel approach to gene therapy, but you were hampered by the British medical education system. Not enough basic science. They throw you right into a lab with kits to do the molecular biology, but you don't ever learn enough classical virology and biochemistry or even real physiology to know how it works. You were lucky with your ATA gene therapy."
Lucky? He didn't think so. Carson said, "How can you be so bloody rude? Just because you had money of your own to bring a lab here? Christ, if I didn't know it was impossible, I'd be wondering if you bought your Lasker Prize!" Carson stopped himself before he crossed his own lines. "I haven't exactly had kits out here on Atlantis, and I expect I know a mite more physiology than you. I work with your 'whole animals' every day. They're called people."
"Dr. Kildare, yes, and you're the McGyver of medicinal chemistry." LeBlanc's sneer was in place, but it didn't have enough energy behind it for his usual sting.
"What are you on about? You want my answer, or no?" Carson asked. "I can get Dr. Weir to explain this lab."
"You won't get the whole story from her." LeBlanc rubbed his eyes. "So how did you end up here?"
Carson gave in, deciding it was easier to give LeBlanc what he wanted if the man was ever going to explain why he was here. Quid pro quo. "I didn't even know I'd been tested for the gene, much less that I had it or that there were such things as Ancients. I was recruited to the Stargate Program."
"Why did you go?"
"What kills any cat? Curiosity. It meant taking on more medical duties and leaving the gene therapy research behind, but a lot of people are good at research. How many get the chance to learn that there's a whole galaxy of planets out there? Two galaxies, now." The question was somewhat pointed, but LeBlanc ignored him, raising his eyebrows and asking Carson to continue.
"I had enough lab time to work on the ATA gene. I isolated it, you might want to know, using microarray experiments. My lab did the preliminary work understanding the gene's function. That's how I met Rodney. He had me turning on equipment in his lab during spare time I didn't have, but he helped with my research into artificial ATA."
"Artificial ATA?" LeBlanc cocked his head. "You could have a portable on-switch for the rest of us. I take it the idea didn't work."
Carson enjoyed knowing something LeBlanc did not. "That's when we discovered the neural component."
LeBlanc looked at him for a long moment, and Carson could almost hear the wheels turning, and then he made the leap. "Your gene therapy is epigenetic, not integrated. It will wear off."
"Eventually," Carson said. "Maybe. It'll take decades, I think."
"Hmm. So how did you end up here?" LeBlanc seemed entirely unaware of just how annoyed Carson was.
Carson took a breath, feeling his jaw tighten. "Elizabeth Weir is very persuasive. So is Rodney. When I saw the technology in Antarctica, there was so much to be learned." He closed his eyes, remembering how the discovery the medical areas made it worth all the rest of the Ancient equipment they asked him to touch. Stepping through the stargate was the most frightening thing he'd ever done. His descent from the Ancients was a burden he would not have chosen, but he had to be here, even if it wasn't always comfortable. There wasn't any way he could say that, and not to this relative stranger. "Curiosity," Carson said again. It didn't begin to describe what he really felt.
"Fair enough," LeBlanc said, after a pause. "Curiosity works for me, too."
"But you don't just waltz up and ask to join a secret international program, even if you can buy your way in. How did you hear of it?"
"I came into my inheritance, and I was going to blow a lot of it going up with a Russian mission to the space station. I'd always wanted to go to space. I suppose I said things that caught someone's attention and they contacted me, asked if I'd be interested in xenobiology. I told them NASA's xenobiology program was a joke. Then they told me they weren't from NASA."
"But this lab?"
"I spent my own money on it. I said it was a condition of taking the job."
"What you just said? Elizabeth could have told me that. Why did you leave Stanford?"
"Would you believe me if I said I was bored?"
Carson didn't believe it, and he shook his head.
LeBlanc took a lanyard with a flash memory drive off his head. "Here."
Carson caught it. "What's this?"
"My medical records."
"I've got your medical records."
"No you don't. Now get out of here."
Carson looked at the device, and the implications annoyed him. "This is going to tell me you have some incurable illness, isn't it? Aren't you dramatic."
LeBlanc shrugged and turned back to his computer.
And then it hit him, and the words were out of Carson's mouth before he could stop himself. "I don't care how much money you gave the SGC, there's no way they'd let someone come here with a terminal disease and not tell the chief medical officer. You didn't tell them, did you? What the hell is it? And none of your dramatics."
"All this is yours when I go boom," LeBlanc said with a swing of his hand. "Now, unless you want to go look at that, I do have some Biacore data that you might find interesting."
"You've got a Biacore?" Even with all the Ancient technology, and some of that had uses he could not fathom, Carson missed Earth technology. And if he'd had one of those and microarrays for finding genetic variations, he might have been able to avoid killing half the population of Hoff. This was infuriating.
"How do you think I got that protein association data? Which, I might add, backed up your theories."
Carson walked over to LeBlanc, and handed him the drive. "You said you'd go boom. Whatever's wrong with you isn't chronic or slow."
LeBlanc picked it up, plugged it into a USB port on the key board, and in a few quick strokes called up an MRI image. "Picture's worth a thousand words."
Carson shut his eyes, but the image of the distorted artery deep in the brain wouldn't go away. "Aneurism."
"Yep."
Any attempt at a surgical repair would cause too much damage to the brain, and an aneurism like that could go at any time, rupturing the blood vessel and killing the patient. Carson pinched the bridge of his nose. He hated things he couldn't fix. He didn't like LeBlanc any better, but Carson felt in his gut the frustration of ineffectiveness. "Boom, indeed."
LeBlanc nodded, closing the file and removing the drive.
"So why this? Why not travel the world? You're in another galaxy and spend all your time in the lab." Carson couldn't understand it.
"What would you do?"
"I don't know. Spend time at home. See my mum, my family."
"Don't have those."
"Friends, then?"
Carson was surprised when LeBlanc laughed. "Not many people get where I was and have a social life, plus, I'm betting the complaints about me only stopped when I finally got this lab up and running and stopped working in the common areas."
He was right, but Carson said, "I got a complaint yesterday."
"I don't think I did anything yesterday."
"Dr. Turner was complaining that you don't go to the biochemistry group meeting."
"I thought she didn't want me there after I made Dr. Innskeep cry."
Carson had heard about that incident, but it wouldn't be good to coddle either of them. He didn't rein in his sarcasm. "Go interact with your colleagues once a week, and give them the benefit of your brilliance. You may have bought your way in for a private laboratory, but you report to Turner, and Turner reports to me. We can send you home." Carson would do it, too, even if LeBlanc was petty and took the equipment with him. He needed the research group to be a real group, despite the fact that they were all a bunch of chiefs and no Indians. "And try not to make them cry."
"I can't help it when they're stupid." He sounded like an eight-year-old.
Carson shook his head, then thought for a moment. "Would you be willing to move your lab if I told you we could make these instruments give you even more data? If you interface the Biacore with some of the Ancient scanning technology, you might get more complete data out of it."
LeBlanc looked away. "I've been ignoring the whole Ancient thing. I don't even take transporters."
"Oh, trust me," Carson said. "If we can get Radek to interface some of the Ancient equipment with some of this stuff, you'll have more data than even you can handle."
LeBlanc looked at him. Carson expected either an argument or enthusiastic agreement. What he got was a sigh. "All right. Let me finish this run."
***
Carson looked down at the body on the table. This one had lasted longer before reverting. Something wasn't right with the retrovirus, and he didn't think the problem was in the artificial genes themselves. There had to be something in the physiology that was causing the Wraith's Iratus genes to re-express. He and his team had been over the genetic structure, examined the blood chemistry at all stages, and mined the Ancient data banks for any relevant information.
The organs in this drone, which Sheppard had named Lassie, were more hybrid human than the previous experiment, but Carson wasn't sure that told him much. The strange adrenal gland-looking thing was there again. He cut it out, handed it to Dr. Biro and said, "Find out what this thing's secreting. What's the hormone profile, and match it up to the blood work if you can."
She took the tissue out of the room, leaving him to open the skull and see if the brain looked any different from last time.
***
"I need four more drones." At Sheppard's confused look, he clarified. "Not weapons. Wraith." Elizabeth's mouth tightened. He wasn't telling her what she wanted to hear.
"Four's going to be tough," Sheppard said. "It's hard enough to get one."
"What are you thinking, Carson," Elizabeth asked.
"I need to find out why they're reverting, and that means more than just blood work during the process." He swallowed. "I'm going to need to look at in-between time points. I've got scans, and I've tried to do some biopsies at the different stages, and there is a lot we can learn from the Ancient scanner, but--" He stopped and swallowed.
Elizabeth said, "You're talking vivisection, Carson."
He bit his lip and shook his head. "It's a fine point, I suppose, but no, they'll be dead."
"Why? Why aren't scanner data and biopsies enough?"
"There are some things you can't tell from scans. Plus, their insides change around a fair bit during the change, and I need to see things like color and texture."
"Eew," said Rodney.
"Well it's part of it. Also, I want to tag some of the Wraith organs with a tracking dye before injecting the virus, to learn what tissues go where. And--" He looked up, glanced around at all the faces. Elizabeth looked appalled, Sheppard and Teyla thoughtful, and Rodney seemed oblivious again, his attention on his tablet screen. "Four is the minimum for this experiment to mean anything."
"Hmm," Rodney said without looking up. "Can you get statistical relevance with just four?"
Carson was exasperated. "I don't even want to do four! But there's something we're missing, and I need more information. We've got some more work to do before the next version of the virus is ready."
"So that means we have time to get your lab rats while you're re-engineering the virus?"
Carson nodded again. The phrase lab rats brought home what he was about to do. He glanced at Elizabeth, and she kept her face pointed at the table. He said her name.
"What, yes?"
"Will you approve the mission?"
She nodded.
Part 2