Intuition Read Online Free PDF Page B

recorded the death, Feng sealed the dead mouse in a black plastic bag. He would put the corpse in the refrigerator that served as the animal facility's morgue.
    As Feng examined the mice in one cage, Marion studied those in another. In silence Feng and Marion held each mouse gently, with gloved thumb and forefinger grasping the fold of skin behind the neck. Positioned on their backs, the mice flailed their legs helplessly and could not turn or bite while Feng and Marion measured their tumors with tiny calipers. Cliff had injected six groups of mice with breast cancer cells. Nine mice in each group. Fifty-four in all. After the tumors developed, he'd injected three groups with his virus, and set three groups aside for his control. Each experimental group had received a different genetic variant of the virus. The mice in two groups with the virus had already died, and those in the third group were close to death as well. Marion couldn't help tsking for a moment at the waste. She wasn't proud of sacrificing living creatures for the idle repetition of failed experiments.
    “Marion,” Feng said.
    He rarely spoke while working, and she started, surprised to hear his voice.
    “What is this?” He was turning a mouse slowly in his hand. “Is this mouse correct?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Is it from the protocol?” Feng asked.
    “I've already checked that. This is the correct mouse. This is number three hundred sixty-three,” she said, pointing to the metal tag on the mouse's translucent ear.
    “Then where is it?” Feng asked.
    “Where is what?”
    “The tumor,” he said.
    She took the mouse herself and turned and felt the wriggling body in her hands. Instinctively, the creature flexed its feet as Marion palpated the first set of mammary glands. The tumor was barely perceptible, scarcely protruding on the animal's neck.
    “Now look at this one. Three-sixty-five.” Feng lifted another mouse from the cage. “This one last week had a tumor point five centimeters in diameter. Where is it now?”
    They began to examine all the mice, comparing tumor size with the records in Feng's lab book. Nearly all had tumors as big as, or slightly bigger than, they had been before. Three mice, however, had tumors significantly smaller. How could this be? Somehow three tumors had actually shrunk.
    Marion and Feng looked at each other. After repeated failure, could one of Cliff's viral variants actually have some effect? What had changed here? What had Cliff done? The variation of the virus was
R-7. Cliff had scrawled a note on the blue index card labeling this cage of mice. But he'd never gotten R-7 to work effectively in live animals before. Were these three mice significant? Or were they outliers of some kind—tainted by some other condition? This was the difficulty with animal research: so many different things could go wrong. Cancer cells would not grow or grew too slowly, blood work was inconclusive, animals died of some extraneous illness. Despite all Marion's precautions, there had been an outbreak in the colony years before. Only a few animals had died, but Marion had terminated all her experiments anyway. “The mice were exposed to pathogens, and they're tainted,” she'd announced at the lab meeting. “Obviously, we can't study cancer and some other unknown infection as well. What would we be looking at?”
    What were they looking at now? Probably nothing. And yet . . . What were the chances that Cliff had actually happened onto something? If there was a real cause and effect, if R-7 actually reversed the progress of cancer growth, then they must find out how. Marion was not excited; she would never pin her hopes on one such observation, but she could not let it pass either.
    She knew Feng was making the same calculations she was. The odds were against them. Still, there was the slight chance of some significance, that Cliff's technique might have had some effect on these three mice. If that was the case, the