Anthem's Fall

Chapter Twenty Five

After staring at the name Nicoli Vatruvia and the subject heading, Let’s Schedule a Meeting, Kristen had clicked on the email.

 Ms. Jordan,

I have read through your senior thesis and am very intrigued by your proposal. We should speak immediately. Please reply as soon as possible and we can arrange a face-to-face meeting. Got to run.

Best,

Dr. Nicoli Vatruvia

Kristen had read over the email a number of times in disbelief. It was surely a weird prank orchestrated by one of her friends. She immediately checked the email address: nicoli.vatruvia@ColumbiaU.com by opening up the Columbia website and performing a staff directory search for him. It was not a hoax. Why would an internationally renowned synthetic biologist want to have a face-to-face with her? Kristen sat back in her desk chair and gazed out her window with uncertainty. There she was, sitting amid the relics of her childhood bedroom, having moved back to her parent’s home outside Boston. Beyond her window, the bleakly overcast November morning and naked tree branches mirrored her internal feelings. The excitement of a warm spring and a hopeful graduation day had since faded into a bare and discouraging autumn. Staring into the drab yard, she decided to take the trip to New York and meet Nicoli Vatruvia.

Later that same week Kristen anxiously sat by the sun-filled window of a Starbucks just off the Columbia campus in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When they had spoken briefly on the phone, Professor Vatruvia had told her to meet him at that specific time and place. He had told her nothing else. Even as she sat in the busy coffee shop, Kristen had no idea what part of her thesis had piqued the celebrated scientist’s attention so completely.

Knowing his face from various articles she had read about him, Kristen sat upright when the man she recognized as Nicoli Vatruvia opened the coffee shop door. She wondered if he could be considered a celebrity? In scientific circles it would certainly be true, but to the others in the coffee shop he was probably just another bookish intellectual.

Kristen swallowed hard and quickly suppressed her rising apprehension. She waved and smiled politely.

“Kristen Jordan?”

“Yes, hi, Professor Vatruvia.”

Standing up, Kristen took his outstretched hand. For a moment Professor Vatruvia regarded her age with unmistakable surprise, before sitting down and taking out a packed manila folder from his briefcase. His looks did not demand attention, yet his features seemed inquisitive, and—although not youthful—he had a young way about him.

“Thank you for coming down to meet me.”

“Of course,” Kristen said, attempting to sound as polite as possible. The man before her was a superstar; a man so renowned that accomplished PhDs would be uneasy in his presence. Professor Vatruvia opened the folder and began flipping through dozens of loose pages as Kristen sat uncomfortably, unsure if she should engage the prominent synthetic biologist in small talk. People were shuffling in and out of line, and baristas hurried around taking orders for the customers.

“Are you from the Northeast?” Professor Vatruvia asked as he skimmed through many pages.

“Cambridge.”

“Nice town . . .” He murmured with little interest. “Ah, here it is.”

Finding what he had been looking for, Professor Vatruvia passed a solitary paper across the table. Kristen recognized the words at once. It was an excerpt from her senior thesis—the specific section that had caused most experts to write off her whole work as theoretical and bordering on science fiction. Kristen had spent many an hour in the MIT student library debating whether to include the section she was now looking at.

A knot tightened in her gut.

In short, the section suggested that the growing field of synthetic biology limited itself by researching synthetic cells only in terms of biological form and function. Kristen had proposed the idea of expanding synthetic biology to the next level of innovation, attempting to create not only improved synthetic cells in terms of their use by people, but also synthetic cells that differed in nature from all other cells ever studied. Now that a synthetic cell had been created—an incredible feat in its own right—it was now time to climb inside the double helix and see what new marvel could be created with this newfound control over genetics. Kristen had proposed that this extensive approach to a synthetic genome might give rise to new proteins, cellular functions, or perhaps something more. They were daring assertions, and she did not relish the notion of defending them against the world’s preeminent thinker in the field.

“Do you really believe that?” Professor Vatruvia asked after letting her examine the page.

Kristen could feel her face flush. “Yes, on a theoretical level I do.”

“A theoretical level?”

“Certainly, in theory.” Kristen paused and sighed before begrudgingly pressing on. “But the number of potential DNA base pairs is practically infinite, and a means of testing all those base pairs to determine which could facilitate viable synthetic functioning would take forever. It’s taken evolution millions of years to create the form of natural cells we already know, so I think it would be unrealistic to expect any drastic changes in a single lifetime.”

Kristen’s answer came out more smoothly than she had expected, which was encouraging. This was after all her thesis, and she had defended it against many hard-lined doctrinaires.

“I agree,” Professor Vatruvia said after a moment, glancing with little interest through more pages of the manila folder. “But if it did exist—a means to code and test base pairs at a rate never before seen—and the theoretical of your thesis turned into scientific reality, what do you think could result?”

“That type of research has never been done, so it would only be speculation,” Kristen said.

“And if it did? We aren’t recording this conversation for journal publication Ms. Jordan. By all means, I am giving you permission to speculate.”

“Well then, there is always the possibility, however unlikely, that these new artificial chromosomes and constituent parts could become . . .” Kristen tilted her head and trailed off. “I don’t know.”

“It sounds like you do know,” Professor Vatruvia said.

“Speculation has no place in science.”

“Indulge me. What could the artificial components create?”

Kristen sighed in resignation. “A functional cell.”