It is not part of the medical school at the big U but it is inside the Medical School. A wanderer needs to enter the medical school and see the students with their huge stacks of Xeroxed notes loitering in the halls walk down the main hallway and then enter the big beige oaken wood door with a window five feet up. A sign above the five-foot wide ten-foot high door reads School of Microbiology and Immunology. On the door is a deadbolt, and only the janitor can let a student in after six PM. Inside the door are laboratories, each with an oaken door, and each with a deadbolt. Only a researcher with the proper key can enter a laboratory. Down near the end is the Tumor Virus laboratory. The lab is long with open bulletproof glass windows lining the room so anyone, anytime can look in and see what is going on. Small white centrifuges line up on the black lab bench and refrigerators and cryo freezers stack in the back. There demonstrates ample workspace for isolation techniques and apparatus to be displayed. The door to the unit has two deadbolts, one high and one low and the curator alone has the two keys to gain access to the lab. In case of an emergency, two professors each unknown to the other has one key and the Dean of the Medical school is called to summon them because only he has both of their names. The curator has the name Dr. Singh. Slightly beyond the virus repository and to the left is the aviary. Here monkeys with terminal cancer are evaluated with therapies and cats with brain tumors sit in cages and scream. Some have electrodes sticking out of their head. Animals with cancer are in pain and bite. The curator of the animal plant is a huge man in a white coat and his name is Charcot.
The Wracks is in the happy part of the complex in the beginning of the hall near the mouse house. In this room, syngeneic mice lab subjects run in circles is cages that are cleaned and changed once per week. The mice are fed a standard blend of brown kibble with ample water. Occasionally a mouse gets loose in the hall is caught and euthanized because each group of mice in a cage is an Immunology experiment in the making and the scientist cannot be sure of the origin of the mouse. The professor assigns the Wracks with a SJl/J strain infected with type B oncovirus that develops reticulum cell sarcoma. The analog in humans is non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
The SJL/j strain is a white purebred mouse line and when they are full of tumor, they puff up into huge balls and necrotic cinders protrude from their back. The Wracks is assigned to sacrifice mice at end date, collect their serum and analyze the serum for tumor-specific transplantation antigens. He is also to develop a 1 gravity sedimentation column that ultimately evolved to flow cytometry. Their huge spleens which occupy their whole body cavity at term also harvest for isolation of type B virus-infected cells for transfer.
The Wracks spends a day calibrating the fetal calf serum that will form the vehicle for the sedimentation column. He tests each lot on a liquid osmometer to standardize the specific gravity of the solution so the experiment has validity. After the final run, he cleans the osmometer and the researchers like him because he cleans up after himself. Inside the animal morgue is a pathologist from the National Institute of Health who autopsies dead animals with cancer. He dissects them piece by piece and makes slides and talks into a voice recorder while he works. He has dark hair and looks like a person you would never want to cross ever anywhere. He acknowledges the Wracks presence as the Wracks walks by.
Tonight it is the end of the quarter and the Wracks is behind in his work because of his course load. He has taken too much burden for a junior at the big U. He finds the janitor for the medical school in his room on the main hall and the janitor opens up the door to the school of Microbiology and Immunology. The hall is dark except for the tumor virus repository where the lights are always on. With his personal key he enters the lab, takes his supplies out of his refrigerator and sets up the column on the bench in a stand with a vice. Taking his tumor cell suspension that he harvested earlier in the day and resuspended in pink minimal essential media, he layers the cells on the top of the column and sets the timer. Near the front of the large laboratory is a coffee stand and hot water dispenser with a coin purse and he puts in a quarter and makes a cup of instant coffee. He quaffs it down his throat and gets back to his timer set at ten minutes for the first aliquot. During this time he cell counts the suspension in a manual cell counter microscope and notes the value in his experiment journal that he keep in his desk near his refrigerator. The timer goes off and he turns the siphon at the bottom of the column and pours five millimeters of fluid in the first tube labeled one and resets the timer for another ten minutes. Putting the cells, labeled with trypan blue in the cell counter, he counts them and notes the result in his experiment book. Repeating this action until the three hundred milliliter Nalgene tube column empties the experiment is finally done. He will have to repeat the run tomorrow. The coffee wears off and the Wracks start to fall asleep at the bench. The time signals well after two o’clock. Suddenly a noise startles him and a man in a suit with glasses and a radioactive Geiger counter hosting a foot long rod sensor walks into the lab and asks him what he is doing here so late at night.
Just running my experiment. I am late and next week is finals week. I have to finish up my work.
The official-looking man looks at him intently and scans his body with the Geiger counter. The machine starts to click.
Radioactive chromium he says. We use it to label white cells. When you are done clean up and don’t forget to turn off the light.
The official leaves just as quickly as he arrived. He must be the head of the department thinks the Wracks, I haven’t met him yet.
When the experiment finishes, the Wracks washes the column and puts the supplies and the labeled aliquots in a rack back in the freezer. He closes the laboratory door after turning off the lights. The white Ford Pinto borrowed from his father, parks in a loading zone in front of the school under a single street light. The Wracks smiles, he hasn’t got a ticket. The police are not up this late at night. The Santa Ana wind blows quietly and the Wracks drives back down Moonrise Boulevard to his home in tranquil hills. He enters the house, finds his bedroom and falls into bed. His brother’s bed is empty and the Wracks wonder where he is. Tomorrow is another day.