Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,58
Beth a favor, and this seemed like a very cheap way of repaying it." Yes, it was definitely a doctor.
"Are you free for lunch today? I know it's short notice ..."
"If you can meet me at half past twelve at the front entrance, I can give you an hour and you can buy me a curry," he said.
"Deal. How will I know you?" I asked.
"Oh, I think I'll know you," he said, voice all dark brown smoothness. Definitely a doctor.
It's a constant source of amazement to me that the staff at Manchester's major hospital complex don't all have seri¬ous weight problems. They're only five minutes walk from the Rusholme curry parade, as serious a selection of Asian restaurants as you'll find anywhere in the world. If I worked that close to food that good, cheap, and fast, I couldn't resist stuffing my face at least twice a day. Richard might be convinced that the Chinese were the only people on earth with any claim to culinary excel¬lence, but for me, it was a dead heat with the chefs of the subcontinent. Frankly, as soon as I was seated at a window table with a menu in front of me, I was a lot more inter¬ested in the range of pakoras than in anything Gus Wal¬ters could possibly tell me.
He was one of the nonrugby-playing medics: medium height, slim build, shoulders obviously narrow inside the disguise of a heavy, well-cut tweed jacket. His hands were long and slender, so pale they looked as if they were al¬ready encased in latex. Facially, he had a disturbing resemblance to Brains, the Thunderbirds' puppet. Given that he'd opted for the identical haircut and very similar large-framed glasses, I wondered if he had enough sense of irony to have adopted them deliberately. Then I remembered he was a doctor and dismissed the idea. He probably thought he looked like Buddy Holly.
On the short walk to the nearest curry house, we'd done the social chitchat about how long we'd lived in Manchester and what we liked most and least about the city. Now I wanted to get the ordering done with so we could cut to the chase. I settled for chicken pakora followed by karabi gosht with a garlic nan. Gus opted for onion bhajis and chicken roganjosh. He grinned across the table at me and said, "The orifice I get closest to doesn't bother about garlic breath." It rolled out with the smoothness of a line that never gets the chance to go rusty.
I smiled politely. "So tell me about IVF," I said. "For a start, what kind of technology do you need to make it work?"
"It's all very low tech, I'm afraid," he replied, his mouth turning down at the corners. "No million-pound scanners or radioactive isotopes. The main thing you need is what's called a Class II containment lab, which you need to keep the bugs out. Clean ducted air, laminar flow, temperature stages that keep things at body tem¬perature, an incubator, culture media. The only really specialized stuff is the glassware-micro-pipettes and micro-manipulating equipment and of course a micro¬scope. Also, when you're collecting the eggs, you need a transvaginal ultrasound scanner, which gives you a pic¬ture of the ovary."
He was off and running. All I needed to do was provide the odd prompt. I was glad I wasn't his partner; I could just imagine how erotic his bedroom conversation would be. "So what are the mechanics of carrying out an IVF procedure?" I asked.
"Okay. Normally, women release one egg a month. But our patients are put on a course of drugs which gives us an optimum month when they'll produce five or six eggs. The eggs are in individual sacs we call follicles. You pass a very fine needle through the top of the vagina and punc¬ture each follicle in turn and draw out the contents, which is about a teaspoonful of fluid. The egg is floating within that. You stick the fluid on the heated stage of the micro¬scope, find the egg, and strip off some of the surrounding cells, which makes it easier to fertilize. Then you put it in an individual glass Petri dish with a squirt of sperm and culture medium made of salts and sugars and amino acids-the kind of soup that would normally be around in the body to nourish an embryo. Then you leave them overnight in a warm dark incubator and hope they'll do what opposite genders usually do in warm dark places