the current state of the situation. The Virus has destroyed our country. Compretely and totally! Whole generations have been wiped down! Those plagues in the Bible? Those locusts, those boyos bursting on the skin – they were just prophecies of this disease!’
Joseph nodded again, a bit warily. He wasn’t a huge fan of the evangelical craze in Lusaka.
‘To make a kew-ah – how can we? The Virus compolomises the immunie system. So you cannot even do a normal vaxin. So maybe the solution? Don’t kill The Virus compretely. Maybe just find some? Equa-biriam.’
Musadabwe uncrossed his arms and levelled his hands like a see-saw.
Equilibrium. Joseph nodded. Commensalis. Okay. Learn to share the table with The Virus.
‘But The Virus, it is velly movious, changing-changing all of the time. You cannot swove this problem just like that,’ Musadabwe snapped his fingers. ‘No! It is a moving target! So we must also keep moving. Like Muhammad Ali, floating like a bee! Knock it off from the pass!’ He punched his fist into his palm, then grabbed a scrap of paper on the workbench and plucked a Bic from his coat pocket. ‘This?’ He drew a circle. ‘It is a human immunity cell. They are calling it? Tee. Cell.’ He labelled it. ‘And these ones,’ he gave it a halo of sprouting mushrooms, ‘are the receptacles.’
Joseph nodded. Receptors. He knew what these were from googling the abbreviations in his father’s notes. Receptors and co-receptors sat on the outside of human T-cells. The Virus used them like portals to break into the immune system and take over. If one receptor didn’t work, The Virus shifted to the next, like a general trying every gate of a walled castle. Musadabwe explained all this in his broken English, which oddly didn’t seem to impede the clarity of his science.
‘Andi so? There was some resatch in Kenya. It’s now twenty years ago! It was showing that these women, you know, the women of the night,’ Musadabwe blinked over the euphemism, ‘they are highly exposed to The Virus. But they did not catch the full disease! The Virus, it was in the cells but at velly low logs, the same low levels that we need for…?’ He lifted his nose and waited like a teacher.
‘Equilibrium?’ Joseph answered tentatively.
‘A-haa!’ Musadabwe see-sawed his hands, slower this time, more dramatically. ‘So these female populations had some natchuro immunities that made The Virus sustainabo. It was because they had a mutation on the respectacle that was preventing The Virus from attaching—’
‘Oh.’ Joseph sat up. ‘The mutation blocks The Virus from getting in the T-cells!’
‘Mm-hmm.’ Musadabwe grinned. ‘Their mutation was on this respectable,’ he scribbled letters next to a mushroom on the diagram. ‘See. See. Arra. Two Dashi. Sickisty-fo. Eye.’
CCR2-641. Joseph recognised the abbreviation from his father’s messages and emails.
‘But your father found a woman with a mutation on a ligand of another receptor as well.’ He scrawled out another abbreviation: CXCR4∆6. ‘We are calling her the Lusaka Peshent. Andi so? If we duplicate both of her mutations in the general populations—’
‘We can prevent The Virus from infecting our immune cells,’ said Joseph. ‘But’ – he nibbled the side of his thumb – ‘how do you duplicate mutations?’ He was out of his depth now.
‘A-haa! So, there is a technology now! Crispa!’ Musadabwe wrote it out: CRISPR-Cas9. ‘It targets the genes. You can make mutations at the DNA level. Crispa is simpo and affordabo.’
So why had this not been done before?
‘Crispa is velly new. And you can make some mistakes. How do you mutate the genes without damaging other things, this-side-that-side? It is not easy. It is some kind of mm, genetical engineering? Because if we go along this path, we are not mutating The Virus. We are mutating our bodies.’
Joseph remembered the last memo on his father’s phone, the words just audible through the wind on the golf course: ‘…the question then is whether to modify the genome of the host or…’
Musadabwe had now embarked on a begging rant. There was a Chinese study being run by a Dr Ling and Ling had said he would back Musadabwe, but new equipment was needed – did Joseph have access to his father’s research funds? To buy a cell sorter? A new incubator? The mice could be ordered online—
Joseph’s head was swarming. He needed to think. He needed to read Dad’s notes and listen to Dad’s memos and process them. He needed to zap each buzzing thought, pinch it between his fingers, pin its jerking body