that direction, but when he’d left, his vision had fizzled. Not only that, but they’d never had anyone with a degree like the one Hunter held. No one had ever worked for HMC with his level of training, in this innovated field of science.
“You start it,” Joel said, nodding his encouragement at Hunter.
His heart pounded hard and stopped for a moment. He breathed, and his pulse raced forward again. Reaching down, he met Joel’s eye. “If this doesn’t work, we only have time for one more calibration.”
“I think this is it.”
Hunter pushed the button, and the two men looked first toward the leaded glass that separated them from the two rotating generators. Both men wore protective eyewear and coats, as the room was cooled to sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit at all times.
The scene in front of them looked straight out of a science fiction movie, and Hunter heard the water recirculating coolers kick in. They kept the generators from overheating on the other side of the protective glass, and they were extremely noisy. Located on the opposite side from where Joel and Hunter stood, the recirculating coolers only produced a healthy hum in the control room.
“There it is,” Joel said, and Hunter switched his gaze to the computer screen in front of them. “Put it on the wall.”
Hunter tapped to transfer the data coming in from the small computer screen to the computerized wall panels.
The detectors embedded in the wall behind the x-ray generators picked up the locations of the rays after they were scattered by the crystal. Hunter and Joel had put in a known substance—a controlled test where they knew what the pattern should be—to test the calibration of the generators.
“That’s aspirin, all right,” Joel said, the key elements being highlighted by the computer system.
Hunter grinned, his relief off the charts. “Perfect,” he said. “Let’s get the first demo set up.” He switched off the projection and powered down the generators. They’d need a few minutes before they could be fired up again anyway, and Hunter wanted today’s lesson to be a smash hit.
“Which one do you want to do first?” Joel said, looking at his tablet. “I have two possibilities in my notes, but I didn’t differentiate which was first.” He looked at Hunter for guidance, and a swell of pride filled his chest.
“What do you think?” he asked. He’d learned over the years of watching his father and uncles that asking others what they thought made them feel important and useful. It didn’t really matter which demo was first, so why not let Joel choose?
“I say we go for the easiest one first,” he said. “Show them that it’s not hard to read. Then we can put in the mutated sample and see if they can find the plot points.”
“Good idea,” Hunter said. “I checked that sample we got from Beyer-Maines too. It’s been growing really well in the cool storage. I think the crystal is big enough to map, and we could do that this afternoon after the demos. Then, we’ll have the data and we can start trying to figure out what that bacteria contains.”
Joel nodded and tapped his tablet with the electronic pen. “Hunter…do you really think we can develop a new drug by working backward from a bacteria or virus?”
“One hundred percent,” Hunter said, looking up in surprise. He studied Joel’s face, wondering where the question had come from. “Didn’t you do that at Sullen’s?”
“Not by analyzing the proteins and makeup of actual diseases,” he said. “It was more trial and error. We knew this drug inhibited that protein, and while it wasn’t a perfect fix, it usually worked.” He shrugged one shoulder, though he still wore a look of concern. “If it didn’t, or the side effects were too drastic, we tweaked.”
“Tweaked.” Hunter couldn’t believe medications had been made like that in the past. “This tells us exactly what we have.” He gestured to the complicated set-up behind the protective glass. The equipment back there cost millions of dollars, and Hunter respected that greatly. “We can take a person’s DNA and their blood, and we can actually develop a medicine that’s personalized to them, based on their individual susceptibility to specific drugs.”
“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” Joel asked. “I’ve just never seen the data points come out like this. I barely know what I’m looking at.”
“The experiment—the actual blasting of the x-rays through the crystals is only the very beginning,” Hunter said. “It’s only the biology. Then we have to analyze that data.