The Tallest Sunflowers

Robin Wright Full Manuscript: 75,000 words

THE TALLEST SUNFLOWERS

Adult

Romance with a touch of suspense

Epigraph:

"Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow. It's what sunflowers do." – Helen Keller

Chapter 1

“The little tiny molecule only has one job, and that is to get into each cell, and find the target molecule. When it gets there, it say hello and clings on. When other, relevant molecules see the little molecule holding on, they come and cling on to the target molecule’s leg too.”

“Because they like the target molecule?” the little voice asked, fascinated.

“Yes, and because it is what they do. When they see someone clinging on, they come and help.”

“Like the Coastguard, when someone is in trouble in the sea?”

“Exactly like that. When enough of the Coastguard molecules arrive, they break the target molecule in two, and then it won’t work.”

“Do you mean they killed it?” There was uncertainty in the small voice, now.

“Not at all, but it has to go home to its mummy to get a BandAid, before it can cause any more trouble. And the little molecule goes home too.”

“Abby Nicholls, if you are teaching my daughter something she wouldn’t otherwise learn until college, you be careful.”

“She just wants to know what her favourite auntie does for a living, don’t you, Florence?”

Florence nodded, her light blonde curls cascading as she waggled her head in the exaggerated nod that is only ever performed – only ever possible - up to about the age of seven.

“She has been telling me how she sends little teeny molecules in to break up big bully molecules that are making people sick, so they get better.” Florence’s version was surprisingly succinct. I should have tried that in my doctoral thesis.

“But Auntie Abbie?” Florence said, with the perspicacity of the young, “aren’t you my only auntie?”

“I’m sure you’ll get some more when you are older. Now, where was I? Oh, yes, so the bully molecule is sent home to think about its bad behaviour, and the little molecule can go round again, to see if there are any other bullies about.”

“What happens if you don’t succeed making the little molecules? Will the bullies make people really sick?”

“Yes. The bullies get in the way of how things happen normally in the body, and in this particular case they mean your blood doesn’t work properly.”

“My blood?” Florence asked, tilting her head, curiosity crinkling her nose and her brows.

“Oh, I can’t wait to hear how you’re going to explain that one!” her sister called from the kitchen island where she was cutting cookies.

“Okay, well, you remember how I told you that our blood is not a red liquid, but a clear liquid with a lot of red bits in it?”

Florence nodded. “You said that’s why sometimes it sets dark red, and sometimes a sort of yellow colour.”

“Exactly right – well remembered!” Abbie ruffled Florence’s hair, a congratulatory motion she had made her own and which Florence adored. “Well, the little red bits are called blood cells. Those red blood cells - red, because they are red, and blood cells because they are a major part of your blood – only really have one purpose. They pick up an important part of the air, called oxygen, in the lungs – in your chest, that is, when you breathe the air in - and then wander around the body, handing out the oxygen to other cells around the body who need it.”

“Like a milk monitor?”

“Milk monitor?” Abbie looked across at her sister Lauren. “Have you been telling this one about the seventies?”

“No, they’ve reintroduced daily milk at St Andrew’s, now. Each class has a milk monitor, and the kids do it for one week at a time.”

“Fair enough.” She turned back to Florence. “Yes, exactly like a milk monitor. And then they go back around the body to the chest, which has breathed in more air since then, and hand back the empty bottles, which are called carbon dioxide, and collect some more full bottles, with more oxygen. But some people have not got the right programs in their blood cells to make all the parts of the red blood cells, and when they get it wrong, the blood cells don’t form properly, and the bottles can’t hold the oxygen.” Abbie reached across to the countertop and snagged a cut cookie. She ignored Lauren’s protest of ‘Hey!”

“You see, Florence, a normal red blood cell looks like this …” She fashioned the cookie dough into the donut shape associated with a normal red blood cell, a circle with thicker edges than centre. “Buuut…if they have this disease and their programming doesn’t get it right every time, sometimes they make cells that look like this.” She quickly squashed the ‘cell’ cookie into the croissant shape associated with sickle cells. “And when they are like this, not only do they not work very well, but they are much stickier than normal cells. Can you feel how sticky that is?”

Florence dutifully tested the squashed cookie for stickiness, and nodded.

“You wouldn’t like it if all your blood got stuck in places in your veins and those places really, really hurt, instead of flowing around freely, would you?”

Florence shook her head, more because she knew it was expected of her from the tone Abbie had used than from a deep understanding of vaso-occlusion in narrow capillaries, but she had grasped the general idea.

“No, you wouldn’t. So if somebody came along with a medicine that stopped that happening, you’d be really happy, wouldn’t you?” Again, Abbie was rewarded with the hyper-extensive nod. “Well, that is what I do. I am making a new medicine which will prevent that happening, by targeting the bully molecules that cause the mistakes to happen in the first place.”

“Yay! Go Aunty Abbie!” called Lauren enthusiastically from the island stool. “Now can I have my much-messed-about cookie back, please? It’s baking time.”

As they slid the trays of prepared cookies into the oven, Lauren spoke quietly to Abbie as Florence drifted off to play in another room. “You know you have a gift, Abs. Florence is two years ahead of her classmates in science, all parts, because of her super-brainy Aunty Abigail.”

Abbie looked at her in surprise. “Two years? Is that even possible in Junior school?”

“Yup. At the last Parent Teacher meeting, the girl who has to teach the little darlings preliminary science said she was thinking of getting Flo to step in on some of the trickier subjects!” She took the next tray from Abbie, and added “You just seem to be able to explain incredibly complicated subjects to kids in a way they instantly take it up. Flo can teach her friends how to get it, because she remembers your stories. The one about why some people are different colours because of extra-special cells in their skin is a particular favourite.”

“Well, if my latest experiment doesn’t improve, I might be out on my ear, and then I will have to become a teacher instead.”

“Is it not going well? I thought everything Greenleaf touched turned to gold.”

“It’s not the company’s fault. I don’t think it is the drug’s fault, even. It does seem to work on the faulty beta-globulins -” Abbie stopped as Lauren turned up her hand.

“I’ll take the Florence version, please, because you know that stuff goes in one ear and out the other.”

“You are hopeless, sis!” Abbie laughed. “Well, you heard the rest of it, right?”

“Oh, yes, I can take a haematology degree from that stuff. Then what happens?”

“Well, people with sickle cell disease have a faulty gene, which produces a flawed instructional molecule, messenger RNA or mRNA for short – which tells blood progenitor cells to make a wrong version of beta-globin, one of the components of haemoglobin, instead of the right version.”

“And that’s your ‘bully’ molecule?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“So what does your little molecule do?”

“It’s also RNA, but much smaller. About 1/25 the size, in fact. And it basically acts as a big flag to the machinery in the cell to find the bully molecules and smash them up.”

“How does that help?”

“Well, if the body finds itself short of anything, it tries to make it some other way, or substitute something different that works. In the case of sickle cell, if it can’t make the faulty adult haemoglobin, it restarts the machinery to make the fetal form of haemoglobin. You know, the sort you have in the womb, when you are not breathing through your lungs.”

“And that works?”

“Yep. Pretty well, actually. It hangs on to oxygen a bit tighter than normal, but as long as you are not trying to be an Olympic sprinter, that doesn’t affect anyone’s life much. You don’t do a lot of major exercise in the womb.”

“Oh, don’t you just? Carrying Florence was like wearing a bag full of fighting squirrels for the last four months. That’s something you’re probably going to find out, one day. Speaking of which…”

Lauren pushed the oven shut and set the timer, before turning to give her sister ‘the look’ every single sister to a married woman knows. “Has Mark popped the question yet?”

“Nope,” Abbie said, smiling, and just as she could see her sister winding up for a rant, added “but he has asked me to Pierre’s on Friday night.”

“Ooh, fancy!” Lauren looked through to the lounge, where Florence had settled cuddled in on the couch with her father Eric and her younger brother Eric Jnr. They were all watching a kids’ movie of some sort. “That’s lawyers for you. Mind you, when they settle down and get married, and you have your babies, you’ll be lucky to get a visit to the pizzeria twice a year.”

“You could sort that out in five seconds.”

“Oh, tell me, O Wise One, how can I get my husband to take me out more often?” Lauren said, digging Abbie in the ribs.

“Forget how to cook so well.”

“Hell, you are smart,” Lauren shot back. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

*

“Two dead? This is heartbreaking, Su-Lin.”

Abbie approached the scrupulously-clean worksurface in a waft of hand-sanitiser, and looked over the younger woman’s shoulder. “How many others injured, this time?”

“Two. Both still alive. That one will not last the day, if I’m any judge, though. That looks nasty.”

Two, and possibly three, dead mice this morning. Abbie's heart sank as she leaned in beside Su-Lin and made herself look. Third cohort. She had lines in the protocol for days like this – observe, record, adjust, do not catastrophise – though she might have to come back later to write it up, as she'd told Lauren she would be there for dinner before Florence's bedtime today.

Abigail’s study protocol called for the concept drug to be tested in mice, mice which were specially bred for this experiment, so that they mimicked the genetic condition the drug was designed to correct. In this study, the drug was intended to be a functional cure for sickle cell anemia, which meant the mice could not make one hundred percent correct haemoglobin in their red blood cells. The protocol called for the mice to be tested, after treatment with the drug, to measure fetal haemoglobin in their blood, a complex assay test that was made much harder by the tiny volumes which could be drawn from each mouse.

This was the third cohort that had shown the mice becoming aggressive with each other. The laboratory mice were usually very sweet, and always well cared for. Every day, one of the lab workers would come in and look after the mice, ensuring they were as happy as they could be under the circumstances. Abbie always used fewer mice than her colleagues, because she would know the answer after a few, even if you could get a better statistical number with more mice. In her part of the development of Greenleaf’s drug products, she didn’t need a big statistical number – she just needed the directions of the indicators to be correct.

“We’ve got one more cohort this afternoon, at the middle dose, so let’s see how that works out, babes, okay?” Abbie checked that Su-Lin understood that this was not the end, but just a data point. “I’ll be leaving early, as I need to get to my sister’s for dinner before her daughter goes to bed. I did tell you?”

“Sure, boss. You said, yesterday.” Su-Lin smiled. She was not the sentimental one – that was Abbie. Abbie often felt that Su-Lin’s cultural background made this part of the work easier for her, but they had never discussed it. Abbie had heard all the stories about ethnically Chinese people eating dormice, and turtles, and all sorts of creatures, and of course there were the tales of how the COVID pandemic had started with someone eating an infected bat, but Su-Lin had only ever eaten the same foods as her, when Abbie had noticed.

*

Chapter 2

The next day was no improvement.

“It’s the same with the new bunch, Abs, I’m really sorry.”

“ ‘Bunch’ is not a word we use in this lab, Su-Lin. The word is ‘batch’, ‘group’ or ‘cohort’.” Abbie smiled to rob her words of offence. Su-Lin would not take offence, anyway, though. And so it proved.

“Whatevs, boss, but they still attack each other when we are not looking.” Su-Lin was almost the exact complement to Abbie. Where Abbie was taller than average and a bit willowy with long chestnut hair, she saw Su-Lin Park as shorter than average, curvier than most and gorgeous with it. Abbie was in awe of Su-Lin's huge personality and confidence, too. Su-Lin could not walk down to street level without men trying to catch her eye. She was as clever as Abbie, or at least Abbie thought so, but this was her first post-doctoral job and, at twenty-four, she had ten years’ less experience. She was learning the ropes of pre-clinical work fast from the more experienced woman, although she was already far more expert than Abbie could believe for a twenty-four year old. Despite the constant attention from the opposite sex, Su-Lin was completely obsessed with her boyfriend, a lovely guy called Marcus, who was a marine biology lecturer at NYU, though he spent most of his time at a marine science unit in San Francisco Bay.

“How many this time?” Abbie asked.

“Four. Well, technically five, according to protocol. Only one is dead, though.”

“Are the wounded mice testable?”

“Sure, if you don’t mind getting your fingers bitten off.” Coming from a culture where until fairly recently pretty much any mammal was regarded as edible, Su-Lin was not remotely sympathetic towards mice used in pre-clinical studies. Abbie was never happy about using live animals, but unfortunately until recently the law had said that you could not test a drug on humans until you had first tested it on two species of mammal. The difficulty, Abbie knew, was that if your drug was safe in a rat or a mouse, and in a non-human primate, then it would be safe for humans nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of ten thousand. With the newer methods, they were not yet much past seventy-five percent safe most of the time, and few healthy people would volunteer to test drugs which still had a twenty-five percent possibility of significant toxicity. Mice and rats, which were specifically bred for scientific research, were excluded from the law when bigger, cuddlier animals like guinea pigs, dogs and monkeys were included, and so tended to get the bad end of that stick.

This experiment, for her new oligonucleotide which had shown spectacular results in all the in vitro proof of concept studies in glass dishes, was proving problematic. The mice who received the drug were becoming aggressive, sometimes very so. It was very hard to work out why. Nucleotides themselves were ‘base pairs’, or two amino-acid bases linked together to form a rung of the ladder of the whole RNA molecule. Oligonucleotides were molecules that had multiple nucleotides linked together in parallel, forming their own extremely short, usually single helix ‘ladder’. They could range from ten nucleotide base pairs up to several thousand, but the biggest RNA molecule in the body was dwarfed by the smallest DNA strand in any chromosome. These RNA molecules were the main messengers of genetic activity. The largest would have up to five thousand nucleotide base pairs, whilst the shortest chromosome in the body would have about fifty million. This enabled the RNA molecules to flit among the DNA strands like motorcycle couriers in traffic, taking and delivering messages to and from the genome.

Abbie’s company specialised in ‘small interfering RNA drugs’. These were the very short kind, intended to have only one purpose, usually to stop an unwanted molecule, nearly always a protein, from being manufactured in the body. They could be used on pre-mRNA or mRNA, messenger RNA molecules normally made by the genes in each relevant cell as ‘factory overseers’ for the manufacture of proteins. A faulty gene would normally make an mRNA which would cause the cell to make a faulty protein, and a faulty protein would either not work at all or would work imperfectly, usually causing an undesired effect – such as sickle cell anaemia in her project. By introducing the correct small interfering RNA (an ‘siRNA’) via an infusion or injection, the doctor could in theory stop the patient’s body producing the faulty protein which was responsible for sickle cell anaemia. The patient’s body would then cast around for a solution which meant it did not have to stop producing haemoglobin entirely, because otherwise it would die. If it found one, and it usually did, then the patient would no longer have the sickle cell problem. It had to be done carefully, though, because just stopping the faulty version without giving the body time to adapt could be fatal, too.

If her drug was making the animals aggressive, though, she might just be swapping one problem for another.

“I don’t get it. We’ve tested this sequence until we are blue in the face in the lab. In all human cell lines, we have shown that it stops the production of faulty beta-globin. We have walked the sequence up and down for miles to ensure that it does not target anything else or cause any off-target effects, and yet these mice are showing an effect that we cannot see in the cell-lines.”

This was the biggest fear of the anti-animal testing people, which was most reasonable people, including nearly all animal testers themselves. If a drug candidate could not be shown to be safe in an animal as simple as a mouse, even if it worked, then it could not be deemed safe for human use – not even for testing. Trying to get the same level of comfort in the safety of a drug by any other method was not yet possible. But if you took the mice away from the drug testing, you put people’s health at risk even as you were trying to help them. A classic lose-lose situation for drug-development scientists with feelings.

“We have another cohort starting on Monday. You’ll be engaged by then, won’t you? So you won’t care!” Su-Lin asked. Abbie had told Su-Lin of her date plans.

“I doubt it, even if I do hope so. You know how it works – if you expect it, it never happens. Still, Mark’s a lovely guy. Well, there’s nothing more we can do here today, so I’m going to go home and let Sylvia help me prepare for tonight. Gotta look my best, just in case.” Su-Lin knew Sylvia, Abbie’s room-mate.

“Break a leg, hon. Not literally! Just…good luck!” Su-Lin came round the bench and gave Abbie a hug, and Abbie took off her lab coat and hung it on her peg by the door.

“You’re not exactly radiating joy, babe. Don’t you want him to propose?” Su-Lin fixed her with a stern glare.

“No, I do. I’m sure I do.” Abbie gave herself a little subliminal shake, trying to feel the confidence she had expressed.

“But even if you get engaged, you’re still doing the checks this Sunday, though?” Su-Lin asked, clearly seeking confirmation. “I’ve got that wedding in Jersey on Sunday, and my flight leaves tomorrow evening.”

“I’m doing them. Don’t worry, and have a lovely time. My regards to Marcus.”

“See you Tuesday!” Su-Lin called, as she left the lab.

*

In a cab on the way back to her SoMa apartment, Abbie considered her relationship with Mark. He was a successful junior attorney, currently carrying the bags for one of the highest-flying partners at his corporate law firm. They had met at a wedding instead of on-line, a fact which had made her even keener on him than his chiselled good looks and great figure had earned, because the dating apps sucked. The only fly in their happy ointment was that he was a very dull lover. Just last weekend, he had told her he was sure she would agree he made Casanova look like a virgin, which had irritated her a little. She found that testosterone-fuelled need to be praised a little childish. If they were married, she hoped he might settle down. He had been mildly supportive of her career, mainly as a result of having no interest in it but wanting to make her feel good about herself. He also believed lawyers were the smartest people in the world, and he was a lawyer, so he must be smarter than she was. The evidence against this was legion, and it had annoyed her a few times, but he thought she was just a lab rat. Once, early on, she had mentioned a research paper – her first lead-author paper, in Nature, which had taken three years to publish, and he'd just nodded and said 'That's great, babe' in the tone he used for the Giants' scores. She had not mentioned any other paper since. As far as he was concerned she was the little woman. Worse, she was his little woman, in his mind. Still, he was attentive, and affectionate, most of the time.

While she often slept over at his Polk Gulch apartment, she still hadn’t sold her own apartment that she shared with her long term college roommate and best friend, Sylvia. Sylvia was dating a semi-professional footballer, Alex, and regularly stayed overnight with him in Oakland. Sylvia could fit that around her job as an assistant producer for a small Bay Area news station, so she was rarely in the apartment either, except on the surprisingly frequent nights when she and Alex had had some minor spat.

Neither Abbie nor Sylvia had made a firm decision to let the small apartment go. Sylvia had promised to be there tonight to help her get ready. There would be pinot grigio and nachos if Sylvia was involved, even if Abbie was going to eat at one of the best restaurants in the City.

Sylvia was very excited. Her messy, dirty-blonde hair was tightly bound up in a bun for once, so she was able to concentrate on Abbie’s make-up and hair. Her work in the news station gave her special insight into the world of make-up and appearance, she claimed, but the truth was she was just more excited about doing it than Abbie was. She worked miracles, though, so it was no hardship.

As she teased and untangled Abbie’s long dark chestnut hair, she was clearly more excited than Abbie was about the date, as well.

“I so hope he proposes! I can get this apartment in the settlement.”

“You don’t have settlements on marriages, Sylvie, sweetie. That’s divorce you’re thinking of.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter, because you’ll never be back here. You’ll be making sweet love with your gorgeous fiancé.”

“Well, that’s nice. Good to know there’s a first time for everything?”

“What’s the matter, girl? You nervous?” Sylvia swung the seat around. She was bigger in every direction than the slender Abbie, so if she hadn’t been nervous before, she would have been then. Sylvia claimed she needed her curves to hold her heart of gold, and Abbie would not have disagreed. Sylvia had once told a man who had called her 'plus-sized' that she was 'precision-engineered for maximum impact' and he had proposed three days later. Not literally, but almost. Abbie had long ago lost count of the times when she had left a bar listening to Sylvia’s naughty laugh holding a room full of new admirers spellbound. That was Sylvia.

“Not really. Well, maybe just a little.” Abbie pinched her thumb and index finger together to indicate how little.

“He’d be the luckiest man in the world to marry you, Abs, given that I am unavailable,” Sylvia pronounced. “You’re a massive catch, darling. Pretty, sexy, super-smart, best friend anyone could have. Massive. Just need to get a little weight on those hips, and you’d be perfect.”

Abbie never stopped trying to keep weight off her hips, although she was fairly lucky in that it rarely wanted to be there in the first place. Sylvia, though, was persistently of the ‘more cushion for your pushin’ frame of mind.

They went through Abbie’s wardrobe, and selected a gown they were fairly sure she hadn’t worn for Mark before now, a long slimming creation in a sparkly midnight blue velvet with strategically placed devoré panels. She didn’t need the slimming illusion – she was thin as a blade as it was – but it did make her feel good. She had bought it for a Christmas party a couple of years before, but Mark hadn’t been able to go at the last minute, and she hadn’t had an occasion to wear it since. Even the normally shy Abbie had to admit that, with hair and make-up done and in that gown, she looked and felt like a million dollars.

As Abbie regarded herself in the mirror, she felt like she did indeed look like someone a handsome man would want to marry. At the same time, she did not feel like a woman who wanted to get married, not at that moment. The feeling would pass, she was sure, so for the moment she filed it away under 'complicated'.

“OK, babes, I reckon you are just about ready. Got your bag? Mace? Rape alarm? Pepper Spray?” Sylvia always said this – it was their little ritual. “Then I reckon you’re ready to get engaged, hon.”

She took an Uber to the restaurant, and arrived exactly on seven thirty. Mark was usually running late, but the table was for now, and she didn’t want to fall foul of their notoriously-strict no-show policy. She was prepared to wait. She had already decided this on the way over – that she would wait for thirty minutes if she had to, that she would not mind, that the evening would be what it was going to be. The maitre d’hôtel took her long black wool coat and ushered her gracefully between the other occupied tables, and she was gratified to see a lot of admiring or even jealous glances, as the dress did its work. Then she saw that Mark was already there, seated, and something in her chest adjusted its position, like a patient who has been told the test results but not the diagnosis. He was devilishly handsome, she thought, with his dark hair swept back like that around a model’s face. He didn’t notice her coming toward him, and only stood up when the maitre d’ pulled back her chair for her.

“Abbie! You’re here!” he gasped. “You look amazing, of course.” He shook her hand awkwardly, because she was too far away across the table for anything else. “Amazing.”

They sat down, and were immediately besieged by servers with bread, water, menus and a wine iPad. Not for Pierre’s the clumsy printed wine list, but a continually-updated electronic wine list. Abbie did not know much about wine, but one thing she did know was that Mark thought it was the man’s job to choose for some reason, so she left it to him. She was slightly put off when he ordered a glass of albariño for her and house red for himself. The Spanish white was a favourite of hers, but he usually asked what she wanted, and if tonight was a special occasion.....

“Everything okay, Mark? You seem a little distracted.”

“Hmm? Yes, yes, just very busy today. Do you know what you want to eat?”

“Yes, I do. I’d like the scallops, please, and then the branzino.”

“The what?” Mark looked at his menu suspiciously, as if it had suddenly betrayed his trust.

“The branzino. Sea bass, it’s usually called. Here they call it branzino. Weird, this restaurant having a French name but an Italian chef.”

“Oh, I see.” He turned to the waiter who had appeared by magic at his side, and said “I’ll have the carpaccio di manzo, please, and then the osso bucco. The lady will have the scallops and the branzino.”

When the waiter had gone, he turned back to Abbie. “I wanted us to have a nice dinner, sweetheart, because I’ve got something to say to you and I didn’t want it to be uncomfortable.”

Abbie had practised her response in the Uber, although the reference to her possibly being uncomfortable duly made her so. “Oh? What is it you want to say, darling?” she replied, as her nerves climbed to a higher pitch, unbidden.

He rummaged in a pocket...