This is a story about a close friend who wishes to remain anonymous, written with her permission and assistance. I am entering it into the Creative Nonfiction category.
She’s staring down, anxious and unblinking, at her 96-well plate—96 little pools of clear liquid, arranged in columns and rows. She’s not thinking about how long it’s been since she last slept, or how her gloved palms are taking most of her weight, pressed hard into the sharp edge of the lab bench she’s leaning over. She’s waiting for blue.
The assay she’s running is called an ELISA. The details of how it works would be of little interest to most, but the short version is that she’s treated each individual well with blood serum, taken from mice treated with one of several candidate constructs. If any of those mice are making antibodies against the target protein, then the enzyme she just added to the wells will turn them blue. Or, if none of the constructs did what they were supposed to do, nothing will happen at all.
Two months of desperate work by the virology team have led to this moment—two months of designing the constructs, preparing them in bulk quantities, treating and bleeding the mice. The streets outside haven’t emptied yet, but they all know what’s coming; and still they’ve been here, putting themselves and their households at risk, every single day. They’ve given everything to this project. Now it’s her job to find out if it worked.
They need it to work. She needs it to work. The nation that will hopefully soon be funding them—and every nation without a lab like hers to fund—need it to work. Because if it doesn’t…
She takes her eyes off the plate, just for a moment, to glance over where her computer is set up on a bench nearby. Stuck to the edge of the monitor is the reason she begged to be assigned to this project: a single, scarlet Post-it note. There’s a number written there, and several other, smaller numbers above it, crossed out. Tomorrow there will be a new number. It’s how she tracks the dead.
When she turns back to the plate again, Well B1 is turning blue.
She knows better than to touch her face, and still she only just stops herself from clapping a hand to her mouth. The skeptic in her tries not to believe what she’s seeing. Is it a trick of the light? Could she have made a mistake setting up the assay? What if the row of negative controls turns blue too? If that happens, this whole plate means nothing.
But the controls aren’t turning blue, and now every well in Row B is. That’s the row she treated with the Construct 1 serum, serially diluted from left to right; she can see the dye responding to the decreasing concentration of antibody along the row, B1’s rich aquamarine fading to B8’s barely-perceptible hue. It’s precisely what she feared she wouldn’t see, having never allowed herself the luxury of hoping she would.
This isn’t the finish line. She still needs to quantify the strength of the antibody response; inform the senior staff; test more constructs and see which hold up best over weeks and months; eventually, get their pharmaceutical partner’s sign-off on the final candidate. Then, of course, the long road to government approval… and before any of that, she’s going to call in every coworker she can find for a brief and fervent celebration. But for a moment, she’s the first and only one who knows:
The mice injected with Construct 1 are producing antibodies against the novel coronavirus. The vaccine might actually work. It could save people.
* * *
She’s part of this lab, this year, because ten years ago she learned about effective altruism.
The ideas made gut-level sense to her, and still do: that the suffering of faraway strangers is no less real for being out of her sight; that inaction is a choice; that part of doing good is finding the best, most effective ways to do good. She had always believed some of this on an intuitive level, but it was when she began consciously framing her decisions in terms of “doing the most good” that she made the connection to her upcoming choice of career.
She was on track to graduate with a Master’s in biology, and she had to decide what to do with it. There were any number of wrongs she could have dedicated herself to righting: cries for help rising from every corner of the earth, starvation and disaster and a thousand thousand bewildering injustices, more than one mind could ever hope to grasp. But her particular horror was, and still is, disease.
She fears death in any form—would end it, for everyone and forever, if she could—but what she fears most is a death she knows is coming and can’t prevent. She is painfully aware of how common that has been throughout humanity’s history; still is, in some places, or everywhere if she counts diseases of old age. It’s the same story again and again, played out over billions of irreplaceable human lives: realization, despair or bargaining or helpless rage, a protracted and undignified end. And the viral deaths are the worst of all.
To her, a virus is the evil design of reality made manifest, the hideous output of an uncaring algorithm of self-replication. It seems profoundly unfair that a silent, invisible monster, something less than alive, could not only destroy her but use her to spread itself to the people she loves. She could spend some cut-short fraction of a lifetime striving to make a better world, only to die at the center of a ripple effect of more, more, and more death—beginning with those she would have most wanted to protect. That such a degradation is even possible is like God spitting in her eye.
So that’s her enemy. That’s her bad end. Which is why she asked herself, back then: What could she do to fight it? Where would she need to be, to wipe as much of it off the face of the earth as she could?
* * *
Early in the pandemic, the narrative she kept seeing—from the public, in the news—was “This might get bad in China.” And that would have been enough reason to fight it; but she knew, and her team knew, that it would be much, much worse than that. Now, months in, there’s no longer any doubt.
Humanity is in hiding. Every nonessential lab has been shuttered; everyone not working on the vaccine or the virus has been sent home. It’s left the campus uncannily silent, not so much like a graveyard as a monastery. There’s only her, her team, and the impromptu arterial network that’s sprung up around them as the commercial supply lines collapse—entire labs devoted to ferrying them the materials they need to keep working, everything from bespoke protein preparations to gloves and pipet tips.
They’ve become a kind of community. Everyone with something to offer the project steps up, and everyone gives everything they have. No one talks about the missed lunches, the fourteen-hour days, the fluorescent lights switching off while they’re analyzing data at 2 AM. Her manager wordlessly signs off on the overtime. They all know what’s at stake—and that they’re working on a ticking clock.
Her partner, too, does what he can. He cleans for them both; cooks for her, when she can spare the time to eat; massages out the knots in her shoulders from hours bent over the hood. On the nights she can’t come home to him, she pours her love into the work that will protect him. She multiplies the thought of losing him by the number on the Post-it, and it keeps her going.
But there’s another reason she hasn’t burned out, no matter how hard she pushes herself. Quite simply, it’s the fact that the fastest way to get from the street to the virology center—and she refuses to waste time on anything but the fastest way—is to cut through the attached hospital.
The worst of it is cordoned off, but there’s no hiding that the place is a bloodsoaked rag pressed into a wound that will not close. She catches it in peripheral glimpses: patients wheeled out of ambulances, cyanotic and gasping; the hollow eyes of the nurses and EMTs; a family member weeping at the entrance, pleading to be allowed in. Every day is a turn in a kaleidoscope of shattered lives.
On the days when her body hurts so much that she can barely get out of bed, the long nights at the bench when staying awake feels like forcing her brain through a sieve, she thinks about what’s happening at that and every other hospital. She lets it offend her sense of justice. She lets herself get angry. COVID-19 is her monster, her dragon, and she will not allow it to keep hurting these people. She will not be the reason this goes on one single day longer than it has to.
***
The pandemic rages. The number of dead climbs faster every day: into the tens and hundreds of thousands, into the millions. Post-it notes layer the edges of her monitor like scales.
But there are victories, too. There’s seeing her data, her methods, in publications about their vaccine’s preclinical successes—papers that are reported in the news, and give people hope. There’s the day the clinical trial begins, and the day her father joins it. These moments are the landmarks that tell her she’s moving forward, that every day is a day closer to her vaccine in people’s arms.
Above all, she’s grateful not to feel powerless. There will be a day when humanity is no longer at COVID-19’s mercy, and she has some small agency in how and when that happens. It’s a heavy responsibility, but one she welcomes. She can endure the exhaustion, the grief for those she couldn’t save, the fear that her loved ones will be among them. She doesn’t think she could have endured not being part of the fight.
She remembers the first time she cracked open a sample containing the live virus, taken from the lungs of an infected animal. How she marveled: Here is the enemy, in the palm of my hand.
***
A year to the day from that first ELISA, her lab’s vaccine receives authorization for emergency use.
It’s not the first vaccine for COVID-19, but being first was never the point. This vaccine is specialized for protecting the most vulnerable. It’s effective at fewer doses and can be stored in an ordinary refrigerator, so it’s there for those that other vaccines might not be able to reach: for remote and developing areas, where cold-storage infrastructure is hard to come by; for refugees, the incarcerated, the unhoused and the housebound.
It’s there for her partner, too, though not for a few more excruciating months. When the vaccines are finally made available to the general public, he makes an appointment for that same week. She herself got the jab when she found out she was eligible months ago—perks of working on a hospital campus—but they go to the site together, and she stands with him in the long, long line, waiting for his turn.
There really are a lot of people in the line. She imagines it stretching into the distance, vanishing over the curve of the horizon, containing everyone who has or will receive the vaccine she helped deliver to them. This is what it was all for, all the lonely, sleepless nights: to protect these people, the ones she can see standing here and the ones she can’t. To make them safe, and to make him safe. She grips her partner’s hand and thinks about what’s to come—her work imprinted on his cells, her aegis coursing in his blood.
There’s a blow out of nowhere, and she stumbles. A man has shoved ahead of the two of them in line. His expression, when he looks back at her, is at first defiant—and then very, very confused, when she wordlessly bursts into tears.
***
Queen mAb: like, someone was about to body me for my work
Queen mAb: most honored i had ever felt in my life and will probably ever feel
She’s at the lab again, because the work is not and might never be done. They have the variants to deal with now, of course, and there are the longevity trials to follow up on and the booster trials to run. But it’s not as desperate as it was. These days, she can go home in time for dinner; she can spend weekends with her partner instead of her ELISA plates; she can even sit down for a few minutes, while said plates are incubating, and message a friend.
It would have been easy to argue herself into redirecting those spare hours to some other cause. Part of her still feels like what she’s done isn’t enough, and will never be enough; there is more suffering in the world than any one person could prevent, and she could unravel herself into it until nothing is left of her. But she knows she can do more good in the long run if she takes care of herself, and she also knows better than to forget the value of her own life and happiness. That’s part of EA, too.
***
AmofGreenFables: this was, what, last spring? it’s been a wild couple of years for you
AmofGreenFables: i kind of want to write about it. like, your experience, everything you did—i think it’s inspiring
Queen mAb: i am definitely not cool enough to write about, i was just in the right place at the right time
Queen mAb: it’s not like I knew there was going to be a global pandemic
AmofGreenFables: you knew vaccine research saves lives, that’s why you were there
Queen mAb: yeah, but it’s not like i’m some genius. i just wanted to help
Queen mAb: it could have been anyone
She really does feel that that way. It’s hard to compare herself to the giants of vaccination she reveres: Salk, Onesimus, Jenner; Balmis and Zendal and their crew of cowpox-inoculated children.
It’s easier, in one of those strange quirks of human psychology, for her to hold that admiration for everyone else who helped make the vaccine happen—her boss and coworkers, those researchers from other labs who made her proteins, the front-line workers who delivered supplies to the lab and groceries to her and her partner’s home. But she’s just a person. She listens to Florence and the Machine and cries over nerdy visual novels. She has, probably too many times, eaten spicy potato chips for dinner and nothing else. There’s no illusion of herself as a prodigy, or as some grand ideal of a pure-minded scientist, driven only by passion for her work. She knows herself too intimately to believe that.
She runs a finger down the single Post-it note stuck to her monitor. She’s decided to start tracking a new figure, and the first number is written here: thirty million recipients of her vaccine, and counting.
She is proud of her work—proud enough to put that note there, proud enough to keep a folder of vaccine selfies from social media. She is truly, earnestly grateful to have been a part of something that has saved so many lives. But she knows that saving lives doesn’t take being some exemplar of science or humanity, not in as harsh a world as this one. What it takes is the choice to try; and in that sense, it really could have been anyone.
AmofGreenFables: yeah, i guess it could have
AmofGreenFables: isn’t that the point?
