A Turbulent Age [HS2035,bioterrorism,deconstruction,GxB/GxG]

[Seigetsu]

I like how Emery's art is progressing. Smoothing out the shading is definitely helping a lot. Makes her look younger. Kaylee's style is quite good. I suppose it's because it's still WIP, but it'd be nice if you lighten the crease lines on her face a little so she looks a little younger as well.

My main concern is... my lack of grad school experience

If you don't mind, I can help you out a little on this one, though I'm no genius for sure.

Occasionally we do bring in high school kiddies to our lab, mainly because our PI thinks it's a good idea for us to mentor younger students, and while undergrads are the usual choices, there's a greater commitment in terms of time and funding for directed studies projects than high schoolers who come in for a week to work on their science fair projects or whatever...

It seems that the general consensus for grad students is that mentoring is necessary, but can be a pain in the "bottom" at times.

A great undergrad takes care of his/her own project. They work hard and come up with their own ideas. Minimal supervision needed and they make contributions to the project. They're great!

But just how often do we get great undergrads? I'd say...maybe 1 in 5.

The average undergrad would come in around 10 hours a week, skip out on lab meetings, ask you what to do every day, and when you tell him/her how to do it, they may mess up (so it's a good idea not to trust all their results until you verify them yourself), or at the very least leave a huge mess on your bench and the common areas for you to clean up at the end of the day. They're not horrible, but they're not super productive, and they're usually VERY messy.

What about high schoolers? If we can't trust the average undergrad on their results, we usually can't trust the average high school kid to work safely in the lab without constant supervision. The way we do it is help them plan out their experiments, then work them through one step at a time, and when the clock tells us time is up, we make sure they wash their hands and didn't leave anything behind and we send them out the door asap.

The great thing about high schoolers? They listen to you, while the average undergrad doesn't. They don't make a mess because you're there, right beside them. The objective for working with high schoolers is different than working with undergrads: with undergrads, we want them to be able to do something so they can make some kind of report/presentation at the end of the term. With high schoolers, we hope they would become interested in the field through their limited experience at our lab (and make sure they walk out without having blown anything up)

I think this ties in really well with your story though, both in terms of Matt's character, and the development of your main cast. I don't know if all geniuses are like this, but the ones I've met tend to be even less "patient with people" than others. They can concentrate intensely on their own field of interest, dedicating a lot of time and effort tackling problems they think are worthy of their attention, but when they're with those less intelligent than themselves, they may "blow a fuse" working with them. If there's a question they can't answer while most people can, it would be "Why don't other people understand this? It's so simple, but they just don't get it!" My very intelligent friend has been TAing for the last couple years and that seems to be his most overwhelming complaint. But the point of mentorship is precisely this - to prepare grad students for teaching, if they ever become a prof themselves. Just because you know everything doesn't mean you're a good teacher - you have to understand what is the problem that your students are facing and teach them the skills to resolve those problems on their own. And building up your students' interest in the field so they WANT to solve those problems is actually very important, thus why mentoring high school students, while it can be a frustrating experience, can benefit us in the long run. As this story's main theme pertains to adolescence, perhaps letting the main cast find out more about themselves, more about what they want to do in the future through their involvement in this "research project" is more important than what they can actually accomplish. Furthermore, Matt's struggles to contain his frustrations and come to terms with the fact that "not everyone is as smart as you and no matter how smart you are, you still need to work with others" will be great for developing his unique character and unique experience "growing up".

On a last note, I really don't know whether or not you can call viral DNA/RNA their own or not their own...I mean, they can't make anything without the host, but it is also true that they infect the host and hijack its machinery for producing progeny. Their genome, in terms of sequence and codon specificity and other modifications, would differ from the native host genome. Ultimately, it is the viral genetic material that is actually infectious - the capsids are just containers for delivering these infectious molecules. So is a genome made by a hijacked host cell the viral genome, or a host genome that will contain viral properties? Hmm... (I digress again, I just can't help it)

[Anomandaris]

In my experience, hard sci-fi usually refers to more heavily technical works. Therefore, unless you do want to put a considerable amount of effort into figuring out the small details of how this virus is now transmitted/its enhanced pathogenesis and spread, I would shy away from labeling it as that and instead just going with regular sci-fi instead.

Like Seigetsu, I'm not sure about the logistics of high schoolers researching a cure with any success. I don't want to sound pessimistic or derogatory, but I've been a high school student in a lab as well, and that was probably when I first discovered that I knew next to *nothing* about real lab techniques. Especially considering that it's approximately twenty years in the future, unless these kids have all had lab internships before (and maybe not even then), a significant portion of their time would probably have to go towards developing basic competence with lab equipment even before they started considering projects (let's not even consider safety issues here). Just analyzing data seems more feasible, but, again, where are they going to get the equipment and the basic knowledge to begin analyzing it? To be honest, even if Matt is a grad student who has time to help them out, they just wouldn't have the expertise to do very much.

I really don't want to sound like I'm tearing the idea down or anything. I think it sounds interesting. It's just that, since you're advertising it as more sci-fi than an adolescence story, the ability of these high school students to do anything real regarding a cure without access to equipment and extensive prior training doesn't seem very feasible.

As far as I know, there's actually a bit of confusion on whether rabies virus completely co-opts the neural host cell machinery to the point of almost completely shutting down host protein production (a la adenovirus and herpes) or whether it does something else to cause pathology (I think it's leaning towards the shutdown side right now from what I've read, but I could be wrong). Regardless, since it's an RNA virus, I'd consider the genome we care about coming out of the infected host cell to be the viral genome.

Rabies virus incubation is really slow (depending on the bite area) in humans because of the transport mechanism that it uses, which is dependent on neuronal properties that the virus can't really do much about in terms of spreading faster. One thing I'm really curious about is your explanation for how the terrorists enhanced this virus to spread faster (since right now it's so slow that you can get vaccinated even after being bitten)? If you aren't delving into the details, that's OK. I'm just interested in your ideas on this subject. Also - and now perhaps I'm just being picky - why something like rabies as opposed to a virus like Ebola? Terribly gruesome, incredibly lethal, and seriously bad news if somebody manages to aerosolize a human strain!

Also, Seigetsu, those are some horrible undergrads. My apologies on behalf of my fellows. (Most of the undergrads I know working in labs, including myself, are either genuinely interested or at the very least, to put it cynically, interested in getting good references for med/grad school, so those statistics are quite shocking. Especially the part about leaving a mess on the bench; that's so inconsiderate!)

[Seigetsu]

Anomandaris actually brings a really good point to the discussion, which I've neglected throughout what I've said thus far: the timeline of this story. With this story taking place twenty years into the future, I'd imagine the barrier to starting lab work to be higher than what it has been in the past. With technological advances, more and more are being done with automated machines, which means that you spend most of your first month in the lab just figuring out how to work everything. It's rather frustrating just coordinating the time to use a machine, and to get someone to train you so you won't break the darn thing, but I can just see this getting worse with our growing dependence on novel technologies (don't get me wrong, those machines are great, it's just the first few times working them that is frustrating)

I also agree with the point with difficulties in data analysis. I'll use the genome sequencing example: while cost of sequencing is coming down, the trend is that we'll be able to gather a lot of data, but we'll run out of space to store the data, and run out of programming power to analyze them. We're seeing more and more time devoted into making sense out of data rather than collecting them, and while this lends a certain sense of realism to your premise of "dry lab work playing a huge role in curing virus", it also means that the work is far more complicated than can be handled by amateurs, just because of the sheer volume of raw numbers.

And while I don't want to make myself and my fellow grad students sound like idiots, we're also at the learning stage, so most of us run into plenty of trouble just getting our own projects working, let alone getting our undergrad's/high school student's projects working as well. Usually, at the end of the term, undergrads can have something worthy to present at a lab meeting, but very, very few can get to publication stage (so world-changing is very farfetched)

I also agree with Anomandaris' comment on rabies virus (I'm no expert in this, however). To the best of my knowledge, there still seems to be some sort of debate as to whether or not it completely shuts off host protein production, and even if it does, when does it do it. There are several studies about VSV (related virus), but with rabies, it seems to be still up in the air. You may want to check this paper out: Nucleic Acids Res. 2007 March; 35(5): 1522–1532. It has to do with the interaction between rabies M protein interacting with host eIF3, which may be the mechanism by which it can (possibly) shut down host protein synthesis.

(Getting back on topic) I think arachni42 mentioned something about terrorist groups in his/her story engineering many viruses, not just one, so maybe fictional ebola is on the list too? From my understanding, it is listed in the level 4 category because its aerosols are also infectious? Not sure if this is credible or not, but it has been said that the Aum Shinrikyo might have attempted to use it as a bioterrorism agent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo I do wonder whether or not bioengineering is even necessary for bioterrorism, seeing as we have plenty of incredibly gruesome and lethal viruses around that can be used to induce public fear without any further engineering required. As I've mentioned a few posts back, bioengineering can be complicated and costly

On a totally unrelated side note, I wish some of our undergrads are as considerate as Anomandaris to not leave our P2s hanging off the bench, about to drop into the trash can (those things are really expensive and my PI would definitely not buy me a replacement...) I suppose the behaviour of students (undergrads and grads alike) heavily depends on each lab's policies: we're somewhat relaxed, although other labs have more of a zero-tolerance policy with regards to missing lab meetings or keeping things clean or just coming into the lab for a set amount of hours each week. I feel that doing something wrong and failing an experiment because of it is entirely understandable for new members of the lab - we've all been there, done that at some point when we started (or even now, since nobody is perfect, which is why we are "supposed" to have replicates). The mess is what really frustrates me. But in my opinion, the actual horrible undergrads are the ones who never show up and never answer our emails (MIA during finals week is understandable), but yeah...that's an entirely different story unrelated to the VN I suppose. I do want to emphasize, though, that great undergrads are really great. They can get a lot out of the experience, and we all benefit from their insightful ideas and physical contributions. (Now excuse me while I go give my undergrad a hug )

[arachni42]

Thanks for the input, guys (or girls, or both? ... I'm a girl), including some new elements that might be cool to bring into the story. Been kind of worn out this week, so I do want to think about everything and reply in more depth.

But I did want to make a quick response to one thing. I went with rabies because I wanted something very deadly and immediately clear (to people in the story) that it wasn't a normal virus. Cases of rabies are extremely rare in the U.S.; you get bitten, and it can be prevented by vaccination. It's also something people in the U.S. are relatively familiar with. So if you suddenly had "rabies" popping up, I'd imagine there being a major "WTF" about it. Something that is definitely not clear in my summary (I should go into it more in my post) is that this "rabies" outbreak is a somewhat short-lived media stunt (I mean, people do die, but not on a widespread scale), with a "there is more to come" message injected in a difficult-to-trace manner onto the Internet.

Plus I know more about it and find it to be a very interesting virus, although it's not like I couldn't decide to go with ebola after all. It could have its own implications, showing up in the States.

The actual threat, as I mentioned later in this thread, will involve multiple viruses working together, ones that take their sweet time to be deadly, because it would be rather advantageous to spend a long time spreading without causing any symptoms.

I took the words "hard sci-fi" out of my original post because I think the angle I was looking for was "deconstruction" -- it doesn't have to be perfectly realistic (and probably not too technical); what I want to do is subvert a lot of the Hollywood-style expectations, ie. "YEAH, we're going to save the world with the Power of Determination(TM) and a little help from a genius imuno--immunal--imunol--er, immune system major, because he has a microscope, and that is all you need to do lab work! And we'll do it in time for the prom." (Warning! Author Bias: I... hate... the Power of Determination(TM).)

Anyway, thanks for the feedback!