Free Spy Thriller: An Involuntary Spy: An espionage thriller (Involuntary Spy Espionage Thriller Series Book 1) by Kenneth Eade Page A

Seth shook himself from his thoughts and looked at the slide.
         “What am I looking at?”
         “That’s just it.  See those two other DNA fragments?”
         “Yeah.  I do.”
         There were two foreign gene fragments unrelated to the cleanup gene or the natural genes in the soybean plant.
         “How do you think they got there?”
         “It could be that the DNA was scrambled when they inserted the gene.  Or…”
         “Or what?”
         “Or the soybean’s own DNA could have rearranged the sequence to try to correct the errors in its DNA.  Jurassic Park again – nature finding a way.  And this DNA strand is large enough to produce its own protein.  This could be the reason we are seeing tumors develop in the rats.”
         Seth’s neck was aching from hunching over the scope.  When he straightened out to rub it, he saw his lab assistant, George, looking right at him in a strange way, like Seth had caught him masturbating.
         “George, do you need something?” 
         “Uh, no.”
         “Did you run those sequences I asked you to yet?”
         “Uh, not yet.”
         “Okay man, get to it, I need those.
         “I will, Seth, sorry.”  George trotted off to comply with the request.
         “It’s alright, George.”  Seth turned back to Robin.  “We have to figure out what’s going on here.  I’ll try to get in touch with those guys from Europe and discuss their findings.”
         “Okay,” said Robin.  “I’ll move on to the other studies.”
         “Yeah, it’s crunch time.  Let me have a report on this finding before you leave tonight.”
         “I thought we were going out tonight?”
         “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.  We are.  Just got a lot on my mind.”
         “I know.  Me too.”  George and Shirley, of course, left at 5:00 p.m. on the nose.  Time slipping away the way it does, it was 8 p.m. before they knew it.
         “We’d better go before they shut down every restaurant in town,” said Seth.  The small cities in the outer reaches of St Louis, Missouri rolled up the sidewalks at 10:00 p.m.
         It had been a while since Seth had a real girlfriend and it was nice to be around Robin.  Dating had always been an annoying aspect of life.  It was more like a series of job interviews than shopping.  If it lasted after four dates (“Sex and the City” rules) that meant the girl was not considered a “slut” if you had sex with her, but it usually it never went far enough for him to find out if the sex was going to be really good or just a “relief pitch.”  Consequently, when he reached a point with a girl where the sex was pretty good, that’s when the relationship ended, and most of Seth’s relationships were based on the sexual aspect so, of course, they disintegrated.  If you’re not looking for the right thing, you can’t be disappointed if you don’t get it.

17
     
         “We fed these rats 500 times the amount of Bt that the corn produces, and there’s no damage to their tissues.  But this group ate the Bt corn and I’ve already had eight out of 40 die, and organ and tissue damage on the others, and that’s with the clean seeds,” Seth said to George.
         “But tests prove the Bt toxin is destroyed by the stomach, before it gets to the intestines,” retorted George.
         “I looked at those tests.  They’re test tube tests, using hydrochloric acid and pepsin to simulate digestive fluids.  But the rats are showing erratic cell growth in the lower part of the small intestine.  That’s the last point to getting into the colon.”
         That meant that either the testing was flawed, and the Bt was surviving the digestive process, or, even worse, that the unpredictable DNA sequence that was created in the process of genetic engineering was creating a toxic protein that had damaged the cells in the rats that ate