Free Out of Touch by Clara Ward Page A

stood by, but James wouldn’t let anyone else touch the old machine. A later palm pilot series offered half the weight with five times the memory. But his could hold complete genetic profiles for 300 subjects, plus annotations, and it was the physical home of his personal calendar for the last seventeen years, the only other data set he wanted accessible locally at all times.
    So when James returned to his latest hotel room, head aching from his presentation and the not quite on-topic questions he’d had to field, he just picked the new note off the beige Berber carpet and pulled out his pilot. As soon as the machine and the new encryption routine were ready, he used the hotel LAN to transcribe, encoded, for Alak:
     
    “Minerva to buy 6Y14P294 rights for D’s scheme.”
     
    He decided the interpretation was too obvious to explain. James hit send and lay back on the tidy hotel bed, sucking in the smell of bleachy over-washing. His right foot thumped against the bed frame; so he thumped his left twice and his right again.
    Minerva was a states-based biotech company. 6Y14P294 was the identifier for a bipolar correlate James had patented in 2015. That was the year the WTO Special Conference on Genetics decided no one could patent an actual DNA sequence, but you could patent reading an understood sequence with any known chip, pore, gel, or other techniques. So, effectively, he’d patented the ability to easily scan for that bipolar sequence, but not the exclusive right to interpret it when looking at a patient’s full genome.
    Financially, it had not been one of his hotter discoveries. When the new laws triggered a clinical diagnostic gold rush, James was well positioned to specify several recently interpreted sequences. His current Thai biotech empire was built on past patents for single recessive depression, addiction susceptibility, and immune system irregularities. They sold test kits to medical providers and took samples by mail from concerned parents or spouses who didn’t want to involve their national health systems.  The bipolar correlate wasn’t something anyone tested for separately, and it wasn’t needed to rapidly screen a large population. It was just one of several sequences that increased a person’s risk for bipolar disorder. What would it have to do with the “schemes” of a new American President, particularly one who killed Brandenburg?
    James needed to arrange an exchange for more psychiatric population samples. He’d noticed a couple of open-minded types at his talk today. Maybe one of them would like to collect some patient samples for a collaborative arrangement. If there was a reason the Americans wanted those rights, James should be able to discover it in lab.
    Approaching new people was asking a lot of himself right after a talk, but he tucked both feet against the bed frame and pulled himself up. 
    Downstairs he drifted for half an hour, listening, planning an approach. Just as he was about to corner a junior professor from Bulgaria, he saw Nigel Radford hovering by his new poster. James had read it earlier. It analyzed immune system peculiarities in subjects with various affective disorders, and seemed cleanly done, if a bit basic. James knew exactly how he could test his pseudomonas spliced retrovirus idea and use the gamma globulin interference to rebalance immune responses in one of the psychotic sub-populations Nigel studied.  But he didn’t want to discuss the idea with Nigel. Not only was he embarrassed from their first encounter, but he knew the English followed America’s lead in not working with him or Thailand, so there was really no point.
    At that same moment, Nigel spotted James and waved for him to come over. Enduring embarrassment like heartburn, James walked toward him. Nigel smiled brightly. He wore a peppery red sweater and his acne had cleared significantly since the last conference.
    “How’re you doing, Dr. Morton? I hope it wasn’t my poster that made you ill