Going Viral

The suits themselves were stark white and the hoods looked like pure science fiction. Between them, the goggles, the facemask and, by that point, two pairs of latex gloves, absolutely no portion of your body was exposed to the air. Heaven help you if you had forgotten to go to the bathroom or felt an itch anywhere at all. (Every once in a while, some exhausted manager or overworked technician would forget to change into his or her street clothes and would stagger into the cafeteria for lunch in a lab suit and safety goggles. You probably had to be there to appreciate how funny this was).

Unlike the high-containment labs that provide such good fodder for science fiction writers, none of the measures we took were meant to protect us from the virus. By the time it reached our lab, all of that stuff had long since been attenuated (modified in a way that made it incapable of causing disease without diminishing its ability to trigger an immune response). No, the idea behind all the gowning and gloving and alcohol spraying—the goal of pretty much every technique we employed, actually—was to protect the viruses and bacteria from us. Humans, even the most fastidious among us, are a notoriously filthy lot. And damned if we were going to let a stray hair or an aberrant sneeze lay waste to so much medicine. All in all, I think we did a pretty good job of it. Most of the same people that I worked with are still there now; they're smart and experienced and they take their work very seriously.

The labs themselves had windows that looked out onto the halls and sometimes, like when the protocol called for 45 minutes of automated stirring, the people inside the lab would play charades with the people standing in the hallway. Occasionally, the FDA inspectors would come to watch us, and we would act very serious and use extra bleach on everything.

Standing in the hallway was actually a job. The people who did this—I called them runners—were responsible for watching through the window in case anything went wrong, or an extra piece of equipment was needed. Almost nothing ever went wrong (at least not in the year I spent there), but it wasn't inconceivable. A hose could blow, or a 14-gallon bottle of reagent could have some particles floating in it. Anything like that had to be fixed immediately (hence the running) because the manufacturing protocols called for each step to be completed in a very finite period of time, and if too much time was lost, 500 gallons of vaccine, worth millions of dollars, would be wasted.

The low men on the totem pole were always runners. In the beginning, I was a runner. To earn a spot in the lab, you had to win the respect of the senior techs. That meant showing up on time, working hard and proving that you were not a complete idiot. A good sense of humor went a long way, but nothing topped a strong work ethic.

Formulating the flu vaccine was a matter of mixing the three different Centers for Disease Control-selected strains of the virus and adding the mercury-based preservative (the source of much anxiety for so many parents of late), along with several other ingredients (the details of which are proprietary). Sounds simple, I know. But the devil is in the details, and the details were all about pacing, documenting and being sure to read the labels. Except for the flu strains, which were somewhere between the color of honey and syrup, all the other ingredients looked exactly the same—clear liquid in a giant, clear glass bottle with a giant black rubber stopper at the mouth. Each liquid flowed from its own container into the main vat, usually a 500-gallon tank—shiny, silver and doused in bleach—from which all sorts of rubber hoses and metal clamps protruded. Everything was very heavy, and after gowning, the worst part of the job was hoisting the containers from the cart to the countertop and back again.

The formulating rooms were small, and, for the most part, we worked in teams of three that almost never changed. Each group developed its own routines and rhythms. The heavy masks and the roar of sterile air blasting down through the ceiling made conversations nearly impossible, and the teams that had been together longest could get through a three-hour procedure without so much as a whisper.