From experience, Pia knew how Rothman worked. These jabs at her spelling and grammar almost certainly meant that he had accepted her structural changes. If you lived for compliments and praise, you’d starve to death working for Rothman. Rothman took good work for granted. If you weren’t good, you didn’t last long, so the only elements worth talking about were the minor faults. Rothman twisted in his seat to face his Mac and started pecking his way around the keyboard. Pia surmised he was adding her changes to the original manuscript. Pia took a seat without being asked. If she waited to be asked, she’d be standing all day.

Pia had enjoyed laboring over the Lancet piece. Scientific writing was something she enjoyed and seemed to have a facility for. Over the previous three years, Pia had collaborated with Rothman on his salmonella studies and had even got credit as one of the authors on several. It had been exciting work. Rothman was continuing his award-winning, landmark research that he had accomplished concerning salmonella virulence, a subject for which he’d won his Nobel and Lasker prizes. Virulence was the microorganism’s ability to invade and kill its host cells, something salmonella was particularly good at. Over the years Rothman had found, classified, and defined the five pathogenicity “islands,” or areas, in the salmonella genome that encoded for various virulence-related factors such as specific toxins and antibiotic resistance, both of which had contributed to salmonella being by far the largest cause of human food-borne illness in the world. Every year salmonella caused the mortality and morbidity of countless millions of people. Every year typhoid fever alone still killed upwards of half a million people, a situation Rothman had his sights on rectifying and was coming closer to each year.

Initially when Pia first joined Rothman’s lab, she had been more interested in his newer area of research, namely stem cells, and had hoped to work with them. But he had had other ideas and wanted her to cut her teeth with his continuing salmonella work. As time passed she’d become as committed as he in the microbiological arena, fascinated by bacteria and viruses in general and salmonella in particular and the microscopic realm they inhabited. Soon she found herself reveling in the involved science while enjoying the thrill of working with one of the greatest minds on the subject. On a daily basis Pia had come to relish refining her knowledge of genetics so that she could one day make her own contribution to basic research. Gradually she had come to realize how exciting research could be and how well it fit with her personality.

Pia watched Rothman type away in front of her. The level of his concentration was truly remarkable. One minute he’d been talking with her, the next he was totally absorbed, as if she were no longer in his presence. Pia did not take any aspect of his behavior personally. After he’d confided about his Asperger’s, she’d read about the syndrome and guessed that many aspects of his personality were dictated by it, even ignoring her as he was doing at that moment. Instead of being annoyed, she thought about the content of the article she’d rewritten. It was about studies that Rothman had been doing involving salmonella typhi grown in outer space on the orbiting International Space Station. Rothman had found that growing the bacteria in a zero-gravity environment made it enormously more virulent than control bacteria grown back on earth. It was Rothman’s belief that the conditions in space somehow mimicked to a marked extent those present in the human ileum, triggering the bacteria to turn on the genes in the pathogenicity islands to produce effector proteins. Pia was one of the few people who knew that at that moment in the refrigerated storage facility inside the biosafety unit there were three strains of these enormously virulent, space-grown salmonella. She also knew that what Rothman wanted to do was to figure out how zero gravity caused these changes with the hope of learning how to turn them off, not only in space but in the human ileum as well.