“Great.” Nate turned his chair so he directly faced Juan. “Okay, you want to create a cure for this virus. Explain to me why it’s so hard.” He gave a lopsided grin. “And try to use language I can understand.”

Juan shrugged. “It’s an extremely complicated issue. I’m not sure where to start.”

“Okay then, let me start. Tell me this: why can’t you just give people an inoculation? They do that for the flu and stuff, right?”

“They do,” Juan said. “But inoculations aren’t cures, they’re a preventative measure. An inoculation injects you with an inactivated or weakened virus, which causes your body to create a built-in immunity, so you can fight off the stronger virus if you ever come in contact with it. That’s good for a short period of time, maybe even a few years, but it doesn’t help you if you’re already infected. But an inoculation doesn’t help you if you’re already infected. You don’t get a flu shot when you already have the flu.”

“Okay,” Nate responded. “So, I know that antibiotics don’t work against things like the flu. That’s because it’s a virus not a bacterial infection, right?”

“Correct.”

“Then, when you get the flu, you’re usually stuck with the flu for a week or two. Now that these folks aren’t dosing themselves with more of the virus, shouldn’t they be getting better?”

“No, that’s not how this kind of virus works.” Juan raked his hand through his hair. “How can I put this… When the flu or most other viruses infect you, they typically invade a cell, take over the cell’s resources to reproduce, and then blow the cell up, with lots of copies of the virus spreading to infect other cells in the body. Eventually, the body recognizes the invaders and starts to fight back. With this virus, that’s not how it goes. With the kind of virus we use for gene therapy, the virus invades a cell.” Juan spread his fingers on both hands and meshed them together as he explained, “When the virus invades, the pieces of DNA that it carries merge with the DNA in that cell. The cell isn’t otherwise damaged, it’s modified. What you end up with is essentially an updated version of the cell. When it divides, the merged DNA splits and you have two copies of the infected cell. The body never knows any different.”

Nate crossed his legs and tapped his fingers on his knee. “Okay, so that means the virus is introducing new DNA into the body. And once that bell is rung, you don’t know how to unring it, right?”