Chapter 17
I invited Brad to a Thai restaurant on the way to the Cross cancer institute to honour the bet I had lost with the tomato sauce. The ambience was homely and the waitress had soft features and a sweet smile. I am not the type who is very fond of restaurants, but I felt comfortable and became genuinely excited about the menu. Brad didn’t share my feeling, I could tell his mind was still focused on the work. “So, what do you think about all those bacteria in the sample?”, he asked as I was pulling up a nest of noodles on my fork. I shrugged and put the forkful in my mouth. “This is good”, I said, “I don’t know about the bacteria. Is seems like the polymer helps them reproduce faster”. “Then why do they stop wiggling around?”, he continued, spooning up his soup. “I don’t know, maybe they ate all the yoghurt till their belly was full and when there was no more food around they decided to slow down”, I replied, laughing. I had said this as a joke, but Brad stopped eating and looked at me attentively. “You are right, they were all around the void spaces, weren’t they?”, he said pensively. He lowered his eyes for a moment, then looked at me again and said “But it’s not like there was no yoghurt left around the voids…”. I shrugged and said I was just making up a story. We finished our lunch without continuing the conversation, but I could tell that Brad was still thinking about it when we left the restaurant.
When we reached the Cross cancer institute I was surprised to find Sandeep waiting for us at the entrance. The eagerness to tell us what he found transpired through his composed manners. “I was waiting for you”, he told us. We followed him to the NMR lab, where he had left the computer on and the files containing the spectra from our samples open on the screen. “I was confused about these spectra, I found new compounds in the sample additioned with polymer, but I couldn’t pin them down”, he began. “So I took the freedom to show the data to a medical researcher here at the institute”, he continued after a pause, “Wilhelm is a respected expert in the field”. I had never been too secretive about my research, but I wondered what McMurrich would have thought about involving too many people outside FoodTech labs in our work. I must have frowned without realizing it, because Sandeep reassured me, “I know the data are strictly confidential, don’t worry. Wilhelm will never disseminate them, you can trust him”. I blushed at having been caught with untold thoughts on my mind. “So what does Wilhelm think about the spectra?”, Brad asked. “They are similar to products of the metabolic activity of bacteria, but not completely identical to them”, Sandeep said. We told him that we had tested the polymer on a yoghurt sample and we had found plenty of bacteria in there. “Ah, maybe it was the same for the pudding, that could explain a lot”, Sandeep said pensively, “But as I said, what we found is not completely identical to the usual bacterial metabolic products. There seem to be some toxins in the sample too, although in very small amounts. Actually they are so close to the detection limit that I am not even sure about what we are seeing”. We told him that Alice was monitoring a milk sample and analyzing bacterial colonies from the yoghurt, and that maybe she could come up with some answers. “You are more than welcome to bring me other samples to look at”, Sandeep said, “I think it would be instructive to compare the compounds formed in different foods”. We thanked him and promised to keep in touch, then headed back to FoodTech labs where we found McMurrich looking for us in the labs.