Heavy Metal

Disclaimer

All characters mentioned here are purely fictitious and bear no resemblance with anyone living or dead. Any such resemblance, if found, should be considered only coincidental.

Chapter 1

Tanvi Sharma was surprised when she opened her mail box and found a letter addressed to her. She had been checking the mail box as a habit right from her school days. Back then, she would have been least surprised to get a letter in the box. However, these days, the only contents of her letter box were the monthly bills and bank statements.

The letter came from National Center for Cell Science, University of Pune. Tanvi was apprehensive of what this letter might contain. She knew about the research facility housed in the University of Pune campus and that they had recently come up with a lot of research papers in domains of her interest. But that was about all. Expecting it to be a periodical subscription offer of some kind, she opened up the letter. The letter was personally addressed to her. She read the letter twice before completely assimilating what it meant for her. The letter was an offer for a job at the institute with an impressive salary and an even interesting job profile.

Tanvi had done BTech in biotechnology from IIT Delhi and then moved to IIT Bombay for a PhD in Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science Department. It had been a severe switch between fields, but she wanted to study the relations between the two. Originally, she had planned to research on something related to transportation of crystals in plants through water and soil. She had changed it to the study of transportation of metal ions and effect of mineral contents of the soil on plant behavior. Her field of study had become so specific that she found it difficult to find a job for a long time after completion of her doctoral thesis. There was one more reason-her boyfriend. Nikhil Gupta had met her in IIT Bombay and their relationship had sparked off smoothly. He was doing his MTech in Computer Science and was about to complete his thesis soon and move to Noida. Tanvi thought of settling in with him soon and hence wanted a job in Noida too. She did get one in a firm that worked mostly on plant cells, and though her doctoral work had little scope in this company, she had accepted since she wanted to settle in Noida. Since then, she was in Noida.

Just when all was looking well, she had got this disturbing letter. The opportunity sounded big and any career centric girl would have not thought twice before accepting it. However, it was not so easy with Tanvi. She knew that Nikhil and she would soon marry and this split of location will not be possible. She knew this was a crucial decision of her life. She decided to call up Nikhil and speak with him about this. Nikhil was still in office when she called him and they decided to meet at a place they both liked because of the privacy it offered.

Chapter 2

“That’s great news!” Tanvi could not believe her ears when Nikhil cried out. “What?” Tanvi asked. “I have been juggling with the idea of shifted to Pune myself for some days. I received a tentative offer from a big firm in Pune. I am already bored with my routine job and would love a change. I was thinking about how to tell you. But this letter here, solves all problems”, said Nikhil. This settled a lot of doubts in Tanvi’s mind; though she was angry with Nikhil for not having told her before.
Tanvi and Nikhil set rolling the machinery facilitating their movement. They resigned from their current jobs, confirmed their new ones and informed their families about the switch. Then they called up their friends in Pune for booking rented or shared apartments. Tanvi had a shorter notice period in her existing firm and could move to Pune in about a month’s time. Nikhil would take a little longer.

Tanvi had her lodging arrangements in place. One of her friends was living alone in a fairly large apartment and could easily accommodate Tanvi with her. Tanvi moved to Pune couple of days before she was due at work and got to know the surroundings better. She also went for a walk in the University campus to locate her new office and to know her way around.

Chapter 3

Tanvi went to the institute a good ten minutes earlier than the office hours. The person at the reception desk looked enquiringly at Tanvi. She understood that few people ever came to the desk. Most people had their access cards and would straight go in through the doors without even casting a glance at the desk. Also, there were almost no visitors here. She recalled having read the strict rules about outside visitors to the institute. There was no way personal visitors could be escorted to the work area or the labs. These areas were out-of-scope for anyone outside the organization.

At the reception desk, she gave her name and showed the appointment letter from the institute. Having confirmed her identity by checking Tanvi’s driver’s license, the receptionist let her in through one of the doors, saying that the director would see her shortly. The area she entered was a small room with two sofa sets and a rack that contained a neat pile of journals. The room had two doors. One opened outside, through which she had come in, and the second one led to the inner area. This second door had its own access lock.

Tanvi was still looking around the room when the other door opened and a middle aged man entered the room. He introduced himself, “Hello Dr. Tanvi. I am Dr. Pandey. I have been looking forward to meet you since I read your thesis. We have certain work going on at our institute that can surely benefit from your expertise. Come in, I will show you around the facility.” Dr. Pandey had not let Tanvi speak. A researcher at heart, Pandey did not trust much in formalities and had already forgotten to tell Tanvi about the non-disclosure bond that she had to sign before the tour of the facility. Dr Pandey’s wife doubled as his secretary in office and did the work of reminding him of his many responsibilities as the Director of the institute. Dr Pandey’s mobile vibrated just as he was going to let Tanvi through the second door. His mobile showed a reminder: “Dr. Tanvi Sharma to arrive today. Signing of non-disclosure bond mandatory and immediate. Other recruitment formalities can be done over the day.” Dr. Pandey stood awkwardly in the doorway blocking Tanvi’s entry into the inner area and said, “Would you mind sitting here a little longer while I get some papers for you to sign?” “Not at all”, Tanvi replied guessing that the mobile had directed the director to do so.
Dr Pandey came back with a two page bond. He explained that the non-disclosure bond is mandatory even before she enters the facility and had very simple terms. The terms were that the signer should not disclose what he/she saw or heard in the facility to the outside world under any circumstances or the institute could get the signer arrested and severe penalties shall be levied. Tanvi scanned through the document and signed it quickly. She had signed such documents with her previous employer and knew that it was how organizations had to function.

Dr. Pandey was a quick paced person and Tanvi had to sometimes break into a mini-jog to keep up pace as the director floated smoothly through his everyday territory. They had already crossed a corridor and another big room, which looked like a lab of some kind, and entered another smaller corridor leading to the lift. Once in the elevator, Dr. Pandey told her that she was about to meet her colleagues and that they were going to the second floor where the team was housed. Tanvi just nodded.

Tanvi had no idea how many people would be on her team or what team had she been assigned to. Curiosity got better of her and she asked Dr. Pandey about the team. “The team is just four people and you are fifth. I prefer to keep team sizes small, as long as they are enough for the work assigned. Your team members will soon brief you about what work they do. The team lead is Dr. Aparna Kamat. She has been working on this field for more than ten years and had already done a PhD before that. Other members are younger like you and I hope you will have a great time ahead with us.” This sounded more like a closing talk than an opening one. After going through another access controlled door that had a password in addition to the card swipe, Tanvi and Dr. Pandey entered into a big room.

The organization of the room was very different from what Tanvi had expected. She thought there would be cubicles with computers where people might be working and a lab. Well, there were cubicle and labs, but it was different. The room was square with white tiles on the floor and reaching waist high on the walls. The walls were coated a dull shade of bluish white. The center of the room was a huge glass box that could have housed a small conference room. The box contained specimen of a multitude of different plants at different stages of growth. Each species was housed in its own smaller glass box. These glass boxes had different colored lights, temperature sensors and regulators, and a lot of other things that Tanvi did not immediately understand. On the four corners of the room were four big closed cabins. On the front wall just behind the glass specimen kiosk was another cabin. Its position suggested that it belonged to the team leader. The space between two cubicles was filled with work benches with microscopes and computers and a multitude of chemicals on the adjoining shelf.

As soon as they entered the room, all the occupants emerged from their cubicles and greeted Tanvi. Sleep deprivation was evident from their faces. Still, all of them were smiling and welcomed Tanvi as if they had waited long for her to arrive. Dr. Aparna introduced all the team members; Ravi-specialist in root growth, Kavita-general genetic engineering, Joe-specialist in water transport systems in plants. Tanvi wondered why her metallurgical PhD would have interested all these biologists. Though she had a biotech degree, her more significant achievements were in relation to mineral transportation in plants. She imagined their plants had some minerals stuck at some place and so she was called to rescue them.

Dr. Pandey bid them all a “Have a nice time together” and walked out of the room. Making small talk, Dr. Aparna moved towards a whiteboard and table. Everybody followed. Aparna was keen on getting things started and everyone else knew it. Everyone sat at the table while Aparna took the stage near the whiteboard. She started to talk about the work they do in the facility and then turned towards the topic of what they did specifically at this lab.

Aparna said, “We are currently facing a problem that we want to solve as quickly as possible and hence this team has been formed. You have with you the very best in all related required fields for our research. It is essential that you understand our strictness about the privacy of matters inside the institute and we expect utmost discretion on your part. What you are going to hear from now on is confidential information.

“We want to develop plants that can absorb specific minerals from the environment and clean up the environment of these minerals. We want these plants to grow fast, be easy to maintain and easy to destroy. Soils in large areas adjoining industrial estates have been rendered useless due to hazardous dumping of waste chemicals. We now have regulations in place that stop chemical companies from doing so, but we already have created a big problem for the ecosystem. With the natural clean-up mechanisms, it will take hundreds of years to make these lands cultivable. However, if we are successful in creating plants that absorb only a specific mineral, we can clean up these landmasses much faster.

“Your role in this operation must have become clear to you by now. We want you to study transportation of minerals in certain species of plants that we have already engineered and come up with economically viable solutions. By economically viable, I mean, it should be possible to reclaim a landmass by cultivation of these plants within one season. All the minerals absorbed by the plants must be of the purest form and must not be dissipated into the environment in any way. We should be able to inexpensively recover the absorbed minerals from the plant body.

“Ravi has done research in containing the root growth to the depths that we require. Chemical factories usually let out heavy metals in the water they drain and this accumulates on the soil. The metals can get deep down the surface, but cultivation plants do not have roots that go below a certain depth. Hence, it is important that we restrict the plants to grow roots only to a specific depth and then mesh out covering a larger and denser area.

“Kavita and Joe have altered some plants to make them grow much faster than their natural speed and consume less water than they usually do. I want you to sit with each one of us and get to know more of the work that we have already done. All that I mentioned is not really complete but we are at substantial degree of confidence levels. So, you are welcome to our team and let’s suck in the minerals!” Though Aparna had explained everything in plain English, Tanvi’s brain was already full of a lot of details that she knew were involved in each of the research that Aparna had explained. She also had a feeling of having been left out of a lot of fun already. After all, if she was a required part of the project, why was she not called in before?

Tanvi spent the entire day with Ravi trying to understand how the plants were genetically modified to produce a larger number of auxiliary roots that the plant would normally require. She was amused by the technique Ravi had devised. A plant would grow roots in a direction in which it requires support to balance itself. Ravi had modified this balance functionality so that the plant always thought it was falling and hence continually grew roots in all directions. This made the roots more dense and more spatially spread. He could not achieve the same success in all kinds of plants that they were interested in, but was at least successful in doing so in some of those plants. He proudly displayed his section of the central glass cube where his plants at different experimentation stage were thriving under artificial lighting and fluids.

Chapter 4

Tanvi took a couple of weeks to warm up to her role in the team. Given the complexities of her task and of the tasks already accomplished before her arrival, two weeks was a record time. She had to get back in touch with the current research in the mineral transportation domain since she had not worked much in the field after her doctoral thesis. Out of the multitude of plants selected and studied by her teammates, she selected only a handful for conducting her experiments. She had found a flaw in Ravi’s theory of plant balance. The growth of roots might also be dependent on nutrition levels and moisture of its surrounding soil. She and Ravi planned to test this by growing a plant in a bed of soil with controlled nutrition value and moisture in different areas. She also wanted to check if different types of roots absorb different minerals more prominently.

Most heavy metals are very harmful if they enter the food chain. Hence, Tanvi felt it would be best if the plants grown were thorny-those which cattle usually do not eat. When she mentioned this, however, no one showed any interest and Kavita explained that we need not worry about cattle eating these plants because the land can be easily fenced off. This removed the next requirement that Tanvi had thought about-keeping the metals as close to the roots or even in the roots if possible.

She had a few other things to do at hand. She had to make the plants concentrate the metals to very high degree. This meant that the plant must absorb a large amount of metals and also keep them from spreading to the whole plant. She required the plants to keep a bank where all the minerals it absorbed are stored. This also facilitates easy extraction for recycling of the metals. Her goal was a bit far fetched; the industry could buy-back the plants after a season and extract the metals. She did not know if this could be even remotely economical, but the idea was a good one. This actually solved the problem of metal contamination.

When Tanvi discussed about her ideas, Kavita and Joe looked at each other and smiled. Among all the plants that they had yet considered for their studies, they had also considered some plants that have buds on their roots or stems. These plants have an inherent storage system of the tune that Tanvi was thinking about. The problem was that the plant borrows its food from these buds and hence, even though the concentration will be large in the buds, minerals will also reach other parts of the plant. The water transportation model was available for these types of plants, but what Tanvi required was a dead-end bud. The plant must not derive its food from these buds.

Chapter 5

Solving problems in genetics is very much like finding a needle in a haystack. Even with the DNA synthesis and electron microscopes to monitor the progress of the cell, it was very difficult to defeat what evolution built into each cell and each nucleus. The team struggled together for many weeks but could not get all the requirements satisfied. They always ended up with some or another problem.

It had been more than eight months since Tanvi and Nikhil moved from Noida to Pune. Nikhil was now feeling comfortable in his new job and got a good increment in the mid-term appraisals. He had made up his mind to ask Tanvi if she was ready for marriage now. They had not got much time to spend with each other lately. They had been very busy at their jobs. Nikhil was happy that Tanvi was also as busy since otherwise, he would have had to spend a considerable number of complete weekends with her. Nikhil felt that it was a good time to marry. They would get some rest form their routine and the future prospects looked good. Flow of money had increased considerably with their better paying jobs. They decided to meet at a restaurant midway from their workplaces.

“I want to marry you, Nikhil. But right now, I am very busy in my current project. I don’t feel even a week’s leave is feasible. After this assignment finishes, I will try to move into a slightly passive role and then let’s get married”, Tanvi tried to reason with Nikhil. “You work on a research project, details of which are beyond my scope of understanding. You are brilliant at what you do and I want you to keep your current role. It gives you the fullest enjoyment and job satisfaction. But that will never end. It will always be that way. You have a personal life too. I have reduced my work hours and am more aligned with the company’s official hours now. Just doing that still gives us ample time together. And, I don’t feel after all the work you have done for the past eight months your institute is going to deny a week’s leave.” Nikhil wanted the decision to go his way. Tanvi just nodded and assured him that she will think about it.

Tanvi could not think of marriage till she finished the project. The project had been progressing slowly for the past few days, but she did not want to miss any excitement by being away even for a day. She stabbed at the fruit dish and then, like a flash of lightening it occurred to her. If they could get this done, most of their current problems in the project would fade away. Nikhil was quick to notice the sudden sparkle in Tanvi’s eyes. “What happened? Is everything all right?” Nikhil asked her. She was thinking deeply and did not want to be disturbed. “I just got an idea.” Tanvi replied. “This idea is about work? And hence you may not share it with me?” Nikhil felt bad that she did not share her office happenings with her. He always told Tanvi what he did, how great was the new algorithm that he wrote and how fast the new system is because of what he did and so on. Tanvi, on the other hand, was much involved in her work and still did not share what was going on at her office. The only thing he knew was that she worked on something involving plants and minerals-big deal! After all that was what Tanvi was trained to do, isn’t it? Zero information gain.

Nikhil dropped Tanvi home after their dinner. By then she had returned to her normal self and promised him to think positively about their marriage. Nikhil was appeased; at least some progress.

Chapter 6

“We have been trying to find solutions for our problem in the wrong direction.” Tanvi said to the team. All of them were sitting near the whiteboard and Tanvi was explaining what she thought will be the solution to their problems.

“We wanted to make plants have nodules and we wanted the plants to concentrate the pure metals in them. However, the plant itself derives food from these nodules and we cannot prevent the metals from being transported to the other parts of the plant. Also, nodules are one big bag of food. There are no compartments and it is difficult to separate the metals internally.

“However, plants bear fruits. Fruits are a place where a lot of nutrition gets accumulated. The plant itself does not derive its food from the fruit. It is a reserve for the seed, or for birds to aid transportation of seed. In any case, fruits are dead-end buds. Nutrition only flows in to the fruit. Moreover, when the conditions are conducive, it is a natural tendency of a living organism to reproduce. We have already got proven research about increasing the fruit yield of plants.

“Moreover, certain fruits like oranges have petals-a natural compartmentalization of nutrition. Some others like wall nuts also have compartments. I think, if we can get the metals to separate out into compartments, we will have done a lot of progress. We have concentrated portions of the nut that contain heavy metals and then other portions that contain a mixture of the lighter metals. This is easier to achieve because we can transport most of the lighter metals together while heavy metals must be given a path of their own. What do you all say? Is it possible?”

Dr Aparna was impressed with what Tanvi had thought about. In fact, the solution seemed to be a very natural one. The problem was that they had not studied the fruits to the required detail. Nevertheless, after a lot of excited discussion over the topic, everyone took up part of the Herculean task. Tanvi would focus purely on highly concentrating heavy metals into compartments of fruits. Joe, Kavita and Ravi would try to make some of their plants bear fruits of the required characteristics. Aparna had specially stressed that since they would have good concentrations of heavy metal, it is best to have hard shells. Getting little plants to bear fruit with hard shells is a difficult task. They set out with taking a sample from the cells of a walnut tree.

Tanvi knew that lot of plants can concentrate heavy metals 300 times their environment concentrations. What Tanvi was aiming for was more than 1000 times. The plant must feel that the metals are utmost necessary for the fruits. Only then will it concentrate metals to this extent. Everyone had a lot of work to do.

Third time in the last week, Tanvi saw one of Dr. Aparna’s plants in the glass box to be subjected to very high temperature. She had disregarded this as a possible error in the measurement apparatus. But three times is too much. Dr. Aparna must know. So she spoke with Dr. Aparna about the faulty readings. Aparna smiled at her and told her that she was experimenting with plants subjected to not only soil contamination, but also ultraviolet and X-Ray contamination. This also involved testing at very high temperatures.

Chapter 7

Enormous efforts on the part of the team were bearing fruit. Many glass boxes in the center of the room had plants with hard round nuts handling from them. Kavita once remarked, “This is a metal-ore. Here, metal does hang on trees!” Concentration and purity levels were close to what they had originally wanted.

A lot of experiments were required to be done. Everyone would be bent over their microscopes or other instruments and churn out meaning of what they observed. Tanvi was closely observing and separating different compartments of one of her nuts, when she saw that one of the compartments had a metal she had not observed before. It was Uranium-235. “This must be some mistake” she repeated to herself many times before repeating the experiment. The result was the same. Tanvi felt her nerve quicken. She had experienced a biological separation of isotopes. Usually, chemical reactions that cause bioconcentration, have no regards towards isotopes. Moreover, U-235 is so rare in natural soil that even after years of bioconcentration, it is difficult to get the quantity of U-235 that she had measured. What worried her more, however, was that the quantity of U-238 was not proportionally larger. In nature, of all Uranium, only 0.711% is U-235. Rest is mostly U-238. But this fruit contained about 15% U-235. This could not happen unless either the plant stored most of its U-238 somewhere else, or, the soil was enriched Uranium.

Excitement made her fingers shiver when she placed a sample of the soil under the spectrometer. What she saw confirmed her worst fears. She was looking at artificially enriched soil. It indeed contained U-235 and U-238 in the ratio that she had estimated from the plant’s nut. Suddenly, she had a shiver going down her spine. Each of those small nuts hanging from the plants appeared like potential nuclear bombs to her. This was no place to conduct experiments with enriched uranium. How could this soil land in one of her plant-boxes? She resisted the impulse of pressing the bright red “Hazard” button present under the desk. Even the thought of the “Hazard” button had a new meaning. She knew she had to act, but did not know how.

Was it logical to trust any of her team-mates? She knew by now that it would have been impossible for anyone outside the team, baring the director himself, to fiddle with anything inside this room. Also, the soil that she was now looking at could have not been possibly come here accidentally. It costs like hell to enrich Uranium, and this was just less than weapons-usable grade. She decided to confront all of her team members together. This way, if there was something fishy going on, everyone would know. She called out to everyone for an “Emergency” meeting.

“What I saw a few minutes ago calls for the pressing of that button.” Tanvi pointed to the “Hazard” buttons under the desks. “This is serious and I want an answer immediately. I detected that one of my plant was subjected to enriched Uranium soil and the plant has biologically separated the isotopes enriching the U-235 to dangerous levels. How did the enriched soil land in my boxes? How did the plant separate the isotopes?”

The room felt silent-dead silent. Aparna was the first to speak. “Tanvi, I think you need to know the whole thing now. Just to answer your two questions, I put the enriched soil in your plant-box, and the plant separates isotopes through a process similar to the gaseous diffusion technique that uses semi-permeable membranes. Now, you need to listen to a lot of things that we have kept away from you. All of us have been associated with this from the very start and have known everything. But we were not sure of how you would react and so we did not tell you.”

“If you remember, India’s first moon mission carried a lot of apparatus and has returned some very valuable information about the surface of the moon. One of the important information is that the surface of moon has a lot of radioactive isotopes in proportions different from that found on earth. This has two consequences. Any human settlement on the moon in the future may be subjected to much more radiation than it should be. If we do have any plans then we have to clean up at least part of the surface. Another consequence is that this nuclear material can be used by atomic reactors to solve our energy problems, here, on Earth. For this, we need to mine the surface of the moon and bring back enriched Uranium, Plutonium and other useful materials. This is practically impossible for many years in the future. However, we can grow plants on moon’s surface. It is possible to give limited supply of oxygen, carbon dioxide and shield from Sun’s intense heat and make plants grow on the surface of moon.

“You now understand the importance of our project to this mission. We should be able to separate isotopes and keep enriched nuclear material in those nuts. Later explorations to the moon will pick up these nuts and bring them back to earth. Done on a really large scale, this can solve our energy problems, and also will provide power for settlements on the moon.” Aparna’s voice was intense and showed the drive she felt inside her about the project.

“But, the moon is not our land! I mean, we had this beautiful Earth and we have almost destroyed it. Now we are doing the same with the Moon. Changing the constituents of the soil? That is out of question. We do not own the Moon. No nation, no organization, no one owns the moon. It’s not like we go over there and start a settlement because we harvested a few nutty weeds in that area. And you want to bring back fissile material concentrated to more than weapon’s grade to Earth in a space-ship? By what you say, it is not unimaginable that Moon soil could contain a lot of plutonium too. Unlike Uranium, Plutonium has a much smaller critical mass of about 10 kg and you could hazard a nuclear chain reaction if more than this much mass was brought together. I do not know how I could have even agreed to work with you people if I knew what you were up to.” Tanvi was very angry at every member of the team. Genetics caused and created things that were not supposed to be a part of the Earth’s ecosystem. This had a potential of disrupting a lot of other things. But mostly remaining within the walls of a laboratory, Tanvi had gotten over that feeling. But this was something new. It was not ethical. Their experiments may go wrong and could have dire consequences.

Aparna tried to appease her. “We were afraid you would disagree and hence we kept it secret from you.” Tanvi was not pleased. “And from where did you get that soil?” Tanvi would have not been surprised if she heard Moon again. “From BARC” Aparna replied. “I cannot allow you people to do this. It is crime against the Universe. Movement of one planet’s assets to another is breach of a natural isolation created and maintained for God knows how many years. What will happen if some microorganisms grow in the lunar ambience and make to the Earth and we do not know how to stop them? We could have diseases of the kind never seen before. We have in this lab, evolved all kind of weird plants but they were all under our nose. When you mentioned they will be planted at sites where there was severe heavy metal contamination, that land still could be surveyed. If the plants evolve into something dangerous, or somehow learn how to grow much larger fruits, we have actually created natural atom bombs. With the natural distribution of isotopes on the Earth, this could have not happened very easily. Also, we do not understand what kind of radiations exist in the Universe and what impact can they have on living tissue. The worst thing is I feel incriminated.” Tanvi was not at all comfortable now that she herself comprehended the possibilities.

“Don’t be silly. Your contribution in this project has been a lion’s share. You should be proud that you are going to solve a lot of energy problems and help a lot of people. You are a scientist of the highest accord and have proven it through your work. Your emotions and Earth-patriotism is only hindering your view. There is a larger benefit that you are missing. Think rationally. This is big. It can take you places, I won’t mention the Moon again, but that is also on the list.” Aparna did not know that someone could be so horrified by the facts. She wanted Tanvi for this project and many more. “I am resigning from the job.” Tanvi declared. Aparna was transfixed. “No!” she screamed. “You are not going anywhere. We need you here. This is your place. You made amazing inventions and it will be a big mistake for you to lose the opportunities that you can have by being with us. Also, you have an indemnity bond with us.” Aparna knew she had spoken in the wrong tone immediately after the sentence was out. But the damage was done.

“Do not try to stop me. I am not in your institute anymore.” She wrote “I quit.” on a notebook page and signed below. Then she threw it towards Aparna. Then she quickly picked up her bag, removed all things that belonged to the institute and said to everyone, “Don’t forget to read the morning paper tomorrow.” It was Aparna’s turn to act quickly. She physically stopped Tanvi and said, “If you want to leave, it is your choice. But you have no right to make the nation suffer because of your foolishness. The people do not understand what amount of toil and energy has to go in anything that makes their lives so easy ands simple. If you go to the press, they will virtually destroy us. This cannot be tolerated. One individual like you cannot jeopardize a great vision. Stop Tanvi. You could contribute here and be the one to be proud. You are afraid of the consequences of our experiments. Then do more of them and establish that such dire things will not happen. We will put these plants on a simulated lunar surface at some other institute’s facility and check the effects. We could monitor the plants from the Earth using very good cameras. You think of it and we will take that precaution. But please do not leave or disclose the project to anyone.” Aparna had not pleaded this way ever before.

Tanvi did not listen to any of her proposals. She had made up her mind. She was not going to stop at any cost and was going to expose the institute for conducting such experiments without informing her and without her consent. She swiped out of the room while Aparna was trying to speak her out of it once more. Aparna was distressed, but also tense. She went in her cabin and locked the door. She picked up the phone and called the Director on the internal line. She explained what had happened in as less words as possible. She stressed that all attempts at stopping Tanvi had failed and that Tanvi had threatened speaking to the press. Before hanging the phone, the Director said, “I am sorry.”

Nikhil called up Tanvi to ask if she felt like having dinner at a nearby restaurant in the evening. The phone was answered up by a man who asked Nikhil if he knew Tanvi. “Yes, I know her”, Nikhil replied. “Please come to Sasoon Hospital as soon as possible” the man on the other side said. Tanvi was declared “brought dead” by Sasoon Hospital. She was the lone victim of a complicated accident that occurred earlier that day.

Epilogue

Two separate news items meant a lot to Dr. Aparna. She was amused that both of them occurred on the same day. The Indian Prime Minister had congratulated the scientists for successfully completing the second mission to moon. He said that the new robots that the mission has sent to moon will help in establishing a lot of unknown facts about the outer space and possibility of life outside Earth. The second news item related to a discovery of a Uranium mine near a military site in Rajasthan. The readers of this news item did not know, however, that the Uranium mine was almost equally near any place on Earth, or rather, equally far away. Tanvi should have been alive to see this day.

Fact and Fiction

Plants can concentrate heavy metals to about 300 times of concentrations found in their environment is a fact. Large mass of nuclear material if brought together can start a chain reaction is a fact. Plutonium’s critical mass is about 10 kg. Proportion of Uranium 235 in naturally occurring Uranium is 0.711% on the Earth. Biological separation of isotopes is fiction. Everything related to the moon is fiction. That the NCCS exists in the University of Pune campus is a fact. That it does research even remotely close to the kind mentioned here is fiction. That the moon missions have returned data that shows higher ratios of fissile material on moon is fiction. Finally, all characters mentioned here are purely fictitious and bear no resemblance with anyone living or dead. Any such resemblance if found should be considered only coincidental. I do not imply that any such incidents as mentioned in this story could have happened or could happen in future in any institutions mentioned or not mentioned.

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Tags: bioconcentration, heavy-metal contamination