Science saves the day!

Alexandra Blake is your typical molecular biologist: She gets frustrated when samples are too deteriorated to yield any DNA, she fights her boss for more time to spend on basic (versus applied) research, she shares access to Science, Nature, and other key journals with her co-workers after her institution decided it couldn't afford more than one subscription per publication. Oh, and she also solves crimes.Alex Blake is the brainchild of novelist Lori Andrews, a law professor and genetics expert who directs the Institute for Science, Law and Technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Blake is a fictional geneticist based at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington DC, who accepted a post there because the institute promised to provide the cutting-edge equipment she needed to continue her sequencing work with the 1918 Spanish flu virus. That's a real project, which includes scientists who are also based at AFIP. Along the way, Blake gets pulled into high-profile cases, such as the one about a serial killer who targets women near military bases and covers their bodies in tattoos. Naturally, the chain of events eventually hits Blake closer to home, and her science comes in handy.Andrews got interested in telling stories about molecular biology while serving as a legal expert in genetics -- for instance, she chaired the committee that dealt with the ethical issues of the Human Genome Project. To get up to speed, Andrews took some genetics courses and spent time in laboratories, which eventually convinced her that the world needed a scientist heroine.Andrews doesn't shy away from using technical terms. Blake freely mentions words you don't see in typical thrillers: mitochondrial DNA, neurotransmitters, microchips, PCRs, the Applied Biosystems 3730x/DNA analyzer. This is a conscious move on Andrews's part, to expose readers to a world they may have never seen before -- one of the benefits of reading fiction, she says. The goal of the series is to "take a good yarn and smuggle in some important social issue about science," Andrews says. "Readers have very much enjoyed taking a glimpse into the scientific world and learning some of the terminology." The stories are truly presented through the eyes of a molecular biologist. In the first novel, Sequence, when a congressman enters Blake's lab, he stands in the middle, afraid to touch anything: "That was a common reaction of nonscientists. They didn't want to disrupt something that might be important," according to Blake. In the second book in the series, Silent Assassin, a colleague continually displays his bodybuilder physique, which reminds Blake of a Science paper about a genetically engineered bull whose chest was so enormous that eventually his legs couldn't hold him up.We also see some of Andrews herself in her novels. The main storyline in Silent Assassin centers around a set of skulls confiscated from returning Vietman veterans, a topic Andrews encountered while visiting the AFIP. Someone mentioned the skulls, "and he opened up a drawer and put a human skull in my hand that had graffiti in it and had been made into a candle. There was a whole drawer-full of these skulls," Andrews recalls. Right away, she knew she had a storyline: What if geneticist Blake was asked to reunite these skulls with the families of the dead?Andrews adds some personal touches, as well. "My mother actually was very disappointed when I went to Yale Law School because she wanted me to be a beautician," says Andrews. So her protagonist is a brilliant scientist, "but as a nod to my mother, she lives in a [closed] beauty salon," where she unwinds from a stressful day among the hair dryers and other equipment. The second book in the Alexandra Blake series, The Silent Assassin, will be released in paperback in June, 2008. Andrews is currently working on the third book in the series, in which Blake encounters an emerging infectious disease and a computer that runs on DNA. Alison McCook mail@the-scientist.comLinks within this article:Lori Andrews http://loriandrews.com/I. Ganguli, "Flu genome sequenced," The Scientist, October 6, 2005. http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22790/VK McElheny, "Human genome project +5," The Scientist, February 2006. http://www.the-scientist.com/2006/2/1/42/1/L. Andrews, Sequence, St. Martin's Minotaur, 2006. http://tinyurl.com/22kbf7L. Andrews, Silent Assassin, St. Martin's Minotaur, 2007. http://tinyurl.com/2cthuvA. Gawrylewski, "The bytes behind biology," The Scientist, August 2007. http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/53432/

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