Chapter 51: MRI Experiments

Early February

When February began, Tamara’s MRI project was in full operation. She had recruited fourteen subjects and had designed a protocol that was broken into several different related tasks, with a possible follow-up of smaller scope, depending on the results of the first series. Tamara had read several articles in the literature which claimed that the anterior cingulate cortex was highly active in empathic response, followed closely by the hypothalamus and amygdala, but specific details differed somewhat for gender and the amount of activity seemed to be related to age. So her studies would be concentrating on those structures.

The first session for each subject was to quantify their midbrain activities detected by the fMRI to try to rank them by degree of empathy. In the protocol, the subjects viewed images of great emotional content, listened to sound tracks of babies crying, and were exposed to similar items of emotional content, while the fMRI scan recorded how the subjects’ brains responded.

Then, on a different day, the subjects were given the task she had designed to activate their olfactory tracts. This task had them trying to distinguish between the three fruit flavors she had chosen while their nostrils were blocked. To confuse their visual-association sense, the flavored items were presented to them in a capsule of the color of a different flavor. She used a cognitive feedback technique in this task to have the subjects “train” themselves to pay very close attention in identifying each flavor.

The third task in the sequence combined the first two, in an attempt to see if the activation of the subjects’ limbic systems could be enhanced by exposing them to mixtures of the fruit flavors, in different proportions of two of the three flavors, and having them attempt to identify the predominant flavor. This test required the recall of a sensory memory and mobilized most of the midbrain structures responsible for memory processing and recall, including the limbic system and the hippocampal formation, while keeping their olfactory tracts active.

After three weeks, the first series of subject tasks were complete and Dr Marcos had the scans. A few days later, he called Tamara, quite excited.

“Tamara, those scans are incredible; the resolution and detail are amazing. I’d like to call in some colleagues to analyze these scans with me, I’m seeing things on the scans that have never been described before.”

“Of course. You can get others to work with the scans. Just one thing—they all need to sign an NDA ‘cause I’m working on the patents for the device. And there’s subject confidentiality to maintain also.”

“Sure. Can you send the NDA form to me?”

“Yeah, I’ll email you a pdf. They can sign one and you can return the signed copy to me by campus mail. But scan and email the scan or a photo of the signed copy back to me also in case the campus mail gets lost or something.”

Tamara was in Emma’s Physics office going over some of the magnet monopole project measurements about a week later, when Dr Montern appeared at the door.

“She’s done it again,” he announced, solemnly.

“Sorry?” Emma said, looking up. “What? Who?”

“Upset the whole world of science. Tamara,” Montern said, unhappily.

“Chet, come in, sit down, keep calm and carry on,” Emma joked. “What’s Tamara done now?”

“Ha. What hasn’t she done. I got off the phone with Dr Karasitos, the head of the Neuroscience Department, a few minutes ago. He called me from the med school with Dr Ellenden on the line; she’s a vice dean there. My sense from their call is that the med school department heads are getting concerned that Physics is taking over their faculty. There’s about a dozen of their faculty who are involved with Tamara’s project now...”

Tamara giggled. “It’s twenty-three as of an hour ago...”

Montern looked at her while trying to keep a stern look on his face, but then cracked up.

“Yeah, Karasitos told me that six of his faculty, they’re in cognitive neuroscience, are poring over some MRI scans from Tamara’s project. The dean said that half of the med school’s and hospital’s radiologists, three pathologists, a number of neurologists, and several psychiatrists—if I’m keeping it straight—are glued to their computers, looking at those scans.

“Um, I think there are one or two psychologists and someone in histology too,” Tamara offered.

Emma leaned back and let out a hearty laugh. “She’ll take over the university next, won’t she,” she sighed.

“So tell me how a physics project got into, well, medicine, I guess,” Montern asked.

Emma looked at Tamara and motioned for her to answer.

“So I’m really doing physics where it interfaces with biology. That’s biophysics, and like one thing biophysicists do is to study how nerve cells communicate—and my work has been tending in that direction. I’m putting that topic together with electrical engineering, since nerve calls act like biological electrical circuits. I’m also using physics when I design MRI improvements. Every system in an MRI uses something based on modern physics. Superconductivity, electromagnetism, radio wave propagation, quantum electronics. And engineering physics too, that’s integrated circuits and semiconductors. Josephson junctions and even Andreev electron scattering are playing important parts in my work. My MRI project was to use the special properties of the SET, the single electron transistor, and designing superconducting RF generating and receiving circuits, to improve the spatial resolution of the scans. That’s helping my collaborators—all twenty-three of them now,” she giggled, “ ... learn how nerve cells communicate.”

“Hmm, a real cross-discipline project,” Montern mused. “The old model of physics with solo researchers is disappearing...”

“That disappeared generations ago, Chet, starting with particle physics,” Emma grinned. “Big physics started, most science historians would say, in 1929, when Ernest Lawrence got his idea for the cyclotron. Then, a little more than a decade later, came the Manhattan Project. Then the really huge projects started. Since the equipment in a typical high-energy physics lab costs a million bucks or more, that lab would want to keep a bunch of them occupied, wouldn’t it. My own solid-state lab has thirteen engineers and techs and three postdoc physicists—not to mention two remarkable students, and Tamara’s employing two additional engineer types. When I got my first appointment to the APL, I had decided to work solo and couldn’t understand why they gave me a lab. Blimey, I was so naive then. Even Tamara couldn’t have done what she’s done without a team backing her, right, Tamara?”

“Totally. It’s true that I get ideas but it takes a number of people to build what I imagine.”

“So I gather the resolution of your MRI coils is the featured news?” Montern asked.

“Yep. The ability to see structures at a finer scale lets you see new neurologic activity centers and new pathways linking them. So this is allowing the researchers to better understand what the brain regions do.”

Emma laughed. “Tamara’s got a bunch of patent apps in the pipeline now and it means that diagnostic and research medicine will get a new tool without having to invest in an MRI with a stronger magnet. I reckon that her new coil will be a hot item for most diagnostic centers. And I’ve got my Cambridge company’s solicitors talking to Tamara’s about licensing deals.”

Mid-February

“Emma, Dr Marcos sent me the preliminary results of the first set of experiments,” Tamara said.

It was mid-February and Tamara was getting ready for the second phase of her MRI tests; she had gone to Emma’s office to discuss her project and the latest idea she had gotten.

“You’ll recall that I was screening for empathy as a possible way to activate the parts of the brain that I suspect work to give me my abilities. To classify our volunteers’ empathy levels, Marcos divided them into three groups based on the written screening questionnaire and their brain activity. The least empathic was a ‘1’ and the most, a ‘3.’ What he found was that the people with the highest empathies also had the best results in the olfactory tests.”

“So I reckon that result helps support your chemical messaging theory, then?” Emma asked.

“Yeah, and also how the brain causes empathy in a person; so that raises a question about charisma. One of the most charismatic people I ever met was your sister-in-law Sam. Do you think that I could get her to do a session with the fMRI? It would be a one-shot scan session and she’d just need to watch a video clip and say something about what she thought about it.”

“I’ll ask, but if you’re flexible on the time, I think she’d do it.”

“Good, thanks,” Tamara said.

The other part of Tamara’s latest idea was twofold. One was to scan Peter, her super-empath subject, and the other was to look for her own chemical signals. Doing the EEG part would have to wait. She had worked out a way to try to capture organic molecules from the air, even the tiny levels of her theorized personal pheromones. She had already lined up time on the new device that the Mass Spectrometry Lab in the Department of Chemistry had recently gotten—it was capable of detection of small biological chemicals in the low femtogram concentration region. The device was a chemist’s answer to the physicist’s particle beam accelerator.

Tamara recalled that very tiny amounts of illegal drugs could be detected in an athlete’s blood by using a device called a mass spectrometer. Sometimes a gas chromatograph device would be coupled to a mass spectrometer for certain complex analyses; in her case, that additional instrument wasn’t needed. Her analysis would employ the new time-of-flight mass spectrometer the lab had gotten. In the device, a volatilized specimen is placed in the source chamber and the molecules in the specimen are ionized with a laser pulse. Then the charged ions are electrostatically accelerated into a drift chamber. The ions of a small mass, as they travel through the chamber, move faster than the heavier ions, so the beam of ions which impacts the detector is separated according to ion mass. Each compound has its own ion mass signature; this is referred to as its “spectra.”

She also had figured out how to collect any airborne pheromones. Peter’s Uncle Dave worked in Ft. Detrick at USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, the Defense Department’s facility for research into defenses against biological warfare agents. Dave had told her about some of the work he did as a virologist and had mentioned the small portable isolation units they used for field work. Tamara had contacted him and arranged to borrow one and had it set up in the MRI room with an air sampler on the unit’s exhaust; this would trap any organic molecules from the exhaust air on its filter.

Tamara planned to run several tests during the next few months. One was to try to collect any unusual organic chemicals in the air when she “pushed” an emotional color taste, but she had learned that her “push” needed a target—and the target couldn’t be herself; that only worked for limited things, like biofeedback methods did. She decided to use the thirst emotion as the challenge, since most of the others in her repertoire were more unpleasant. This part of her followup experiment had two components: the first was with her in the open but out of sight of the subject and the second was with her in the isolation tent with the chemical-capturing filter in place.

She planned slightly more elaborate tests with Peter and a simple one with Sam—Sam’s was to scan her brain when given the task of reacting to a brief video and presenting her point of view on the video’s topic in a convincing way. Tamara had no doubt whatsoever that Sam would perform that task admirably. Tamara, like many other people, saw how charismatic people always had their personalities turned on—like many other people, she had noticed that when certain people entered a busy room, most everyone in the room turned to look at who had entered, despite their being engaged with other activities, like conversations, at the time.

Tamara had arranged with a faculty member in the Hopkins Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology to collaborate on identifying and characterizing the molecules that the isolation unit’s air filters had trapped. They had analyzed those molecules using the Chemistry Department’s mass spectrometer unit and now had copies of their spectra; this allowed them to use their characteristic fragmentation patterns to match up the fragment ions formed with known molecules. Tamara met with one of his postdoctoral fellows, Joyce Darner, who agreed to help to do the identification.

What Darner found from analyzing the spectra of Tamara’s compounds was that they were all based on a compound very similar in structure to the supposed human pheromones called androstadienone and estratetraenol, exocrine hormones produced by human males—the “andro” compound, and females—the “estra” form. Even though those molecules had been assumed to be sexual pheromones, Tamara knew that every well controlled study published to date failed to show a significant sexual response to exposure to the molecule. But Tamara’s molecules were slightly different from the base molecule; the MS analyses showed that in Tamara’s case, the major difference was that the methyl group moiety in the molecule was replaced by different radical groups of varying composition.

By early February, Darner had enough information to attempt to synthesize one of the molecules, one with the simplest radical group. Tamara had visited her to learn what she had found.

“Tamara, this is a hard one to make synthetically. The attached radical groups make the molecule fairly unstable during syntheses, but that’s not the real problem.”

“What’s the problem, then?” Tamara asked.

“I get optical isomers when I synthesize the compound,” she said, “and isolating one enantiomer from the other hasn’t worked; the molecules degrade easily. The molecules you secrete are the D enantiomer, I suspect that, biologically, the stereoisomer mixture would not work at best or be harmful at worst. That’s what’s been found in pharmacology when dealing with stereoisomers.”

Tamara knew from her organic chemistry courses that biologically active molecules are enantiomeric, or stereoisomeric. They have identical chemical structures except that their bonding angles differ at certain atoms in such a way that one version cannot be converted to the other. Such molecules also possess optical activity; that is, under certain conditions, light passed through concentrations of the molecules is polarized in either a right- or left-handed direction. She also recalled that stereoisomers of the same molecule have different biological properties in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. These properties describe how long they stay active in the body and how the body absorbs, metabolizes, and excretes them.

“Uh huh, I understand,” Tamara told her. “Can you keep trying? This might be a breakthrough chemical. Or is there a way to concentrate the molecule from the filters?”

“Possibly. This work is a real challenge, and it’s an interesting molecule too. Something brand new that nobody’s seen before; that’s rare.”

Tamara left, wondering how to deal with this part of her emotion-communicating project. She vowed to look into the quantum-mechanical properties of steroid hormones to see if that would suggest an answer.

But National Engineers Week was here and on Saturday, Tamara and Emma would be presented with the Draper Prize. Engineers Week gets little publicity, not because the seventy-odd engineering and education societies that observe it don’t try to make the public aware of it. So do all the fifty-plus corporations and government agencies which get involved in it. But the events of the week rarely get into the news. News which isn’t scandalous, sensational, dramatic, or lurid, mostly doesn’t get published.

The National Engineers Week was created in 1951 to recognize the contributions to society that engineers make and it’s observed on the week in which George Washington’s birthday, February 22, occurs. Washington is regarded as the nation’s first engineer because of his initial career as a land surveyor, which he began at age 17.

The Draper Prize is awarded at an event hosted by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and this year, the awards ceremony and banquet were to take place in a D.C. hotel ballroom. Honorees could invite family and friends to attend, so Tamara included her family and Peter and his family while Emma invited her family. There was a dinner followed by speeches and then Tamara and Emma each gave a brief acceptance speech.

As the event was winding up, Sam looked at her siblings.

“Kinda low-key compared to the Nobel Prize ceremony, innit?” she chuckled.

Emma nodded, grinning. “I much prefer this kind.”

“You guys went to Emma’s Nobel Prize affair? Wow,” Tamara exclaimed.

“It was brill,” Abi gushed. “Especially how all the people there, the nobility too, thought Sam and I were the granddaughters of one of the laureates. And when they saw who this Dr Emma Clarke really was, a 14-year-old kid, most of the blokes there were gobsmacked.”

Those in Peter’s family were amused by this revelation and wanted all of the details and Sam was happy to comply [as told in Emma Comes in from the Cold].

Back at work after the weekend, Tamara dealt with a number of invites for her to present a seminar, sent by email and even a few by postal mail. Then she dove back into her calculations. While speaking to a few of the engineers and scientists at the NAE event about her work and answering several questions about applying her discoveries about electron storage and flow to their own design situations, she had gotten another inspiration about how mathematics could account for her discovery.

She had realized that the explanation for how her circuit permitted electrons to flow against a charge gradient was almost certainly related to the magnetic monopole phenomenon; many of her circuit designs and their physical layout were similar in both. She began with the assumption that the circuit that she had invented, which allows electrons to move against a charge gradient, must be analogous to the phenomenon known as quantum tunneling, where electrons are able to penetrate a potential energy barrier whose energy exceeds the electron’s kinetic energy. Under the influence of her circuit, which employed her unique use of superconducting components and single-electron transistors, the SETs, to amplify current flow, she theorized that the attractive force exerted on the electrons by the coil circuit’s monopole force effect was stronger than the repulsion of the electrostatic field, allowing the electrons to travel through the electrostatic barrier of the field.