Toxoplasma

Toxoplasma

by Abe

In academia, teaching ability is unimportant. Success depends on getting large research grants. The President wants more brain research, and the military and CIA are always interested in mind control and illegal bioweapons, for defense only, of course. How could I tap into that government money? I'm not a famous neuroscientist, and I don't have access to sophisticated equipment, like MRI and brain scans. If I wanted a big research grant, I would need to think “outside the box”, as they say, and use stuff already on hand. I had our cat house, cats our pre-med students use in labs to study anatomy and physiology. For example, they remove brain parts and then test the reflexes of the cat, followed of course, by euthanizing the cats. For PR reasons, we don't talk much about our cat breeding. The tree huggers object to our keeping cats in cages and then killing them.

Then I met Clara Haber PhD, a tall blonde nordic goddess, 31 years old, known as “the ice queen”. From the moment I saw her I lusted for her body. She was aloof, dated neither men nor women, might well have been a virgin. Her interest in life was psychology, rat psychology. She had access to hundreds of rats, who spent their lives running mazes, being conditioned by shocks and rewards, and otherwise doing things that fascinate rat psychologists but bore most other people. How could I get close to Clara Haber PhD? We should apply for a grant to do research together, cats and rats. She was agreeable, but how do we get some government bureaucrat to give us gobs of money?

Toxoplasma gondii. It's a common parasite, known for more than a century.

Perhaps one in four Americans over the age of twelve is infected with T. gondii, more in other countries. Most people don't know they are infected, but some experience flu-like symptoms, and toxoplasmosis can harm a fetus if the host is pregnant. It can, rarely, result in death. In the US, it's thought to be the second largest cause of death by food borne disease. There is no known cure, and big pharma doesn't foresee big profits selling anti-toxoplasma drugs. So who is to pay for research?

The primary host of T. gondii is the cat. They reproduce sexually in the gut of some sort of feline and then pass oocysts, little capsules of eggs, in the cat feces. The oocysts contaminate soil, water, and plants. If a warm blooded host; a bird, a rat, a sheep, a human, drinks the water or eats the plant or consumes infected meat, they will most likely become infected. I tell my students to cook their lamb well and to wear gloves when cleaning litter boxes. The oocyte breaks up and little, single-cell microbes move through the host's body. They are small, shaped like a banana, and they have no problem penetrating tissues, even entering the brain. Then they reproduce asexually, cloning themselves, and form new cysts.

Unless a cat eats a bird or mammal with toxoplasmosis, the parasite has no future, sexwise.

Interestingly, the parasites can affect the brain. Rats who are affected lose their aversion to the smell of cat urine and seem to lose some of their fear of cats, leading riskier lives. Clever little microbe: make the rats more likely to be eaten by a cat, so you can have sex in the cat's intestine. Well, does it affect other animals, like humans? Yes! It seems that infected humans are more likely to have automobile accidents, to attempt suicide, to get brain cancer or schizophrenia, and they react differently to the smell of urine. There are subtle effects that are different in males and females. It has been reported infected men are less likely to follow social rules, are more suspicious, more prone to jealousy, not things we want to promote. Women, on the other hand, are more warmhearted, more easygoing, less suspicious, less prone to jealousy. Suppose, I wrote to a certain not-to-be-named government agency, that I could breed a super T. gondii. It might be used as a weapon. Spray it over Afghanistan and turn the Taliban into schizophrenic sociopaths distracted by nymphomaniacal women. They bought the idea, sent lots of money.

Pretty soon suits from the agency showed up to inspect our facilities and see how we were spending their money. We were expanding our animal care facilities, hiring students, part time, to collect cat urine and feces,feed the critters, etc. The university, of course, got a lot, essentially rent on the facilities, heating, lighting, even security. Where was the high tech equipment? Were we going to sequence the toxoplasma genome? No, we were doing things the old fashioned way, selective breeding, the way people bred new breeds of dogs and special racing horses. After all, a doberman pinscher is only a Manchester terrier selectivbely bred for size. We gathered cat feces from animal shelters and other sources, to maximize the genetic diversity of the toxoplasma eggs. We even irradiated some, with x-rays, to increase the mutation rate. We converted the feces into egg-rich cat food and fed them to cats, where the sexual reproduction in the cat's gut further scrambled the DNA of the toxoplasmas. Then the cat feces were processed into rat food, and lots and lots of rats were infected. Dr. Haber would observe their behavior. Were they risk takers? How did they react to cat urine? Were they more aggressive? More “warm hearted”? The selected abnormal rats were fed to cats, to make more of the oocysts used to infect more rats.

The suits kept visiting and asking questions, like when will we get results?

After several months, many generations of oocysts, we began to get results.

Mind you, while we did not have security clearances, it was understood that everything was confidential, that we could not publish, and that the results, the rats and cats, would belong to the government. Dr. Haber and I showed them a short video. At first, it showed normal rats. Boring! Then we showed infected rats, ten males and ten females. Individually, they were not remarkable, just sat in their cages as rats will do. Then we put the males in one cage and the females in another cage and put the cages next to each other. The females behaved as if in estrus, as if ready to mate. The males went crazy. When we let the males into the female cage, they instantly mated with the females and then, full of suspicion and jealousy, they fought among themselves until there was only one male left alive, king of the harem.

The agency doubled our grant money and suggested we try to isolate the most effective oocysts so they could figure out how to “weaponize” them and conduct tests on humans. They took our video and classified it TOP SECRET.

Unfortunately, someone didn't play by the rules. Our university president boasted to the press how successful we were at getting grant money for animal research, how we planned to expand our facilities and employ more students. Animal rights activists broke into animal labs and set the cats and rats free. The animals quickly dispersed throughout the campus and the town. White lab rats aren't very savvy about survival in the wild. They quickly fell prey to, infected, most of the cats in town, and the cats, ours and the newly infected cats, shit all over the place. The agency, of course, would not let us warn people, except for generalizations about washing hands and cooking food, so it was inevitable that they got their tests on humans.

Attendance in class has tumbled. The pregnancy rate is way up. There have been countless fights, and three homicides, among male college students, and similar incidents in the town. Mental health professionals are seeing schizophrenia everywhere and, of course, they have no explanation. FEMA, the FBI, NIH, and a dozen more federal agencies are alerted but don't know what to do, and the one agency which understands is keeping quiet.

In spite of the objections of the agency, we have fumigated our labs and destroyed all our rat food. As far as we are concerned, the research is over, and... Oh, I'll have to stop keyboarding for a moment. Dr. Clara Haber has taken off her lab coat, is stark naked, and she's crawling toward me begging to be fucked.