Carson sat down at his desk, and was unwrapping his lunch when his phone rang. Tapping the button on his keyboard, the screen popped to life, revealing the haggard visage of his caller.
"Yes?" he said, as he stuffed a quarter of his sandwich into his mouth. The face on the screen was vaguely familiar, but he couldn't place it off hand.
"Dr. Carson, I don't know if you remember me. I came to see you a few years ago, about serpentitis?" Carson's bushy eyebrows shot up: now he recognized the face.
"Just a second" he said, as he rolled his chair back and flipped the office door closed. Returning to the desk, he said "Johnson... Andrew, right? What can I do for you?"
Johnson half-smiled at being recognized. "I was just calling to ask you about..., well, did they ever figure out what caused it?"
Carson leaned forward, closer to the screen, and lowered his voice. "Well, here's the story the CDC finally pieced together. A biotech company just outside Boston was doing functional genomic research. What they were doing was, they'd take a human gene, and a rat promoter region, and splice them into a viral vector, like a gene-therapy setup. The gene would encode a human protein, one where the function hadn't been identified, and the promoter would cause the protein to be expressed in a rat. They made thousands of different constructs randomly, and then put them into rats. As far as they could tell, someone handling the rats became infected, and spread the infection to a number of people. Several hundred men apparently came down with it, altogether. The gene was later discovered to be a homeobox gene, which is a gene that controls body proportion and shape during development. The promoter turned out to be the rat testosterone receptor, which was completely functional in humans."
Johnson scowled a second, digesting the unfamiliar terminology. "So, it was a human gene, but you caught it like a cold?"
"Well, pretty much. The vector, or carrier, that the company used was a mildly infectious virus that normally causes colds. It was modified so that it wasn't supposed to be able to infect humans, but their stock strains had reverted at some point, and they hadn't checked its infectiousness rigorously."
Johnson nodded. "So, could you catch it over and over again, like a cold?"
Carson dismissed the idea. "No, you don't actually get the same cold repeatedly: you might get a cold from one adenovirus, and then get another cold from a different strain of adenovirus, but you'd be immune to the first strain. Your body develops an immunity - that's how you get over the cold in the first place. Your immune system keeps a special form of the same immune cells on tap, essentially for the rest of your life. That way, the next time you encounter that infectious agent, your body can mount an immediate immune response, and the infection never gets started the second time."
Johnson nodded, "But don't some people get the same thing twice. Like, don't some people get chickenpox twice?"
Carson grudgingly admitted, "Well, sometimes. It's pretty rare. It could happen if you've gone through chemotherapy, which wipes out your immune system, or even if you're exposed to a large source of infection at a time when your immune system is depressed. Some medications can do that, or exhaustion. Why?"
Johnson now looked concerned. "OK, and if someone caught serpentitis twice, what would happen?"
Carson snorted. "He'd be fucking elephants! Sorry. Everyone who caught the virus seems to have grown in length by a factor of two to two and a half, with a concomitant increase in girth. Basically, they all ended up between 12 and 15 inches long, depending on how long it took them to get over the infection, and how long they were to begin with. As soon as your immune system kicked in, it shut down the protein production, and the growth stopped."
"You said, 'and how long they were to begin with...'"
"Yes, guys who said they were longer to begin with appear to have grown proportionally. Of course, we didn't have any 'before' measurements - only their word to go on. But most of the guys who said they started out around 6-1/2 to 7 inches ended up around 14-15 inches, and most of the guys who said they were 6 inches or smaller ended up closer to 12, unless they were infected for a particularly long time. If someone caught it twice, say starting with 12 inches, they'd probably end up with something like two to three feet."
Seeing the concern on Johnson's face, Carson continued "Say, you look like you could use a checkup. Would you like to make an appointment to come in?"
Johnson was nodding. "Oh, and what happened to the biotech company?"
Before Carson could answer, Johnson's girlfriend (wife?) appeared on the screen. "What are you doing out of bed? You need your
rest
, Andrew." With that she smiled at the screen impishly, said "Excuse me", and terminated the call.
* * * * * *
Carson sat back, startled. "What happened to the biotech company, indeed." Well, that was one question he would rather not answer at the moment.
His half-eaten sandwich forgotten on his desk, he leaned back and replayed in his mind the story of his own bout of serpentitis. Years ago, when this began, he was already an established urologist in Boston, practicing in a small but well-respected clinic. Several men had come to see him, including Johnson, complaining of unexpected sudden growth. Well, "complaining" wasn't really the term for it: mainly, they came in because they thought they might have some weird form of cancer, or because their wife or girlfriend were concerned they wouldn't stop growing. Each had complained of having a severe cold just before the growth started, or even during it. Carson wondered how many men around Boston had caught this "cold", and didn't bother to mention it. Come to think of it, Johnson was still suffering from the cold when he came in, coughing and hacking all over the examination room. It was probably Johnson who passed it to me to begin with, thought Carson.
Of course, the very idea of a cold that made one's penis double in length was utterly ridiculous, and at the time Carson could think of no possible explanation for such growth. The first patient he sent home with his girlfriend with instructions to measure length and width when erect, and to repeat the measurements daily for two weeks. He didn't expect to find any change, but thought that the exercise would at least relieve the patient's concerns that he was still growing. Frankly, the only explanation he could think of was some form of possible psychological error, or perhaps an odd neurological problem. Within a week, however, four more patients had come in with the same story, and the same "symptoms." All proved to be obviously well-equipped on examination, and all reported measurements in the 12-15" range, with the aid of wives or girlfriends. Carson had been pondering these results when he came down with a cold himself.
