Trans-Temporter by Christopher M Robinson - HTML preview

Chapter 8

Ark Medical

When originally developed, few understood how important temporters could be. It took a while before people started to realise how useful they would become for the medical profession.

Lei had invented the Hospital Stasis Units which were automated Temporters with restricted use principally to prevent a patient from dying whilst the surgical team could be assembled for life-saving surgery. Part of the former Lesser Heath trading estate had been taken over as a hospital unit with patients helicoptered in before it was found to be possible to make HSUs that could be provided to the hospitals themselves.

My granddad, Aled, ran a pharmaceutical company and realised temporters could be very useful to him in maintaining various strains of bacteria for instance. He had also wanted to be close to the original temporter equipment and had established Ark Medical with the extra aim of supporting the developments in medical technology his daughter, my mum Frances, and Saanvi had been working on.

Ark Medical had become a centre of innovation and medical research making devices to aid mobility, born from Saanvi’s and mum’s experiences working with patients in war zones. This had gone way beyond artificial limbs and exoskeletons to implantable devices that could re-establish nerve function and release movement in worn joints etcetera.

Other implants had also moved on from previous simple stents to 3D printed ducts and ‘parts’ for some organs. 3D printing was also being used to rebuild some parts of the body. Some ‘scaffolds’ were now being experimented with to implant in the body to support the cells that could grow some replacement body parts in situ. I was amazed when I saw what Aled’s pharmacological branch of Ark Medical were achieving. Using stem cells, they were on the path to being able to recreate many of the body’s organs.

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I had remembered asking my granddad many questions. He never tired of answering. “Never be afraid to ask. You learn by questioning,” he’d said.

“Stem cells are the building blocks,” he’d explained. “They can become any part of the body. Every cell contains our entire DNA which has about three billion base pairs of information determining all your personal characteristics. We use a tool called ‘CRISPR’ to manipulate that.” He had told me that because Chris and I had been formed from the same original cell, we had identical DNA giving us identical features, though there were very minor variations such as fingerprints. (That had answered one question I’d had, if my brother were to commit a crime, I couldn’t be convicted based on fingerprint evidence.)

There are about thirty trillion cells in the human body and each one is reproducing itself constantly with the old cell dying to be replaced with the new one in what’s known as the ‘cell cycle’. The speed of cell replacement via the cell cycle is typically around once a day.

“So every day, around thirty trillion cells are each replicating three billion bits of information?” I had asked incredulously and Aled had nodded and explained that with copying that amount of data, errors can occur which can lead to cancer. Much of the on-going work of Ark medical was to find preventative medicines and cures for the remaining cancers for which cures still hadn’t been found.

“If so much is going on and errors can occur, how come we don’t have more cancers?” I’d asked. Aled had explained that minor errors don’t cause problems and it requires repeated errors to the same cell, which is why cancers are more common as we get older. Copying errors from earlier in our lives are continually being propagated by those cells replicating as part of the cell cycle, so fewer extra copying errors are required before the mutations become malignant. He described it as almost like a game between the body’s immune system and cancers. The cancers started as almost imperceptible changes to a cell. T cells, which are part of the immune system, run about playing ‘spot the changes’, a bit like the

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Pelmanism games we’d played. “If they spot one, they zap it,” he’d said. “And the new drugs we’re developing, could help the T cells.”

This medical facility was an obvious source of inspiration for Tanvi to want to become a surgeon. Although much surgery was now done robotically, “They could never replace humans,” was Tanvi’s response. If someone contracted a cancer that hadn’t been prevented nor could be cured by the medicines the Ark Medical’s pharmacology department had been developing, it may still need surgical excision. “The best AI doesn’t always find the hidden neoplasms or tumours, though surgical robots are excellent for preventing any knife wobble where there’s millimetres between life and death,” she added.

…

Minutes after I’d been despatched in the temporter along the pipeway, to find Valu, Tanvi had received a call from her younger sister.

“I’m fine,” she’d explained. “I will tell you more when I see you. But we have an urgent medical problem that we’re hoping you and your colleagues can help with.” Tanvi had been intrigued and slightly irritated by not knowing who “we” referred to but was attentive when Valu continued to explain Madeleine’s medical condition. She’d thought it sounded like ‘primary biliary cholangitis’ which the new experimental procedures they were developing may be able to help with but agreed speed was of the essence so had jumped to getting a theatre and surgical team prepared as a matter of urgency.

Right on cue, the patient’s pod had arrived at the SSS dock and nurses and porters extracted her and rushed her to the operating theatre.

“Could a temporter be built into a pod?” Lei asked her husband. “If so, perhaps we could build some ambulance pods?” Dai mused on the suggestion and said he’d work on it. Although the rapidly growing network of narrow pipeways was officially freight only, this emergency medical dash had shown a human possibility. Indeed, ambulance pods were shown

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to be a possibility. “But not for every emergency,” he said. “There wouldn’t be room for an accompanying doctor or medical equipment.”

“Though, if needed, a doctor could follow in a separate temporter pod as could requisite equipment,” added Lei warming to the possibilities, “as no time will have elapsed. If necessary a life support machine could be uncoupled last minute and recoupled at the temporal destination with absolutely minimal delay.”

Thus Ark Medical’s fleet of ambulance pods was to be born. “We just need the network of pipeways to spread to make deployment faster.”

…

A couple of hours after her arrival at the facility, Tanvi assisted as the senior surgeon, Ranjit Lyal, completed the task. “And you can hardly see the puncture wounds where we operated,” she said, “thanks to the latest endoscopes and laparoscopes we’ve developed.”

“Thanks to Harold Hopkins,” corrected Ranjit Lyal. “He invented endoscopes and laparoscopes to look into and operate inside the body in what used to be called ‘keyhole’ surgery.” My earlier interest in optics with “scopes and tropes” helped me appreciate that.

“Your mother’s doing fine. She’s been transferred to a ward in the SSS hospital facility,” Tanvi told Pierre via media link a little later, showing the lady sleeping comfortably with some attached miniature remote monitors just visible.

…

It was UK Associated Pipeways, who started introducing ‘trans-temporters’ by providing passenger pods for the narrow pipeways using temporter pods.

UKAP has established a base in Dungeness in Kent. The shingle peninsular was home to nuclear power station but not much more.

I been taken on a school trip there as it’s steeped in history. There is still a narrow gauge railway run for tourists to this forgotten corner of England although it’s uneconomic to use steam engines except on very special occasions.

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At the end of the peninsular is an ancient lighthouse that was used in the times before modern navigation aids to warn shipping. The lighthouse keeper used to live on the bleak and barren peninsular and his job involved him climbing the stairs that spiralled up inside the tower to make sure the light was working. Its beam would have been visible over twenty miles away, directed by the large glass Fresnel lenses that constantly revolved around the lantern floating on a tank of mercury. The positioning of the lenses provided a distinctive pattern so sailors could be assured of their position years before GPS was invented. Dungeness point lighthouse gave five flashes every thirty seconds. (Of course, I had been fascinated by the lenses.)

Because of its importance as a navigation aid for shipping in the English Channel and Straits of Dover, there had been a lighthouse there since the 1600’s and it had been one of the first to use electric light in the mid 19th century.

There are actually two lighthouses that can be seen. The one we had climbed dated from the beginning of the 20th century. The newer one had to be built sixty years later because the nuclear power station had obstructed its view.

Another communication aid at Dungeness are the sound mirrors. These large curved walls act like magnifying lenses for sounds and were built for defence to listen out for noises of attacking aircraft when war was threatened in 1930 just before RADAR was invented. That had been invented by British physicist Sir Robert Watson-Watt in the 1930s though it was the United States who coined the acronym, short for RAdio Detection And Ranging, in 1939.

The UKAP yard was sited on Dungeness point for its remoteness and proximity to the underused pipeway that served the nuclear reactor.

The launch of the new trans-temporter passenger pods attracted considerable media attention. Anyone could now call up a pod to transport them anywhere. The individual pod would arrive pre-programmed for the

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passenger to climb aboard and go into stasis during their journey via pipeways and other transport connections as required.

However, they hadn’t thought sufficiently about security and one night six trans-temporter pods were loaded onto the back of a lorry. The thieves having blocked the views of the security cameras.

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