The noonday Caribbean sun blazed on the deck of the small Boston Whaler sitting idle over its shadow on the white sand bottom twenty feet below. The anchored Whaler was the only boat out on the placid blue surface of the bay, unusual for a Sunday on Isla Colombo. A slowly swimming snorkeler in bright red trunks was returning to the boat from the outer reef. Distracted earlier by a small school of trumpet fish darting around him, Larry Griffin had not seen the jellyfish when he swam over to the reef a half hour ago, and he did not see them now. The pain hit him like a blast from a flamethrower. The air bursting out of his lungs blew the snorkel out of his mouth as he reflexively arched partway up out of the water, startling several sunbathers over on the beach. As Griffin choked and clawed in a frantic dog paddle, a young couple dragged a kayak down off the beach and started paddling toward him. Griffin somehow made it the last few yards to the boat and pulled himself up over the gunwale. Everything went numb as he lost consciousness.

Forty-eight hours later, Griffin was hallucinating as he regained consciousness in the infirmary of the Medical College of Isla Colombo, where he was a second year medical student. The hallucinations slowly gave way to increasing awareness of the muffled sighs of the breathing support apparatus and the rhythmic beep of the heart monitor. He grappled with his first real thoughts, which began with the vague memory of the jellyfish tentacles clinging to his face, shoulders, arms, and chest just before passing out in the boat. Now he remembered hearing somewhere about a prediction that worldwide overfishing of top predator species including sharks would eventually cause jellyfish to dominate the predator niche in the oceans. He hated the thought that the goddamn environmental scientists might be right. His scorn for environmental scientists stemmed directly from his painful memories of being dismissed from a graduate program in freshwater ecology up in Michigan two years earlier on charges of sexual harassment of two students while he was a TA in an intro biology lab section. He had then applied to this second-rate Caribbean med school and had succeeded in getting in, although just barely.

Griffin’s thoughts were interrupted when two nurses entered his room and began taking his vital signs. One of them was an attractive young mestiza, native to the island. As Juanita gazed at Griffin’s deeply tanned face and wavy dark hair, tears brimmed at the corners of her almond eyes. She had seen him in a bed several times before—her own bed actually, and she had been in it with him, unable to resist the urgent allure of his dark brown eyes and tanned muscular body. His eyes still closed, Griffin recognized Juanita’s voice as she spoke to the other nurse, apparently unaware that Griffin was conscious now.
“His reaction to those stings was unusually severe wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, nearly fatal, and it’s still touch and go,” replied the other nurse. “They think it was more of an allergic reaction than purely neurologic damage; the jellyfish in this area are not that toxic.”
“Do they think he will recover?”
“Probably. He’s lucky he got help quickly.”
“Yes.”
“And lucky it wasn’t the Australian box jelly. That much contact with that species would almost certainly have been fatal within minutes.”
The nurses put away the blood pressure equipment and left the room. As Griffin thought about that conversation, the searing pain of the hundreds of stinging welts on his upper body brought into focus the beginnings of an idea.

Two months later, Larry Griffin was enrolled in the gene technology course at MCIC. From the windows of the second floor lab he could look out on the crystal blue water of the small bay where he had become acquainted with the jellyfish. He applied himself with rapt attention to learning the techniques of identifying, isolating, and transferring a gene from one species to another. The hard parts were identifying and isolating a gene, and happily for Griffin the genes he was interested in had already been obtained by Professor Mendoza, who was teaching this very course.