Jamie Brodie 01 - Cited to Death

the full text of the articles. If I was right in speculating that Dan had sent the letter to me because I was a UC librarian, then I’d put the power of the UC library system to work.
    With that settled, I drifted off to sleep.

Wednesday May 30
    I was feeling pretty good the next morning, and went for a swim before work. I had three goals in mind for the day. First, I had to finish going through the mail and get the interlibrary loan materials delivered. It wasn’t necessary to do that in person, but it was a good way for me to keep in touch with the history faculty, to remind them that they had their own subject librarian at their disposal. That took most of the morning, and it wasn’t until almost 11:00 that I was able to focus on my second goal: finding the full text of the citations Dan had given me.
    I opened up our citation linker and typed in the second title first. It popped up, but only the abstract was available to me. I read it; I was unsure of some of the jargon, but it looked like a typical medical research article. For the full text, I needed a separate log in for the biomedical library, which I didn’t have.
    I went back to the citation linker and typed in the first title, first in English and then in Welsh. No hits on either. So I was going to have to visit the biomed library.
    I let Dr. Loomis know where I was going, and headed south. UCLA’s hospital and medical school complex is spread across the south end of campus, and the Research Library is at the north end, so it’s a nice walk. I went in the biomedical library and found the reference desk. I was glad to see Karen Lewis there. At least I knew her a bit. We’d served on a couple of committees together, and she’d always been cooperative. She spotted me and waved.
    “Jamie Brodie! We are graced with the presence of the humanities!”
    I laughed. “Social sciences, to be exact. Got a minute?”
    “Sure. What’s up?”
    I laid my printout of the two citations, including the translation of the Welsh title, in front of her. “I’ve got a little mystery to clear up, and I need the full text of these. Google Translate gave me the English version of this title, or at least a reasonable facsimile. The language is Welsh.”
    “Huh.” Karen looked at the two articles. “This is stem cell research. Looks like your Welsh guys were unsuccessful with this procedure, and the next guys were successful. There are four years between these two; I’d bet that the second one finally figured out how to do the procedure.”
    “That’s kind of what I thought, but I wanted to make sure…a librarian friend of mine asked me to look these up, then he was found dead on Monday.”
    “ What ? Oh my God! Do you think there’s some connection?”
    “No. He had a seizure disorder, and apparently was alone at work on Friday evening and had a seizure and died. The library was closed on the weekend, so no one came in to find him until Monday.”
    Karen frowned. “He was a librarian? Where?”
    “Cedars. Dan Christensen. Did you know him?”
    “The name is familiar. Was he active in any of the associations?”
    “I really don’t know. We went through library school together, but I hadn’t seen him since then.”
    “Why’d he ask you to do this?”
    “I have no idea. I thought it might have been because I was the only UC librarian he knew.”
    Karen read the titles again. “Actually, this is pretty big stuff. I think what both groups were trying to do is create human egg cells out of stem cells. This would be hugely significant if it was possible.”
    “So this second group has figured out how to do it. Good for them.”
    “Yeah. Okay...” Karen turned to her computer and started clicking on things. “I’ll do the easy one first…okay, here it is, right in Biological Record.”
    “Yeah, I could see the abstract, but I couldn’t log in for the full text.”
    “No problem.” Karen printed the article and handed it to me. “Now…boy, Welsh is an odd language. Can you find someone to translate the article for you?”
    “I think so. If Google Translate can’t handle it, I’ve got friends at Oxford that can either do it or know someone who can.”
    “Ooooh, friends at Oxford.” Karen smirked. “Okay, we don’t seem to have it. I’ll have to put in an ILL request.”
    I shrugged. “That’s fine. There’s obviously no rush.”
    Karen looked at her screen. “It’s only held by three libraries in the world. Lucky for you, one of them