4 ideas
They plant specimens and steer his experiments so that Ross's official science advances only where it serves their own hidden research into a malaria-borne 'Calcutta chromosome' that can move a personality from one body to another. The Egyptian clerk Antar and the vanished researcher L. Murugan later piece this together from archives in a near-future New York and in Calcutta.
The cult practices a 'counter-science' whose method depends on not being articulated. On its view, anything stated or published changes the thing it describes, so knowledge has to be passed on through silence, indirection and deliberately planted fragments rather than through papers and proofs. It gains power by refusing the openness and credit-seeking that define Western laboratory science.
Read the canonical history of a discovery by asking who handled the materials, cleaned the equipment and chose the specimens, not only whose name is on the paper. On this view the credited scientist can be an instrument whose attention is directed by uncredited colonized workers. The archive records the result but not the steering hand, so absences and odd coincidences in the record become evidence.
The novel proposes that a non-standard genetic element, carried and recombined through malarial infection of the brain, could move traits of a personality from one host to the next. Selfhood would then pass through a chain of bodies instead of ending with one. This gives the cult its goal: immortality achieved not by preserving a body but by migrating across successive ones, with disease serving as the carrier.