Waiting for them were Stan Chow, Derek Wyman, and Betsy Watkins, a geneticist from Northeastern specializing in human aging. Chris could hear monkeys chattering, but Jimbo’s cage was empty. Betsy opened the rear door to the large enclosed pen outside where the animals could move about in fresh air. Chris could see the nontoxic red
J
painted on his chest. “Is that him?”
Jimbo was sitting on a high perch casually grooming Fred, a male ten years his junior.
“He’s quiet now, but for the last two hours he’s been jumping around like a kid,” Vartan said.
Jimbo saw Chris and hooted a hello.
“I don’t believe it.”
When Jimbo had arrived four months ago, all he did was sit in a corner or sleep. What movements he made were crimped by arthritis. When put in the group pen, he’d either ignore the other animals or whack them if they approached. Twenty-nine years had reduced Jimbo to a lethargic, flabby, antisocial curmudgeon. Incredibly, he looked reborn.
“He even made a move on Molly,” Betsy said.
“You’re kidding.”
“He went through some courtship gestures then he tried to mount her. We had to separate them because she’s still fertile.”
Chris beamed at the animal. “You old gunslinger, you.”
Vartan handed Chris Jimbo’s vital functions charts. “What’s interesting is that he’s eating less, yet he’s gained nearly a pound, mostly in muscle mass.”
Fred decided it was time to play and leapt to the ceiling bars. Instantly, Jimbo was behind him, chattering and swinging across the pen. His movements were slower but still fluid. It was like watching an elderly man on amphetamines.
“Even more remarkable, his blood sugars are down by 80 percent. And so are the protein substances that block arteries, stiffen joints, produce cataracts, and gum up brain tissue.”
“All the signs of aging,” Chris said.
“Yes. Tabulone seems to have reversed the process. I don’t think he’ll turn into a juvenile again, but the stuffs kicked him back a few years. My guess is that it will stabilize as with the mice.”
Chris was stunned. They just hadn’t notice the effect in the mice.
Not only did Elixir prolong life, it had some initial rejuvenating effects.
Even more bizarre, several witnesses say that before the strange affliction, Quinn looked thirty years younger than his age.
My God! thought Chris, It’s what took hold of Dexter.
He had a damaged heart which he knew would kill him soon. Maybe on an impulse he’d tried it on himself and experienced a backward thrust like Jimbo. It must have been like nothing else he had ever experienced. Nothing out of a medicine jar or syringe. The ultimate high: the fires of spring redux.
Betsy Watkins, who had a reputation for being a no-nonsense researcher rarely given to superlatives, was also amazed. “Tabulone appears to restore the DNA to effect a kind of cellular retrogression. I’ve seen nothing like it before. I don’t think anyone has. It’s nothing short of a miracle.”
“Does Ross know?” Chris asked.
“Yes, he does.” Around the corner came Quentin. He was beaming. “The real question is, What’s the next step?”
Chris could smell alcohol on his breath and it wasn’t even noon. What Quentin really wanted to know was when they could file application with the FDA. “I think we’re talking a few years.”
“Years? Why so long? I mean, you’ve got a monkey who’s regressed a decade. We should be thinking about moving on to human subjects and all.”
“We have protocol to follow. You know that,” Betsy said incredulously. “Disconnect these animals, and they’ll die.”
“Don’t disconnect them and they’ll go on forever.”
Betsy began to laugh, but caught herself because Quentin was perfectly serious. “Quentin, this is a compound that will make you die of old age on the spot if you overdose or underdose. It’s hardly ready for human trial.”
“Betsy, we supply most hospitals and clinics with Proctizam which is highly toxic.”
“Proctizam is an experimental drug for cancer patients near death,” Betsy shot back.
“So is Elixir! There are people who would pay dearly to have it the way it is, with all the risks.”
Chris could feel the others stiffen. It wasn’t just that they were dedicated university scientists not used to corporate bullying. They couldn’t quite believe Quentin’s suggestion. It bordered dangerously on blind desperation.
“Quentin,” Betsy said, “speculation like that is not within the interests of any responsible pharmaceutical company.”
Quentin’s face flushed as if it had been slapped. He sucked in his breath and recomposed himself. “Well, let’s just say I’m getting a tad frustrated. We’ve got too many important people invested in this project who don’t want to wait a bunch of years to see this go to market. If you’ll excuse me.”
And he walked away, leaving the others wondering what that was all about.
“
I
think your sister’s a little paranoid.” What Chris really meant was that she was getting wackier. “She carried on about the evils of the modern world for half an hour.”
It was a few days later, and Jenny had flown in for a quick visit. After driving her to the airport he had returned home to work with Wendy on the nursery. Pressure from Quentin had him working long days so he almost forgot how good it was to share time with her. Presently he was hanging wallpaper while she was putting up curtains.
“She can get like that. I wonder what set her off?”
“A radio report about drugs at some junior high. She carried on like the Antichrist was dealing in every schoolyard in the country. No wonder Kelly’s so screwed up.”
“Chris, Jenny’s a great mother. She gave up a nursing career for Kelly. Nobody could have predicted her problems.”
“Well, she’s trying to make up for them with Abigail. The kid’s a year old, and she’s already thinking about home schooling.”
“Maybe it’s second motherhood. She’s determined to make this one work.”
So are we
, Chris thought. The old wound was healing. Wendy was loving the prospect of motherhood. And with it, they had moved closer over the months. It was like going back in time themselves, happy in love all over again.
Last month they had learned that their baby would be a boy. So Chris hung paper with sailboats on a field of blue, while Wendy made nautical curtains. They bought a new crib and set up a bookcase with a collection
of kiddie stories, a Jack-in-the-box, and a few stuffed animals including a big goofy Garfield cat.
“It’s costing her and Ted a fortune,” he said.
While shopping yesterday, Jenny had spent hundreds of dollars on toys including a inlaid pearl music box that played “Frere Jacques.” While he was fond of Jenny, he worried about her influence on Wendy. It wasn’t just the mood swings or neatness obsession. It was her hangups. Some people got worked up over the Russians, others the environment. For Jenny it was how our culture killed childhood innocence. At the slightest provocation, she’d hold forth on the usual demons—drugs, rock and roll, alcohol, TV violence—and how kids didn’t have a chance to be kids anymore. Wendy didn’t need that kind of talk. It was hard enough to get her to decide to have another child without the hyped-up ravings.
Wendy returned from the other room. “Did you see Kelly’s photo—the one at her fifth birthday? It was sitting with the others in the office.” She wanted to group early family shots on a shelf in the nursery.
“No.”
“That’s odd, it’s missing.”
“Maybe Jenny took it.”
“But she would have said something.”
“Unless she had one of her spells.” Jenny was known to have moments of confusion—vestiges of childhood schizophrenia that slipped through the medication.
“I’ll ask her,” Wendy said vaguely. She had hung up a watercolor of children at a yellow beach against a sunlit ocean. “What do you think?”
Chris came over and put his arm around her. “Looks good.”
“Hey, why don’t we go away someplace tropical—just the two of us, before I’m too big to fit on a plane.”
“Like where?”
“Anywhere as long as it’s romantic and far from mass spectrometers and rhesus macaques.”
“No such place,” he grinned.
“That’s the problem. You spend more time with your monkeys than you do with me. I’m starting to feel like Jane in the Tarzan movies.”
He laughed and gave her a squeeze. The suggestion was wonderful. The tough part was finding the time. He would check the lab schedule to see when he could take off a week. “Sure.”
“Good. Maybe Jamaica or Barbados—someplace with beaches, palm trees, and a big double bed.”
“You have no shame,” he said.
“How would you know?”
He could see the glint in her eyes. He kissed her lips. Instantly his body flooded with warmth as she flicked her tongue in his mouth and ground her hips against him. “I’ll never kiss Jimbo again.”
She laughed and pulled him to the couch. In a moment he was naked and lying across the cushions, an erection poking in the air.
“You’re obscene,” she said, slipping out of her pants.
“I hope five minutes from now you still think so.”
For a moment Wendy’s face clouded over as something rippled through her. “Everything will be all right, won’t it?”
There it was again, the old wound that just wouldn’t heal. In a flash all defenses had dropped.
“Of course, it will. He’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine.” He held out his hand to hers.
The moment passed, and she smiled again.
Her breasts were beginning to swell, and her belly looked as if she had swallowed a football. She climbed onto the couch and straddled him. “Ever do it with an old heifer?”
“Always a first time for everything.”
“You’re supposed to say you’re not old or heiferey.”
“You’re not old.”
“Moo you,” she said, and they made love while Garfield looked on with a sly grin.
Chris had anticipated Betsy Watkins’s presentation, but he was not prepared for what he heard.
They met, as scheduled, at ten on Friday morning in the lab conference room. Gathered were Derek Wyman, Stan Chow, company chemist, Vartan Dolat, and Quentin. For the last several months, Betsy had taken over the cell studies.
Betsy was a compact woman with a sharp and pleasant face and wide intelligent eyes. She had dark loose curly hair that only emphasized the hard cool substance of her mind. Armed with notes and board chalk, she reviewed recent breakthroughs in the science then launched into a description of how Elixir worked at the cell level.
“Capping mammal chromosomes is a DNA sequence called ‘telomeres,’” she explained. “Like the plastic tips on shoelaces, they function to
protect chromosomal molecules from proteins that trigger the cell deterioration associated with aging.”
She illustrated her point with diagrams on the board. “Each time a cell divides, telomeres of offspring cells become shorter and shorter. In healthy young cells, there is an enzyme called ‘telomerase’ containing the genetic code for restoring telomeres, allowing cells to divide by keeping the telomeres long. But as the cell gets old, the telomerase activity decreases and the telomeres get shorter until after a half a dozen replications in mice—fifty in humans—the sequence shortens until the cells die.
“But as we’ve discovered, cells treated with Elixir don’t senesce. Instead, telomeres in treated animals held their length while cells continued to replicate. My guess is that tabulone activates the genes that produces telomerase, thereby maintaining a constant supply to keep the telomeres long and cells young.”
“How does that jive with the literature?” Chris asked.
“Well, all aging studies hit the same brick wall: how to switch on telomerase production indefinitely.” She held up an ampule of Elixir. “It’s the magic bullet. It triggers an endless source of telomerase—the Fountain of Youth, if you will.”
Betsy’s reasoning was brilliant. But it also raised some fundamental questions. “Are you saying, then, that the cells of our bodies are genetically programmed to die?” Vartan asked.
Betsy hesitated to answer because of the enormity of the implications. “No, because that would mean that death is an evolutionary necessity. And, frankly, I don’t believe that aging is the result of evolutionary forces,” she answered. “And the reason is that Nature is a red-toothed demon that kills off most animals before they reach reproductive age, and those that make it almost never live long enough for aging to have become part of the natural selection process.”
Chris felt a warm flow of satisfaction because it was the same conclusion he had reached years ago. More than that, he felt considerable admiration for Betsy and pride that a scientist with such fierce intelligence and authority was on his team.
Betsy continued, “There are so-called ‘big-bang’ exceptions like the Pacific salmon which seem genetically programmed to spawn and die within a few days. But on balance, death seems clearly to be the result of cell deterioration at the molecular level and not natural selection.”
“Which means that aging could be stalled as long as the cells are protected,” Chris added.
“Exactly, and tabulone appears to do just that. As long as the antioxidant binds to the DNA telomere sequence, cell death will not occur.”
“What about the rejuvenating effect?” Chris asked.
Betsy nodded in anticipation of the query. “My guess is that it reverses the process. Say we started Jimbo on treatment on his twenty-seventh out of a max of thirty replications. As Elixir turns on the telomerase gene, instead of going twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, death!, the replications went twenty-seven, twenty-six, twenty-five until he reached a steady state. Telomere lengths were restored with each division, and in the meantime he experiences moderate rejuvenation. That’s still conjecture, but the important thing is that tabulone is a natural telomerase activator.”
Chris was dumbfounded: What Betsy was describing was a breakthrough in cell biology. Under ordinary circumstances such findings would be winged to every major scientific journal. But they were sworn to secrecy.
The next step—Phase 2—was the rapid senescence problem. While the molecular work would be conducted by the others, Chris would concentrate on determining dosages—when exactly senescence began and how to reverse it.
“There’s one more thing,” Betsy said. Her expression had suddenly darkened. “While our successes don’t guarantee prolongevity for humans, we’re moving inexorably closer. I need not remind you how stupendous a discovery that is. But it’s imperative we consider the higher implications before we blindly push onward.”
There was a hushed moment.
“In fact, I suggest we stop right where we are.”
“Stop? What are you saying?” It was Quentin from the rear of the room—the first words he had uttered in nearly two hours.
“I know how you feel, but there are some serious moral and social ramifications to what we’re doing.”
Quentin bolted upright in his chair. “Betsy, let me remind you that this project is guided by FDA protocol and good manufacturing principles as with all our work at Darby.”
“I know that, Quentin, but Elixir is not like any other pharmaceutical in history. We’re not talking about adding ten years to a person’s life but doubling or tripling it.”
“I fail to see the problem.”
“The problem is we’re no longer playing scientist, but God. And, frankly, I don’t have the credentials! I’m asking, do we really want to open that door?”
“What door, for godsakes?” Quentin was losing his composure by the second.
“To all the nightmare potentials. If suddenly we introduce a compound that keeps the next generation from dying, the population in a hundred years would be twenty-six billion. Meanwhile, resources run out, the environment is devastated, and wars erupt between the Elixirs and the Elixirnots—”
Quentin cut her off. “Betsy, your nightmare may be the only hope for patients suffering multiple sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease … or Alzheimer’s.”
That was intended to ingratiate Chris. But from Quentin it was a smarmy jab. He didn’t give a damn about ethics or humanity. His sole interest was his billion-dollar dream.
“The potential impact is unimaginable,” Betsy continued, “and we had better think about it while we still have time.”
The others nodded in agreement. Sensing a conspiracy, Quentin shot Chris a look for help. But Chris remained silent. “You mean you want to pull the plug because it might be too successful?”
“Yes—because we should be working on improving the quality of the life, not trying to prolong it.”
“Prolonging it
is
improving the quality, damn it!”
“Then we should get Public Citizen or some other watchdog agency to monitor its development.”
“Jesus Christ! We don’t need to have Ralph Nader and his people hanging over us again.”
Four years ago, the medical arm of Nader’s consumer group got the FDA to withdraw one of Darby’s high-profit arthritis drugs because it caused heart failure in some patients. The very mention of the organization made Quentin apoplectic.
“Please,” said Vartan holding up his hands. “Betsy’s making an important point. There are too many big unknowns to grapple with. It’s only ethical we reassess matters.”
Derek and Stan agreed. It was clear that they had discussed matters among themselves already. Only Quentin and Chris were hearing the dissent for the first time.
Chris felt the battle lines divide them. He did not like being on the same side as Quentin. He also felt the rising expectation to say something. It was his project, after all. Suddenly his people were talking about halting a seven-year investment of his mind and soul—and at the very threshold
of the kingdom. And they were expecting him to resolve what smacked of being the ultimate conflict between science and ethics.