The Immortality Factor (4 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
t wasn't our work on cancer that led to the regeneration experiments,” Arthur said to the examiner. “That came later.”

Rosen seemed to think that over for several long moments. The hearing chamber was absolutely silent, not even a cough or a shuffle of feet. With his back to the spectators, Arthur realized that every eye in the chamber was focused on the lawyer, including the television cameras. He glanced at the TV monitor set up against the side wall. It showed Rosen's dark-haired, somber face in a tight close-up.

“You just suddenly got the idea of how to regenerate organs?” Rosen asked.

“Yes.”

“Such as the heart?”

“Yes.”

“And limbs? Legs, arms, fingers?”

“Or toes.”

“This idea just suddenly sprang into your mind?”

Arthur suppressed an urge to smile. “Like all ideas, it was the result of many different stimuli, most of them subconscious until the big ‘Aha!' hits.”

The audience behind him stirred slightly. He heard a couple of small laughs.

“The big ‘Aha'?” Rosen asked.

“The final realization of the idea in all its splendor,” Arthur said. “What you might call the inspiration.”

“Inspiration? That sounds like an artist's word, Dr. Marshak. We're talking about scientific research here, aren't we?”

“Albert Einstein said, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.' He did a fair amount of scientific research.”

Rosen huffed. “Very well, you were . . . inspired to think about the possibilities of regenerating organs and limbs. What did you do then?”

Arthur looked past the lawyer to the panel of judges. “I thought this court was to be a scientific inquiry. What's all this questioning of my personal behavior got to do with it? We're here to settle the scientific issue!”

Before Graves or either of the other judges could respond, Rosen said, “I am attempting to set the background against which this research was conducted. Science does not happen in a vacuum.
People
do science, and their motivations can be as important to the outcome of their research as any other factor.”

“That's nonsense and—”

“A young woman died as a result of this work,” Rosen said coldly.

Arthur felt his words like a blow to the pit of his stomach. “Her death had nothing to do with this research and you know it,” he snapped.

Rosen turned to the judges.

Graves pushed at his bifocals and cleared his throat, tactics Arthur recognized as a way of stalling for time while he thought. At last the chief judge said, “Since this is the first time the science court has been convened, I am willing to allow the examiner a certain degree of latitude. There is the question of wrongful death involved, whether we like it or not.”

“This court shouldn't be concerned with that matter,” Arthur insisted. “We're here to examine the scientific evidence and nothing more. You said that yourself.”

Looking pained, Graves replied, “We would all be grateful, Dr. Marshak, if you would indulge us and answer the examiner's questions to the best of your ability.”

He called me Dr. Marshak, Arthur said to himself. Two nights ago we were drinking together at the Cosmos Club and now he acts as if we're strangers.

“Please answer the question,” Graves repeated.

“What was the question?” Arthur grumbled.

The clerk pecked at his digital recorder. Rosen's voice droned, “Very well,
you were inspired to think about the possibilities of regenerating organs and limbs. What did you do then?”

“I consulted with my brother, Dr. Jesse Marshak,” said Arthur.

“That was the first thing you did when you got the idea that it would be possible to regenerate human organs?” Rosen asked.

Arthur shifted slightly in the witness chair. “The idea hadn't gotten that far yet. I was thinking then in terms of helping paraplegics.”

The examiner stroked his mustache for a moment as he slowly walked across the front of the room, eclipsing the judges, one by one, from Arthur's view.

“Paraplegics.”

Impatiently, Arthur replied, “This is all in the written documentation I've provided the court. If you've read the material—”

“There is nothing in the documentation about paraplegics,” said Rosen.

“Yes, there is,” Arthur insisted. “In the note I published in
Biophysics Letters
I discussed nerve regeneration in vivo as a means of reversing paraplegia.”

“Was this application vigorously pursued?”

“Not per se.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It became part of the larger effort to pursue tissue regeneration in general.”

“In other words, you forgot about helping paraplegics once you hit upon the possibility of regenerating organs such as the heart or kidneys. Is that correct?”

“More or less.”

“There's much more money in organ regeneration, isn't there?” Rosen said. “A bigger market than paraplegics.”

He's intentionally trying to make me lose my temper, Arthur told himself. With deliberate calm he replied, “Let me correct myself. We did not forget about helping paraplegics. We simply realized that regenerating nerve growth is a part of the more general problem of regenerating tissue, all kinds of tissue.”

“Human tissue?”

“Yes.”

“And this regeneration would take place inside the human patient?”

“Whenever possible, yes. That was our goal.”

“Grow a new heart inside the patient's chest?”

“Yes, if necessary. In most cases I think it would be sufficient to repair the damaged sections of the heart and make it as good as new. You see, heart muscle cells have differentiated, specialized; they lack the ability to multiply. When the muscle is damaged by a heart attack, the damaged area can't repair itself.”

“And your technique would repair the heart?”

“Or grow a whole new one, if necessary.”

“This would require the use of stem cells?” Rosen asked.

“At first we examined the possibility that—”

“You want to play God!” someone screamed from the audience.

Arthur turned in his chair. A florid-faced woman was on her feet glaring angrily at him.

“Using stem cells is killing babies! Smite this ungodly murderer, this false Antichrist! He's trying to play God!”

“Silence!” Graves banged his gavel on the tabletop. Arthur had thought the gavel was strictly symbolic. “Anyone who makes a disturbance will be removed from this hearing room. Is that clear?”

The woman sat down, muttering to the people next to her.

This isn't a trial, Arthur thought. It's an inquisition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
he morning after Jesse's Humanitarian of the Year dinner I drove straight from the Waldorf out to my lab. It was a sunny April morning, the first really warm weather after the long gray winter. Forsythia bushes bloomed bright happy yellow all along the busy parkway. I almost imagined I could hear birds singing.

We had put the Grenford Research Laboratory just over the state line in Connecticut mainly to satisfy Omnitech's corporate tax accountants. Of course, within a year of the lab's opening, Connecticut's taxes rose to meet New York's. But the location was a good one anyway: close enough to New York City for me to feel at home yet far enough into the countryside to enjoy some trees and fresh air. We could attract top talent for the staff and they didn't have to worry about parking or muggers at night.

The building was a low, modern structure of brown brick with curved corners and wide sweeping windows. It hugged a green landscaped hillside that dropped off to a wooded stream behind the building. A beautiful site, really. Originally it had been the headquarters of an independent computer software
corporation. But they had gone out of business in the economic doldrums after 9/11 and Omnitech had bought the building for little more than the back taxes owed on it. Interstate 95 and the more scenic Merritt Parkway were only minutes away; you could hear the muted buzz from the highways coming through the trees surrounding the lab's parking lot.

It was almost ten a.m. by the time I eased my Infiniti over the speed bumps at the entrance to the parking lot and pulled to a stop in my reserved space at the lab's front entrance. The lot was almost full. Usually I got to work among the earliest arrivals, but I had stayed up until dawn talking with Jesse. So I didn't bother going home; I just stuffed my tuxedo into my overnight bag, pulled on the slacks and sports jacket I had brought with me, and checked out of the Waldorf. I felt a flash of relief that my car hadn't been stolen from the parking garage overnight; it's a silver Infiniti Q45, and even though the corporation leases it for me, I wouldn't want to lose it.

I waved hello to Helen, the receptionist, as I went through the lobby. I had deliberately placed my office suite far back in the building, so that I have to walk past most of the staff offices to get to my own. And it was only a few steps away from the working labs, as well.

As I made my way down the carpeted corridors, the staffers nodded or smiled or called their good-mornings to me. Several tried to talk to me, falling into step alongside, but I was already behind schedule, so I put them off with a “Not now, please. I'm running late.”

But Darrell Walters, one of the oldest men on the scientific staff, wouldn't be brushed off so easily.

“This'll only take as long as the distance to your office,” he said. He looked worried; a frown creased his normally cheerful face.

“Okay,” I said, “I'm listening.”

I kept the lab's organization pretty loose, but Darrell was closer to being my second-in-command than anybody else. With his long horsy face and the craggy wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, he looked more like a canny old backwoods guide than a biochemist, especially in his chambray work shirt and faded Levi's. But he was one of the sharpest men on the staff. And I knew how much it cost him to look so unpretentious; the story around the lab was, if Walters ever dressed up, L. L. Bean would go out of business.

“Cassie's run into a real roadblock,” Darrell told me. “Blasted NIH won't give their okay for the clinical test.”

Cassie Ianetta was one of my bright young cell biologists. She was working on an antibody that had been developed by a university team up in Boston that could stop viruses from reproducing inside human cells. Cassie did absolutely brilliant work, directed mainly to using the antibody as a tumor suppressant. It stopped cancer cells from reproducing; killed the tumor, if the treatment was applied early enough. She had tried it out on laboratory rats and monkeys and
even chimpanzees. Now she needed to test the treatment in humans. Volunteers had been easy to come by: terminal cancer patients have little to lose.

I wasn't surprised by the government's refusal for human trials, though. “They're just protecting their asses,” I said.

“And then some,” Darrell agreed fervently. He was matching me stride for stride down the corridor without running out of breath, as many of the younger staffers would.

“Talk to Lowenstein up in corporate. Tell him what you need. He'll set Cassie up overseas someplace, maybe Mexico.”

“She doesn't want to travel. Max and all that.”

We had reached the door to my outer office. It was wide open, as always.

“Well,” I asked him, “is she more interested in Max than her work?”

Darrell shrugged. “Hard to say.”

“You're closer to her than anybody else on the staff. How's it look to you?”

“I don't think Cassie knows herself what she wants to do. She's all tied up in knots over this.”

I knew what he was after. “Okay, tell her to come see me,” I said. “Let me talk some sense to her.”

That was what Darrell had wanted to hear. He broke into a toothy grin. “Right. I'll send her over right away.”

“No. This afternoon. After lunch.”

Darrell looked slightly disappointed, but he reluctantly agreed. “After lunch. Okay.”

“Set it up with Phyllis.”

“Will do.”

Phyllis Terhune had been my secretary since my days at Columbia. She was black, plump, a youngish grandmother who brooked no nonsense, not even from her boss. She ran my office with cool efficiency, the only barrier between me and the staff people who constantly streamed through that always-open door. And she took pride in making the lab's best coffee.

“Kinda late for you,” she said from behind her white-lacquered desk.

“I was up most of the night,” I replied. I must have grinned smugly.

She cast me a disapproving look. “I bet.”

I went past her to my inner office, peeled off my sports jacket, and hung it in the closet next to the lavatory. Phyllis stood at the doorway to the outer office as I slid into my big comfortable swivel chair.

“Your schedule's on the screen,” she said. “Coffee's in the warmer.”

“Good.”

“You need orange juice?”

“Vitamin E, I think.”

She frowned again. Grandma Phyllis. “Better put some citrus scent in the room,” she said, half to herself.

That was Phyllis's one quirk. She was into aromatherapy. She was convinced that subliminal odors could alter a person's moods. I teased her about it being voodoo science, but she stuck to her guns. It was a small price to pay for the best secretary I had ever known. And who knows, maybe she was right.

I booted up my desktop computer, checked the morning's commitments, then said, “Jesse's coming in for lunch around twelve-thirty, one o'clock.”