Elixir. Part 9

And in his mind Chris saw his father in two different shoes, tearing up as he struggled to find the right word... to recall his son's name. To block the fog that was slowly closing in.

"What do you think triggers this accelerated senescense?"

"I don't know, but my gut feeling is that it's in the molecule itself. It's huge, which means the problem might be in the binding sites. Maybe something in the compound attaches to neuroreceptors and blocks the natural process of aging, and once it's withdrawn the conditions causing senescence are heightened. Or maybe it works directly on the DNA sequence."

"Any rumors of people rapidly aging in New Guinea?"

"None I know of."

The intensity on Ross's face said he was becoming convinced of grand possibilities. "The first step will be to get a patent on it. That's essential."

Because secrecy was essential they would have to apply for a "composition of matter" patent rather than a "use" patent to avoid stipulating the compound's application as an anti-aging drug. Chris knew that the senescence effects would never pa.s.s FDA.

"What will it take to do the job?" Ross asked.

Chris was ready for him, and he ticked off the contents of his fantasy lab: High-speed computers with elaborate imaging software, nuclear magnetic resonance equipment, ma.s.s spectrometers, and so on. Ross snapped his fingers for Quentin to take it all down.

"Also, geneticists, pharmacists, physical chemists with pharmacology backgrounds. I can give you names. And test animals, especially rhesus monkeys-very old ones and virus-free."

When he finished, Quentin looked at the list he had taken down. "You're talking major capital investment."

"And it may not be successful," Chris added.

"But I think you're on to something extraordinary," Ross said. "So we'll do whatever it takes. I want you to put together the best team and lab that money can buy."

Chris nodded, amused how in less than two hours he had pa.s.sed from company crook to messiah. "I'll do my best."

"And the sooner the better," Darby said. "I'm just a couple years this side of my own warranty. You get it to work on old monkeys, and I'm next in line."

"If this works," Quentin said, "you'll be more famous than G.o.d and twice as rich."

Chris smiled. Fame and personal wealth were the least of his interests. He was by nature a private person and making enough of a salary to afford his and Wendy's needs. Yes, it would be nice to have a few extra thousand, what with a child on the way and Wendy's decision to take an extended maternity leave from teaching. But sudden wealth would only add an unnecessary edge of anxiety, like what put those Rocky Racc.o.o.n rings around Quentin's eyes. Maybe it was no longer fashionable, but he was a scientist motivated solely by intellectual challenges, not financial ones. Even if he could afford otherwise, he preferred L. L. Bean to Armani, a Jeep to a Mercedes, and vacations at Wendy's family lodge in the Adirondacks to chateaux on the Riviera.

Ross had one more question before they left. "Does anybody else know about this? Colleagues or friends?"

"Just my wife."

"Good," Darby said, "and let's keep it that way because if word leaks that we're putting our resources into an anti-aging drug, the media will be on us like vultures and compet.i.tors will be scrambling to learn what we've got. Think of this as our own Manhattan Project."

Later, while driving home, Darby's words buzzed in Chris's head. It wasn't the demand for secrecy that bothered him-he was used to that. It was recollection of the first words of Robert Oppenheimer moments after the original Manhattan Project made a ten-mile-high column of radioactive smoke over Almagordo: "I have become Death."

Two.

"Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man."

-LEON TROTSKY.

8.

JUNE 1987.

Chris didn't sleep much for the excitement. In a few months Wendy would give birth to their son or daughter. Meanwhile, Darby Pharms was going all out on tabulone. At times he could not distinguish which buoyed his spirits more.

Wendy's former apprehension about another baby had vanished like a low-grade fever. On the contrary, she happily antic.i.p.ated the November birth and a year's leave of absence. To add to her delight, she had finished If I Should Die, and a literary agent had sold the ma.n.u.script on the second submission. It had garnered a modest advance, but her publisher loved the book and the series proposal. The publication date was February of next year. Wendy was ecstatic-a baby and a book, just months apart. It couldn't get much better than that.

Last week Jenny had flown down for another visit. The good news on that front was that her daughter Kelly was out of the hospital and planning to return to school in the fall. And Abigail was growing into a happy and healthy toddler.

Meanwhile, a SWAT team of workmen had over the months converted Chris's old lab into a state-of-the-art research site. Walls had been pushed out, and the floor s.p.a.ce had doubled. Fancy equipment had arrived almost daily from all over the country. Also test animals. Mice they still procured from Jackson Labs. But finding the right monkeys presented problems. There were vendors all over the country, but only one had virus-free "retired breeders"-an isolated colony in the Florida Keys. Chris ordered two dozen ranging in age from twenty-one to twenty-nine-the oldest, named Jimbo, who was equivalent to a 105-year-old man. The younger animals cost four to six thousand dollars each. Because he might have been the oldest virus-free rhesus macaque in the world, Jimbo went for a cool ten thousand.

As director, Chris had also sought out the best talent he could find. But wooing them required special artfulness since he had to make the project alluring without revealing the objective. He explained that Darby had launched a project never before attempted in the pharmaceutical industry. As expected, his recruits were intrigued that a reputable company was investing millions of dollars in a steroid. Unique as its crystalline structure was, steroids was an area very few bothered with today. Intriguing also were the starting salaries-twice what they were earning. By the time Chris was through, he had hired six fulltime cla.s.s-A researchers-two pharmacologists plus a medicinal chemist, a microbiologist, a protein chemist, and a geneticist. It was a pharmaceutical dream team.

The other good news was that Darby had received a patent on tabulone, which meant that no other inst.i.tution could research the molecule for seventeen years.

By midwinter, the cancer toxogen had mysteriously dropped off the boards in spite of the initial media blitz. The official explanation was that a blight had killed off the apricot crops. The loss had cost the company dearly, and Chris guessed Quentin took some flak. Whatever the real story, Ross had managed to raise millions for the new lab from select venture capitalists. And he had done so with fantasies of developing a fountain-of-youth drug and turning investors into billionaires.

Toward that end, a special meeting was held in June with Chris, Quentin, Ross Darby, and a couple others to come up with a trade name for investors, research doc.u.ments, and the FDA application. They met in the conference room where Chris wrote the suggestions on the blackboard. "Tabulone" did not impress anyone, given the product's momentous promise. Quentin said it sounded like an Italian dessert.

"What we need is something striking," Ross said. "Something that suggests what it's for-longevity, but not so literal. You know, something exotic and catchy."

So for nearly two hours they kicked around names until the blackboard was full and Chris was covered with chalk.

Eternity Vitalong VitaYou VitaLife AgeNot

For awhile they got stuck on puns, odd spellings, until the suggestions turned silly. They then moved on to various a.s.sociations with time, clocks, life, then Latin and Greek roots, mythological and biblical names. And because the compound was a steroid not too unlike testosterone, they bandied around the -one suffix which produced some goofy tongue-twisters like Immorticone and Methuselone.

Next they played with prefixes like ever- and eva-, which yielded Evagreen, EvaYoung, EvaYou, and so on. That gave way to combos with vita-mega-, and omni-. Breaking the frustration somebody suggested f.u.k4Eva and they all cheered.

Finally, into their second hour, Chris moved to the blackboard and in large block letters he wrote:

ELIXIR.

For a moment everybody fell silent as they let the word sink in. Then heads began to nod. Ross straightened up in his chair, his eyes wide as he tested the suggestion. "Yes, I like it. Exotic, but not arcane. Overtones of alchemy yet with a s.e.xy scientific X dead center." He slapped the table and rose. "That's it. Elixir," he said as if mouthing a spell. "Elixir. It's perfect, and can't you just imagine the great TV ads and promotional material? Yes! That's what we'll call it. Elixir!"

And everybody agreed.

Elixir.

"Elixir?"

"What do you think?"

"It's catchy."

It was the first time Wendy had visited the lab in years. Chris had brought her in to see the new facilities. Boxes of materials were stacked on the floor, but the structural work had been completed and equipment was functioning.

Wendy feigned interest as Chris showed her all the fancy instruments. In one room was his pride and joy, a ma.s.s spectrometer for determining chemical compositions and molecular weights. In another room, looking like something from a science fiction movie, sat the high resolution nuclear magnetometer. "Very nice," she said. "What does it do?"

"Tells us the number of atoms in the molecule, as well as their structural relations. Tabulone is very sophisticated-lots of interesting branches and bondings."

"Why's that important?"

"To help figure out the senescence problem. It's possible the flatness of the molecule lets it wedge itself between the coils of the DNA promoting mutagenesis. If that's the case, we may be able to alter the problem structure. Otherwise, no Elixir."

"But you don't even know if it works on humans."

"Except for Iwati."

She had almost forgotten. New Guinea juju was alive and well and living in twentieth-century Boston. "If he suddenly went off the stuff, would he age?"

"I really don't know. The next step is to see what happens to primates, which means determining dosages. They're just a few genetic steps up from mice, but my guess is that the stuff will prolong their lives, too."

Wendy was happy that Chris was finally out of the shadows and that his sideshow study was now a major scientific inquiry. She could also enjoy his excitement because he seemed like a different person, a great big, handsome, lovable kid. However, while she kept it to herself, all she saw on her tour was scientists producing false hopes of finding a cure for death itself. There were no magic cures, she told herself. People got sick and died. Like Ricky. It was an inevitability that Chris would not accept. A grand illusion. She just prayed that when that discovery hit home, he would not be crushed.

Chris led her to a computer station nearby where he tapped some keys and, like magic, the Elixir molecule appeared on the monitor in different colored b.a.l.l.s. Slowly the figure rotated like a bubble dancer, turning itself around in 3-D to show off its endless cheeks.

She put her hands on his shoulders and peered at the monitor. "Pretty. So what do you do with it?"

"If you know binding sites, you can see how atoms fit together, then manipulate the geometry." He clipped off a hydrogen/oxygen stem and added a carbon-hydrogen cl.u.s.ter. "Now we have a different molecule with different properties."

"You're designing new matter."

"More like redesigning old."

"Improving on nature," she said.

He looked up at her with a blank face. "Wendy, you're not going to give me your Imperial Margarine lecture, are you?"

"Now that you mention it..." she joked.

The last stop was the monkeys. They were kept in rows of steel cages lined up along one long wall. Each contained a single rhesus. Wendy stopped at one cage tagged FRED and his birthdate, 3/13/65. He looked at her with quick anxious eyes. It was so unfair, she thought. In a few weeks his head would be in clamps, his body paralyzed, the skull cap removed, his brains exposed and sprouting electrodes to monitor his death. "Poor little guy."

"I know what you're thinking. But if it's any consolation, he may teach us how to prolong human life."

"I don't approve of that either."

"Not exactly a news flash," he chuckled. "But frankly, it appeals to me."

She knew what he was getting at. "Honey, you don't have Alzheimer's."

"You don't know that."

"Nor do you."

"Yeah, but sometimes I almost feel it coming. Yesterday I couldn't remember Stan's extension. There are days I'd call him half a dozen times. How could I forget?"

"That's natural. You're under a lot of stress."

"Then what about forgetting our anniversary last week? The first time in sixteen years that's happened. Or your birthday last year?"

"You're just preoccupied. Besides, Alzheimer's affects people in their sixties and seventies, not forties."

"That's not true, I checked. It could start in the late thirties even."

Wendy stared into Chris's two-tone eyes. As an old friend had once said, it was like two different faces superimposed. At the moment, he was at once the brilliant, cool-minded scientist and an irrational kid. "Chris, you're being ridiculous. You don't have Alzheimer's disease."

"Maybe not. But every instinct tells me it's in the cards. Whatever, the bottom line is that aging stinks. All that stuff about wisdom in the years is a lot of feel-good garbage."

Wendy watched Fred stir the wood chips with his fingers. She felt the tired old debate coming on but pushed it aside. "Just one question: Say it works, say you eliminate the senescence problem. How would people relate if some grew old while others didn't?"

"I haven't thought that far ahead."

"Maybe you should if the future's going to make sense."

Chris said nothing but handed Fred an orange wedge. It was his cue to change the subject.

"And what if it's so expensive only the rich can afford it?"

"That's what they said about penicillin and the polio vaccine, and they're available to everybody in the world today."

"And what about the population?"

"That can be worked out with proper regulations."