Syndrome Part 14

After their brunch of smoked fish and onion chutney and soda bread and a pot of double-strength Earl Grey, she'd tried to sell her mother on a trip to the Bahamas, with Maria joining them. Soon, maybe at the beginning of summer. She wanted Nina to spend some time thinking about it, but she didn't want to wait too long. Was this just going to be a distraction at the end of Nina's life? G.o.d, she didn't want to think so. She wanted to think of it as a rebonding.

Nina had always liked to revisit the Devonshire countryside of her childhood in midsummer--when Arthur could take time off--always for just a week, but it was as intensively planned as a major military campaign.

Her favorite thing was to trek among the hedgerows and stone fences, making charcoal sketches on opened-out brown bags. In the evenings they would dine _en famille_ at a country inn. They went with local favorites, like kidney pie. Then they would stroll the country lanes in the moonlight as a family. No TV, and she and Grant hated everything about the trips. Booooring.

But that was long ago and far away, when she and Grant were still kids.

Now her mom would surely want something restful. And some guaranteed sunshine wouldn't hurt either. Already she had an idea: why not rent a house with a private pool, say on Paradise Island where Nina could spend a couple of hours each afternoon in the casino? She'd always loved casinos, and never missed a chance to hit the blackjack tables if she was anywhere near one. Her loss limit was a hundred dollars, but she actually beat the house more often than not. The teatime scotch hadn't impaired her card-counting skills.

Nina appeared to like the idea, so Ally had started making up a schedule in her head. The beginning of summer would be off-season in the Caribbean and there should be some real bargains to be had. She made a mental note to ask Glenda, her a.s.sertive, gum-chewing travel agent at Empress, to start trolling for a package.

What was Ally really thinking, hoping? She was fantasizing she could heal Nina all by herself. She so desperately wanted to, she had a premonition she could will it to happen. When she saw her mom on good days, she always found herself believing she could somehow make all her days good. She was sure of it, against all odds.

What she wasn't sure about was what her mother really thought about Grant's proposal to enroll her in this clinic in New Jersey. Was this doctor's "miracle" stem cell cure based on a real medical advance, or was he some kind of charlatan?

The first thing to do was to find out more about this supposed medical magician, Karl Van de Vliet. The envelope Grant gave her was still lying there on her breakfast bar, unopened. She told herself she'd read it the minute she got home tonight, when the day's work was over and she could concentrate....

The Sunday office. The interior-design job she had on her mind was behind schedule and she was feeling a lot of pressure. It was for a Norwegian couple in their mid-thirties. He was a software programmer working in New York's restructured Silicon Alley, and she was teaching at the Fashion Inst.i.tute of Technology. Together they pulled down over 250 thou a year and they'd decided to stop throwing away money on obscene New York rents.

They bought an entire floor, actually three small apartments, of what was formerly a tenement in the West Fifties, an area once known as h.e.l.l's Kitchen but now much gentrified and renamed Clinton. They had dreams of an open-s.p.a.ce loft of the kind made famous in SoHo when artists took over abandoned factory buildings and gutted the s.p.a.ce, taking out all the walls.

Because they had combined three apartments, they had to file their plans with the NYC Department of Buildings and modify the building's Certificate of Occupancy to reflect the change in the number of dwelling units.

So far so good, but then a woman who was the local member of the District Council got wind of the project and sent someone from her office to look over the place. The next day, the Department of Buildings' approval of their plans was abruptly withdrawn.

It turned out that there was an obscure law on the books concerning Clinton, one that even the Department of Buildings was only vaguely aware of. It said that in order to preserve the "family character" of the neighborhood, no renovation could alter the number of rooms in a residential building. Not the number of apartments, mind you, just the number of rooms.

That was when they showed up at Citis.p.a.ce in despair. They wanted Ally to help them by doing some kind of design that would satisfy the law and also give them the open, airy feeling they had set their hopes on.

On the face of it, their two goals seemed mutually contradictory and impossible.

He was short and shy and she was plump and sa.s.sy and Ally liked them both a lot. Sometimes in this business she sensed she was helping people realize their dreams and that was a very rewarding feeling. Real estate was an emotional thing. Your home was a part of you. She always tried to get to know people before she did any designs for them.

Sometimes design was more psychology than anything else.

But this time she had to solve a problem before she could wax creative.

If their plan for open s.p.a.ce could be stopped by some obscure local provision that even the Department of Buildings was fuzzy about, then maybe there was some other obscure law in the Housing Code that could be used to fight back. The full code had recently been put on the NYC Web site, so she wanted to go over every page and see what she could come up with. And she wanted to do it in the office, undisturbed with all the architectural plans close to hand.

The office was deserted when she cruised in and clicked on the lights.

She got on the expansive NYC Web site and started poring over the Housing Code, though she was still obsessing about Nina. What if this doctor in New Jersey actually could do something for her?

Finish here, she told herself, and then go home and read the guy's CV.

A pot of decaf coffee later, she came across a little-known fact, which she now vaguely remembered from her days as a practicing architect. If you installed a fifteen-inch drop across a ceiling, that was technically a wall in the eyes of the NYC Department of Buildings. The s.p.a.ce on each side became a separate "room."

As they say in the movies, bingo.

In fact, why not do a honeycomb ceiling that would actually simulate the industrial look they were seeking, anyway? The ceiling was over eleven feet high; there was plenty of vertical s.p.a.ce. n.o.body would know it was just a sneaky way to get around a funny local aberration in the Building Code.

I'm brilliant, she thought. Yes! Dad would be proud.

She made some sketches, and by that time it was after six. Time to go home.

Knickers was waiting by the door, and she gave Ally a dirty look and some very disapproving barks. By way of penance, Ally took her on an extra long walk, all the way up to Fourteenth Street and back. Then she picked up some tuna salad and steamed veggies from a new deli on West Tenth Street.

As she settled down to eat at the breakfast bar, she felt like a single mom, always eating and doing everything on the run--and all she had to worry about was a friendly dog. How did real working moms do it?

It was just past nine when she poured a gla.s.s of Chardonnay and picked up Grant's envelope and took it into the living room, pausing to put some Chopin ballades on the CD player.

The envelope contained a bound folder that was Dr. Karl Van de Vliet's curriculum vitae, his resume. It was in fact a minibiography that devoted a page to each of his career turns. His life story was presented from a G.o.d's-eye view, as though it were a novel.

Karl Van de Vliet had done his undergraduate studies at the prestigious University of Maastricht after which he'd migrated to the United States and taken a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from the University of Chicago, top of the cla.s.s. Following that he went to Yale as a postdoctoral fellow, again studying genetics.

From the beginning he focused his research on the mechanisms that govern human cell reproduction. Along the way he'd become interested in something known as the Hayflick limit--which concerned the number of times a cell could divide before it became senescent and ceased to replicate. This natural life span controlled the aging process of every organism, and it seemed to be nature's device for nipping undesirable (i.e. mutant) cells in the bud by never letting any cell, unhealthy or healthy, just keep on replicating indefinitely.

However, there were "immortal cells" buried within us all, so-called stem cells that could replicate forever, unchanged. They were present at the very beginning of life and all our differing body tissue was created from them. Some still lingered on in our body, as though to be available for spare parts. If one could figure out how to transfer the characteristics of those cells to other cells, then the possibility existed that we could regenerate damaged or aging tissue in our vital organs. The trick was to figure out the mechanism whereby stem cells managed to cheat time.

His research, which was accompanied by a flurry of scientific papers, was celebrated and encouraging. After three years he was lured away from Yale to become a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, which offered to double his laboratory budget. He was there for six years, during which time he met Camille Buseine, a neurosurgeon finishing her residency.

She had a doctorate from a medical inst.i.tute near Paris and she was doing research that was similar to his, so the biography said. They married and became a team, and when he was asked by Harvard Medical to found a department for molecular genetics, she was immediately offered a tenured position there too. Harvard considered it a double coup.

His research was zeroing in on the telomerase protein, an enzyme many scientists believed was responsible for suppressing the aging process in stem cells. Could it be used to regenerate tissue?

He was well along on the task of exploring that tantalizing possibility when tragedy struck. Camille, who had worked around the clock during her residency at Johns Hopkins, began feeling weak at Harvard and was diagnosed with acquired aortic stenosis. After a 2 1/2-year struggle, she died during a severe cardiac episode.

My G.o.d, Ally thought, that's what I have.

After Camille died, he left Harvard and its time-consuming academic obligations and went to work full-time at a research inst.i.tute affiliated with Stanford University. He even formed a paper company to structure the work, the Gerex Corporation. But then there came a second strike against him. He was doing research using embryonic stem cells obtained from the discarded embryos at fertility clinics. After two years of hara.s.sment by right-wing political groups, Stanford decided his research was too controversial and terminated his funding.

Three months later, Karl Van de Vliet merged his company with Bartlett Medical Devices and moved his research staff east to New Jersey, to the Dorian Inst.i.tute. That was five years past, and now his research using stem cells was in third-stage NIH clinical trials.

The official history ended there, though with a strong hint that the final chapter was yet to be written. Then at the back there was a bibliography of publications that extended for eight pages, and included a summary of the most important papers. His work on stem cells and the telomerase enzyme appeared to be at the forefront of the field.

Oddly, however, some of his writings also were philosophical, an argument with himself whether his work could be misused to alter the natural limitations life imposes. One of those papers, from a conference presentation in Copenhagen, had a summary, and in it he pondered whether the use of stem cells to rejuvenate the body might someday give medical science G.o.dlike powers.

The Greeks, he declared, had a myth about the punishment reserved for those who sought to defeat our natural life span. When the G.o.ddess of the dawn, Aurora, fell in love with the beautiful youth t.i.thonus and granted him immortality, it turned out to be a curse, since he still reached the decrepitude of age but had to suffer on forever because he could not have the release of death.

But, Van de Vliet pondered, if we could find a way to arrest the aging process in our body's tissue, might we escape the process of aging? If so, was this a good thing? Or might this be a step too far that would bring on unintended, and as yet unknown, consequences?

_Well_, Ally thought, _I wouldn't mind having Mom's mind restored. Or my own heart, for that matter.

_All in all, Karl Van de Vliet was clearly a genius. He also was a very complex man. But might he be a very gifted huckster as well?

The inside back cover had a group photo, showing him surrounded by members of his research staff, all in white lab coats. There were two men and two women and each was identified, along with a list of his or her academic credentials. They were standing on the porch of what appeared to be a nineteenth-century mansion, which had large Doric columns in Greek Revival style. The lettering in the marble above their heads read THE DORIAN INSt.i.tUTE.

She put down the folder and went into the kitchen and poured herself another gla.s.s of wine, finishing off the botde. Her mind was chinning, but not because of the words on the page. It was that photograph at the back. It was dated less than two years ago.

His Ph.D. at the University of Chicago was granted in 1962. But even if he was a genius and got his first doctorate in his early twenties, he'd still have to be--what? At least sixty years old by now. Probably halfway to seventy.

_But in the photo, he looks no more than forty, well, forty-five at most. What the heck is going on?

_She went back into the living room and picked up the brochure and stared at it. He had sandy hair that lay like a mane above his elongated brow. He was tall and gaunt, with high cheeks and deep, penetrating eyes. But no matter how you gauged him, the guy hadn't aged a day since his forty-fifth birthday, tops.