The Immortality Factor

by Ben Bova

  Jesse was going on, “Then modern science got into the game. Found out that what cured your headache was acetylsalicylic acid, so you don’t have to chew the whole tree bark, just make a pill out of the effective ingredient.”

  “Pasteur,” Julia murmured.

  “Huh?”

  “Pasteur was the turning point, was he not?”

  Jesse shrugged. “Yeah, sure. He needed the invention of the microscope and a lot of other things, though.”

  “Yet it was Pasteur who established the germ theory of disease,” Julia said firmly.

  “Right,” said Jesse. “That started the second era of medicine. We began to learn what causes diseases. Bacteria, infection. And later on we discovered viruses. Once we started to understand what caused diseases, we could start looking for ways to kill the bugs.”

  “I see,” said Pat.

  I was almost amused by Julia’s performance. She had always been quiet, self-contained. British reserve, I called it. People thought she was shy, or even upper-class snobbish. But she was a little tigress at heart. She could let Jesse prattle on for a half hour and then bring him up short with a single word. Nobody who knew her could ever take her for granted. Beneath that sedate English exterior she had a first-class mind and an even sharper sense of how to make the most of her intelligence.

  “It was Ehrlich who coined the term ‘chemotherapy,’ ” Jesse was explaining, “back around 1910 or so when he came up with his magic bullet for syphilis. We started developing specific chemical compounds to attack specific disease agents. That was the second era of medicine.”

  “We’re still doing that,” said Pat.

  “Yeah, but there are limits to chemotherapy. For one thing, most of the chemicals we use are poisons. They kill the bacteria that infect you, yes, but they kill healthy cells, too. That’s why doses have to be closely regulated and you get side effects from medicines.”

  “And none of those medicines attack viruses,” Julia pointed out. “Not even the most potent antibiotics.”

  “So now we go into the third era of medicine.” Jesse quickly reclaimed the floor. “We start developing antiviral agents through genetic engineering, recombinant DNA, and all that. Antibacterial, too, of course, but it’s the antiviral stuff that’s the new breakthrough. Monoclonal antibodies to attack cancer cells, for example.”

  “And AIDS?” Pat asked.

  With a vigorous nod, Jesse replied, “There’s some work going on at the Cancer Institute on ADA deficiency, trying to restore a damaged immune system. That’s a tough one.”

  “AIDS activists claim that we’re not putting enough money into the research.”

  “More money would help,” Jesse said. “But all the money in the world can’t buy new ideas, new insights.”

  Julia chipped in, “It can if it’s used to put more researchers to work on the problem.”

  “Maybe,” he conceded. Turning back to Pat, “But I was going to tell you about gene therapy. That’s the newest thing. Inserting genes into a patient whose own genes aren’t doing the job they’re supposed to do. We’re starting to cure diabetics, getting them off insulin shots, because we’ve given them genes that make their pancreases produce insulin naturally, the way normal people do.”

  “I’ve written stories about that,” Pat said. “They’re working on cystic fibrosis, too, aren’t they?”

  “Yep. And various forms of cancers, especially ovarian cancer, up at the University of Rochester. Malignant melanomas, brain cancer—some group in Shanghai is working on hemophilia, I hear.”

  “Using gene therapy?”

  “Right.”

  “Then what’s the fourth era?” Pat asked.

  Jesse gave her a lazy grin. “That’s what Arby and I are starting.”

  “Arby?”

  Jesse pointed at me. “The silent dummy that’s been sitting next to you all evening. I think he’s had his tongue amputated.”

  I forced myself to answer, “You’re doing so well, Jess, that I didn’t have the heart to break in on you.”

  “First time that’s ever happened!” Jesse laughed.

  “What are you doing?” Pat asked again. “What about the fourth era?”

  “Regeneration,” said Jesse, the way a stage magician might say, Presto!

  The waiter brought our desserts just then and all four of us fell silent, as if we’d been talking about some dark international secret.

  I glanced down at my fruit tart, then before Jesse could resume his monologue I said, “Jess and I are tinkering around with some ideas about regenerating nerve cells in the spinal cord.”

  Jesse laughed. “Arby, you could take the end of the world and make it sound humdrum.”

  Pat swiveled her head from him to me and back again. Julia quietly spooned up some of her zabaglione.

  “What we’re doing,” Jesse went on, “is going to allow us to reconnect the severed spinal nerves. For paraplegics. We’ll make them walk!”

  “Really?”

  I started to say, “We’ve just started—”

  “That’s just the beginning,” Jesse said, his enthusiasm growing. “I mean, if we learn how to regenerate spinal neurons, what about other cells, elsewhere in the body?”

  Julia put her spoon down and looked at her husband thoughtfully.

  “Let’s see if we can regenerate a few neurons before we start going off the deep end,” I said.

  “Yeah, sure,” Jesse replied. “But listen, Arby, why not other kinds of tissue? It might even be easier.”

  “Might be,” I conceded.

  “I mean, think of the possibilities! Grow a new heart, new kidneys, whatever!”

  I couldn’t help smiling at my brother’s excitement. “At least there wouldn’t be a rejection problem.”

  “Wait a minute,” Pat said. “You’re going too fast for me. Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  Jesse hunched forward so eagerly he nearly dug the elbow of his sports jacket into his dish of spumoni. Julia caught his arm just in time.

  “Listen,” he said, ignoring his wife’s help. “You, me, all of us—each human being was once just a single cell, one teeny little fertilized ovum.”

  Pat nodded.

  “In nine months that one cell grew into trillions of cells, cells that became lungs and hair and brain and muscle and everything else.”

  “The cells specialized,” said Julia.

  “Differentiated,” I said.

  “Okay, okay. Now, you’re seventy years old and your heart’s crapping out on you. What are your choices?”

  “Medicaid,” Pat snapped.

  “Come on! You need a new heart! What can you do?”

  “How much money can I spend?”

  “Money is no object.”

  I said, “This is all theoretical.”

  Pat grinned at me, then turned back to Jesse. “If money’s no problem, then I can get a heart transplant.”

  “Or an artificial heart,” said Julia.

  “They don’t work.”

  “Temporarily, until a transplant donor is found.”

  “Okay.”

  Jesse was practically bubbling over. “But what if you could grow a new heart? Right there inside your chest? Just like you did originally when you were a fetus.”

  “Would there be room for two inside?”

  I put a hand on my brother’s sleeve. “It might be easier to grow the new heart in vitro, from the patient’s own somatic cells, and then put it in surgically.”

  “Well, maybe, yeah.” Jesse clearly did not like that approach. “But the really nifty thing would be to grow it in vivo. No surgery at all.”

  “Is that possible?” Pat wondered.

  “The information is there, in the DNA of your cells,” Jesse said. “Same information that built your heart in the first place. All the information is stored in your DNA, everything you need to grow every part of you.”

  “You mean that if I had an arm or a leg amputated you could grow
a new one for me?” Pat asked eagerly.

  “Why not?” Jesse answered.

  My head was spinning just a little bit. “This goes to show you the effects of Italian wine on Jewish brains,” I said.

  They all laughed. But then Jesse asked me, “You don’t think it’s possible?”

  “In theory, maybe. Just maybe. In practice—”

  “What would the obstacles be?” Julia asked softly.

  Watching the expression on Jesse’s face as I spoke, I said carefully, “In the fetus the cells grow and differentiate. You start out with one cell, then it multiplies and multiplies until—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jesse interrupted impatiently. “Once the cells differentiate you can’t get ’em to regenerate anymore. Right?”

  “Not as yet,” I said.

  Jesse broke into his patented grin. “Ahh! You’re not going to be an old fart about this after all.”

  Julia frowned. “Perhaps you have had too much wine, darling.”

  “I’m just kidding.” Turning back to me, Jesse said, “If we can activate the codons for nerve cell regeneration, Arby, we ought to be able to do the same for any kind of cell. Right?”

  “In theory,” I replied.

  “You will need stem cells, won’t you?” Julia asked.

  Pat said, “Oh-oh.”

  “We probably will,” Jesse admitted. “If the government doesn’t get in the way.”

  “I know there’s a lot of controversy about stem cell work,” Pat said.

  I nodded.

  “And the right-to-life lobby is against stem cell research, isn’t it?”

  “Because the only source for stem cells is from aborted fetuses,” Julia said.

  “So far,” added Jesse. “We’ll be able to get stem cells from adult patients. Some lab in Japan or Korea or someplace has produced adult stem cells out of ordinary skin cells.”

  I put in, “But the fetal stem cells are easier to isolate and we know they’re totipotent. Adult stem cells aren’t.”

  Pat started to say, “Totipotent means—”

  Jesse couldn’t wait. “They can be made to produce any type of cell you need: skin, muscle, neuron . . . anything.”

  “But it’s illegal to use the fetal stem cells?”

  “Not illegal,” Jesse said. “The government wouldn’t fund stem cell research for many years. Now they do, but only under very special circumstances.”

  “We’ll fund the work ourselves,” I promised. “We won’t use government money, so we won’t be hampered by their red tape.”

  “The rest,” Jesse said dramatically, “is details.”

  Julia asked, “Didn’t someone once say that God is in the details?”

  Jesse countered, “It was genius, not God.”

  “The quotation is from Ellice Hopkins,” said Patricia. “ ‘Genius only means an infinite capacity for taking pains.’ ”

  I smiled at Jesse. “I think the proper quotation for this dinner is, ‘Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can.’ ”

  ARTHUR

  The limousine was waiting for us at the curb when we left the restaurant.

  Jesse played at being impressed. “A limo! Rank has its privileges.”

  “We’ll take you home,” I said as the chauffeur opened the door for us.

  “We could take a taxi,” said Julia.

  But Jesse went straight to the limo. “Come on, hon. We don’t get treated this well very often.”

  “You don’t mind if we drop them off first, do you?” I asked Pat.

  She shook her head and then followed Julia into the car’s dark interior. Jesse and Julia had taken the rearward-facing seats, separated by a console that held a TV screen. Pat slid across the leather-upholstered bench and I ducked in and sat beside her. The limo was wide enough so that there was considerable room between her and me.

  “Give the driver your address,” I told Jess.

  Jesse twisted around and said to the chauffeur, “Three thirty-four West Eighty-seventh.”

  As the limo pulled away from the curb, Julia said, “It’s getting to be rather a good neighborhood now. You must come up and see us, Arthur.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I’m learning to cook,” she said.

  “Is it a safe area?” Pat asked.

  Jesse grinned at her. “Safe enough. As long as you don’t go out alone in the dark and you walk fast and carry a baseball bat.”

  “Oh, rubbish!” Julia said. “It’s as safe as anywhere else in Manhattan.”

  “See what I mean?” said Jesse.

  I leaned my hands on my knees and hunched forward toward my brother. “We ought to go see Momma together, Jess. She asked me to tell you.”

  “Sure,” Jesse replied easily. “When?”

  “My schedule’s probably more flexible than yours.”

  “Yeah. I’ve got patients to see and rounds to make. All you’ve got to worry about is board of directors meetings and parties with the rich and famous.”

  And two hundred people at the lab who depend on me, I added silently. Jesse always did think that he was the only one who had pressures on him.

  I asked him, “What’s your schedule like for the next few days?”

  “We’re going to Africa next month,” Julia said.

  “Africa?” That was a surprise.

  “Eritrea,” she said.

  “But you just got back from Brazil—”

  “They need all the medical help they can get,” said Jesse, his smile gone. “Malaria, typhus, AIDS; there’re even reports of bubonic plague.”

  “It’s because of the famine, you see,” Julia explained. “Starvation lowers their resistance to disease.”

  “But they’re still fighting a civil war there, aren’t they?” I asked. He’s not taking Julia there, I told myself. He can’t take her into a pesthole like that.

  “The war’s over,” Jesse said.

  “But there’s still fighting going on,” Pat said. “One tribe raids another. Pillaging, that sort of thing.”

  And rape, I added mentally.

  “We’ll be at a UN station,” Julia said. “We’ll be protected by peacekeeping troops.”

  “You’re not going with him, are you?”

  “Of course I am. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “But . . .” I floundered for an excuse. “But what about your own work? What about—”

  “British Airways can get along without me for a month or two,” Julia said coolly. “I’ve arranged for a leave of absence.”

  “It sounds awfully dangerous to me,” I muttered.

  “Even airline executives need a little excitement now and then, Arthur,” she teased.

  “You just got back from Brazil.”

  “That was last year.”

  I turned to Jess. “It’s one thing for you to go traipsing around the world, but bringing Julia along, exposing her to all those dangers—it’s not right.”

  Before Jesse could reply, Julia said, “I wouldn’t let him go without me, Arthur, dear. I’m his wife. I married him for better or for worse. Wither he goest, there go I.”

  Jesse grinned at me. “I couldn’t leave her behind even if I wanted to, Arby.”

  I sank back in the seat, defeated. But my mind unreeled pictures of Julia dying in some fly-infested tent, sick with a tropical fever while Jesse was out tending to the natives. Or worse, some wild band of marauding bandits breaks into their camp and . . . I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to erase the images from my mind.

  We drove in gloomy silence up Riverside Drive, past the piers where the cruise liners dock and the floating museum of the aircraft carrier Intrepid. At last the limo cut back into the city streets and pulled up to a gray stone apartment building.

  Jesse immediately opened the door on his side, before the chauffeur could get around to it.

  “Call me tomorrow and let me know when you can come up to see Momma,” I said to him.

  “Right,” said Jesse
as he ducked out the door.

  “I’ll see that he does,” said Julia. She kissed me lightly on the cheek and then she, too, left the limo. I watched them walk up the steps hand in hand. Jesse tapped out their security code on the electronic pad built into the wall next to the front door. The glass door was reinforced with cast-iron scrollwork; meant to look decorative, but actually there to keep thugs from breaking in.

  Jess waved nonchalantly as their front door popped open and the limo pulled away from the curb.

  “You’re really worried about them,” Pat said.

  “Jesse’s a damned fool to take such risks.”

  “I suppose that’s how you get to be Humanitarian of the Year.”

  I guess I gave her a sour glance. “He can be all the humanitarian he wants to be. But he shouldn’t drag her along with him.”

  “It doesn’t look to me as if he’s dragging her, exactly,” said Pat.

  I fumed inwardly, but said nothing. There was nothing I could say. Julia had made that clear.

  “She is his wife, after all.”

  “That doesn’t give him the right to risk her life.”

  “She seems very determined.”

  I wanted to yell at her, to roar out my fear and anger and hurt, scream to the heavens about my brother’s stupid insensitivity. Jesse was taking advantage of her. He knew Julia would go wherever he did. She enjoyed the challenge, she was excited by the idea of living dangerously. It never occurred to her that she could get hurt, get sick, be raped or killed. Those kinds of things did not happen to her. Other people might be blown up by terrorists or murdered in the streets in a senseless drive-by shooting, but that sort of thing never happened to anyone you knew, anyone close to you. How could it happen to you?

  But I saw it happening to Julia, and when it did, it would be Jesse’s fault. He’d have killed her just as surely as if he’d put a bullet in her brain.

  I smoldered in silence while the limo purred softly through the quiet streets, heading for the midtown condo building where the corporation maintained its VIP quarters. Pat said nothing for several blocks. I think she must have sensed how distressed I was.

  But after a while she asked softly, “Do you really think you could grow new organs for people?”

  It took me a moment or two to mentally shift gears. “Maybe,” I said. “It might be possible. In theory, at least.”