The Immortality Factor

by Ben Bova

  “Can’t say I blame them,” he said.

  “All they can do is get in the way,” I said.

  “Yes, you’re undoubtedly right. But, Arthur, do you have any conception of the magnitude of your work? If you successfully grow new organs in people . . . why, it’s earthshaking. Revolutionary.”

  “Some people want to stop the work.”

  “I have no doubt of it. Furthermore, I’m sure that they’ll try to hedge you around with government restrictions. Perhaps they’ll even get the Congress to pass laws to stop this kind of research altogether. Things like that have been done before, you know, with fetal tissue transplants, remember?”

  I nodded gloomily. It had started to rain outside, gray and miserable and wet and cold. Just the way I felt inside.

  “For what it’s worth,” Graves said, “no one has come to the academy to request a scientific assessment.”

  “They will, sooner or later.”

  He made a tiny little motion of his head, barely half a shake. “Don’t be surprised if your enemies avoid the academy altogether. The last thing they want is a scientific study that says you’re on the right track.”

  I sank back in the worn old plush chair. “Maybe I ought to ask for a study from the academy.”

  Graves nodded slightly, pressing his fingertips together before his lips. “Perhaps I have a better idea, Arthur.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s an idea that’s been around for some time, but it’s never really been tried. Not in its full flower.”

  “What?”

  “A science court.”

  I had heard something about that years ago. But nothing had ever come of it.

  “A courtroom procedure,” Graves said, “where we examine strictly the scientific aspect of a question of public policy. Strip away all the politics, all the emotional rhetoric and personal opinions. Stick strictly to the available scientific evidence. A jury of your scientific peers. You present your evidence and the jury makes an informed decision about whether or not your research is valid.”

  That could be an end run around all the bureaucrats and politicians who’d want to investigate my work and try to stop it for one reason or another. It could generate enough media attention—and the right kind of media attention—to finally get the truth through to the general public.

  “I like it,” I said. “A science court. Can we do it?”

  Graves beamed like a happy grandfather. “I believe I can bring the necessary people together, if you’re willing to go along with the idea.”

  “Certainly,” I assured him. “I think it’s a fine idea.”

  I really did. Then.

  THETRIAL:

  DAY FOUR, MORNING

  State your name, please, and your affiliation.”

  “Wilson K. Potter, professor emeritus, molecular biology department, Columbia University.”

  From his seat on the front row, Arthur saw Potter in profile as the old man sat at the witness table. He’s had a stroke, Arthur realized. The half of Potter’s face he could see was drawn, tense, the corner of his eye and mouth pulled slightly downward. His cane slipped from his fingers as he tried to rest it against the table and clattered to the floor. Potter glared at it momentarily, then left it there at his feet.

  Rosen got up from his seat and walked slowly around the judges’ desks as he said, “Professor Potter, it’s fair to say that you are one of the pioneers in the field of molecular biology, is it not?”

  “I suppose it is,” said Potter.

  “Dr. Marshak was one of your assistant professors, at one point in time?”

  “He was, until he left for greener pastures.”

  Arthur’s guts clenched. He could feel his face flame with anger.

  Smiling at the old man, Rosen asked, “Professor Potter, are you still active in the field?”

  “I am retired. But I still maintain an interest in the field. I read the journals. I write an occasional paper.”

  “You wrote a paper on the subject of organ regeneration, did you not?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Glancing at Arthur, then turning to face the jury, Rosen asked, “Could you give the jury a brief summation of that paper, please?”

  “I assume they have all read it,” said Potter.

  “It was only entered into the file of testimony last night, when we learned that Professor Phillips would not be able to appear here.”

  “Anyone who wants to keep up in the field should have read my paper when it was first published,” Potter said testily.

  “Yes, sir, I’m sure,” Rosen said smoothly, “but a brief summation would be very helpful, sir.”

  Potter huffed and turned painfully in his chair to look at the jury. “As you know, even if you read only the abstract, I proved that any attempts to grow new organs inside a human body are doomed to failure. There is no way on God’s green earth that it can be done.”

  ZACK O’NEILL

  Trouble is, Arthur said one thing when he meant something else. He told me to go ahead and set up the protocol for using Max, but I could see that all he was doing was putting off the decision to use the chimp.

  He was hung up over Cassie. He knew she’d go ballistic and she was prone to cancer and her emotional condition was tied in to her autoimmune system so strong that he was afraid if she got cranked up about Max it’d knock her immune system down and she’d end up with another bout of cancer.

  That wasn’t my problem. My problem was that I had hit a dead end with regentide unless and until I could do some experiments on one or more chimps. Max was the only one we had and I couldn’t see stooging around for a year or more waiting for another batch of ’em. I mean, who knows who else was working along the same lines we were? We had all this mother-loving publicity from that butthead evangelist, but sixteen dozen other labs could be working along the same lines I was and not say a peep about it. Just stay cool and quiet and beat us at our own game.

  I had tried borrowing chimps from other labs, but no go. Everybody knew it took tons of red tape to bring new animals in from Africa or get newborns from a breeding facility. To make matters worse there was this strain of AIDS hitting the African chimp population and, believe me, that put a stop to importing, but good. And to borrowing, too. Nobody wanted to part with the animals they had.

  So it was Max. Had to be. Nobody else in sight. I knew Arthur wanted to push ahead as fast as I did, but still he hemmed and hawed. Scared of Cassie. I don’t think he gave a shit about the chimp itself. It was Cassie that was bothering him.

  I had to have help. I went to Darrell Walters, the grand old man of the staff. If anybody could convince Arthur, it was Darrell.

  “I don’t know,” he said when I bounced the idea off him. “Cassie’s awfully attached to Max.”

  I wished I could use Cassie. It would cause less trouble.

  But I said to Darrell, “I won’t hurt Max. We don’t have to do anything major. Just regrow a finger, maybe. Just to show that we can produce a strain of regentide that works on chimps.”

  We were in Darrell’s junk shop of an office. He was perched on his barstool, swiveling back and forth slightly like he was swaying in the wind. Looked like an older Howdy Doody, all arms and legs and that long horse face of his.

  “Arthur’s already thinking about how we can do human trials without having the government come down on us like an avalanche,” Darrell said, trying to avoid making a decision.

  “We won’t get to human trials if we can’t get good results from chimps,” I pointed out. “Or one chimp, at least.”

  “We’ve got plenty of monkeys.”

  “We’ve got plenty of yeast molds, too,” I snapped. “What the hell does that have to do with it? We can’t move on to human trials without solid evidence from chimps. You know that!”

  It was a no-brainer of a decision, yet still Darrell just sat there, swiveling back and forth, back and forth, like some brain-dead idiot who can’t make up his mind.
r />   “Tell you what,” he said finally. “Let me make a few phone calls, pull a few strings, call in a few favors. Maybe I can get you a couple of chimps.”

  “If Arthur can’t do it . . .”

  “Let me see what I can do,” Darrell said, and he winked at me. He actually closed one eye in what I guess he thought was a neat trick.

  I was disgusted. But I went back to my office to think the whole problem through. One thing I learned as a kid: a little thinking can save a lot of blood, sweat, toil, and tears. Look before you leap, my stepfather always told me. Out on the streets in the neighborhood where I grew up, you looked both ways before you stepped out of the house. No telling who might be out there ready to give you a knuckle sandwich just for your lunch money.

  I had been buddying up to Max for weeks, bringing him candy and treats, getting him used to seeing me. Okay, so it was a rat-fink thing to do. Better than having the chimp bite off one of my fingers, huh? Arthur said he would okay using Max, but I knew he’d try to figure out a way to keep Cassie from going into orbit.

  If I could bring Darrell around I could get Arthur’s okay to work on Max. The boss trusted Darrell, and besides, Darrell could godfather Cassie when she got back. But Darrell was sitting on the pot and I figured he’d stay there for weeks, maybe months. How to move Darrell? Vince Andriotti. Darrell and Vince had been two of Arthur’s original staffers. Hired them when he started the lab. The rest of his researchers had been Arthur’s grad students from Columbia, at first. But he had taken on Vince and Darrell at the beginning and regarded them as equals, almost, not former students.

  Okay. How to get to Vince? And here I had to laugh. His daughter Tina, of course. What could be better? I liked her. This would give me an excuse to get as close to her as possible.

  So I set out to win Tina Andriotti’s heart and mind. It would even be fun, I thought.

  ARTHUR

  It took a surprising amount of politicking to get the science court out of the realm of dreamy ideas and into the real, workaday world. Even with Graves pushing for it, the first responses we got from the National Academy and most of the scientists I broached the idea to was—well, tepid, to say the least.

  “It’ll never work,” was the kindest response I got.

  “Arthur, you can’t expect to keep a public trial restricted to nothing but the scientific facts,” said the chancellor of the University of Texas, an old friend from back in the days when we were both students at Columbia.

  “Of course we can,” I insisted. He was in New York to meet with his university’s financial advisors on Wall Street. I had invited him to have a quiet drink at a cocktail lounge in the Waldorf. I wanted his support for the science court; he could be very influential, either for or against.

  His hair was still dark, and he had a fine tennis-player’s tan. As chancellor of the university, he was involved far more with fund-raising and politics than with academic matters.

  “I think the science court is an idea whose time has come,” I said loftily.

  He shook his head. “You might just as well simply mail out all your reports to the people you want to serve on your jury and have them write their evaluations back to you.”

  “No, no!” I said. “If we set this up as a judicial procedure they can call countering witnesses, we can cross-examine each other.”

  “Strictly on the scientific merits of the question?” His voice dripped skepticism.

  “Yes. The political, economic, and other issues can be discussed in other forums, once we have the scientific question settled.”

  He took a sip of his margarita and grimaced. “Nobody east of the Mississippi knows how to make a decent margarita,” he grumbled.

  I was drinking California chardonnay. Would you believe that the Waldorf didn’t stock any Tavels? “We need a rational procedure for making decisions about science,” I said. “The science court is the way to go, I’m convinced of it.”

  He wasn’t. “You expect to have a courtroom-type of trial strictly on the scientific merits of your work—”

  “And once that’s settled, the politicians and priests and general public can argue about the economic impact or the morality or whatever else they want to bring up.”

  His expression was worse than dubious. It was positively sour.

  But I went on, “The important thing is to settle the scientific facts first. The way the government makes scientific decisions today is crazy, absolutely irrational.”

  “I can agree to that, at least.”

  And it was. They mixed the science and the politics and economics and ethics and everything else all in a big jumble. You pick your side of the argument and go out and find scientists who agree with you and get them to make solemn pronouncements. That’s how you get scientists on both sides of the issue; they’re not speaking as scientists, they’re speaking as regular citizens. They’re not making scientific decisions, they’re telling you their opinions. But to the public at large, it looks as if scientists are just as confused and ignorant as anybody else. The science court would separate out the scientific question from all the other facets. Scientists would have to stick to the facts, to the data, regardless of their opinions. Science would produce a definitive answer, one way or the other.

  “The science court will make it easier for the general public to understand the scientific facts,” I said.

  “The general public.” The chancellor sneered. “They don’t know shit from ice cream.” His margarita was starting to hit him.

  “We’ve got to educate them,” I said. “Otherwise—”

  “Somebody’s got to educate them,” he agreed. “Did you see the survey the Chicago Academy of Sciences did a year or so ago? Eighty percent of the general public doesn’t know what DNA is! Ninety percent haven’t the foggiest notion of what bacteria are!”

  “All the more reason for a science court,” I insisted. “We can’t let people who’re that ignorant make decisions they’re not equipped to make.”

  “The politicians make the decisions.”

  “And they’re smarter?”

  He scowled at me and gulped down the remains of his margarita.

  Things at the lab were getting tense. I was spending most of my time traipsing around the country to rally backing for the science court, but I was in the lab often enough to feel the growing tension.

  Zack had gone as far as he could go without trying his regentide on a chimpanzee. We were trying to get him a few chimps to work on, but the red tape was titanic. And there was Max sitting out in the back yard, untouched. I had Zack do more work on macaques, and he got good results, but we both knew that we were just marking time. Wasting time, I should say.

  More than that, Zack had started romancing Tina Andriotti pretty strongly, and her father apparently didn’t like it. Vince had an Old World attitude about his one and only daughter: he didn’t like to see her falling for a guy who wore an earring and never mentioned a word about marriage. Tina, from what I could see, could handle herself without her father’s glowering presence. Whether or not she was serious about Zack, I had no idea.

  So I decided to use a spy.

  “Pat,” I said one chilly spring morning, “I need your help.”

  Pat Hayward had stayed at the lab all through our publicity ordeal. She had earned every penny of her consulting fee, screening us from the nutcases and orchestrating the serious reporters so that they saw enough to be impressed and write good stories about us. I had given her absolute control of Glamour Alley; she would lead the TV camera crews through that section of the lab and end the tour with Max. The chimp earned his bananas; he was on the tube more than I was. Which was fine with me.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  It had taken a certain amount of self-control to keep our relationship strictly on business. Patricia was a handsome woman, and intelligent. That night in Las Vegas could have turned into something extraordinary if either one of us had moved a centimeter closer toward the other. I got the fee
ling that she was struggling to keep her emotional distance from me, but that might have been nothing but my ego bragging to itself. She certainly made no overt moves; neither did I.

  Yet, she was mighty attractive, sitting in front of my desk. Even in a tailored business suit with slacks that hid those long legs of hers, and her red hair neatly tied up, she looked awfully good.

  “Have you ever done any espionage?” I asked, trying to make it sound light.

  “Spying?”

  I raised both my hands. “Let’s call it intelligence gathering.”

  “Where?”

  “Here in the lab.”

  Her expression went a little on the grim side. “Spying on one of your employees.”

  “Zack O’Neill seems to be spending a lot of time with Tina Andriotti.”

  “That’s their business, isn’t it?”

  “I just want to know how serious Tina is about him.”

  Pat nodded briefly. “Her father. Vince.”

  “I’d like to avoid an explosion, if that’s possible.”

  “Why don’t you just bring the two men in here and ask them about it?”

  “Too confrontational,” I said. “I’m trying to avoid an explosion, remember.”

  “So you want me to go to Tina and ask her if she’s shacking up with Zack?”

  It took me a moment to realize that Pat was trying to shock me. I forced a smile. “Nothing so crude.”

  “Then what?”

  With a shrug, I answered, “I don’t know. Whatever it is that you women do, do it. You seem to be able to exchange complete life histories in thirty seconds when you want to.”

  She broke into a hearty laugh. “Is that what you think?”

  “I’ve seen it happen,” I said. “Two women meet, complete strangers, and thirty seconds later they know all about each other.”

  Pat shook her head. “Arthur, deep down inside, you’re a male chauvinist.”