Living Proof

by Kira Peikoff

  “Impressive,” Trent said. “It seems very well thought out.”

  “Thank you. We all worked it out together.” Arianna smiled at Sam, who looked away. The three men stood by like white-coated sentries, noting Trent’s every move.

  Arianna sighed. “So that’s how it’s done.”

  Trent tugged at the strap on his watch. “But if you know how to clone embryos, then why couldn’t you just keep cloning the same embryo over and over for research purposes instead of using a bunch of donated ones?”

  “It’s possible in theory,” Arianna replied. “But not in practice. If you clone an embryo, it increases the chance of tainting the cells, which could skew your experiments. It’s the same problem with thawing frozen embryos. We also want a wide gene supply to ensure that the techniques will work the same way on every cell. So we need a constant supply of fresh new embryos.”

  One of the scientists cleared his throat. “Some of which are going to waste right now.”

  “Of course,” Arianna said. “We’ll get out of your way. Let me just show him the rats.”

  She dropped her cane to the floor and grabbed Trent’s arm. They walked to the cages in the corner, while Ian and Patrick grudgingly returned to their microscopes. Trent glanced over his shoulder, feeling the tingly wrath of a stare; sure enough, Sam stood by the door with crossed arms, watching him. Trent whipped his head back to Arianna, who was pressing her fingers into his biceps.

  “I know you might have been skeptical about stem cells,” she said quietly. “But this is the proof I wanted you to see in person, to show you I have a chance. See those rats that are barely moving? They have a similar disease to multiple sclerosis in humans, but for them it’s called EAE—experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis. But see those other rats running around like crazy? They had the disease, too, but my guys injected their spinal cords with stem cells, which restored their ability to move.”

  “Wow,” Trent said, genuinely taken aback. “That seems like magic. How does it work?”

  She beamed. “Let me try to explain. You have many different specialized cells in your body—for example: heart cells, bone cells, nerve cells, which all develop out of stem cells. Around your nerve cells, there’s a dense membrane called myelin that transmits impulses to the cells, allowing movement. The thicker the myelin, the faster the impulses are conducted. But in multiple sclerosis, this myelin degenerates over time, so eventually you’re paralyzed. That’s why I’m walking so stiffly now, and will need a wheelchair soon. But if the scientists can trick stem cells to grow into myelin-producing cells, and inject those into my spinal cord, then theoretically they will replenish my lost myelin, restore my cells’ ability to move, and save my life—just like these lucky rats.”

  “That’s brilliant! So if they can do it with the rats, why can’t they do it with you?”

  “It’s harder for humans because we have different genes. What Sam and the others are working on is trying to activate the right genes in human stem cells to trick them into becoming myelin-producing cells, which are called oligodendrocytes. But in order to activate the right genes, the guys have to use an exact—and so far unknown—combination of molecules to inject into the stem cells. This combination is the holy grail of the research, and the key to my life. Once—if—they figure this out, we’ll be able to inject the right cells into my spinal cord, and hopefully, my myelin will grow back. It’s just a matter of time, and lots of trial and error, but they’re getting closer every day.”

  “So this is for real,” Trent whispered. “This could really save your life.”

  “Yes.”

  Hope burst like a tonic within him, overpowering his anguish. He stared down into her blue eyes and saw the intensity of his own feelings reflected in them. A lump rose in his throat. He leaned in and kissed her lips so she wouldn’t see the wetness in his eyes. All he wanted was to stand there and hold her, and to think about being able to do so for the rest of their lives.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, his conscience was shrieking.

  He pulled back. “I still have so many questions,” he murmured. “This is all so unexpected.”

  “I understand—it must be quite a shock. But a good one, I hope.” She smiled. “What do you want to know?”

  “Where are the embryos?”

  In his years at the DEP, Trent had never set eyes on an actual embryo, the driving force behind his work.

  “They’re not too glamorous, but I’ll show you.” She tugged him over to the refrigerator and pulled open the heavy door. Gas billowed out. “That’s the carbon dioxide that controls their environment,” she explained. “And there they are.”

  Rows of thin glass flasks lined the interior of the fridge. Inside each flask was a red liquid. As far as he could tell, there was no life in there at all. And even though he knew to expect this, the reality seemed like a letdown.

  “I told you they weren’t that exciting,” Arianna said. “At this stage, they’re just clusters of cells that you can only see under a microscope.”

  “I see. Why are they red?”

  “The red fluid is a culture medium that contains nutrients for the cells.” She shut the door and turned to him. “We should go.”

  He nodded with relief.

  “Bye,” she called to Patrick and Ian, who lifted their heads from their microscopes but said nothing. Trent and Arianna crossed over to the door, where Sam remained seething.

  “Sam.” She patted his arm affectionately. “Please don’t worry. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “We should change the password,” he spat.

  “Okay,” Arianna said, rolling her eyes. “Tell me later.”

  Trent waved awkwardly as he and Arianna walked out into the cold night air. The door shut hard behind them in satisfied riddance.

  “Sorry about them,” she said immediately. “Working in this kind of atmosphere makes them paranoid. But it’s just because they don’t know you—it’s nothing personal.”

  “No, don’t apologize. They—you—are taking a huge risk.”

  “This is true.”

  When they reached the landing of the stairs, he put his arm around her and guided her through the alley. “So why here?” he asked. “Of all places for a lab, a church basement? And how did you manage to set it up like that?”

  “I know it’s an odd place, and scary at night, but we couldn’t risk using a known lab, because the DEP makes periodic sweeps. And you saw how much equipment is needed, so none of us had the space in our apartments. When we were talking about forming this group about a year ago—”

  “Are there other members?”

  “Two more, the other doctors who work at my clinic. They help with recruiting donors, keeping the clinic running smoothly and studying the embryos. So with the three scientists, there are six of us altogether.”

  “How did you find the scientists?”

  “When I was an undergrad at Columbia, Sam was the foremost embryonic stem cell researcher at our school before it became illegal, and I formed a club that rallied to support him after the DEP got on his trail. He ended up going to jail, though—”

  Trent barely contained a gasp, recalling that his initial research had yielded the same story, forever preserved in the campus archives.

  “—and I found him all these years later, through some mutual acquaintances. I approached him cold, explained my situation, and of course, he remembered me. He was basically a recluse when I found him, but I managed to convince him to take on this project—he needed this in a way as much as I do. And he contacted Patrick and Ian, who he had worked with at Columbia. He actually contacted his whole team from back then, but only Patrick and Ian would have anything to do with the idea.”

  “Fear?”

  “Yes. If the DEP ever discovered us, we would all go to jail, no doubt. But luckily a few others feel the same way Sam did: that someone has to take the risk, or else scientific progress will end. And I’m paying them, of course, since I c
ommissioned the research.”

  They were standing at the threshold of the alley, but Trent could not wrest himself away from her, or stop himself from prodding. “It’s very brave,” he said. “Wouldn’t you be putting your body in serious danger to be the first human trial, if it comes to that?”

  “And I hope it does! Of course it would be very dangerous, but necessary, so the risk is meaningless.” She looked pensive. “I feel like I’m reclaiming my life and my world. And if I happen to die in the process, well, then, I hope they learn something from my body. Then I’d die happy. But I refuse to sit around and wait for it to happen, with no struggle, no point, nothing whatsoever to be gained.”

  Trent drew a ragged breath. “So, you were saying, why here of all places?”

  “Right. When we were talking about forming this group, I looked up foreclosure properties, and this abandoned church was available to the top buyer or it was going to be destroyed. So then I realized: What is the last place the DEP would look for a secret lab? In a church. Plus, I couldn’t help but enjoy the irony. So, to be extra cautious, I put the money in a real estate investment trust where my cousin is a partner. Her company has a bunch of legit investors and buys a lot of properties in Manhattan, so the church slipped in under the radar. She bought it in her company’s name, so the IRS has no reason to trace it to me. I purposely left it looking deserted so nobody would think anything had changed.”

  “Smart move, especially if the IRS decides to audit you. But how did you get all the lab equipment? And how did you get it in there?”

  She explained that she ordered it from a manufacturer, who delivered it to a storage facility, and then she drove it in a rented U-Haul to the church in the middle of the night, with the group acting as movers.

  “It’s taken my whole inheritance and savings to afford the building, plus the equipment—which cost thirty thousand dollars alone. Then there are the salaries of Sam, Patrick, and Ian, and I also pay five thousand dollars in cash to each woman who donates. Basically, I’m working at a huge loss. But, of course, it’s worth it.”

  Trent squinted down the deserted street. His reporter’s curiosity had kicked into high gear. “How do you account for that huge loss of money to the IRS? Besides the investment in your cousin’s company for the church?”

  Arianna nodded. “It’s an important question, and one that bothered me for months before this whole operation began. But I think I managed to get around it. Back in February, I took a trip to Europe and seemed to spend a fortune on MS treatments that I supposedly couldn’t find in the U.S. Actually, I put that money in a Swiss bank account, even though the U.S. government thought I spent it. Then I used it to buy the lab equipment. And that’s the cash I’m using to pay the scientists and the women who donate.”

  Trent nodded. “So you thought everything out.”

  “I had to. It would be too risky if the IRS could trace my money.”

  They stood in silence for a moment.

  “Talk about reclaiming your life,” Trent said. “You’re exhausting every resource you have.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  He nodded, thinking of the seemingly inanimate flasks. It might be tempting to choose your own life over those, he thought, but not if the cost was mass infanticide. Such a horror could never be justified; and how could she pretend it was? But then again, were five-day-old embryos really—really—the same as human babies? The Church said so, but how good was its track record with truth?

  Suddenly a bothersome memory hit him.

  “Wait, didn’t you say when we were at your apartment that you were going to church to practice religion?”

  “I said to practice my religion,” she corrected. “That of furthering and bettering human life here on earth.”

  He suppressed the words he itched to retort: When does human life begin? It did not seem like the type of question that could have an ambiguous answer. He thought again of what the Church said: Life began at conception. It seemed as straightforward as basic math.

  Wasn’t it? He had never thought to question it, but now everything he had learned there seemed subject to scrutiny. Yet what other answer was there? Life began at conception. It seemed like wondering about the shortest distance between two points. He studied Arianna’s calm face and considered asking her, but thought better of it.

  Instead, he vowed to research it the only way he knew how—on the Internet—as soon as he could. If anything was clear, it was that he had to be completely confident of the answer; for without certainty on this point, he could not move forward.

  An unsettling twinge pulled him back to the moment. Something was still bothering him about their night in her apartment.

  “But what about the Sistine Chapel?” he demanded. “The painting on your wall? Why would you have that if you weren’t actually religious?”

  She laughed. “You have an eye for details, don’t you? Michelangelo’s work is inspirational to me because it conveys the same sense I have about the beauty of life, in a way that has nothing to do with religion.”

  “Oh.” He watched the puff of his own breath disperse.

  Arianna leaned against his chest, rubbing her arms. “Got everything straight so we can go home? I’m freezing.”

  Everything, he thought, except the main thing.

  It was a question he could not answer with any degree of conviction, and the only question that mattered.

  * * *

  Trent lay across his bed, racked by the thoughts rolling through his mind: I’m destined to murder. Whatever I do, I’m going to help kill embryos or help kill her. Somehow, somewhere, there had been a terrible mistake.

  The clarity he had so briefly enjoyed in the museum was like a distant light overshadowed by a hailstorm. He pictured telling Dopp.

  I know everything, he would say. Somehow, his mouth—a traitor to his heart—would form the words: You were right.

  Dopp’s face would light up with all the triumph of an innocent prisoner finally exonerated. I knew it! he would shout. Perhaps he would pump a fist or, in a moment of feverish excitement, throw his arms around Trent. Then the police would be called and they would all converge in the alley, force their way past the steel door if necessary, and storm the underground lab. What if Arianna was there when it happened? Trent pictured her face, frozen in shock at his betrayal, and at the realization that she was going to die in jail.

  He moaned. He could not bring himself to do it, not until he had answered the question once and for all: When does human life begin? It seemed impossible to imagine a truth different from the one he had always accepted.

  He lifted his laptop onto his thighs and typed the critical question into a search engine. A list of websites popped up: godnet.com, prolife.net, christiansunited.org, humansforhumans.com, alllife.com. The list was endless. He clicked the first site, knowing what it would say.

  “The fusion of an egg and sperm marks the beginning of a new life with a unique genetic map never before created,” read a statement posted on the site’s homepage. “This is an inarguable fact, and, as such, God endows each embryo with all the dignity and the sacredness of every human being on earth.”

  Trent opened the next site.

  The moment of conception marks the exact moment of personhood and of the human body, which God injects with a soul. You are no different in your later incarnation than you were at that very moment. Therefore, unborn babies have the same right to life as you and I.

  Was there any answer not tied to religion?

  He typed in the website of the National Institutes of Health, the federal government’s leading biomedical research organization. On the search page, he typed “stem cell research.” A section of the website popped up labeled: “Adult Stem Cell Information.”

  Trent clicked on a list of FAQs: “How are adult stem cells different from embryonic stem cells?”

  Adult stem cells are undifferentiated cells found in specialized tissues such as heart or muscle tissue. Adult stem
cells can give rise to the type of specialized cell found in the tissue of origin and may or may not be able to give rise to other cell types. Embryonic stem cells are found in five-day-old human embryos, and can give rise to any cell in the body.

  So far, so good. Trent clicked on the next question in the list: “Why is adult stem cell research preferable to embryonic stem cell research?” The answer was one he knew well:

  Adult stem cells are cultivated from the developed tissue of already-born humans, so they do not involve compromising a life. They have been used for decades for procedures like bone marrow transplants and are being widely researched to find the potential life-saving gains associated with illegal embryonic stem cells.

  He stared uncomfortably at the screen, realizing that the question was loaded.

  On the sidebar of the web page, he noticed a tab that read “Archives.” On a hunch, he clicked and navigated more than twenty-five years back to the year 2000. Then in the search bar, he typed “embryonic stem cells.”

  A list of old news announcements appeared: “First Symposium on Embryonic Stem Cells Calls Human Life-Saving Potential Unprecedented.” Beneath that headline, there was another: “National Institutes of Health Answer: What would you hope to achieve from embryonic stem cell research?” A seventeen-page-long answer followed, outlining the specific hopes of each institute: Heart, Lung, and Blood; Dental and Craniofacial Research; Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases; Neurological Disorders and Stroke; Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Child Health; Eye; Aging; Arthritis and Skin Diseases; Deafness; Mental Health; and Human Genome Research.

  Trent stared in awe at the broad array of hope for every part of the body, wondering why he had never researched the topic before, why he had never questioned it.

  Because even though religion allows you to ask questions, he thought, you’re not supposed to question its answers.

  He changed the year in the archive to 2001, the first year that legislation against embryonic stem cell research began. More news announcements popped up, but the change in rhetoric was stark: “Congress Limits Embryonic Stem Cell Research to 64 Existing Lines,” and “President Calls on NIH to Issue Grants Only for Adult Stem Cell Research.”