by C. P. James
“Today I am announcing the Merriweather Prize to Reduce Human Suffering. This award will go to any individual, team, institution, state, or country who can produce a viable, long-term cure for one or more of the most insidious human diseases. If such a cure is presented to the satisfaction of the committee I appoint, the Merriweather Foundation will commit an initial investment of one billion dollars toward the refinement, testing and eventual FDA approval of that treatment, and more as results merit.”
Geller didn’t hear the gasp of the press corps over his own. His hands were sweating.
“My wife will not be saved by any treatment we now have. If it’s even possible to develop a cure for these diseases, it will be many years away. I’m a patient man, but I have lost my patience with our society. A society that seems satisfied with incremental advances and half measures in the pursuit of truly revolutionary science. A society whose brightest minds are valued more for their commercial potential than for the boldness of their approach. We’re looking for the thing that changes everything. We’re looking for a panacea.”
He paused to let those words hang in the air for a moment.
“More details about the Merriweather Prize will come soon, but for now I offer my apology to any industries whose scientists choose humanity over hairspray.”
That story ended and a panel of pundits readied themselves to weigh in. Geller’s mind raced; Merriweather might as well have descended from Mt. Olympus to lay this at his feet. What could he accomplish with a billion dollars of capital? The possibilities washed over him. He saw a grand research center, elegant and clever in its architecture. He saw dream teams of scientists from around the globe, tripping over each other to impress him. Adulation. Celebrity. Clinical trials and entire walls of framed patents. Most importantly, he saw himself leaving an indelible mark on history.
News of the prize spanned the globe in minutes. Engineers and architects whined about the prize’s medical focus. Within weeks, thousands of researchers either quit their jobs to go it alone or formed teams to chase the prize together. Geller decided he would continue availing himself of university resources, correctly assuming Biermann would keep him on a very long leash. He’d only have to move up his timeline on the side project.
Traditional gene therapy was fraught. First, you needed to design a vector—usually a modified virus or an engineered nanoparticle shell—to deliver good genes into cells with bad ones. But viruses didn’t always cooperate and nanotech was hard to produce at scale. A patient’s immune response was unpredictable and it was maddeningly difficult to target the exact right tissue in the exact right way. Plus, it mainly worked to replace a single gene; no one had figured out how to replace several at the same time. There was the size of the vector itself, which had to be small enough to enter a cell nucleus and potentially cross the blood-brain barrier. But no challenge was more vexing than the unpredictable long-term effects of a gene vector on cells other than the ones being targeted. If a vector replaced a broken gene in one area—say, the brain—but inserted its DNA into a different place in another group of cells, there was no telling what would happen, or when.
In the days that followed Merriweather’s announcement, Geller mused whether he should target cancers or other genetic disorders. The techniques were essentially the same, but there were a few ways to tackle cancer through gene therapy. You could instruct the cells to produce a specific cytotoxic protein, as some had tried in the past, or you could program them to commit suicide. It had been shown that you could also reprogram lymphocytes to target cells with a specific RNA signature and re-introduce them into the bloodstream. Promising, but none were magic bullets. Better progress had been made toward curing genetic disorders like Huntington’s or sickle-cell anemia.
Geller’s idea wasn’t so much a cure as a guarantee against getting sick at all. He’d have to replace all the problem genes in all the cells at once, and that was only possible when there were relatively few undifferentiated cells. That meant introducing the vector in-vitro.
Stem cells were the raw materials of human life. They could become virtually any differentiated cell. All they needed were “instructions” and the right conditions. Geller thought that a vector “cocktail” inserted into an embryo could replace all the genes associated with a raft of genetic disorders, whether they were defective or not. With cancer, the central problem was random, unregulated cell reproduction. He theorized that the genes responsible for regulating tissue growth could be modified to be receptive to a specific, synthetic protein—a key of sorts which, if introduced, would instruct rogue cells to throttle back or die. He thought of this while watching one of his favorite movies, The Manchurian Candidate. The tragic character of Raymond is brainwashed so that when he sees a very specific trigger—the red queen—he becomes a helpless puppet. This modified gene would work similarly; the protein was the red queen, but it would tell the gene to stop cells from reproducing. Doing so could give conventional cancer treatments time to work, or the body’s own defenses a fighting chance.
But even if theory became reality and he received FDA approval for such a treatment, most diseases with genetic links were still rare. But so were car crashes, and people still had insurance. He’d seen how parents were about keeping their children safe, even from factors over which they had some control. He suspected “disease insurance” wouldn’t be a hard sell if proven safe.
Baz was a game partner in the research, rarely in a position to disagree. His core research was understanding the autoimmune process that destroyed pancreatic beta cells in type 1 diabetics. It wasn’t sexy, but Geller needed a competent and fastidious wingman in this pursuit, and Baz was it.
The work was tedious, though by genetics standards it moved at lightning pace. One by one, Geller’s gene-replacement therapies proved effective for congenital disorders in rats, and the red queens were having dramatic effects on the more environmental cancers. Taken alone, any one of them would’ve been on the cover of Scientific American and hailed as revolutionary but he bided his time and kept the circle tight. The lab assistants never knew exactly what tests they were running or why, and they rarely asked. Only Baz knew the whole truth; even Biermann was led to believe they were still struggling to develop a single effective vector.
Martin abruptly left college the next year. That left Geller homeless, so out of convenience and a desire to extend the workday, he moved into a cramped second-floor apartment with Baz and his fiancé. It was a dump, but he was often at the lab for 18 hours at a stretch so it didn’t matter. Baz kept more normal hours, though Lucia continually bemoaned his workload.
It was an exciting time for the two of them, and it seemed like a new breakthrough was always just around the corner because it often was. Though not religious, Baz was still spiritual and he saw in Geller something almost godlike. His genius was so special, so prescient, that it made the scientific method seem perfunctory at times. By gut instinct or providence he would rule out combinations that anyone else would have had to test to know they didn’t work, and it saved incredible amounts of time. And time was of the essence.
Yet for all his talents, Baz came to understand a great irony behind Geller’s tireless pursuits to develop his treatment: He was a misanthrope of the highest order.
Occasionally, they would leave the lab to get lunch. One day they sat down to their Gordo’s subs at a little table next to the sidewalk just a few blocks from their building. Three women came by having a loud conversation when the heaviest of the three tripped and fell. Baz instantly sprang from his chair and hurried to her aid, along with a couple other people eating nearby. Geller paused chewing and looked on, bemused, while Baz gently helped the woman to her feet and verified that she was okay. She thanked him and they continued.
“Well that was something,” Baz had said.
Geller chuckled and wiped a smear of mayo from the corner of his mouth. “Pretty big production.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s
a 35-year-old woman with no obvious impairments. I’d bet you a thousand dollars she couldn’t lift 20 pounds.”
“So what?”
“I’m just saying she’s lucky she’s not a gazelle, that’s all.”
“Someone falls, you help them up. It’s what people do. Well, people who aren’t you.”
Geller shrugged. “Natural selection has failed us. More like we’ve failed it.”
Baz stared at him, incredulous. “You’re a horror show.”
“Hey, if I ever trip and fall on a half-inch of sidewalk, you won’t have to help me—I’ll cull myself from the herd. Are you gonna eat your pickle?”
6
When Lyle was a kid, Pioneer Crest Cemetery was new. The labyrinth of narrow roads were the smoothest runs of asphalt anywhere in town, and he rode his bike there often. They wound around the hillside in a pattern that might have resembled church pews if viewed from above, and had great sight lines, so it was easy to jump off your bike when you saw a car and make like you were there to grieve.
In fact, Lyle did have a reason to be there, even as a kid. His great-grandfather on his mother’s side, whom he never knew, was a wealthy businessman of some sort—shipping, if he remembered correctly. He’d purchased a substantial family plot with perpetual care so all his descendants could be interred together under a plain, authoritative black monolith bearing his surname: FISCHER. As he wished, a community of stones marking the remains of Fischers and Carmodys and Ungers and Trevains now encircled it.
One day after school, his mother drove him there and they walked among the plot as she shared tidbits of information about every distant, long-dead relative under their feet. Some led interesting lives, some not, but he never forgot how much it mattered to her that she was the keeper of that information. Like each little piece of history was a handwritten note on a wrinkled piece of paper she kept in her pocket. It was both sad and beautiful, not unlike the cemetery itself.
Laura’s grave was among the first in an entirely new section of the cemetery. She would’ve appreciated his thoughtfulness in choosing it, which was to balance convenience with seclusion. Their plot backed up to a stand of Douglas firs, with a fence on one side and a bend in the little road on another so only one side could be next to another plot. There was nothing to see except more of the cemetery, technically the back side, which rose to the eponymous crest before spilling back down toward Triad Parkway. When it rained hard, it was possible that not even the elaborate system of culverts and French drains crisscrossing the cemetery would be able to direct all the water away from Laura’s corner, but there again she would’ve appreciated Lyle’s logic: She loved the water.
But this day was sunny and beautiful. Chilly, but that was the trade-off for a clear February day in Seattle. He removed the folding chair and fleece blanket from the trunk and walked it over to her gravesite, setting the chair atop his own plot. He felt a little bit guilty about choosing burial over cremation, but there was something more dignified about a cemetery. Her absence was a presence. He talked to her like he wanted, but not with the casual freedom he envisioned. It still felt like she was there, listening.
Work was the only thing keeping him together. He had little to do with the day-to-day operations, focusing instead on philanthropy and certain special projects. These days that meant the Merriweather Prize.
He initially envisioned a true cancer cure, on account of Laura, and wanted to call it the Laura Merriweather Prize. But his committee of scientists convinced him to make it more general to include a spectrum of groundbreaking medical research, and to just use his surname. Lyle valued science, so it frustrated him to know how thoroughly it failed Laura. He believed humans ought to do better. He had the means and the will, and so he put things into motion.
Nearly three years had passed with no luck. The media had long since forgotten about it, and news of promising new submissions amounted to a cry-wolf scenario. The committee met semiannually to review both new submissions and the financial health of the Merriweather Prize Trust. A silver lining to it was that the trust had done exceedingly well—so well, in fact, that they could award nearly double the promised amount to whomever came forward with the brass ring.
But none came.
There were flickers of hope. About a year earlier, a Norwegian team presented early research that might eventually lead to a cure for Tay-Sachs, a lethal nervous disorder in children caused by a defective gene on chromosome 15. Japanese researchers claimed to have cured cystic fibrosis in laboratory mice, but the committee poked too many holes in their findings to take them seriously.
The committee always met at the Emerald Club, a members-only club that occupied the top two floors of the Paramour Hotel. Lyle’s company had a corporate membership but he rarely set foot in the place. It was pretentious and expensive, and he would’ve preferred a food cart in the park. But, they had a great conference room and it seemed more like neutral territory than his office building.
Lyle heard the patter of voices from the door of the open conference room and entered. Isaac Lindh, chair of the committee, had just removed his jacket. Four others were already seated.
“Hello, Lyle,” he said in his thick accent.
“Isaac, good to see you,” Lyle said, and shook his hand. He did the same with the others who had beaten him there: Spivey, Alward, Ita and Djoumbe.
Lindh was a feisty Nobel laureate in genetics, and one of the top scientific minds in the world. His staff weeded out so many crackpot submissions that he and the committee had only ever laid eyes on the legit Norwegian and Japanese efforts. He and Lyle respected each other, but they never got on well. It made for some interesting meetings.
The remaining four greeted each other and exchanged pleasantries as they entered. McCarter was last to arrive, having missed his connection in San Francisco. They officially began 25 minutes late, which irritated Lyle to no end. The foundation paid the committee very well to do very little. Ramirez, Hyler, Abbott and Ramadi were more or less on time. Finally Sarika Hyler, the only woman besides Eileen Alward, read back the minutes from their previous meeting and everyone turned to Lindh.
“Yes. Well. My people flagged 13 submissions since our last meeting,” he said, pausing to hand out neatly prepared little packets. “Unfortunately, they are unworthy of consideration. Abstracts and evaluations are in your reports if you’re so inclined.”
Lyle flipped through the pages, but most of it was over his head. This is how it usually went with Lindh; he poo-poohed anything of which he was not personally in awe. But Lyle knew to trust the scientists with the science, and the others trusted Lindh. They read through the packet in silence for several minutes.
“I’ve read about this jellyfish protein,” said Noel Ramadi, a biochemist, tapping the printed document with his thin finger. “The initial research was extremely promising.”
“Yes, I read about it as well,” Lindh said, rubbing his eyes. “And in three or four years, we’ll know more, but it’s not ready for prime time and it’s not the kind of … panacea we’re all here to find anyway.”
Lindh glanced in Lyle’s direction as curled his lips around every syllable of “panacea.” He leaned back in his chair and sighed heavily.
“Lyle, we believe in what you’re trying to do. No one has ever sought to reward scientific innovation to anywhere near this degree before. But the parameters we’re working with are simply impractical. In this report are 13 projects that, taken together, would move medicine forward a decade, if not more. Even if we chose 10 such projects to support, each of them is still coming away with nearly $200 million. Science doesn’t move at the pace you want it to. In fact, if it did, it would be irresponsible.”
“You’re saying put the money to use, now,” Lyle said, trying to match Lindh’s tone.
“It’s been nearly three years.”
Lyle’s eyes searched the others in the room. He could see that most were inclined to agree with Lindh, but opted to test that theory.
They exchanged nervous glances.
“I may speak only for myself, but it is a hard point to disagree with,” said Ramirez. “The wheels of science turn slowly. Groundbreaking discoveries usually follow years or even decades of groundwork.”
Nods all around the table. Lyle folded his hands on the table in front of him.
“Only a couple of you knew Laura. She was sort of this constant light source. For me, for everyone who knew her. Just brightened the room, y’know? I’m sure you all know someone like that. Anyway, as she got sicker and sicker, it was like this black thing snaked its way through her body and started to dim that light. I’m not talking in metaphors here; she was literally dimmed by it.”
Everyone lowered their eyes.
“I don’t deny the value of treatments. God knows, if I could’ve found anything else to extend her life, I would’ve. But what I really wanted was for her not to have this thing at all. What I wanted was for there to be nothing to treat in the first place. After she passed, that’s all I could think about. If our sole focus isn’t to keep these terrible things from happening to the people we care about, then what else is there? What else is worth spending time on besides that?”
He looked around. No one said anything.
“We stay the course for another year, then we have this conversation again. This was a dream I had for Laura, and even if I’ve let go of her, I can’t let go of it. Not yet.”
7
The lab was dark and silent, but not empty. Geller was there, checking on the animals and entering notes in a tablet. The last time Baz had seen him was at the apartment Wednesday morning, and it was Friday. It was likely he hadn’t left the room.