by C. P. James
Many think Baz should’ve stood in my way, and been the voice of reason. That thinking is flawed for two reasons: One, neither Baz nor anyone else could have stopped me. I was at the peak of my abilities, highly driven, and highly productive. Two, continuing with our work was the only reasonable thing. Say you like to garden, but a stubborn weed takes over. Nothing you try to get rid of it works until one day, it just does. Would you stop before it was gone?
10
The call came a week later. Geller had spent the morning in the lab as usual, only he’d decided to take a break from the “Cure,” as he and Baz called it, and instead helped Biermann supervise a small group of weary grad students assisting with Biermann’s own immaterial research. No one was more surprised at this than Biermann, but he kept his mouth shut.
There was a message from Merriweather himself on his voicemail, with his private number. He eased into the couch, put his feet on the coffee table and turned on the news, muting it instantly. Mudslides in Sri Lanka, hundreds dead. He dialed.
“Dr. Geller.”
“Mr. Merriweather. I didn’t expect to hear from you so—”
“Have you eaten?”
“Um … no. Why?”
“I’m in town. I’d like to chat over dinner if you’re free.”
Geller tried not to laugh. One of the world’s wealthiest men was calling asking if a meeting fit into his schedule.
“We might have a couple bean burritos in the freezer. Oh, I’ll bet you meant go out.”
Lyle chuckled. “My car will be there in ten minutes.”
It was. Geller had his jacket on, looking out the window when a black Mercedes sedan pulled up in front of the house. Baz and Lucia were across town, having dinner on their own with Lucia’s family so the house was unusually quiet. He killed the lights, ran down the steps and climbed in the back seat of the Mercedes, where Lyle was waiting.
They went to Elysium, an upscale place Geller had only heard about. A few people seemed to recognize Lyle, but he paid them no mind. Geller wore a sport coat and a dress shirt, but still felt underdressed. Lyle ordered a bottle of wine without consulting the list and made small talk while they waited for it to arrive. He approved of the wine once proffered and ordered for Geller, who was okay with that. After they ordered, Lyle took a sip of wine and smiled.
“I figure you know why we’re here, Dr. Geller.”
“Is it the consolation prize? Lemme guess—a box of Omaha Steaks.”
He smiled. “You were … impressive the other day.”
“I thought it went well. You might as well call me Brent, by the way.”
“Lyle.”
“Cool.”
“So why do you do what you do?”
“What? Research?”
“This research.”
Geller paused. “I guess I want to help people.”
“Is that right?” He was skeptical.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve noticed how you look at people. How you talk to them. They’re cattle. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Geller cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t think that’s quite—”
“I think it’s pure ego. I think what you want more than anything is for the world to acknowledge your genius. To celebrate you. On fourth and long, and you want the ball.”
Again, Geller paused. Lyle sort of had his number, and that was weird. “Would that disqualify me?”
“Only if you didn’t admit it. In a way, it makes me that much more confident about you. I don't think you'd risk being wrong.”
“Alright.”
“If you pull this off, it will change everything. You, me, the world, the economy, life expectancies. You realize that, of course.”
Geller shrugged. “I don’t think about it that way.”
Lyle sighed. “I’m trying to convince myself that doing good for the wrong reasons is still doing good. I’m sort of a bleeding heart.”
“I’m not interested in the money, if that’s what you mean. Not for myself, at least.”
“No one’s interested in money. They’re interested in what they can do with it.”
“What I want to do will take lots of money.”
“Why would you want more people, living longer? We already have overpopulation problems.”
“It’s the challenge. Something to match wits with. Human suffering is a clever opponent.”
“Ah, now we’re getting down to it. And what if you run out of those? Clever opponents, I mean.”
“Maybe I’d learn how to fly fish.”
Lyle smirked and took an experienced sip of his wine, let it tumble over his palate, and leaned over the table.
“You scare me, Brent. The people in the room with you last week are some of the world’s best minds. You're so goddamned far ahead of your time here that I’m not sure anyone knows what questions are the right ones. Which angles are left to consider. They’d never admit it, but they barely knew what to tell me about what you had to say.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I don’t think you have many peers. If any. So either we wait until the world catches up with your mind so we can ask the right questions, or—”
“—or you give me the keys to a billion-dollar car. I get it. I’m a risk.”
“It’s not that. A billion is a lot of money, but as far as the foundation goes it’s not betting the farm. Plus, if you do anything remotely interesting we’ll make it back pretty quickly.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“You don’t care about fame or money, you don’t care about people, and I don’t think you care about doing something good for humanity. I’m trying to understand what you do care about.”
Geller didn’t get intimidated, and he started to feel that this was Lyle’s goal. He’d had enough.
“I care about being right.”
“Now that I believe.”
“You don’t need anyone to ask the right questions, Lyle, because I’ve already asked them. If you want to keep auditioning wannabes for the next 10 years, go right ahead. I’m moving forward either way. And when I do what I know I’m going to do, we’ll prove each other right and all this hemming and hawing will seem funny.”
Lyle studied him for a long few seconds, during which Geller just stared right back.
“This is going to be your legacy, one way or another. After this, nothing else you do will matter.”
“I’m good with that.”
“Okay, then.” He raised his glass. “To the Cure.”
Geller raised his as well. “To the Cure.”
11
The Billion Dollar Man
Dr. Brent Geller beat out thousands of the world’s best scientists to win the $1B Merriweather Prize. Now what?
by Marcus Olivetti
(from Time, Oct. 18, 2022)
Brent Geller has a headache. He doesn’t have any remedy and doesn’t ask for any, but our photographer for the day, a freelancer named Dave, offers him a couple ibuprofen. Dr. Geller—Brent, as he prefers to be called—takes them without water (or thanks) and tries to focus on my questions. Less than a week after being announced the winner of the $1 billion Merriweather Prize, by far the largest and most ambitious reward in history for scientific innovation, he is playing the part of put-upon celebrity with aplomb.
The oldest of two children (his sister, Jennifer, died of complications from Down syndrome at 17), Geller was born to Julianne and Arthur Geller, owners of one of the last small-town pharmacies in Ohio. He showed an early interest in science, preferring his father’s plastic molecule sets to toy cars or video games. At his seventh birthday party, he entertained friends by demonstrating the leidenfrost effect—a phenomenon where droplets of water in contact with a smooth, very hot surface dance around on it without evaporating. In the process he warped his mother’s favorite steel mixing bowl. Emboldened by their wide-eyed reaction, he made a vinegar/baking soda rocket out of an empty 2-liter bottle and sent it flying almost a hundred feet into the n
eighbor’s yard.
“It should’ve gone twice as far, but it was a rush job,” he recalls with a rare smile. “I had people to impress.”
He finished high school by age 15, college by 18 and completed his MD and PhD—simultaneously—in four years. His most recent post-doctoral supervisor at the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Horst Biermann, says Geller’s mind doesn’t work the way the rest of ours do.
“The scientific method is hypothesize, test, evaluate, repeat. Over time, you get closer to the answer by finding what doesn’t work, like throwing darts and getting closer to the bullseye each time,” Biermann said. “Brent has a way of hitting that bullseye on the first or second dart, every time. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s almost prescient.”
That prescience led Geller and his research partner, Dr. Basilio Montes, to develop a gene-therapy cocktail of sorts that could treat nearly three dozen diseases with genetic triggers all at once, including several cancers with genetic markers. They just call it the Cure.
“To this point, gene therapies have been a bit like time travel—anything you change has unpredictable repercussions in the future,” Montes explained. “Brent thought it might be possible to engineer those future repercussions to only be beneficial, like a desirable side effect.”
Traditional gene therapies are reactive, using modified viruses called vectors to deliver new genetic instructions to defective cells. The cells can be instructed to do any number of things, from manufacturing a specific protein to block or encourage certain genetic pathways in the body, or hosting the vector while it makes copies of itself (which is what viruses do). The problem is that the problem cells are constantly dying off or multiplying. Regular treatments are required in perpetuity for the treatment to have any positive effect, if it works at all.
The Cure simplifies matters by proactively replacing all the genes tied to specific disorders, whether the flaw is present or not. If the gene was fine to begin with, then the DNA is essentially unchanged. If not, it’s fixed. For the genes to stay fixed, they need to be replaced while there are a small number of undifferentiated cells. There lies the rub of this already controversial treatment: It can only be delivered in vitro.
“No expectant mother can be dismissive about this,” Geller says. “If they carry the gene for a particular disorder, they can guarantee their child, their grandchildren, and on down the line won’t. This is their gift to the future.”
Preventive gene therapy has never had an ally in the FDA. Even the scientific community has approached it with kid gloves because of the moral and ethical questions of “playing God.” But if what Geller says is true, it may be the only way to do it right.
He adds that we’ve known for years—decades, in some cases—the genes that cause specific disorders.
“If we can fix those broken genes at the earliest stages of development, then only healthy genes are passed on,” he says. “If we have the technology to change that—and we do—why wouldn’t we?”
Geller’s ambition is to equip an entire generation with flawless genes, heading off debilitating and fatal genetic disorders just as life begins and essentially freeing future generations from them. Mutations in those or other genes can still occur, for environmental and other reasons but he believes that by then, instances of the disorder in question would be extremely rare. Lou Gehrig’s? Gone. Parkinson’s? History. Huntington’s? Buh-bye. All together, the Cure would theoretically eliminate 34 diseases with clear genetic links from the American gene pool.
“We still don’t know exactly how many genes are in humans, but we’re close. It’s around 25,000. We’re looking to replace a few dozen that tend to cause trouble, and leave the rest,” he says, making it sound both simple and obvious.
As details of the Cure and the Merriweather Prize have been splashed all over the web, religious groups worldwide have lined up to denounce it. Father Guiseppe Alarcon, a spokesperson for the Vatican, issued a statement on behalf of Pope Leo IX that read, in part, “We are gravely concerned about the moral and ethical implications of this treatment, which may interfere with God’s Law. As has always been the case, we should be very wary of ‘miracle’ drugs.”
But Geller’s supporters happen to include President McMillian, who, ironically, is a devout Catholic. His closed-door meeting with Geller days after the announcement was followed by a brief grip-and-grin outside the oval office, during which he told reporters, “My grandmother always told me, ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’ I believe that Dr. Geller’s research has the potential to keep millions of Americans safe and healthy, and I look forward to seeing the fruits of his labor.”
The implications of White House support are far-reaching. McMillan may be religious, but he’s no fool; an FDA-approved treatment of this magnitude and scope could be just the sort of catalyst the long-suffering economy needs. Even though Geller has promised that The Cure will be free (more on that in a moment), the thought of an entire generation of healthy citizens begetting another would be tantalizing to any head of state, especially one riding the caboose on the recession train. Not only could they work harder and longer than an untreated generation, but they would be much less of a drain on the healthcare system and so would their children—at least in theory.
Interestingly, the religious right’s moral issues with the Cure may be a much easier hurdle to clear than its planned price tag: free. The healthcare industry finds itself in the position of having to applaud the development publicly while shareholders of Big Pharma wring their hands.
“Sick people have always been good business,” says economist Walter Horvath, a senior fellow at the Lewiston Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank focused on the healthcare industry. “But the drugs they need are even better business. This is a game-changer, and the industry knows it.”
Big Pharma depends on many of the diseases Geller’s magic cocktail cures, especially considering the hefty price tag commanded by things like chemotherapy drugs. But when it comes to eliminating competitive threats, Horvath says they hold two aces: time and money.
“First off, there are a lot of ifs. If the Cure gets FDA approval, and if it gets administered widely, and if it works the way it’s supposed to, then pharmaceutical companies might have a real problem on their hands. But all that is going to take time, and you’d better believe they’re going to try and figure out their own thing. If they don’t or can’t, they might come to Brent Geller with enough money to make $1 billion look like chump change.”
But if what Dr. Geller says is true, he doesn’t care about the money. And if time is money, he doesn’t care about that much either.
“Edward Jenner gave the world the smallpox vaccine and he was hailed as a great humanitarian,” Geller says. “Someone does that today and people think, ‘What’s the catch?’ ‘What angle is he working?’ We’ve gotten very cynical that way. There is no catch, and there is no angle. This is the battle I was born to fight, and I feel uniquely qualified to fight it.”
12
Dr. Biermann, principal investigator on Baz and Geller’s grant, threw the two of them a party before they left. At that point, it was hard for him to get too worked up about the extent to which they’d taken advantage of his hands-off approach, because they’d tested and improved upon an effective gene therapy for liver cancer. All he knew besides that was that Geller had won the Merriweather Prize, and that it probably was because of work they’d done right under his nose. But issues of intellectual property could be debated later; it was time to eat schnitzel. And so they did. Baz considered himself a vegetarian but obliged Biermann with a small piece of the breaded pork. Geller’s ratio of hefeweizen to schnitzel was about 4:1, which was just as well since Baz was driving.
The next several months were exciting and stressful. Lyle appointed a board to oversee the Merriweather Development Corporation, whose charge it was to build the literal and logistical foundations for what would eventually become their base of operations. They purcha
sed 500 wooded acres in a remote part of Colorado, which had offered substantial tax breaks in addition to privacy and beauty.
Baz took great interest in this end of the planning, sitting in on board meetings and videoconferences and proving himself to be a savvy and enthusiastic administrator. Geller had some clear ideas about the lab spaces themselves and some interesting opinions about the overall architecture, but for the most part he remained in the background. It was an awkward and frustrating period for Geller, who was nearly mad with boredom. He no longer had the free reign he enjoyed under Biermann and had signed agreements with Merriweather’s people saying he would suspend all work on the treatment, so mostly he read, wrote, and filled notebooks full of formulas and ideas for whatever might come next from a dingy temporary office at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Faculty regarded him with curiosity and awe until they met him, after which they gave him a wide berth.
During this time, a strange partnership developed between Geller and Merriweather. It wasn’t anything like what he’d had with his old college mentor Jim Robb; it was more like a mutual fascination. Merriweather understood very well who and what Geller was but believed in him anyway. His fundamental goodness could be important in the times to come, and Geller knew it. They did a press tour, spending the better part of a week together in New York doing talk shows and late-night TV, and another few days in LA doing the same.
Merriweather didn’t care for the spotlight but was always ready with a sound bite or two. Geller, by contrast, came off as every bit the cynical, egomaniacal scientific genius he was. The Robert Ripley/World’s Smartest Man dynamic played well on TV. Still, Geller grew tired of explaining the how and why of his work, and the ways in which it would change the world. He wanted to get going.
Baz and Geller were rarely together while their facility and staff were built. They communicated occasionally via video, with Geller deferring to Baz about any decisions he considered boring. He and Lucia had married just a few months into the process and went on their honeymoon as planned even though it put everything else on hold. When Geller’s phone finally rang, it was the Kyra Broyles Show back in New York. With nearly 10 million regular viewers, mostly women, Geller couldn’t afford to blow it off.