by C. P. James
Around the time Baz was due back at the construction site, Geller was on his way to join Merriweather in New York. Though they were years away from having a treatment that ordinary people could get, Merriweather felt it was important to get women on their bus because it could grease the skids for FDA approval. Geller felt like he was constantly defending the science, which was silly since only a handful of people in the world truly understood it. Lyle did most of the talking.
The studio was on West 57th, on the 22nd floor of Hearst Tower. Geller got in the makeup chair for a few minutes, and sat in the green room for almost an hour before Lyle finally showed up with maybe ten minutes to spare. The producer, Gwen, was so apoplectic by then that Lyle’s arrival didn’t calm her at all. He offered no explanation for being late. The same makeup person who worked on Geller entered in a huff with a small pouch and pointed to one of the vanities.
“Sit.”
Lyle flashed a look at Geller, who shrugged and obliged the young girl who tried to eliminate the shine on his bald head, checking the clock over the door every ten seconds. It was 4:57.
“What’re we talking about again?” Lyle asked.
“Construction progress, I’d imagine,” Geller replied. “Maybe the studio audience can help us pick out window treatments.”
“Business, me—science, you.”
“I know the drill.”
The makeup girl sighed and gave Lyle’s forehead a final dab of powder, undid the collar protector, and expertly restored his tie to its original position. She looked defeated.
“That’s as good as you’re going to get.”
“I look twenty years younger. Thank you,” Lyle said, and handed her a folded $100. “I’m sorry I stressed you out.”
Geller watched this with great interest, then wondered if he would do the same when he was a billionaire. He doubted it.
The girl considered it for a moment, then shoved the money in her pocked moments before Gwen barreled through the door and held it open.
“Sixty seconds, guys. Time to move,” she said.
Lyle rose, smoothed his jacket, and moved into the doorway as Gwen took off in a huff down the hallway. She was waiting for them when they arrived, glaring at them as though they’d stopped off for a sandwich. She put a finger to her lips and opened the studio door and ushered them toward another producer, who led them to the side of a large set piece crisscrossed with runs of electrical conduit. They could sense the studio audience and heard the applause when Kyra introduced them. The producer gestured toward the opening and they walked in.
The interview went as most did—a recap of who they were and why they were there, followed by a summary of what was going on now. As usual, Lyle did most of the talking. He was charming and authoritative, two of the many traits that made him a good leader. After a commercial break, however, the conversation turned toward the science. Geller talked generally about what their treatment would and wouldn't do, and then Kyra said:
“Dr. Geller, there are growing concerns in the religious and medical communities about an in-vitro gene therapy. Some religious leaders believe you’re playing God, while there are medical researchers who believe your plan is too ambitious to work. What do you say to your critics?”
In the chair next to him, Lyle sucked in some breath and shifted in his seat.
“Well, Kyra, religious leaders like to tell their feeble-minded followers what they can’t or shouldn’t do, and my colleagues in medicine who fret over ambition either have none themselves or haven’t bothered to read our research.”
Kyra’s eyes glinted in the studio lights as she leaned in.
“I’m sorry—did you say that people of faith are feeble-minded?”
“They prefer believing to knowing, so draw your own conclusions. Frankly, I don’t know why they have a voice in this discussion. If you want to talk morality, then how about the morality of letting preventable diseases continue to exist?”
“So what about the medical community?”
“Most science takes baby steps. This is like the long jump. Not many of them can get their heads around it. It’s fine to be skeptical if you know what you’re looking at, but otherwise …”
He trailed off, followed by a profound silence.
“Kyra, we are so excited to talk about the facility we’re building in Colorado,” Lyle said.
Geller rolled his eyes and leaned back. Kyra took Lyle’s cue and launched into questions about the facility, though she frequently looked past him at Geller, who no longer appeared to be listening.
After a while they concluded the interview and a production assistant removed their lapel mics. The same producer that rushed them out of the green room ushered them back out the studio door. Lyle thanked her, and the door auto-closed shut.
“What the fuck, Brent?!” Lyle hissed. Geller had never heard him swear.
“I forgot I’m supposed to be a set piece.”
“She baited you and you took it.”
“It was good TV. That’s all these morons care about.”
Lyle whirled suddenly, planted his big hand in the middle of Geller’s chest and shoved him hard against the wall, like a senior to a freshman. Geller was stunned. Lyle leaned in close, his breath redolent of the pastrami sandwich he had at lunch.
“I know what you are, Brent. I’ve known since the first time we met. You’re not the kind of man I would associate with unless I thought you were the only one—the only fucking one—who I thought was the real deal. Don’t make me regret that any more than I already do.”
Geller reached into his pocket, smirking, and proffered a stick of peppermint gum.
“Seriously,” he said.
Lyle eased back on his hand and straightened his suit coat. He stared at Geller for a few moments, shook his head, and strode, fuming, down the hall. Geller popped the gum in his mouth.
13
The Geller Institute for Genetics, or GIG, opened its doors two years after the official awarding of the Merriweather Prize. Private investors footed the bill for the massive, state-of-the-art facility in the mountains west of Denver, which left Geller pretty much the full $1 billion (plus interest) to fill it with equipment, lab assistants, and a small army of lobbyists and lawyers whose only job was to lay the tracks that led to FDA approval. But once the dust settled, Geller’s peers had become very doubtful of his success. Investors were still bullish on the whole thing, but to the larger scientific community it still seemed like science fiction. The net result was that Geller didn’t have many people on his side who weren’t on the payroll.
That was just fine with him. His team was small and connected—mostly people he knew from earlier in his career. There was Baz, of course, and Biermann left UW to oversee lab operations. As a nod to Lyle, he even hired Kihn and Alward—the two geneticists on the prize panel. The long-term challenge would be to synthesize the Cure so it could be produced at scale. To that end, he’d hired a Dr. Li-Xiong Xu, who oversaw the production and distribution of the H1N1 vaccine in the 2000s.
Preclinical trials on animals tested toxicity the synthetic protein mixture Baz devised to carry the viral vectors. But the need for in-vitro delivery meant that Phase 1 trials had to use live embryos. Geller knew from stem-cell studies that his treatment would only be effective on embryos aged 60-90 days. There wasn’t a huge population of mothers-to-be with family histories of genetic disorders willing to endure nine microinjections into their marble-sized unborn children when it would take years to know if it was safe. Geller’s team found just 17 in the first year, and they didn’t come cheap.
Phase II trials couldn’t begin until they showed the FDA that the initial test group hadn’t been harmed, cognitively or functionally, by the treatment. Phase 2 would have a much larger test group, and from there into phases 3 and 4, the number of subjects would continue to grow along with length of time between follow-ups. In all, Geller anticipated that full FDA approval of the Cure would take 8–10 years. That was a long time, but
not nearly as long as if each of its 34 elements had been developed and tested separately.
The first person to receive the Cure was a young Hispanic woman named Veronica Veracruz, or Vivi. She’d literally been in the stirrups at an abortion clinic when her doctor mentioned the GIG trial and the six-figure stipend they were offering. It troubled Geller that her interest in the trial was purely financial, and that the chance to make history held no meaning for her. But she fit the profile of a young, healthy mother with at least one genetic Trojan horse: Tay-Sachs, a rare disorder that usually results in death by age four or younger and was addressed by the Cure.
A series of robotically guided microinjections were necessary because the embryo was too small for anything else. That was fine, because Geller had figured out that breaking the treatment up into parts and delivering it in a particular order would actually be more effective. Some of the injections went right into the embryo itself while others went into the umbilicus. The procedure had been practiced hundreds of times by Geller’s surgical team, mostly on chimps, so everyone was happy but not surprised when Vivi’s treatment went flawlessly. Over the next few months, 15 others received it; one freaked out at the last second and changed her mind on the table. It was a very exciting time at GIG, but it didn’t take long for everyone to realize that, at least when it came to the Cure, there wasn’t much for any of them to do but wait.
Phase 2 trials began the following year on the heels of Phase 1’s unequivocal success. Vivi’s son, Perfecto, was a healthy 10-year-old who joined his Phase 1 cohort (6 other boys, 9 girls) on the cover of TIME (“The Cure: 10 Years Later”), smiling and fairly glowing with youth, as a follow-up to its first article about Geller. GIG’s PR department had planned it that way to reinforce the safety of the treatment. DNA tests, the results of which were published with the article, confirmed the absence of recessive or dominant disease genes. Any random sample of 16 10-year-olds probably would have shown the same thing, but just the fact that they were all healthy was enough to silence many of Geller’s former critics.
The same couldn't be said about Vivi, who died of a heroin overdose when Perfecto was only two. He became a ward of the state for about three months, before being adopted by Baz and Lucia. They were unable to have children of their own.
Geller was 37 and firing on all cylinders. Their FDA fast-track plan was working. The Phase 2 trial would expand to nearly 200, and thanks to all the publicity about the 10-year anniversary, there was all kinds of pressure to make the Cure available to the public. However, the economy was still foundering. Joblessness and political instability at home combined with unprecedented unrest in Europe and Southeast Asia to create a global mess. China and the US were the only superpowers left standing.
While Phase 2 continued, GIG churned out hundreds of patents, on everything from new lab equipment to food additives that sped the absorption of minerals by dairy cows. Geller kept his inner circle tight and hired many of the world’s best scientific minds away from other places. GIG was slated to have 13 regional clinics, spread around the country in order to make the Cure easy to get.
Geller kept mostly to himself. Baz was usually the top executive at any company function, or if Geller showed up it would be for an awkward couple of attaboys before disappearing back into the lab. Some days he would hike up the ridge behind the building and not return for hours. He’d been inscrutable and odd since anyone could recall, so no one thought much of it. Mostly he left everyone to do their job, and no one had much of a problem with that.
President Art Dixon was re-elected to a second term in 2036 by the narrowest of margins—a fortunate outcome, considering his support of the sciences. GIG was both a productive startup and a research center, garnering support across the political spectrum. Geller’s notoriety ebbed and flowed, more or less in step with GIG’s. His intuition about new models and ways of thinking was undimmed by time. He already had started planning future embellishments to the Cure that included more forms of cancer and rarer genetic diseases like the blood disorder porphyria and the enzyme disorder phenylketonuria. Each enhancement added several orders of complexity to how the treatment was designed and delivered, but considering how long it would be before any of it came to pass, he figured he had time to sort it out. He held enough patents by then that he didn’t have to worry about money, either.
Perfecto and his fellow test subjects were regular visitors to GIG. The general health of the volunteers was of great concern to GIG, so it was part of the deal. Of course, most of the blood tests and scans wouldn’t have been standard procedure for a hometown clinic, but parents didn’t seem to mind. Everyone really was quite healthy, and any lingering fears they had about the Cure’s safety had ebbed.
Late that summer, a former professor of Geller’s named Jim Robb called. They hadn’t spoken in years, so he favored Geller with news of his undergrad alma mater, Laird College. Once the small talk petered out, Robb revealed his real reason for calling, which was to invite Geller to the grand opening of the new science building he’d contributed the final $20 million to build. Appropriately, it was being named Geller Hall.
To Robb’s surprise, he agreed without hesitation.
14
Professor Robb was the reason Geller chose Laird, a tiny liberal-arts college on Michigan’s beautiful western shore, over the many Harvards and Princetons that offered him everything. For those scientists and donors who had followed his career and wooed him to attend their institutions, it came as quite a shock. There was no legacy connection to the college, which was better known for its chamber choir than for the sciences. But anyone who knew about Geller would have understood why Professor Robb succeeded in recruiting him where so many others did not: He appealed to his ego.
In an e-mail to Geller, Robb explained he had a problem. A of Costa Rican frog species he’d studied for years was dying out because of diminished reproductive success. He’d eliminated environmental factors such as pesticides, yet smaller and smaller numbers of eggs were hatching. He hoped Geller might have a theory why, and whether anything could be done about it. There was no mention about visiting Laird, scholarships, student life or the usual pablum—just a small-town PhD with a problem he couldn’t solve.
Geller responded to that on two levels: One, he had done extensive, graduate-level work on frog reproduction as part of an 8th-grade science project. Two, he knew and admired Robb’s work. In a sense, their relationship already felt collegial. Everyone else’s pitch was based on what great minds he could learn from, and all the dazzling things they would help him do. But even at 14, Geller knew he needed people smart enough to get out of his way. It didn’t matter where he did his undergrad—he’d only be there a couple years anyway. A tenured, widely published expert asked a kid prodigy for advice on a real-world problem. That was good enough for him.
Within a month of matriculating, Geller accompanied Robb to Costa Rica to spend two weeks in the rainforest studying the frogs. Three days in, Geller identified a mutation that made their eggs’ outer walls slightly too thick for most tadpoles to break through, or for the water to break them down in time. He designed a cross-breeding program to slowly eliminate the mutation from the gene pool, ultimately sharing authorship of the resulting paper with Robb, who got a big NSF grant out of the bargain.
Geller left Laird with a BS two years later and started grad school at the University of Wisconsin immediately afterward. Robb sent him a note of congratulations after the Merriweather announcement, which Geller didn’t see because he never read his e-mail. Other than that they hadn’t been in touch for about 17 years, so Robb was a little surprised when Geller accepted his invitation to attend the grand opening and contribute to the time capsule.
The college spent the next few months figuring out how how to get their wealthiest and most reclusive alumnus back to campus. Geller’s check for $45 million was an ordinary bank note that came in the mail by itself, with “science building” typed in the memo line. An awkward series of p
hone calls, letters and emails between the college and Geller’s administrative assistant followed, during which they only learned that Geller was “fine” with having his name on the building if that’s what they wanted. He didn’t attend the groundbreaking ceremony, so Robb’s successful efforts to land Geller made him something of a hero; his sabbatical request for the spring semester was granted without hesitation.
Robb, along with Laird President Ryan Humphries, met Geller’s jet at the airport. For all his faults, Geller was still as unpretentious as they came; he emerged wearing faded Bermuda shorts and a plain T-shirt. Robb warned President Humphries to expect as much, and couldn’t help but smile a little at knowing he still knew a thing or two about the inscrutable Brent Geller.
Mrs. Humphries prepared a gourmet feast at the president’s house for the four of them, plus select members of the board and three science professors emeriti. After a few glasses of cabernet, Geller was downright garrulous, even to the point of sounding interested in the long-retired professors’ accounts of their own research, and what they could have done with more funding, and the Internet, and so on. He endured the trustees’ faked understanding of his work, and even shared stories from his and Robb’s exploits in Costa Rica. Eventually the evening wound down and everyone departed except Geller himself, who tipsily accepted Humphries’ invitation to stay in the attached guest house for the night. Arrangements were made for the ceremony the next evening.