by Dara Horn
Why Hannah Mendelsohn, Badass Biologist
Who Developed the First Effective Anti-Dementia
Treatment, Wants Everyone to Die
Hannah Mendelsohn doesn’t know you, but she wants you to die.
Not now, but someday, when you’re old and satisfied, even if you’re sure you’ll always want more. “Dying is what gives life its meaning,” Mendelsohn asserts.
If that sounds obnoxious coming from an energetic 43-year-old biologist and mother of two, consider this: Nine years ago, before she began the work that led to Memagen, the anti-dementia treatment that comes to market this month, Mendelsohn was hard at work on defeating death. A recipient of a grant from Google, she and a team of colleagues were toiling away at expanding the human life span.
She laughs about it today. “Grant money makes people do really stupid things,” she says.
While Mendelsohn was researching life extension, a beloved grandmother died violently, running into a burning building to save Mendelsohn’s child. That marked the beginning of the end of Mendelsohn’s interest in immortality.
“She was very much against my research,” Mendelsohn said of her grandmother. “She had told me that she wanted to die. Her death was basically a suicide. I’m not a very spiritual person, but after she died I thought I could feel her judging me.” Then came Mendelsohn’s own bad news: lymphoma.
Her illness proved treatable, but harrowing. “After my diagnosis I couldn’t do anything at all professionally for over a year, even after the treatments ended,” Mendelsohn says. It forced her to do a lot of thinking, specifically about death.
“My fears while I was sick were pretty universal: not accomplishing as much as I’d hoped, not getting to see my children grow up,” Mendelsohn recalls. “But those are really dynamic things. Every stage of a project or year with a child is really different from the one before. And it’s exactly those changes that make those things matter,” she says. “I realized I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was afraid of no longer changing. I wanted to keep changing, keep making and seeing things change. And if you back up a bit, you see that none of that can happen without the arc of our lives, without one generation replacing another.”
When she returned to work, Mendelsohn decided to focus exclusively on cognitive deterioration. The result is Memagen, an entirely unprecedented
The baby stirred in Rachel’s lap, then opened its mouth and wailed. She put her phone down on the couch and brought her breast to the baby’s lips.
Nir came into the apartment and dropped a pack of diapers on the floor. He joined her on the couch, caressing her hair.
“Reading anything interesting?” he asked, pointing at her phone.
“Nothing new,” she said, and smiled.
“Of course not. Everything new is right here.” His face glowed as he kissed the baby’s head. “It’s so exciting, isn’t it? Here we are, at the very beginning.”
Rachel looked down at the baby and saw, in the tiny body at her breast, everything that awaited him. In weeks he would smile; in months he would crawl. He would stand, he would walk, he would run, he would grow, he would learn, he would labor, he would love, rage, dream, move through his own tunnels of joy and sorrow, bear both the light and the curse, suffer and die, and she would endure it all. But it was worth it, it was worth it, all of it was worth it.
The baby leaned away from her, removing himself from her body as he always would, again and again and again until he was buried in the earth. She held him up to face her in the room’s dim light.
“Yochanan,” she whispered, “I am watching.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
. . .
Historical portions of this book are drawn in part from Talmudic sources on the first-century sage Yochanan ben Zakkai, on the Jewish revolt against Rome, and on the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 CE, as well as from The Jewish War by Flavius Josephus and from Jacob Neusner’s scholarly biography of Yochanan ben Zakkai. I am indebted to Michael Wex for his comparison of Hillel’s maxim “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor” with the Golden Rule, found in his playfully titled How to Be a Mentsh (& Not a Shmuck), and to Ilana Kurshan for her interpretation of terumat hadeshen (the ritual clearing of ashes) in relation to family life, found in her radiant memoir If All the Seas Were Ink. I also thank her for checking the manuscript for continuity with traditional texts; any remaining errors are mine alone.
I was fortunate to have early readers, including Sarah Hurwitz and Roberta Schwartzman, who offered me much-needed encouragement at the beginning, and even more fortunate at the end to have incredibly detailed and invaluable comments from Gretchen M. Grant. As ever, I am grateful to my agent and my editor, Gary Morris and Alane Mason, for their dedication to my work; and to my siblings Jordana, Zachary and Ariel for their lifelong devotion, and particularly to my sisters for their reading and feedback.
This book is dedicated to my parents, Susan and Matthew Horn, who taught me what to do when it doesn’t go by so fast, and to their fourteen grandchildren, including my personal favorites: Maya, Ari, Eli and Ronen, whose inspiration for this book is perhaps best left unexamined. And to Brendan Schulman, for twenty years of adventures in our life together, and hopefully a hundred more.
Praise for the Work of
DARA HORN
A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED
A Booklist Editors’ Choice 2013
Longlisted for the 2014 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
“[An] intense, multilayered story. . . . [Horn’s] writing comes from a place of deep knowledge.”
—Jami Attenberg, New York Times Book Review
“Anyone who cares about the art of fiction will want to read A Guide for the Perplexed. . . . Extraordinary material, emotionally resonant and intellectually suggestive.”
—Wendy Smith, Washington Post
“A novelist at the height of her powers.”
—Andrew Furman, Miami Herald
ALL OTHER NIGHTS
A Booklist Best Book of the Decade
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“Slam-bang. . . . Horn is too gifted and ambitious an artist to settle for easy reassurances or a facile happy ending; she instead offers her readers the deeper satisfactions of complexity and generosity as she limns a world of agonizing, implacable moral ambiguities and guides her imperfect yet lovable protagonist toward a tentative redemption.”
—Wendy Smith, Washington Post
“Engrossing. . . . Delicious.”
—Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, New York Times Book Review
THE WORLD TO COME
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2006
Winner of the 2007 Henry U. Ribalow Prize
Winner of the 2006 National Jewish Book Award
January 2006 Book Sense Pick
“Each page of [Horn’s] novel is a marvel.”
—Debra Spark, San Francisco Chronicle, “Our Editors Recommend” section
“Rich, complex and haunting.”
—Susann Cokal, New York Times Book Review
“One could make a pastime of fishing for hidden resonances in The World to Come. . . . Horn’s roving, kinetic imagination and storytelling talent are on abundant display here, and there’s no question that this book is the real thing.”
—Julia Livshin, Chicago Tribune
“Perfectly paced prose. Horn’s deft touch is often wryly funny—but never maliciously so. . . . An accomplished work that beautifully explains how families—in all their maddening, smothering, supportive glory—create us.”
—Natalie Danford, Los Angeles Times Book Review
IN THE IMAGE
Winner of the 2003 National Jewish Book Award
Winner of the 2003 Reform Judaism Fiction Prize
Winner of the 2002 Edward Lewis Wallant Award
“Told with moral passion, vigor, humor, and an unflagging fascination w
ith the coincidences, miseries, grotesqueries, and triumphs of life.”
—Richard Snow, American Heritage
“An unsettling, otherworldly novel.”
—Boston Globe
“Impressive . . . remarkable. . . . All of the characters struggle for those gemlike qualities of passion, brilliance, clarity, fire.”
—New Orleans Times-Picayune
ALSO BY
DARA HORN
A Guide for the Perplexed
All Other Nights
The World to Come
In the Image
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Dara Horn
All rights reserved
First Edition
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