Forever and Ever

by Dan A. Baker

  “Guess the news was pretty big. Victor says there are two TV trucks in the parking lot and the protestors have doubled. He wants us to do a press conference at ten,” Earl said, sounding a little worried.

  “A press conference? Earl, I’m not in any way ready for that! I have to get through the new array data, and…” Jasmine began to sweat.

  “He says it’s important to do it today, and he’s probably trying to squeeze Solista with it,” Earl said.

  Jasmine noted the strange distance in his voice. “You look tired, dear.”

  “I’m ready for a change, ready for a break. I’m tired of watching these children die, and tired of countering these stupid self-infatuated religious thugs,” he said, using a new term.

  “Well, two years will go fast. Maybe we can take a break, then teach, or do research,” Jasmine said, longingly.

  “Sure. Get back on the grant treadmill, watch half the money go to licensing, and spend the rest of our lives pushing paper across the table to lawyers. No thanks. I think I’ll go to Guatemala and treat people who just need their children to live,” he said, with a trace of bitterness that was unusual for him. “We could sail down there, or maybe Belize,”

  Earl slowed the Volvo station wagon so they could take in the protestors before turning into the parking lot. This was the biggest crowd so far. There were some new signs as well.

  FORGET FRAKENFOODS - HERE’S FRANKENSTEIN!

  GENE THERAPY FOR THE RICH - DISEASE FOR THE POOR

  DNA IS GOD’S HANDWRITING

  There was a guard at the parking lot for the first time. “May I see your employee cards?” the guard asked.

  As Earl fumbled for his, Jasmine stepped out suddenly. “Mine’s in the Back; open the tailgate, Earl.”

  “There she is! That’s her! A tall rough looking demonstrator yelled, walking briskly down the sidewalk to Jasmine. “You, you want to change the work of God, just to make money; so the rich can be bigger and stronger! You are a blasphemer! You are an enemy of God!” He dropped his sign and grabbed her with both hands. Jasmine looked into his twisted face for a long moment. Finally, he screamed into her face, “Blasphemer!” The security guard hurriedly pushed his way between them, motioning Earl to drive into the parking lot, fumbling with his radio. Jasmine walked quickly behind the car, looking back at his twisted face.

  The rest of the demonstrators stopped and watched, slowly talking among each other, unsure what this outburst might mean. Earl slammed the Volvo into a corner spot and ran over to her.

  “Did he hurt you?” Earl asked.

  “No. But he has the worst bad breath on earth,” Jasmine said.

  “I can’t believe some of these people! All we’re trying to do is make sure people don’t get sick and they want to get tough!” Earl yelled into the parking lot, turning back to Jasmine.

  “I’m alright. Let’s go in, I need to get to my desk,” Jasmine said softly, seeing the strain in Earl’s face.

  The Kids in the Hall, as they liked to call each other, lined up inside the door, were waiting to greet Jasmine. Lou Chin was first. “Jasmine, we are so overjoyed and thrilled! You deserve every bit of it! Lou never bothered to try to hide his dramatically affected gay speech. He had the largest bouquet of flowers. Jasmine liked to say he was as gay as a daffodil, and the best bioinformatics scripter alive.

  Jessy Sparks was what they called a Bench Babe in Menlo Park, one of few. She looked like the western wear model she was, and had just won a tough mountain bike race in Nevada. She had mastered the extremely delicate work of enucleating cells, with or without her long nails, which Lou envied. “See Jas, we’re not the only ones who think the world of you!” she said, while draping a lovely, white lei over Jasmine’s neck.

  Jasmine and Earl pressed through the excited employees, only about thirty-five now, down from over two-hundred just a few years before. Most biotech firms were like this, operating on skeletal staffs, burning venture capital as slowly as possible, with conference rooms full of unused computers and desks.

  Jasmine looked down the line for Victor, but he wasn’t there.

  Victor’s office was the only flashy part of the building. The doors were black glass with gold piping around them, and looked like they belonged in Las Vegas.

  “Life is good!” Victor said, plugging his second cell phone into the charger. “Congratulations, Jasmine, and it was right on time, I might add. The little rumor from London drove the stock price up nine points in the last twenty-four hours! And you know that makes me extremely happy.” Victor had a way of ending sentences with a reference to himself.

  “Nine points?” Earl asked.

  “No, it was nine delicious, nine juicy, nine lovely little points! Yeah, the bean counters at Solista are crapping apples!” Victor said, running down the neat lines of papers on his desk with his fingertips. Victor was a famous neat freak, and had actually invented a picture frame that self-leveled. The pictures in his office were all of him surfing, except one.

  “Victor, who were the guys in the Limo,” Earl asked quietly.

  “Later, O.K., there are two networks and CNN here to cover the Nobel nomination story! This is a very big break for us. Need to mention that third phase clinical trials are almost complete and the treated embryos are viable, and thanks to Jasmine’s killer modeling software, are showing no abnormalities. Might also mention we are at five generations of pigs, and no problems. No, let’s don’t. Probably shouldn’t mention the agricultural thing right now, with the human trials approval so close, but it’s going to be a huge crowd pleaser for the stockholders!” Victor realized he was over the top.

  “What are the details of the buy-out, Victor?” Jasmine asked.

  “Thirty-five percent premium and two board seats,” he said.

  “Telomerase,” Jasmine asked pointedly.

  “Don’t know. They’re more interested now in successful branding, licensing, making sure the gadgets work, and monitoring the technology,” Victor said, glancing at his rocket clock. He had a six-foot high rocket with a red digital clock in it behind his desk.

  “Didn’t it come up?” Jasmine persisted.

  “Yeah, but these guys don’t have a hand in that big cancer slop bucket. My guess is they’ll maybe out-license and spin off, who knows?”

  “Victor, we’ve been sitting on the Telomerase IP for ten years, and I’ve been dying to start on it, and you’re telling me our new parent company isn’t interested?” Jasmine stood up. “What’s the board going to say?”

  “They’re grazers, Jasmine, you know that! Half of them never make the meetings anyway. Maybe they’ll spin that off, hand you the IP and a play pen for Marjorie,” Victor said quickly.

  “She’s not retiring for that reason,” Jasmine countered.

  “Mr. Magnusson, the producers would like to begin as soon as possible,”

  Penelope said sweetly on the intercom.

  “Let’s take one thing at a time, Jasmine. Let’s get this buy-out right, and then we’ll all move on,” Victor said, motioning everyone to the door.

  The little podium in the conference room looked silly to Jasmine. She immediately looked around to see if the pizza box pile was still there.

  The first question started before she even got to the podium.

  “Dr. Metcalf, where did this research originate? Where did it start?”

  Jasmine turned and smiled. “The knocking out of large numbers of genes began when the polymerase technology of accurately excising genes was automated, which allowed us to excise just about any part of the genome we wanted to, rapidly.” She paused for a moment, trying to determine if the press was hostile, or merely curious.

  “This enabled us to see the function of a gene by removing it. As result of the dramatic leap in knowledge of the human genome, we were able to locate the genes associated with many human diseases and birth defects. By simply correcting these genes, we can be certain a treated embryo will not express any of those genes. The child will not hav
e any of the birth defects on your list, many of which are fatal,” Jasmine said in a strong, even voice, as Victor nodded his approval.

  “And you can be sure that no other functions will be affected? Aren’t some genes responsible for more than one, uh thing?”

  “We have spent tremendous time and resources, including exhaustive computer modeling to ensure that no other biological functions are affected. The recent data indicates we are ready for human trials.”

  “The Pope recently condemned this technology as interfering with God’s plan. How do you respond to that?” The icy question hung in the air.

  “We’re helping God,” Jasmine said, absentmindedly. The reporters stirred.

  “You’re helping God? Doesn’t that make you God?”

  “You think its O.K. to be playing God with the fabric of humanity?”

  “You think God needs help?” The questions came in a flurry.

  “I meant, I meant to say, we want to help God’s children. We want them to be born healthy, and have disease free lives…,”Jasmine stammered.

  Victor was visibly unhappy with this sudden turn of events.

  “This technology can easily be used to produce designer children, can’t it? If you can eliminate genes at will, you can change genes and add new ones that will enhance intelligence and… and …”

  Earl interrupted to offer a detailed rundown on the Bioethics Commission and the stringent regulatory rules, slowing the rhetoric.

  During one of those unexplainable pauses in press conferences, a print reporter stood up and said, “You must be extremely confident in your work to know that the changes you’ve made to the genetic make-up of these children will be passed down to all of the generations that will follow.” It was not a question, but a statement.

  “You have no way to change any of these genetic modifications?” The question ricocheted around the room.

  Jasmine and Earl stood still for a long moment. Earl finally answered. “Currently we could easily correct any problems or issues in the embryos of those treated, before they are passed down to the next generation, and those treated will be carefully monitored.”

  The questions went on with speculation on approval of human trials, but the buy-out offer had not been public yet.

  Jasmine finally pushed open the door to her office. Marina had carefully put all the flowers in vases, and stacked all the FedEx packages. Jasmine glanced at the mail, and quickly went down to the bioinformatics lab.

  Koji and Malia were looking at the latest array data from the treated embryos, scrolling through cascades of data on oversize flat panel displays. The room was warm, but not as warm as it had been, when The Cray supercomputer was here. Victor had somehow found the money to lease a Fujitsu 9900 parallel cluster, which was so powerful it had to have a large cooling system in the basement, connected to this room with cables the size of fire hoses. They called it the Rockcrusher.

  “How did the haplotype runs go?” Jasmine asked.

  “We completed the full genome scans, and nothing. There were no disturbed alleles, no changes, not even in the introns. The new automated PCR processors are working perfectly. These embryos should have no problems at all. We’re ready for the clinic,” Koji said, trying to sound businesslike.

  Jasmine settled in for a long catch-up session in the lab, proud of the competence of her work group in her unplanned absence.

  “Mom, do you think we’ll get FDA approval?” Malia asked innocently. She had been helping in the bioinformatics lab for almost a year now, and had become the company’s data librarian.

  “Yes. With the patients group and the political power of the Jewish lobbying group, I think we’ll see this process in world wide use in less than four years,” Jasmine said, scanning the data displays.

  There was an air of excitement in the company now. Pre-implantation of Embryonic Screening (PIES) was poised to be a huge success, and the possibility of a Nobel Prize carried real prestige, which dramatically helped the cache of the company as a buyout target.

  As Jasmine opened the first Fed EX package, the building vibrated slightly as a helicopter lifted off the roof. She stepped over to the window and watched the bright red Jet Ranger bank toward San Francisco. She made a mental note to ask Earl about the men Victor was seeing.

  The highly charged day: the press conference, catching up, taking calls from all over the world, and stepping out into the hall for local interviews with TV stations, had so drained Jasmine, that she didn’t say a word on the way home. Earl was silent as well, which bothered Jasmine slightly.

  Putting the hot tub on the hillside was Jasmine’s idea. The view of the valley was great, surrounded by the tough Manzanita bushes.

  The Bay Area had surprisingly good weather in the winter. There were often breaks in the winter storms that swept in from the west. The first day after a storm was the best. The air was clear, with just enough clouds passing overhead to visualize the winds aloft.

  “Another ten minutes of jets, or do you want quiet?” Earl asked.

  “Jets,” Jasmine said, still feeling the long plane ride in her back.

  So much was swirling around them, including the company, PIES, old friends leaving science, and breathtaking leaps of technology every six months. It was happening so fast that the online biotech E-zines had to update hourly.

  Something was different for Jasmine now. All the breathtaking advances meant nothing. We still get old. We still die. Death was still a vast black window. She felt extremely deflated as a person, suddenly thinking about how infinitesimal a part of the great mystery of life she really understood.

  One of her mother’s favorite movies was Alfie, the 1960’s movie with Michael Caine. The song in that movie used to play on the radio when she was young. What’s it all about, when you sort it out, Alfie? It was such a lovely melody, and such a deep question. She turned to Earl.

  “What’s it all about, Alfie?” she said in a distant voice.

  The pause was so long Jasmine thought he might have fallen asleep. “I don’t know,” Earl said earnestly. He turned slowly to her. “I like Roy.” For some reason he’s different from the rest: such a little optimist. He knows all about his condition. We told him last month. Jonelle did such a beautiful job of telling him he’s going to die. It cut me in half this time,” Earl said, rubbing his finger slowly around the lip of his wine glass.

  “What did he say, when she told him?” Jasmine asked.

  “Are you coming with me, Mommy?” Earl said, looking at Jasmine, who felt his old doctor’s heart breaking.

  The jets finally stopped. The distant sound of the surf played in and out in the trees behind them, as the small wispy clouds hurried overhead. It seemed like they were happy to be over land at last, Jasmine thought. She reached out holding Earl’s big hand to her face, and felt a great stirring in her soul. Vague and unformed, it was a deep sensation of entering a new time in life.

  Searching for something to say, Jasmine started to reply to Earl’s heartbreak, twice stopping, wondering what you could say to a doctor who had to let his young patients die. In a rush, it came back to her.

  “Life is a series of small victories: victories over the inertness of space; victories over cold and darkness; unimaginable pressure, over randomness and chaos; and victories over the master monster, time itself. Life is a series of small victories that we scarcely notice until they end,” she said, reciting from the eulogy she had written for her mother.

  “And death is defeat,” Earl said, draining his glass.

  “And death is defeat,” Jasmine said after a long pause.

  “I was hoping to try the endothelial telomerase treatment on Roy, but Victor talked me out of it,” Earl said, with a barely perceptible streak of anger in his voice. “It would have meant a few more years for him.”

  “I talked you out of it too, remember? You’d have a young circulatory system feeding a dying body,” Jasmine said, reminding him of the modeling she had run for him on the new super
computer cluster.

  “Even if you could somehow get a gene patch into every one of his cells, you couldn’t reset the length of his telomeres without triggering cancer somewhere,” she said, going over old territory.

  “Yeah,” Earl said, in a defeated tone.

  “We can do a few simple things, like PIES, but to ever treat one of your children will take a complete biological systems approach, and that’s years and years off,” Jasmine said, trying to talk him out of this new depression.

  “Nano balls are working perfectly. At least that much of the puzzle is in place,” Earl said, reminding her that a new method of inserting genetic information into the nucleus of cells was working beautifully.

  “There’s so much you’d have to change in the cells of these children, Earl. So much,” Jasmine said, tenderly. “And then you’d have to repair the damage. Lot’s of aging damage.”

  “It would take a wheel barrow full of stem cells,” Earl said, slowly adding up what it would take to reverse the devastating effects of premature aging. “You’d have to carefully design a, a… cascading gene expression program, kind of like body development during puberty, and that would…”

  Jasmine finished the sentence for him. “Re-extend telomeres, and insert an additional P-53 cancer checkpoint, with an apoptosis mine if the cells fail…”

  “Phase in the reversal of senescence in specific tissues and organs at specific times, so you don’t overload..,” Earl trailed off.

  “The ability of the body to process all the lipofuscin and cell debris from the rejuvenating cells…”

  “And overload metabolism pathways…”

  “You would have to…”

  “Design and build synthetic genes, modeled on developmental gene regulation…”

  “And put them on an artificial chromosome…”