Forever and Ever

by Dan A. Baker

  “That would be delivered to all the body’s cells by nano ball…”

  “With a series of radiation responsive genes to modulate de-senescence…”

  “That you could remotely control by…”

  “Highly selective radiation signals…”

  “Fed into an MRI…”

  “While you monitored the whole body regenerative process…”

  During the long pause, Jasmine mentally calculated how many different phases it would take to do what they were envisioning. It would take big grants, licenses, and excessive computer burn time. It would be a ten-year, hundred-million dollar project. After throwing in the bioethics battles and resistance from the religious right, it would be a twenty-year effort.

  “Earl, do you know how long it would take to negotiate licenses, grants to set royalty stacks, and the reach-throughs for…,” she said outloud.

  “Twenty patented genes, an artificial chromosome, a license for Celeromic’s radiation activated cell specific gene expression controllers…,” Earl replied.

  “Ten-million in licensing fees, ten-years in the lab, ten-years to fight the Bible thumpers, five-years of bioethics …,” Jasmine spoke without thinking. “You’d want to restore the telomere length in existing somatic cells and immortalize adult stem cells…”

  “So you wouldn’t need to have any follow up treatment…,” Earl countered.

  “And then what?” Jasmine replied.

  “You could select a target age…”

  “And prevent further aging…”

  “But for how long?” Earl questioned.

  “Forever,” replied Jasmine.

  “Forever?” continued Earl.

  “Forever and ever,” Jasmine said slowly, suddenly realizing what they were talking about.

  The realization washed over them like an avalanche. No one had ever treated a Progeric child. The biological system therapy they envisioned would also work on naturally aged people, and it could perhaps be controlled.

  “What if…,” Earl said, as the wind eased and it became still.

  “The pieces are all there,” Jasmine said quietly.

  “The pieces are all there in our minds only,” Earl said.

  “And in the minds of others, I’m sure,” Jasmine said.

  “Not really. No one else is this far down the road. Do you know what we are talking about? We’re casually talking about designing an entire new set of physiological control genes, and resetting the telomeres in the entire body! No one has gone that far yet,” Earl said ominously.

  An insolent gust of wind blew Earl’s glass into the hot tub.

  “The pieces are all there,” Jasmine said again.

  “It won’t work,” Earl said after a long pause. There are too many senescent cells and too much damage. You’d need a river of stem cells for about a year to fix damage from aging.”

  “Will Behlen,” Jasmine said without hesitation.

  “Where was Will on that crazy artificial stem cell organ idea when he left the country?” Earl said in an urgent tone.

  “I don’t know. He was run out of Boston over two-years ago, and NIH took back his last grant for using human embryos,” Jasmine said, suddenly intrigued.

  Their minds worked feverishly. Jasmine could feel Earl thinking this process through, looking for the roadblocks, adding up all the opposition.

  “The Luddites will discover the dual use angle very early, and they’ll go ballistic over aging reversal and indefinite life extension possibilities,” Earl blurted.

  “Maybe they’ll decide the child dying of birth defect angle is too tough, and they’ll pass on fighting this one?” Jasmine said, almost whimsically.

  “Jasmine, they fight to stop everything. Hell, they even fought to stop fluoride,” Earl said, making a sad point.

  “What did you talk to Marjorie about on the last run at Homewood?” Jasmine said, changing the subject.

  “We talked about treating Roy,” Earl said, writing on a napkin.

  “What did she say?” Jasmine asked.

  “If anybody would sue us for treating a dying child, it would be Victor, is what she said,” Earl turned, reaching for another napkin.

  “And…”

  “When do you want to start?” Earl finished, looking at Jasmine.

  Earl reached out and stroked Jasmine’s arm. The impact of a gene therapy that prevented aging or reversed human aging was unimaginable. Jasmine looked down at her hand, turning it over slowly. She then glanced at the skin hanging from her upper arm. She looked up at Earl’s kind face and saw the years of life there. She thought about the years of sunny days on the boat and in the garden; the years of struggle and hard work. For the first time, she saw him as an old man; an old man, like her father.

  “It’ll be irresistible,” she said softly, holding Earl’s hands tightly.

  “I know,” Earl said. “Irresistible to…”

  “Everyone,” Jasmine finished his sentence.

  “We can’t do this,” Earl said softly.

  “I know,” Jasmine said.

  “Our money won’t be nearly enough. We need to leave this now, Jasmine. This is way too big for us. It’s big and dangerous,” Earl said.

  Jasmine felt a very distant and familiar feeling, a feeling that first brought her into science. “I feel the need,” she said automatically.

  “Do you feel the need for speed?” he asked, remembering their old joke.

  “I feel the need for speed,” Jasmine said, laughing suddenly.

  The exquisite craving for knowledge, for new knowledge, energized her completely. The ideas seemed to surge through her.

  “Herr Doctor! It might work!” Jasmine stood up, thrusting her arm in the air.

  “It can’t work! You are mad!” Earl shook his finger at her, remembering an old grad school joke.

  “Let’s try it anyway, for we are brave!”

  “They will hang you for this; this impetuous reaching for knowledge!”

  They both laughed, remembering the thrills of their grad student years.

  Earl held her to him, hugging her softly. “It’s time for us to leave the world alone; pick up our chips and move on.”

  “Ok,” Jasmine said, looking down at her hands again.

  That clear, windy night was the last normal evening Jasmine could remember.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  UCSF Medical center sprawls crazily on the edge of the old Hippy stronghold, the Haight Ashbury district in San Francisco. UCSF proved the point that the human race is sedentary, and needs a sense of place to function. An entire medical school: research center, clinics and a hospital had found a way to wiggle into this cramped hilly area.

  Bright young medical students hustled past the unsteady and pale clinic patients, waiting endlessly for the traffic lights to change on tiny, blustery Parnassus Street. When the neighborhood simply would not absorb any more, the Regents had to site the new Genome sciences building somewhere else. They put the new building on Sixteenth Street in San Francisco, on the edge of the rough and seedy south of Market area. Some of the most illustrious names in science now had an address that spelled broken wine bottles.

  Marjorie had learned two things very early in life from her father, an Australian Army Colonel. Momentum counts, and hit em’ where they ain’t.

  Her father took credit for the first platitude. The other he got from Douglas McArthur.

  Marjorie filled out forms for early retirement from the University of California system the night she returned from Lake Tahoe, and announced her retirement in a letter to the Regents the next day, after informing her small staff. The grad students were horrified, as the prestige of working in her lab would go out the door with her.

  The news of her retirement spread around the world in about six hours: first on the email lists of her friends and associates; then on biotech E-zines; then in a series of calls among researchers, biotech head hunters, pharmaceutical giants, and the biotech press.

  �
�Yes, I plan to stay in science, but I feel that I have done all that I can…”

  “I simply felt that the scientific community needs an elder statesman figure to, to… to…”

  “I have reached the point where I believe that research is no longer about teasing the tantalizing secrets from a disingenuous mother nature, and discovering the delicious taste of new knowledge; but, that it is about begging; begging for permission to seek knowledge of nature…, of life’s secrets from those who staked a claim on evolution, for…, to learn….”

  Marjorie had a good friend in PR who advised her to write out and refine a statement, and stay on message.

  She stared through the window, at the black steel bridge on Third Street with the Bay behind it, and suddenly remembered a poster that hung in her old lab for years. It was a drawing of a penguin in a large pack of penguins, singing…, “I just gotta be me, oh… I just gotta be me.”

  Marjorie shut down her computer and wrote out a one-sentence statement with a pencil.

  “I am leaving my position at this wonderful University to pursue other interests, to get out of the doorway, and stop blocking the hall.”

  The retirement party went all afternoon, spilled out of the conference room and into the cafeteria. Actually, sixty-two wasn’t that young to retire, but Marjorie was still in mid-stride with work underway in several important areas. Deflecting all the probing questions was exhausting, especially since Marjorie was not really sure what she would do.

  The big hit was the fish. The gift table for those who didn’t read the invitation was piled high with nicely wrapped small boxes: gag gifts, like walking canes and oversized gold watches; but the fish was a huge success, and created a frantic search for a black light.

  “Here it is!” Carmen yelled, holding up a single bulb light. The entire room went silent when the lights went out. When she finally got the black light to the fishbowl, the little Rice fish suddenly glowed in a bright green.

  “It’s too cool!”

  “I want a cat that glows in the dark!” The comments rocketed around the room, finally quieting when Marjorie walked in. The room waited for her response. She looked at the fluorescent green fish swimming in the eerie black light for a long time, finally turning to the crowd.

  “Somewhere, in some ocean, there is a sequence that codes for a protein that can grow a black light, I’m sure!” The room exploded with laughter.

  The Rice fish was the first genetically modified pet available, and was a hit in labs all over the world. A simple sequence for phosgene from a jellyfish had been added to its DNA, causing it to glow under black light.

  Edward Maynard, a senior UCSF Regent, waited patiently for Marjorie to come over to him. He was the only board member not shocked by her sudden retirement. “We were afraid of this. Build a research building down here, and our best academics wouldn’t like the address,” Edward said, leaning over to his side. Marjorie laughed softly.

  “Twenty-six years of trying to see the Golden Gate Bridge out of our windows, and instead of cleaning them, you move us down here. What did you expect?” Marjorie liked to kick the ball around with Edward.

  “Tell me there’s a romance involved with this mystery, and I’ll have something to quiet the board down. You’re our designated hitter, and this board likes hitters. They very much wanted you to stay,” Edward said, watching a grad student lower a glowing necklace into the fishbowl.

  “I’m a knowledge addict, Edward, you know that, and I just can’t seem to get to my pusher anymore,” Marjorie said, smiling at her old secretary.

  “I tried, I tried everything, Marjorie. Genetechna just wanted too much money and too juicy a reach-through to get you a telomerase license. We would love to have seen you work on telomerase inhibitors. Too bad Genetechna shelved it,” he said, in a belated tone that Marjorie had heard many times in the past few years.

  “We could have sued them. The patent was way too broad,” Marjorie countered.

  “Yes, but shiny new ten-story research buildings make boards and endowment managers happy. We never really stood a chance, Marjorie. That’s just the way it is.”

  “For some, that’s the way it is,” Marjorie said, looking directly at Edward.

  “Marjorie, what does that mean? If you’re going to Singapore, or Israel, or Oxford, why can’t you tell us? We can counter those offers,” he said, genuinely surprised at her comment.

  “Because I’m not,” she said, and walked quietly to her lab.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The days passed quickly for Jasmine, in a long blur of grueling data runs on the Rockcrusher and a few minor problems with the arrays on the PIES side. The complex gene-replacement therapy promised an end to birth defects, but it was a very large therapy and required huge amounts of computation time.

  She left the lab early on a blustery Tuesday, and drove a few miles down to Oyster Point beach; the windy, industrial wasteland that became home to the largest biotech company in the world. The rocky little beach was surprisingly quiet, and except for the windsurfers and a Filipino man fishing, it was mostly empty.

  Malia roared in from the choppy green bay on her kite board, and pulled the best bottom turn she could muster, but the spray fell a little short of the new picnic tables at the windsurfing beach.

  “Nice try!” Jasmine hollered, hoping Malia could hear over the wind.

  “It has to be blowing south to hit the tables!” Malia shouted, as she jumped off her board. “Mom, guess what?” she said hurriedly.

  “What?” Jasmine asked.

  “They’re going to build a condo tower down here, and I think I’m going to put a deposit down on a unit! I might need a little help, though.”

  “That’ll be great for you, pumpkin head. We’ll help you with the down,” Jasmine said, trying to focus.

  “That would be, like so cool, Mom.”

  “How do you like kite boarding?” Jasmine asked, as the big kite tugged at Malia’s arms.

  “It’s like sex on Christmas! Watch this!” she said, and hopped on the short little board, snapping the kite up into the air. Malia tore across the little bay, heading out toward the San Mateo Bridge, zipping up the faces of the wind chop and launching into the air, hanging for an impossibly long time. She turned back to Jasmine for a moment and waged the bright green board side to side. She kept going and going, until she was just a bright dot among the fierce little whitecaps.

  Jasmine laughed outloud. She laughed at the careless nature of youth, and at the outrageous things that people could do: like fly over the water at forty knots on a little piece of foam and a nylon sheet; fly over the nasty punishing chop, and into the sun, just for the sheer fun of rushing through the air and over the water. Mother Nature would be proud, she thought. Proud that one of her pet monsters still had a sense of humor, and liked to fool around.

  Jasmine remembered that Malia had told her the horizon under the far span of the bridge was a true horizon, as it was more than eleven miles of water away. She looked at it for a long moment, wondering what cruising on a sailboat would be like; wondering what it would be like to be at sea, with an empty horizon all around for days at a time.

  “Heaven,” she said to no one, feeling a vague weariness reach up for her, but the feeling did not belong there. She wanted to feel the thrill, the sensation, the lust, the lust for knowing. At that very moment, her heart flew away, rose up, and leaped over the steep, vicious waves. It was only for a moment; a moment so profound, she jumped up from the picnic table.

  It was actually impossible. Earl was right. Just buying the licenses to the genes involved would require a fortune. She tried to drop the thought several times, but the question haunted her like a playful ghost, and the sheer intrigue of wondering if it was possible, was exhilarating.

  Was it possible? What could go wrong? How diabolically complex and unpredictable might this become? The pieces were all there, she kept saying to herself. Someday someone is going to put them together; someone with unlimit
ed money, in a country that defended science, or coveted the power that science can provide.

  She stood up, and stood very still, feeling the wave of great events flowing through her. The pieces are all there. The pieces are all there. The pieces are all there. She looked out at the horizon again, wondering how many other people were thinking the same thing.

  Malia finally came in, leaping in the air and hooting loudly as she spanked her board on the water. “I wish you wouldn’t go out so far,” Jasmine yelled into the wind.

  “Mom, this is a hoot first, ask questions later sport, you know that!” Malia said, trying to catch her breath, as Koji sailed up.

  “I know, but it’s blowing hard and the waves are big,” she replied.

  “Not big! You should see Paiea, in Maui, or Okinawa in the winter!” Koji said, shaking from the cold. “Perhaps you would like to learn to kite board?”

  “I’ll wait till it warms up a little,” Jasmine said, stopping to think if she could handle the sport. Jasmine was helping Malia fold her sail when her cell phone rang. Her intuition alarm went off as she touched the small green talk button.

  “I caught you. Well, it finally happened,” Earl said gravely.

  “What, what happened?” Jasmine asked struggling to hear over the wind.

  “They did it! The nut brigade did it! They cloned a human,” Earl said.

  “Was it the Raolians?” Jasmine asked, opening her car door.

  “Yeah, twins,” Earl said.

  “Oh no,” Jasmine said.

  “Oh yes,” Earl replied.

  “The right wing will go completely crazy!” Jasmine blurted, realizing she was beginning to panic.

  “Herr Kloss will bite down on this all the way. I’m at the lab. I taped the news for you,” Earl said with a far away voice that drove Jasmine’s heart to her throat.

  “O.K,” she said, trying not to cry. “I’ll be right over.”

  The entire biotech world had been dreading this. Someone, somewhere, would clone a human being. This would set off a wave of hysteria and new regulation, fire up the religious right, and pump up the new anti-post human movement.