The Experiment

by John Darnton

  And now Skyler saw that the men around him were wearing hardhats and some were holding up signs. He tried to fight his way out of the crowd, but a man with a yellow T-shirt would not let him pass, and soon he felt himself being pushed until he was at the very edge close to the horses. He saw a brown flank twitching right before him, and then the side of the horse moved toward him and a hoof almost struck him on the foot. He yelled along with the men around him, and magically the horses drifted back. But in their place came a phalanx of policemen on foot, holding shields and nightsticks.

  Skyler tried to get away, but the men behind him were pushing and struggling and he couldn't find an opening. He turned again, but now the police had formed a cordon around the mob and moved in quickly, pushing with their shields and waving nightsticks. Skyler felt one strike him in the shins. A man next to him screamed, and then Skyler lost his balance and began to fall backward, just as he saw a nightstick rise in the air above him. Almost in slow motion, he saw it descend toward him and then he felt a searing pain on the top of his skull. He fell down amid a forest of moving legs and felt someone falling on top of him, just before he hit the pavement and blacked out.

  ¨

  Jude took a subway downtown, got out at City Hall and killed time in the park. He ate a hot dog with sauerkraut and sat on a park bench, thinking about his situation. He wondered how Skyler was getting on, and he thought about Tizzie, how protective of Skyler she had become. It was touching. He contemplated Raymond and wondered what he wanted to see him about. Surely something to do with New Paltz. Jude was eager to meet him, too, but he thought he should come armed with at least some facts. That's where McNichol came into the picture. Funny, he thought, a week ago I had never even heard of this man—now I'm about to see him for the third time and he holds the key to my future in his hands.

  Almost absentmindedly, Jude looked around at the other people in the park. He saw no one who looked suspicious, no large strangers with streaks in their hair. He was surprised at how casual he had become in checking for a tail. You'd think I'd been doing it my whole life, he thought. It's amazing how quickly we accustom ourselves to an outrageous twist of fate, even something as patently absurd as this. One day your double walks in the door and, bingo, your life cuts to another movie. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the whole thing would just go away?—if I were to wake up on this park bench and find that it all was some kind of celluloid fantasy that curled up and caught fire in the afternoon sun.

  He sighed and looked at his watch: 3:50. He pulled out his notebook, checked the address and walked the three blocks to Foley Square. The building was a nondescript office tower near the criminal courts that housed various state agencies. Jude must have entered it a half dozen times looking for some kind of malfeasance or other. He took the elevator to the thirty-second floor and passed into a glass-enclosed office with no name on the door. There was a waiting area with wooden chairs and a receptionist's desk that was empty. He entered a corridor with stained gray carpeting and anachronistic metal ashtrays lashed to the wall and followed it until he found the room he was looking for, number 3209. McNichol was inside.

  The examiner was at a desk, a stack of files before him. The room was a combination of an office and laboratory; it had stacks of old metal filing cabinets and a long counter with a computer and some basic hardware—a microscope, banks of slides, a well-used centrifugal separator. A wide window gave a view of the busy bridges over the East River and the townhouses and smokestacks of Brooklyn.

  They exchanged greetings, for some reason with an undercurrent of formality. McNichol offered him a cup of coffee, which Jude gladly accepted. As the examiner poured it into a mug decorated with a drawing of fornicating rabbits, he explained that he often did per diem work in the city's morgues.

  "With the decline in homicide, they've had to let a number of assistant M.E.'s go—one of those unfortunate side effects to the downturn in crime. Not enough corpses to keep them occupied. But there are still those unlooked-for busy spells when people's thoughts turn to murder, and that's when they call upon me."

  Jude thought he would start right out with flattery—an opening gambit whose success never failed to amaze him. He graciously thanked McNichol for taking on the task he had asked of him, and he said he knew that if anyone could solve the mysteries of the two hair samples—and tell him if they came from the same person or not—it would be the medical examiner of Ulster County.

  "Come, come," McNichol replied. "It was quite a challenge—I'll say that much. And I couldn't for the life of me figure out why you had presented me with it. Then I guessed it—and I'm willing to bet I'm right."

  Jude was perplexed. He raised his eyebrows a tad—an invitation to continue.

  "I recalled the story your paper did some years back on the ten best judges and the ten worst judges—very eye-opening, by the way—especially that trick of sending the same defendant before them. So I assume you are about to do a similar undertaking with respect to the forensic sciences—that you are, in effect, testing the various examiners in and around the city, to see who's the best and who's the worst. Or else your motivation is completely beyond me."

  Jude did not deny or confirm. He didn't want to do anything that might upset McNichol, as they were approaching the critical juncture at which information is divulged.

  "And what conclusion did you reach?" he inquired softly.

  "Not so fast. Not so fast." He held up one hand, the traffic cop's signal. "Let me tell you about the journey before I reveal the destination."

  He folded his hands upon the desk, as if he was settling in to tell a long story, and Jude sat back in his chair and waited.

  "Have you ever heard of Leonard Hayflick?" he asked, as if it were the most natural question in the world.

  Jude shook his head. He had his notebook out, but he stopped writing.

  "Pity. He only happens to be one of the most outstanding anatomists of our time. He was a giant in aging research. Who said the world is fair? Everyone knows James Watson and Francis Crick, Cambridge University in 1953, the whole myth, going into a pub afterward and declaring that they had uncovered the secret of life itself—which of course they had."

  "The discovery of the structure of DNA. The double helix."

  "Precisely. The singular event that brought us into the modern era of genetics. Hayflick performed the analogous feat in the field of gerontology."

  "What did he do?"

  "He took some cells from a fetus and raised them in a petri dish. This was back in 1961—it's difficult now to conjure up the memory of how primitive the thinking was back then. In those days, aging was viewed as a straightforward matter of biological destiny. You got old because your body wore out, like a machine whose parts disintegrated under wear and tear. Your skin wrinkled, your hair fell out, your brain shrank, your arteries clogged. There was nothing you could do. A human was born, lived a certain number of years and died, and that was more or less all there was to it. Of course, you could cheat around the margins—depending upon whether you were an abstemious librarian or a Left Bank poet drowning in absinthe—but basically your life span was prescribed. One hundred years at the outside. It was the dictates of Nature. Now, of course, we know that all that is hogwash."

  "So I've just heard."

  "Well, you heard right. Believe me, the advances in life extension over the next fifty years are going to make your head spin. Future generations will look back at our pathetic span of eighty years and shake their heads in wonderment. Did you ever tour the chateaux of the Loire? When the guide points to those little beds five feet long and those tiny suits of armor, you're astonished that people could ever be so small. They'll regard our lifetimes like that. Remember your amazement upon learning that Alexander the Great died at age thirty-three? Future generations will feel that way when they discover that Einstein died at seventy-six."

  He fixed Jude with a hard stare.

  "And it began with Hayflick. You see, he tackled aging head on.
He asked the pertinent question—why does aging happen? Does it happen because the individual cells give out, eventually incapacitating the whole human organism? Or does it happen because of an age-related deterioration in some part of the organism that shuts down the cells? When does an army lose a decisive battle? When so many soldiers are cut down that it can no longer mount an effective force in the field, or when a superior officer perceives a rout and gives the order to surrender? My metaphor, incidentally, not his.

  "In any case, Hayflick designed a simple experiment—that is, simple in hindsight, like all great experiments. He put the cells in the petri dish to see how long they would live, left to their own devices. They didn't have to do anything—they didn't have to perform work on behalf of the nonexistent human. All they had to do was what cells do naturally, divide and multiply. Which they did. About fifty times. And then they died. He repeated the procedure with cells from a seventy-year-old person. They divided, but only about twenty or thirty times before they, too, died."

  "So the answer is that the soldiers die?"

  "Don't get hung up on the metaphor," said McNichol brusquely. "Real life is more complicated. Real life is not either/or. In real life, thousands of soldiers die and the general gives up."

  McNichol stood up and began gesturing as he talked.

  "The point is that the cells from the seventy-year-old were themselves older than the ones from the fetus. The point is that Hayflick had established that there is a natural limit to the life of a cell, that from the time it's a newborn, it divides fifty times and then turns senescent."

  "If there's a natural limit, then there's no hope of overcoming aging."

  "On the contrary, it means that there is hope. In biology, things don't just happen by themselves for no reason. In nature, nothing is so natural that it can't be undone by man. If there's a limit, that's because something is imposing a limit. Something is making it happen."

  He was getting more and more excited.

  "Don't you see? There's a clock, a clock inside the cells that tells them when their time is up. And if there's a clock there, it means we can find it and go in and tinker with it and eventually even learn how to reset it. We can make it last longer. Which is what we are doing."

  "Where?"

  "In laboratories all around the world. Scientists are discovering single genes that postpone senescence in simple organisms. There is only one tree of evolution, so the same gene sequences exist in us. Some of the most important work has been done on a one-celled protozoan that lives in ponds. It provided the key to the clock."

  "What's the clock?"

  "Telomeres."

  "Telomeres?"

  "Strips of DNA that cap the end of our chromosomes. As you know, chromosomes are long strands of DNA that contain the cell's genetic instructions. At the end of each one is a telomere. It's been compared to the little plastic tip at the end of a shoelace that keeps it from unraveling. And that seems to be pretty much its job here. Each time the cell divides, it loses a little bit more of its telomeres, so that the strand keeps getting shorter as the cell gets older. When the cell reaches its Hayflick limit of fifty divisions, the telomere is down to a nub. That's the point at which the cell switches over into old age and declines. That's the beginning of cell death.

  "So the age of cells has nothing to do with chronological time, as we experience it. Which makes sense when you think of it—time is an artificial human construct to begin with. The age of cells is related to how much work they do, to how many times they have to divide. That is why the skin of someone who has spent his life tanning in the sun is so much more wrinkled than someone who stayed in the shade; the skin cells of the tanning fanatic have to keep reproducing in order to replace those destroyed by ultraviolet rays. They have to work harder—their telomeres are shorter."

  "Fascinating," said Jude. "But for whatever reason, the cell still ultimately has to die."

  "Ah, but does it? Or rather, does it have to die at such an abysmally early age?" McNichol drew his words out dramatically. "You see, living cells are extremely efficient. They are magnificent creations—they consume food, expel waste, perform work, and have a strong membrane for protection. A perfectly balanced world within a microcosm. So perfect that there is no reason to think they are cursed with a built-in limit to their longevity.

  "That much we know from looking at cancer cells. Cancer cells replicate themselves endlessly, generation after generation, so much so that experiments to count the number of divisions virtually never end. There are cancer cells in laboratories that live on in petri dish after petri dish for decades. They are, for all intents and purposes, immortal."

  "How do they do it?"

  "How indeed? The secret lies in an enzyme called telomerase. It works like a little repair kit. Every time a bit of telomere is lost through cell division, it comes along and replaces it so that the strand never gets shorter. The shoelace never gets frayed, if you will, because it gets a new plastic tip. Telomerase is present in cancerous cells. It's also there in egg and sperm cells because, of course, these cells have to remain young—they're passed on to the offspring. But the enzyme is not in your run-of-the-mill normal cells even though normal cells could make it. They have a gene to make it, but the gene is switched off."

  "So if the cells only had the enzyme, they'd live longer? That's the theory?"

  "It's not theory. It is demonstrable fact. Scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have injected the core of the enzyme-producing gene into human cells. Incidentally, they were able to get the gene by studying our little pond protozoan, which happens to produce huge amounts of telomerase. After they injected it, the telomeres regained their youthful length and the cells kept on dividing happily way beyond their life span. The cells have been rejuvenated."

  "So they've discovered the fountain of youth—Ponce de Léon?"

  "No, aging is much more complicated. For one thing, not all cells follow the same rules—brain cells and heart cells, for example. But it's certainly an important start. It's confirmation of the fact that the human body, like all living organisms, has a remarkable capacity for self-repair. It turns out we are not machines after all."

  McNichol sat back down, his lecture done. Jude was intrigued by all that he had heard, but he was at a loss to figure out what all of it had to do with him. He turned a page in his notebook—a sign that he wanted to get down to business—took a sip of coffee, which was now cold, and looked the medical examiner in the eye.

  "Mr. McNichol... Dr. McNichol. All this is very interesting. But if you don't mind, what does it have to do with the two swatches of hair I left with you?"

  "Background, my boy. Background. Without my little lecture—and I'm sorry if I went on a bit there—but without it you would not be able to understand what it is that I did and how I reached the conclusion I did."

  "And what is that?" prodded Jude.

  "As you might expect, all of this research has implications in my own little pond," he said with a false tone of self-deprecation. "The forensic sciences have grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, and we are doing things we never thought possible back when I was in medical school."

  "Yes. Please get to the point."

  "The point is, I did a straightforward DNA analysis, in which I compared the two samples of hair. DNA, as you know, is a matching of gene sequences that permits us to establish whether or not two specimens come from the same person. The likelihood of error is greatly reduced when compared to fingerprinting. We are usually able to establish ownership within margins that defy coincidence."

  "Yes, I know. And you found...?"

  "Well, very simply, I found that the DNA matched perfectly. The chance that such a match would occur in two different people in this case is approximately one in four hundred thousand, which is to say, negligible. So that finding leads inescapably to the conclusion that the two hair samples came from the same person."

  "Or," said Jude slowly, "they could co
me from identical twins—correct?"

  "Yes, of course. Identical twins do not have the same fingerprints, since fingerprints form in a late stage of fetal development. But they do have the same genetic makeup, and so any DNA specimens from identical twins would form a perfect match. But in this case, I ruled out twins."

  "What? Why?"

  "Well, that takes us back to the telomeres. We have recently developed and refined a subset of DNA testing called RFLPS, which stands for restriction fragment length polymorphism. The procedure can differentiate between organisms by analyzing patterns derived from cleavage of their DNA. We can look at the length of the telomeres to come up with an estimate of the age of the person. It's not exact, mind you, but the technique is sufficiently sophisicated to establish a difference in ages between two samples. And that's what I was able to do here."

  "And what was that? Dr. McNichol, please, tell me the conclusion."

  "One sample—in the bag you marked A—came from a person who is five years younger than the sample in bag B. Give or take a year."

  "But... but," Judd stammered. "That's not possible."

  "Exactly. That's not possible if they were from identical twins. How could you have identical twins of different ages? And so I reached my conclusion, which you may feel free to print in your newspaper, provided of course that you do end up doing a story, and that conclusion is..."

  "Yes."

  "That the two swatches came from the same person, which I assume is you. You gave me two more or less identical samples of your hair, except that one was about five years younger. So you cut it off five years ago and preserved it."

  Jude fell silent.

  "What I can't fathom," said McNichol, "is why you would have saved it—surely you didn't have the foresight five years ago to know that you would be doing this kind of article."