Syndrome by Thomas Hoover (read along books txt) 📖

Thursday, April 9

11:16 P.M.

“Let’s go into the lab to talk,” Van de Vliet said. “I’m very sorry I wasn’t here when you came out of sedation. But Marion called me at home, as I’d told her to do, and I came in as quickly as I could. I’ve got a place on the lake, just down the road, so I’m never far away.”

He was rolling her through the air lock door, Marion behind them. Then they took the elevator up. She was furious that Kristen was being left behind like an abandoned casualty of war.

Ally also was reminding herself about her appointment with Grant to get the hell out. But her mind was having trouble holding a lot of thoughts at once.

He pushed her wheelchair into the section of the laboratory where a line of computer terminals was stationed. After he’d fluffed a pillow behind her head and turned off some of the glaring fluorescents, he began.

“Alexa, this is a delicate time for you. We need to get you upstairs as quickly as possible and feed you some broth and put you back to bed. However, I want very much to give you an update on the status of your treatment. The headline is, it’s going very well. We fused some of the telomerase enzyme with your existing stem cells and your response was immediate. In fact, it appears the new heart tissue has reached critical mass and has already begun replicating itself. We’ve learned to expect the unexpected around here, but your response has significantly exceeded our simulations.”

He turned to Marion and asked her to go up and make sure Alexa’s bedding had been changed. “We’ll be up in a second. And please make sure that bowl of broth is ready and waiting.”

After she departed through the air lock, he walked over to a lab bench and checked the numbers that were scrolling on a CRT screen.

“All right,” Ally said “talk to me. I just saw Kristen. I’m still not sure if I believe what I think is happening, but I want the real story and I want it now.”

“That’s part of what I need to discuss with you.” He glanced away for a long moment, a pained expression on his face, seeming to collect his thoughts. Finally he turned back. “You see, the clinical trials have demonstrated that we can use the telomerase enzyme to ‘immortalize’ a patient’s own stem cells and then rejuvenate their brain or liver or even their heart. So the next question that’s hanging out there in space is obvious. What would happen if we could find a way to generalize the enzyme and disperse it throughout someone’s entire body, not restricting it to just one organ? And not just rejuvenate-regenerate.”

This question had actually passed fleetingly through her consciousness, though not fully articulated. It had taken the form of wondering where the use of these “immortal” cells could eventually lead.

“The trick would be to have just enough enzyme in your bloodstream to replace senescent cells as they are about to the, but not so much that healthy cells are replaced.” He paused searching for a metaphor. “If we thought of the process of cell senescence as something inexorable and steady, like a treadmill, then what we want to do is run just fast enough to stay in one place.”

“This whole thing does sound like Alice in Wonderland.”

“Yes, well… if we could do that, then it’s possible, just possible, that one’s entire body would simply begin regenerating itself instead of aging. Not just your skin. All of you. That’s the theory behind what we’ve called the Beta procedure.”

“But is that something you ethically ought to be doing?” she said, feeling a sense of dismay, of playing God. “Isn’t that going too far?”

“Frankly, I’m beginning to agree with you, but there are others who ask, how far is too far? Half the medicines we now have are intended to trick the body’s responses somehow-or to meddle in some other way, turning off stop-and- go signals at the cellular level. For example, some birth control pills make your body think you’re already pregnant. They trick our natural mechanisms. That kind of thing is commonplace in medicine today. But our research is poised for the next level, to answer the question of how long we can actually live. So here’s the argument. There’s no reason the human life span has to be what it is. In some unhealthy nations the average citizen doesn’t even reach sixty. Whereas in others, like the United States and Japan, the mean is already well past three score and ten. So what is right? What is reasonable? A hundred? Two hundred? It’s entirely possible to believe we could live productive lives at least twice as long as we do now.”

“And you think we should do this? The world would be thrown into chaos.”

“But look at the incredible cure rate we’ve already effected here using the telomerase enzyme. When our clinical trials for the NIH are announced, it will be the medical equivalent of the shot heard round the world. Nothing we know will ever be the same again.”

“That’s where you should leave it. To go further is obscene.”

“I fear recent events may have proved you right. Against my better judgment, I went ahead and experimented with the Beta procedure. And the results thus far have turned out to be disastrous.”

“I guess you’re referring to Kristen.”

“One day I casually mentioned the Beta to Winston Bartlett and without telling me, he brought it up with Kristen. She insisted on trying it.” His expression grew increasingly pained. “I want you to know I was against it. I warned her that it was highly experimental, that I could not guarantee what the side effects might be, but she begged me to do it anyway. Then Bartlett essentially ordered me to do it.”

“So what happened?”

He grimaced. “I got the dosage wrong. That’s my best guess. After I performed the Beta on Kristen, the enzyme was stable in her for over two months and appeared to be having an effect. All signs of aging abruptly stopped. It gave me a false sense of confidence. Also, there were no side effects. That was when Bartlett wanted to try it too. So I went ahead with him. But then, to my