The Immortality Factor

by Ben Bova

  Is it the takeover bid? I asked myself as I sat at the long polished Brazilian cherrywood table. No, I decided, scanning the faces of the other board members. We’ve been wrestling with the takeover bid for almost a year now. It’s something else. Something new in the wind.

  No matter how sales and profits went, the board’s meeting room remained opulent. Two walls were all glass, from floor to ceiling, glass that darkened automatically when direct sunlight fell on it. Manhattan was spread out on display through those glass walls, from City Hall past the spires of the skyscrapers all the way out to the almost-hidden greenery of Central Park. The emptiness of Ground Zero was off to the left. In the other direction I could see across the East River toward Brooklyn Heights. Not so far away, as the crow flies, from my childhood home. Only a lifetime or two.

  The meeting ticked along almost perfunctorily. Johnston kept to the agenda and discouraged speech-making. He sat at the head of the table, with the nominal chairman of the board at his right hand, a doddering old man whose reputation far exceeded his talent, as far as I could see.

  Freda Gunnerson was giving a terse report on the Stockholm Division’s program to build and operate a modern computer factory in Moscow. The report was pretty glum. Looking around the table, I realized that not all of the board members looked wired tight. Some seemed as unruffled or musingly distracted as they did at every meeting. Fewer than half of the twenty-four-member board ever had anything constructive to say at these meetings, and they were usually the members who also ran operating divisions. The others, mostly white-haired or balding, were on the board because they owned large blocks of stock or had risen to the level of senior statesmen in the corporate world. I often wondered how some of these semi-somnolent old men ever got out of bed, let alone rose to the level of captain of industry. I’ve got to admit that the few women on the board seemed sharper, more focused than the elder statesmen. Probably they had to be, to rise past the glass ceiling.

  The more I studied my fellow board members, the more it seemed to me that only the members of the executive committee were wound up. Something’s going on in the executive committee, I realized.

  “The Russians say they want capitalism,” Gunnerson was complaining in her thin nasally whining voice, “but they are riddled through with corruption and they have no idea of what competition really is or how incentives work.”

  The executive committee had held its own private little meeting before the regular board meeting, I knew. Something happened that’s got them all edgy as hell. Maybe Johnston will get into it when we go to new business on the agenda.

  “Thanks for your report, Freda,” Johnston said when she turned over the last leaf of the pages before her. “Any comments?”

  The board members glanced at one another. Before anyone could speak up, Johnston said, “Okay, we’ll go on to new business.”

  Several of the members looked clearly surprised.

  “Before we do that,” said Tabatha Young, the only woman among the senior officers of the board, “what’s the latest on the takeover bid?”

  Johnston squirmed slightly in his chair. I liked white-haired Tabatha Young; she had taken her late husband’s seat on the board as a temporary measure nearly five years earlier and had shown that she possessed as much knowledge and drive as anyone sitting at that table; more than most of the men her own age, in fact.

  “It looks as if the Europeans are going to go ahead with a hostile takeover bid,” Johnston said unhappily.

  “That’s what you told us last meeting,” said Tabatha. “Hasn’t anything happened since then?”

  Frowning, the CEO said, “I expect them to make a public bid for our stock in a couple of months, three at the most.”

  That sent a shudder of sighs and whispers down the table.

  “And what are we doing to prepare for that?” Tabatha could be relentless when she wanted to be.

  “The one thing we’ve got to do is improve our cash position,” said Johnston. “That should up the market price of our stock, make the takeover attempt too expensive for them.”

  “And what steps are you taking toward that end?”

  Johnston hesitated, then replied, “I’m not prepared to discuss that yet. The executive committee is working out a plan, but it’s not finalized. It may be necessary to call a special meeting of the board in a few weeks specifically on that subject.”

  “I see,” said Tabatha.

  “Any new business?” Johnston asked eagerly from the head of the table.

  Sid Lowenstein said, “I hear Art’s started down another new trail. Maybe he can tell us something about it.”

  My annoyance at Lowenstein’s calling me Art was swallowed by my surprise at being asked to report on the new work I had started at the lab. I had only had that one brief discussion with Johnston about the paraplegic work and now Lowenstein wanted me to talk about it in front of the entire board. Why?

  “It’s very early,” I said cautiously, trying to think it out while I talked. “And very small. I can handle it out of the division’s internal funds for the time being.”

  “What’s it all about?” asked Tabatha.

  “Don’t be coy, Arthur,” Johnston said. “Tell the board what you told me two weeks ago.”

  Have they rehearsed this? I wondered. I felt as if I were stepping into a quicksand bog. “It’s much too early to let this information go beyond these four walls.” I knew that corporate board members kept secrets about as well as congressmen or White House aides.

  They all leaned forward in their plush chairs and looked expectantly down the table at me.

  There was nothing for me to do except plunge ahead. Gingerly. “We’ve started very preliminary work on experiments that may lead to a way to cure paraplegics.”

  “Cure them?”

  “If this idea works, we may eventually be able to reconnect the severed spinal tissue and allow paraplegics to regain control of their legs.”

  Surprisingly, one of the oldest men there asked, “What about their bladder functions? It’s kidney and bladder infections that kill most paraplegics, isn’t it?”

  He must have one in the family, I thought. “Yes, it should allow them to regain control over their bladders, as well. Reconnect the spine, and the brain regains control over all the parts of the body that were lost when the spinal cord was severed. If they haven’t degenerated too far.”

  “Can you really do that?” the woman next to me asked.

  “Not yet. We’ve just started some preliminary work on the concept. That’s why it shouldn’t be repeated outside this room.”

  Johnston was smiling happily down the table. But Lowenstein asked, “How many paraplegics are there in the United States, Art?”

  That surprised me. “I don’t really know. But there must be hundreds of thousands, at least. Maybe a million or more.”

  “I looked it up,” Lowenstein said with a thin smile. “About ten thousand cases per year in the U.S. Most of them are the result of trauma—injuries. Automobile accidents, motorcycles, things like that.”

  “How many altogether?” someone asked.

  “Can’t be more than three, four hundred thousand altogether,” said Lowenstein.

  “How many of them would you be able to cure?” Gunnerson asked.

  I waved a hand in the air. “I don’t know. A fair percentage of the accident victims, I should think. If we get to them early enough so that their legs haven’t atrophied.”

  “That’s not a very big market,” one of the older men muttered. He pulled a pocket calculator from his vest and tapped on the keys. “Let’s say fifty percent of ten thousand. Not much of a market at all, really.”

  That nettled me. “There’s the rest of the world,” I pointed out. “And quadriplegics, too.”

  “There’s about two hundred thousand quadriplegics,” Lowenstein said. “In the U.S., that is.”

  “Even so.” The old man shook his head as if in disappointment.

  Feeling as i
f I had to defend myself, I said, “Well, there are some things that we do because they’re the right thing to do. If we can make paraplegics and quadriplegics get out of their wheelchairs and walk, lead normal lives again—”

  “How much would it cost?” someone asked.

  Another board member said, “If the market’s this small, there won’t be any profit in it.”

  “I don’t see why we should invest money in a program that’s not going to be profitable. Your burn rate is already too high, Arthur.”

  “The money my lab burns,” I shot back, “produces this corporation’s profits five years downstream. And I’m not asking for more funding.”

  “Not yet,” someone muttered.

  “But you will,” the old man said with a knowing smile. “Sooner or later you’ll come to us for money, won’t you?”

  I had to admit, “Sooner or later.”

  “I think you ought to drop this project right here and now, before you pour too much money into it.”

  Johnston pursed his lips as if he wanted to say something, then decided against it.

  “Now, wait a minute,” I said. “Do you mean that if we could save the lives often thousand people, we wouldn’t do it unless we could make a profit at it?”

  “We can’t engage in programs that lose money,” Lowenstein replied. “For god’s sake, Art, we’re not the government! We can’t print money, we’ve got to earn it.”

  Most of the board members chuckled.

  I tried to hold on to my temper. “But what if this technique would have wider applications than merely a few tens of thousands of paraplegics?”

  “What do you mean?” Johnston asked.

  “Suppose we could find out how to regenerate other types of tissue, in addition to spinal neurons?”

  “Like what?”

  “Hearts. Livers. Kidneys. Amputated limbs.”

  That stunned them. They all sagged back in their chairs as if I had slapped their faces, all at the same time.

  “Are you serious?” asked the oldest member of the board. I knew he had undergone quadruple bypass surgery and several other cardiac procedures.

  “I am serious,” I told him.

  “Regenerate a heart?”

  “Regenerate any organ in the human body,” I said firmly. Then I added, “Eventually.”

  The woman next to me asked, “Do you mean you could grow a new heart for a person? Inside her own body?”

  “Without surgery,” I answered. “That’s the goal of our work.”

  “New breasts for mastectomy cases?”

  I nodded.

  Johnston gave Lowenstein an intense stare, then said to me, “I had no idea you had come so far . . .”

  Waving my hand again, I confessed, “We haven’t done anything so far except talk. And think.”

  “But you think you might be able to regenerate organs?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Tabatha. “This is going to need stem cells, isn’t it?”

  She was even sharper than I had thought. “It might. At the outset, at least.”

  “Can we do that?”

  “If we fund it ourselves, without government money,” Johnston answered for me.

  “Regenerate any kind of organ? Like lungs?” one of the older men asked again, in a wheezing voice.

  “Eventually we’ll be able to regenerate any kind of tissue,” I said, knowing that eventually would probably be too late for him and most of the others around the table.

  “That’s a different kettle of fish,” said the man with the calculator. “That—it’s kind of staggering, isn’t it?”

  I had them hooked. There was no way they were going to order me to drop the work now. But I didn’t want to build their expectations prematurely.

  “Look,” I said, “I don’t want to give you the idea that we’ll be able to do this by Christmas. All we’ve got right now is a few basic ideas—and the talented people who might be able to turn those ideas into reality. But it will take time. I have no idea of how long.”

  “It would be very nice,” said one of the old men, “if you could have it done before my next physical.”

  Everyone laughed. There was no question of stopping the research now. No one asked about how much money it would take, not even Lowenstein.

  And I almost forgot that the executive committee was keeping secrets from the rest of the board.

  But as the meeting broke up, I noticed once again that all six of the executive committee members drifted up to the head of the table and huddled with Johnston briefly, whispering. One of them even glanced back my way, like a guilty little kid plotting against me.

  Something was definitely cooking, that was certain. I picked my PowerBook from the table and headed slowly for the door. Sure enough, I was barely out in the corridor when Johnston clapped me on the shoulder, like a policeman grabbing a suspect.

  “That’s a nice fast one you pulled on me in there,” the CEO grumbled.

  “Fast one?” I feigned innocence.

  Johnston started toward his office, one massive paw still gripping me by the shoulder, almost hard enough to hurt, dragging me along the corridor with him.

  “That business about regenerating hearts. You never told me about that before.”

  You didn’t tell me you were going to sabotage the paraplegic work, either, I retorted silently.

  Aloud, I replied, “It’s new. We’ve just had a couple of conversations about it, nothing more.”

  “But you made it sound to the board like it’s almost a done deal.”

  Johnston was clearly angry, I could see that. Why? What’s going on?

  “I told them it’s just in the talking stage, didn’t I?”

  Frowning as he strode into the anteroom of his own office, Johnston said, “The board members aren’t scientists, Arthur. You know that. You tell them something might be possible, they assume you’ve got it in the bag.”

  “Well, it’s not, and I’ll be happy to explain that to them at the next meeting.”

  “Yeah, you do that.” Johnston finally let go of my shoulder and headed for his broad, curved, ultramodern desk.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Johnston looked up at me as he sat behind his desk. “What do you mean?”

  “Why are you so upset about what I said? Why’s the executive committee so wired?”

  “I don’t like being surprised at board meetings.”

  “I told you about the paraplegic work.”

  “But not about growing new hearts.”

  I put on a grin, trying to lighten the mood. “Well, you don’t think I’m going to let Sid shoot me down without fighting back, do you?”

  Johnston did not grin back. “Sid’s fighting to save this corporation from being bought out by a bunch of European bastards who’ll gut the company, milk it for all it’s worth, and then throw us all on the garbage heap.”

  “Is that what the executive committee’s so tense about?”

  “Yeah,” said Johnston. “What else?” But his gaze did not meet mine.

  The desk phone buzzed and Johnston’s secretary’s voice announced, “Your call to Tokyo is coming through, Mr. J.”

  “All right,” he said to the phone speaker. As he picked up the handpiece he shooed me toward the door with his free hand.

  Still wondering what was really burning Johnston’s guts, I drove back to the lab and got there by late afternoon. I made a brief stop at my own office, then wandered out to the laboratories where the research work was being done. The real world. I loved the sights and sounds and smells of the working labs. I knew each one of the researchers and their technicians by name. I chatted with them about their work, their families; I exchanged jokes with them. I knew every inch of the elaborate glassware apparatuses they were using, every humming, beeping, blinking instrument on their benchtops. Like a good general, I wanted to know exactly what my troops were doing, and I let them do their jobs without sticking my fingers i
nto their experiments.

  The real world. The board of directors can play their games and talk their talk, but out here is where the real work gets done. You can’t bullshit with science. It either works or it doesn’t. Like Omar Khayyám’s moving finger: it writes and neither piety nor wit can change any of the words.

  I ended up in Darrell Walters’s office, a ramshackle corner room stuffed to the ceiling with gadgets and shelves full of reports and pictures tacked to the walls and a well-scarred wooden drawing table and a big flip-chart easel covered with scribbled lists in half a dozen different-colored felt-tip marking pens in Walters’s scrawling hand lettering.

  Darrell had no desk. He preferred a broken-down stuffed sofa and an eclectic scattering of chairs, some wood, some plastic, one a high swiveling barstool.

  I sat on the barstool. Darrell had stretched out on the sagging sofa. Vince Andriotti had joined us, scowling darkly, his natural expression.

  We were brainstorming the idea of regenerating organs.

  “Whatever made you tell the board of directors about it?” Darrell asked from his supine position.

  I shook my head ruefully. “It was either get them excited about growing new hearts or have them direct me to stop the nerve regeneration experiment.”

  “I guess most of the board members could use new hearts,” Darrell said.

  “Some of them have never had a heart,” I joked.

  “What about growing brains for ’em?” Andriotti suggested.

  Swiveling the barstool back and forth, I said, “You know, one of the women on the board asked me if we’d be able to regenerate skin and muscle tissue. Instead of plastic surgery for face-lifts and breast replacements.”

  “Now, that’s a moneymaking idea!” Darrell said.

  Vince was sitting backward astride one of the wooden chairs with his heavy forearms draped on its back and his chin buried in his hairy arms. He asked, “Does this mean I can stop moonlighting and get a legitimate charge number for the job?”