Ross had one more question before they left. "Does anybody else know about this? Colleagues or friends?"
"Just my wife."
"Good," Darby said, "and let's keep it that way because if word leaks that we're putting our resources into an anti-aging drug, the media will be on us like vultures and competitors will be scrambling to learn what we've got. Think of this as our own Manhattan Project."
Later, while driving home, Darby's words buzzed in Chris's head. It wasn't the demand for secrecy that bothered him-he was used to that. It was recollection of the first words of Robert Oppenheimer moments after the original Manhattan Project made a ten-mile-high column of radioactive smoke over Almagordo: "I have become Death."
Two
"Old age is the most unexpected
of all the things that happen to a man."
– LEON TROTSKY
8
Chris didn't sleep much for the excitement. In a few months Wendy would give birth to their son or daughter. Meanwhile, Darby Pharms was going all out on tabulone. At times he could not distinguish which buoyed his spirits more.
Wendy's former apprehension about another baby had vanished like a low-grade fever. On the contrary, she happily anticipated the November birth and a year's leave of absence. To add to her delight, she had finished If I Should Die, and a literary agent had sold the manuscript on the second submission. It had garnered a modest advance, but her publisher loved the book and the series proposal. The publication date was February of next year. Wendy was ecstatic-a baby and a book, just months apart. It couldn't get much better than that.
Last week Jenny had flown down for another visit. The good news on that front was that her daughter Kelly was out of the hospital and planning to return to school in the fall. And Abigail was growing into a happy and healthy toddler.
Meanwhile, a SWAT team of workmen had over the months converted Chris's old lab into a state-of-the-art research site. Walls had been pushed out, and the floor space had doubled. Fancy equipment had arrived almost daily from all over the country. Also test animals. Mice they still procured from Jackson Labs. But finding the right monkeys presented problems. There were vendors all over the country, but only one had virus-free "retired breeders"-an isolated colony in the Florida Keys. Chris ordered two dozen ranging in age from twenty-one to twenty-nine-the oldest, named Jimbo, who was equivalent to a 105-year-old man. The younger animals cost four to six thousand dollars each. Because he might have been the oldest virus-free rhesus macaque in the world, Jimbo went for a cool ten thousand.
As director, Chris had also sought out the best talent he could find. But wooing them required special artfulness since he had to make the project alluring without revealing the objective. He explained that Darby had launched a project never before attempted in the pharmaceutical industry. As expected, his recruits were intrigued that a reputable company was investing millions of dollars in a steroid. Unique as its crystalline structure was, steroids was an area very few bothered with today. Intriguing also were the starting salaries-twice what they were earning. By the time Chris was through, he had hired six fulltime class-A researchers-two pharmacologists plus a medicinal chemist, a microbiologist, a protein chemist, and a geneticist. It was a pharmaceutical dream team.
The other good news was that Darby had received a patent on tabulone, which meant that no other institution could research the molecule for seventeen years.
By midwinter, the cancer toxogen had mysteriously dropped off the boards in spite of the initial media blitz. The official explanation was that a blight had killed off the apricot crops. The loss had cost the company dearly, and Chris guessed Quentin took some flak. Whatever the real story, Ross had managed to raise millions for the new lab from select venture capitalists. And he had done so with fantasies of developing a fountain-of-youth drug and turning investors into billionaires.
Toward that end, a special meeting was held in June with Chris, Quentin, Ross Darby, and a couple others to come up with a trade name for investors, research documents, and the FDA application. They met in the conference room where Chris wrote the suggestions on the blackboard. "Tabulone" did not impress anyone, given the product's momentous promise. Quentin said it sounded like an Italian dessert.
"What we need is something striking," Ross said. "Something that suggests what it's for-longevity, but not so literal. You know, something exotic and catchy."
So for nearly two hours they kicked around names until the blackboard was full and Chris was covered with chalk.
Eternity
Vitalong
VitaYou
VitaLife
AgeNot
For awhile they got stuck on puns, odd spellings, until the suggestions turned silly. They then moved on to various associations with time, clocks, life, then Latin and Greek roots, mythological and biblical names. And because the compound was a steroid not too unlike testosterone, they bandied around the -one suffix which produced some goofy tongue-twisters like Immorticone and Methuselone.
Next they played with prefixes like ever- and eva-, which yielded Evagreen, EvaYoung, EvaYou, and so on. That gave way to combos with vita-mega-, and omni-. Breaking the frustration somebody suggested Fuk4Eva and they all cheered.
Finally, into their second hour, Chris moved to the blackboard and in large block letters he wrote:
ELIXIR
For a moment everybody fell silent as they let the word sink in. Then heads began to nod. Ross straightened up in his chair, his eyes wide as he tested the suggestion. "Yes, I like it. Exotic, but not arcane. Overtones of alchemy yet with a sexy scientific X dead center." He slapped the table and rose. "That's it. Elixir," he said as if mouthing a spell. "Elixir. It's perfect, and can't you just imagine the great TV ads and promotional material? Yes! That's what we'll call it. Elixir!"
And everybody agreed.
Elixir.
"Elixir?"
"What do you think?"
"It's catchy."
It was the first time Wendy had visited the lab in years. Chris had brought her in to see the new facilities. Boxes of materials were stacked on the floor, but the structural work had been completed and equipment was functioning.
Wendy feigned interest as Chris showed her all the fancy instruments. In one room was his pride and joy, a mass spectrometer for determining chemical compositions and molecular weights. In another room, looking like something from a science fiction movie, sat the high resolution nuclear magnetometer. "Very nice," she said. "What does it do?"
"Tells us the number of atoms in the molecule, as well as their structural relations. Tabulone is very sophisticated-lots of interesting branches and bondings."
"Why's that important?"
"To help figure out the senescence problem. It's possible the flatness of the molecule lets it wedge itself between the coils of the DNA promoting mutagenesis. If that's the case, we may be able to alter the problem structure. Otherwise, no Elixir."