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."
"But you don't even know if it works on humans."
"Except for Iwati."
She had almost forgotten. New Guinea juju was alive and well and living in twentieth-century Boston. "If he suddenly went off the stuff, would he age?"
"I really don't know. The next step is to see what happens to primates, which means determining dosages. They're just a few genetic steps up from mice, but my guess is that the stuff will prolong their lives, too."
Wendy was happy that Chris was finally out of the shadows and that his sideshow study was now a major scientific inquiry. She could also enjoy his excitement because he seemed like a different person, a great big, handsome, lovable kid. However, while she kept it to herself, all she saw on her tour was scientists producing false hopes of finding a cure for death itself. There were no magic cures, she told herself. People got sick and died. Like Ricky. It was an inevitability that Chris would not accept. A grand illusion. She just prayed that when that discovery hit home, he would not be crushed.
Chris led her to a computer station nearby where he tapped some keys and, like magic, the Elixir molecule appeared on the monitor in different colored balls. Slowly the figure rotated like a bubble dancer, turning itself around in 3-D to show off its endless cheeks.
She put her hands on his shoulders and peered at the monitor. "Pretty. So what do you do with it?"
"If you know binding sites, you can see how atoms fit together, then manipulate the geometry." He clipped off a hydrogen/oxygen stem and added a carbon-hydrogen cluster. "Now we have a different molecule with different properties."
"You're designing new matter."
"More like redesigning old."
"Improving on nature," she said.
He looked up at her with a blank face. "Wendy, you're not going to give me your Imperial Margarine lecture, are you?"
"Now that you mention it…" she joked.
The last stop was the monkeys. They were kept in rows of steel cages lined up along one long wall. Each contained a single rhesus. Wendy stopped at one cage tagged FRED and his birthdate, 3/13/65. He looked at her with quick anxious eyes. It was so unfair, she thought. In a few weeks his head would be in clamps, his body paralyzed, the skull cap removed, his brains exposed and sprouting electrodes to monitor his death. "Poor little guy."
"I know what you're thinking. But if it's any consolation, he may teach us how to prolong human life."
"I don't approve of that either."
"Not exactly a news flash," he chuckled. "But frankly, it appeals to me."
She knew what he was getting at. "Honey, you don't have Alzheimer's."
"You don't know that."
"Nor do you."
"Yeah, but sometimes I almost feel it coming. Yesterday I couldn't remember Stan's extension. There are days I'd call him half a dozen times. How could I forget?"
"That's natural. You're under a lot of stress."
"Then what about forgetting our anniversary last week? The first time in sixteen years that's happened. Or your birthday last year?"
"You're just preoccupied. Besides, Alzheimer's affects people in their sixties and seventies, not forties."
"That's not true, I checked. It could start in the late thirties even."
Wendy stared into Chris's two-tone eyes. As an old friend had once said, it was like two different faces superimposed. At the moment, he was at once the brilliant, cool-minded scientist and an irrational kid. "Chris, you're being ridiculous. You don't have Alzheimer's disease."
"Maybe not. But every instinct tells me it's in the cards. Whatever, the bottom line is that aging stinks. All that stuff about wisdom in the years is a lot of feel-good garbage."
Wendy watched Fred stir the wood chips with his fingers. She felt the tired old debate coming on but pushed it aside. "Just one question: Say it works, say you eliminate the senescence problem. How would people relate if some grew old while others didn't?"
"I haven't thought that far ahead."