‘Is it important?’ Dryden asked.
‘It is to Bill Serafin,’ Professor Walsh said emphatically. ‘His Vienna research is the main thing in his life. He sees it as the bedrock of his theories — I’m calling them his, but many others share them. In his years here, he submitted numerous papers to the scientific press. Few, I’m afraid, ever got into print. He got the reputation of being obsessed with this theory of increasing growth, without ever adding anything of substance to his research in Vienna. And a lot of people, including close colleagues, I may say, began to wonder, like you, if it was important.’
‘It was, I expect, if you had to work with the man.’
She nodded. ‘You must understand this, Mr. Dryden. Medical history rings with the names of men and women who devoted the greater part of their lives to investigating some hypothesis, often counter to the orthodoxy of current practice. As working associates, people like that can be extremely tiresome to get along with, but there’s always the chance they will make a breakthrough that transforms our thinking. Yet I suppose for every one who makes it, there are scores who never do. Where fulfillment might have been, there is emptiness, a vacuum. Bill Serafin, I think, fits that category. He left this place an embittered man. The morale among the rest of us was pretty low when I took over. I had to make it clear from the beginning that I saw the role of professor differently. This room used to be his office. It didn’t look like this. He would shut himself in here with his books and write papers no journal wanted to publish. Rightly or wrongly, the rest of the staff forgot about him. The department was managed by his secretary, a formidable character. I made it a condition of my appointment that she be transferred, and she was. Now she runs Bio-Engineering instead. I could see, too, that if I moved in here, where Bill used to shut himself away, I’d be sunk. Things wouldn’t alter. So I took over a small office up the corridor nearer the rest of the staff, and had this place decorated and furnished as a general-purpose tutorial room. I use it as well for receiving VIP visitors, like publishers back from the dead.’
Dryden grinned, but thought fast. She was rounding off the interview. There was something else to confirm. ‘Before I cap that by floating gently out of the window, may I ask a damn-fool question about Dr. Serafin’s theory? He has to prove the human skeleton structurally capable of accepting an increase in size, is that right?’
‘That has to be faced, if his ideas on growth are valid. Scientists from Galileo onward have argued that nature can’t construct an animal beyond a certain size without altering the proportions and materials that give it its characteristic appearance.’
‘Well, what’s to stop him pointing out that there are plenty of tall people around without apparent difficulties? Fellows of seven feet and upward are pretty common in basketball, and they’re not on crutches, that I’ve noticed.’
She shook her head. ‘That’s missing the point. We’re not talking about extremes. You’re in merchandising, you said, so I guess you know all about graphs. If you plot the distribution of human stature, you get a normal curve, the bell shape, with the lip of the bell taking in your basketball players on one side, and midgets on the other. Unless some form of genetic selection is introduced, the graph will always look that way. Bill’s theory says, in effect, that the entire bell is edging toward the right. Your seven-foot men won’t look so tall in the year twenty-one hundred; they won’t even make the basketball team. But giants don’t prove anything. We’re concerned with the norm; an increase of one centimetre per decade might not seem significant on present average height, but it could be too much for certain types of physique. The bell won’t necessarily chip at the edge; it could crack in the center.’
‘So that’s the point he has to answer if his hypothesis is correct?’
‘He’s been trying to answer it these last ten years,’ said Professor Walsh. ‘Sadly for him, it’s in the area of speculation. Only time will tell us if he was right.’
Dryden saluted this assessment with a philosophic nod. He wasn’t making the mistake of leaping at the chink of light it revealed. ‘I suppose there’s no way of inducing growth artificially?’
She gave him a long look, then shook her head. ‘You’re thinking of anabolic steroids? They add muscular mass to the body, but there’s no effect on height.’
He nodded again. ‘You said only time would tell. There’s no way around that?’
‘You mean by augmenting growth?’
‘Something like that.’
‘The process of growth is still a biological enigma, Mr. Dryden.’
‘I thought perhaps there might be a hormone...’
She hesitated. ‘That’s in the area of biochemistry.’
‘But growth is governed by hormones, isn’t it?’
She nodded. ‘From the pituitary gland. Somatotrophin — the human growth hormone. We generally call it HGH. But if you’re suggesting Bill Serafin—’
‘Without suggesting anything,’ cut in Dryden, ‘what would happen if you administered HGH artificially?’
‘It’s already used as a treatment to remedy a certain type of dwarfism. The pioneering work was carried out in the sixties at Tufts University, Boston. HGH was extracted from the pituitary glands of corpses at autopsy and administered to children with arrested growth. It proved successful with the Lorain type of dwarf, that is the well-proportioned small human being. We have a unit working here at the Institute.’
‘What happens if you administer it to normal children?’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘I have no idea. I can think of no reason why anyone should want to do that.’
‘Of course not.’ He reached for the ashtray and made a performance of stubbing out his cigarette. ‘It might make them taller at maturity.’
She didn’t comment.
‘Of course, it’s a grotesque idea, pumping growth hormones into normal children,’ he went on. ‘Nobody would do such a thing. If they’ve got a deficiency, okay, but not if they’re normal. Maybe it’s been tried with laboratory animals?’
She said in a voice that was thinking of other things, ‘In 1921, two American researchers administered a bovine pituitary extract to young rats, continuing through their normal period of growth to adulthood. The results were dramatic: giant rats, with a normal body configuration and without obesity, twice the weight of untreated controls. But before you draw any conclusions from that, Mr. Dryden, you should know that the rat has a built-in capacity for growth. Its epiphyseal discs, unlike ours, don’t ossify. If that’s blinding you with science, maybe I’m doing you a service. You’re on very doubtful ground.’
‘Thanks for the warning. I was thinking aloud. Bad habit. Perhaps there are more natural ways of stimulating growth. Does exercise have any effect?’
‘Very little, that we know,’ said Professor Walsh. ‘It possibly encourages some acceleration of growth. I believe there was some Swedish research carried out on girl swimmers in the twelve-to-sixteen age group which showed that their height as a group was accelerated above established norms, but that’s not what you’re interested in, is it? You want to know if there is any way of producing people taller than they would normally grow by natural means.’
‘That sums it up,’ admitted Dryden.
She stood up. ‘Mr. Dryden, I don’t know what this project is of Bill Serafin’s, and I don’t wish to know. If you and your client are sponsoring research intended to substantiate theories about growth, there is one other thing I would care to say to you. There’s a way of increasing people’s stature that’s been known for hundreds of years: the medieval torture rack. They justified its use as a means of discovering the truth. Think about that.’