_Sunday, April 5
8:20 A.M.
_"Okay, you'd better take it from here," Winston Bartlett declared to
Kenji Noda over the roar of the engine. He had lifted his feet off the
pedals and was unbuckling the cockpit seat belt. He liked having a turn
piloting his McDonnell Douglas 520N helicopter on the commutes between
his corporate headquarters in Lower Manhattan and his medical research
park in northern New Jersey, but prudence dictated a more experienced
hand on the collective during descent and landing. For that he had
Noda, formerly of the Japanese Defense Forces. A tall, wiry man of few
words, Noda was also his bodyguard, chauffeur, and curator of his
museum-quality _katana _sword collection.
With the sharp, delicious aroma of the pine forest below wafting
through the cabin, Noda quickly put aside the origami he'd been
folding, to center his mind and slid around a special opening in the
bulkhead. He strapped himself into the seat, then took the radio
headphones. The sky was the purest blue, with not another craft in the
visual perimeter. They were, after all, over a forest.
As Bartlett settled himself in the passenger compartment, he thought
about where matters stood. There was the very real prospect he had
rolled the dice one time too many. The daily blood tests at his clinic
in New Jersey were showing he was disturbingly close to using up his
nine lives.
To look at him, though, you'd never suspect. At sixty-seven he was
still trim and athletic, confident even cocky, with a full head of
steel dark hair and probing eyes that instantly appraised whatever they
caught in their gaze. He played handball at a private health club near
his Gramercy Park mansion for an hour every other morning and he
routinely defeated men half his age, including Grant Hampton. Remaining
a player in every sense of the term was the main reason he enjoyed
flying his M-D chopper, even though his license had been lapsed for
eight years. It was the perfect embodiment of his lust for life. As he
never failed to point out, his lifelong business success wasn't bad for
a City College grad with a bachelor's degree in Oriental art history.
He had gotten this far because he wanted success enough to make it
happen.
He'd started out in New York real estate, but for the last twenty years
he had concentrated on buying up small, under- priced medical-device
manufacturers with valuable patents and weak bottom lines. He
dismantled some of the companies and sold off the pieces, always for
more than he'd paid for the whole. Others he restructured with new
management, and when a profitable turnaround was in sight, he took them
public or sold them to a major player like Johnson & Johnson. The
potential winners, though, the ones with promising pipelines of medical
devices or drugs whose FDA approval was imminent, he relocated here at
the BMD campus in northern New Jersey.
But competition was fierce, and the bigger players like Merck and J&J
had limitless research capital. They could write off dead ends a lot
easier. Thus it was that five years ago, when his pipeline was drying
up, Winston Bartlett took the biggest gamble of his life. He acquired a
cash-strapped new start-up called the Gerex Corporation, whose head
scientist was at the cutting edge of stem cell research. Karl Van de
Vliet, M.D., Ph.D., had just had his funding terminated and his
laboratory at Stanford University closed after a political flap by
right-wingers.
Bartlett had moved Van de Vliet here to New Jersey and poured millions
into his stem cell efforts, bleeding BMD's working capital white and
racking up 85 million in short-term debt just to keep the rest of the
company afloat. Now, though, the gamble was paying off. This month
Gerex was winding up stage-three clinical trials for the National
Institutes of Health. These trials validated a revolutionary procedure
that changed the rules of everything known about healing the human
body. Already his CFO, Grant Hampton, was heading a negotiating team
hammering out a deal with the British biotech conglomerate Cambridge
Pharmaceuticals to sell them a 49 percent stake in Gerex. Over 650
million in cash and stock were on the table, and there were escalators,
depending on the results of the trials now under way.
The problem was, Cambridge had only seen the financial and summaries of
data from Gerex's successful clinical trials. They knew nothing about
the fiasco of the Beta procedure.
"Karl called just before we left and said she's worse this morning,"
Bartlett remarked to Noda. He was removing his aviator shades and there
was deep frustration in his eyes. "God I feel so damned responsible.
She was--"
"Having the Beta was Kristen's idea," Noda reminded him. "She wanted to
do it."
What he didn't say was on both their minds: what about Bartlett
himself? After Kristen Starr had had the Beta, and it had seemed
successful, Bartlett decided to have it too. Now his daily blood tests
here at the institute were showing that the telomerase enzyme was
starting to metastasize and replicate in his bloodstream, just as it
had in hers.
"Well," Bartlett went on, "Karl thinks he's got a new idea that might
save us. Hampton is supposed to be on the case this very morning." He
stared out the chopper's window, down at the rooftops of his empire. At
the north end of the industrial park was the main laboratory, where
stents and titanium joint replacements were tested on animals--mostly
sterile pigs, though some primate testing also was under way. The
central area had two large manufacturing facilities where the more
complex devices were made.
The buildings were all white cinder block, except for the one they were
hovering above now. It was at the far south end, a massive three-story
mansion nestled among ancient pines and reached by a long cobblestone
driveway. Though it was actually the oldest building of the group by a
hundred years, it was the latest acquisition for the complex. It
fronted a beautiful ten-acre lake, and had been a summer _palacio_ of a
nineteenth-century railroad baron. Around mid-century it was turned
into a luxury retirement home, complete with nursing services. Its
ornate appointments reminded patients of the Frick Gallery, if one
could imagine those marble halls teeming with wheelchairs and nurses.
Bartlett had bought the defunct manufacturing complex next to it
eighteen years earlier for the BMD industrial park, but it was only six
years ago that the owners of the mansion, a group of squabbling heirs,
finally relented and agreed to part with the property. It was now a
flagship holding of BMD.
He had an eye for design and he had loved remodeling the old mansion
and making it into a modern clinic and research facility. He had
renamed it the Dorian Institute and moved in Karl Van de Vliet and the
research staff of the Gerex Corporation. He also had put a landing pad
on the expansive roof, along with a stair leading down to an elevator
that could take him directly to the laboratory in the basement.
Kenji Noda settled the McDonnell Douglas onto the pad and cut the
engines. Bartlett never let himself worry about the noise. The patients
in the clinical trials were here at no charge, so they really couldn't
complain, particularly since they were now part of what was possibly
turning out to be the greatest advance in the history of medicine. If
your Alzheimer's had just been reversed at no charge, you weren't going
to complain about a little hubbub on the roof.
"I'll wait here," Noda said opening the side door. His bald pate,
reminiscent of an eighteenth-century samurai, glistened in the early
spring sun.
Bartlett nodded, knowing that his pilot did not trust physicians and
hospitals. Taking care of your body was your responsibility, Kenji Noda
frequently declared and he trained his own daily. He ate no meat and
drank gallons of green tea. When he practiced _kendo_ swordplay, he had
the reflexes of a man half his age. He never discussed why he had left
Japan, but Bartlett assumed it was for reasons best left in the dark.
Bartlett headed down the metal stairs leading to the self- service
elevator. This daily ordeal of flying out to give a blood sample and to
see Kristen was increasingly unsettling. As he inserted his magnetic
card into the elevator security box, he felt his hand shaking slightly.
So close to the eternal dream of humankind. So close. How was it going
to end?
_Sunday, April 5
8:38 A.M.
_
"Dr. Vee, I'm feeling so much better, I can't tell you." Emma Rosen
reached out and caught her physician by the collar of his lab coat,
pulling him down and brazenly bussing his cheek. She'd been longing to
do this for three weeks but hadn't mustered the nerve until now. "This
morning I climbed the stairs to the third floor, twice, up and back
without any chest pain. Oy, can you believe? It's a miracle."
Karl Van de Vliet was a couple of inches over six feet, with a trim
face and sandy hair that some older patients judged too long for a
physician. His English normally was perfect, though sometimes he made a
mistake when trying to sound too colloquial. But everyone, young and
old adored his retiring Dutch manner and those deep blue eyes that
carried some monumental sadness from the past. They also were sure he
would soon be recognized worldwide as the miracle worker he was. The
prospect of a Nobel didn't actually seem that far-fetched.
"Emma, please, I begged you to rest." He sighed and checked the dancing
electronic pens of her EKG. They were in the basement of the Dorian
Institute. Upstairs, the "suites"--nobody called them rooms--were
intended to invoke a spa more than a clinic, so most of the heavy-duty
diagnostic equipment was kept in a row of examining rooms down near the
subterranean lab. "For another week at least. Why won't you listen?
You've been a very naughty girl. I may have to tell your daughter."
He glanced at the seventy-three-year-old woman's readout one last time,
made a quick note on his handheld computer, and then laid a thin hand
across her brow for a fleeting, subjective temperature check.
She's all but fully recovered, he told himself. It's truly astonishing.
Five weeks earlier, she had come through the front door of the Dorian
Institute in a wheelchair pushed by her youngest, a bottle blonde named
Shelly. He took one look and scuttled the normal security precautions,
the frisk for cameras and recording devices. Emma's low cardiac output
had deteriorated to the point that her left leg below the knee was
swollen to almost twice its normal size, owing to renal retention of
fluid, and she was so short of breath she required oxygen. He hadn't
wanted to complicate the clinical trials by taking on another patient
at that late date, but she had been referred by a physician friend in
the city, begging. How could he turn her away?
He had removed a microscopic amount of bone marrow from her right
ankle, extracted the stem cells, applied the hormonal signal that told
them to develop into heart muscle, and then injected a thriving cell
factory into her heart. Since stem cells could be made to ignore the
body's rules to stop replicating after a certain number, they were able
to reproduce forever, constantly renewing themselves. The only other
cells with that immortal characteristic were cancer cells. In fact, it
was as though he had given Emma a new kind of cancer--one that produced
cells as healthy as those in a newborn. Today she probably could have
run up those stairs.
Although his stem cell technology was going to create a new era in
regenerative medicine, he had experienced his share of bumps in the
road. Five years earlier, Stanford University had canceled his research
project there since the work he had been doing involved the special
stem cells in unused fertility-clinic embryos. The university claimed
there had been death threats to its president. The Board of Regents had
finally decided with a sham show of remorse, to revoke his funding.
They called him in one sunny afternoon in May and pulled the plug. He
thanked them and tore up his contract. By that time he had already
demonstrated that, using the right chemical signals, stem cells could
be coaxed into becoming almost any organ. Inserted into the heart, they
became new heart muscle, replacing scars; inserted into the brain, they
became neural tissue. No way was he going to be stopped now. They
didn't know what they were losing.
What he needed was a "white knight." He did some poking around and came
up with Winston Bartlett, then floated feelers to Bartlett's people.
What if, he proposed, Bartlett acquired the Gerex Corporation for BMD
and made it a for-profit business? No more public funding (and
maddening administrative meddling). The research already completed was
so close to a payoff, after years and years of grinding lab work and
thousands of white mice, that the deal could be considered an
investment where 95 percent of the seed money had already been supplied
by taxpayers.
Winston Bartlett had liked the sound of that, and Karl Van de Vliet had
his white knight.
Once his financing was secure, he decided to begin by solving the
problem that had dogged him at Stanford. Since there would always be a
distracting public-relations problem hounding any researcher in the
United States who made use of aborted embryos, even if it was to save
lives, he was determined to find a less controversial way to trick
Mother Nature and garner "pluripotent" stem cells, the name given those
that could give rise to virtually any tissue type.
He had. After he moved his research team into the Dorian Institute just
over 4 1/2 years ago, he had perfected a way to use a human protein, an
enzyme called telomerase, to make adult stem cells do most of the
miracles once only thought possible with embryonic cells.
The phase-three clinical trials over the past seven months had proved
conclusively that the technique worked. Adult stem cells, when treated
with the telomerase enzyme to arrest the process of cell senescence,
could indeed regenerate everything from the human brain to the human
heart, from Parkinson's to acute myocardial infarction.
Twenty-three days from now, when the phase-three clinical trials were
formally scheduled to be completed, Karl Van de Vliet would have enough
data for the National Institutes of Health to confirm one of the most
important breakthroughs in the history of medicine.
Unfortunately, however, there was that other bit of data that he would
not be sharing with the NIH. The Beta.
Thinking about that, his heart heavy, he turned back to the situation
at hand.
"Emma, you're making wonderful progress," he continued on with the
banter, "but don't push yourself too hard just yet."
She laughed, sending lines across her forehead. Her voice was deep and
rich, sultry in its own way. "When you get as old as I am, honey, you
do anything you can get away with. What am I saving it for? I just
might go to Atlantic City next week and pick up a sailor."
"Well, then, I may have to have Shelly go along and keep an eye on
you," he said with one last programmed smile. Then he checked his
watch. Bartlett should be arriving any minute now. Time to get Emma
Rosen the hell out of here and back upstairs.
He turned and signaled for Ellen O'Hara, the head nurse, to start
removing the suction-cup electrodes that had been stuck on Emma for her
EKG. Ellen had been with him when he was at Stanford and her loyalty
was unquestioned. She had made sure that the Beta disaster with Kristen
hadn't become the gossip of the institute. Still, how much longer could
it be kept quiet?
Then Sandra Hanes, the lively, dark-haired woman in charge of the
second floor for this shift, walked into the examination room. She knew
nothing about Kristen.
"Perfect timing," he said. Then he drew her aside. "Keep an eye on
Emma, will you? Try and keep her in her room and quiet as much as you
can. The last blood work showed her white-cell count over twelve K/CMM.
It could mean there's some minimal rejection rearing its head. Probably
nothing to worry about, but can you just keep her away from the stairs
for godsake? I don't want her tiring herself out."
"I'll tie her to the bed if I have to," Sandra answered. The clinical
trials had required a mountain of paperwork, and her face was strained
from working long shifts, including a lot of weekends, like this one.
But he suspected she actually appreciated the overtime. She was forty-
five, divorced and putting a straight-A daughter through Rutgers.
She also was a first-rate nurse, like all the others at the institute,
and her loyalty couldn't be more secure. Still, he knew that she and
all the other staffers were bursting to tell the world about the
miracles they'd witnessed. That was why Bartlett had insisted on an
ironclad nondisclosure agreement in the contract of every employee to
be strictly enforced. (And to put teeth into the security, all
employees were body-searched for documents or cameras or tapes on the
way in and out.) To violate it would be to open yourself to a life-
altering lawsuit. During World War II the claim had been that "loose
lips sink ships." Here they would render you a pauper for life. Nobody
dared even whisper about the spectacular success of the clinical
trials.
As the examining room emptied out, he checked his watch one more time.
Winston Bartlett was due any minute now and he had nothing but bad news
for the man.
Trying to control his distress, he walked to the end of the hallway and
prepared to enter the lab. Whereas the ground floor and the two above
were for reception, common dining, and individual rooms, the basement
contained the laboratory, his private office, the examination rooms,
and an OR (never yet used, thankfully). There also was a sub-basement,
accessible only through an elevator in the lab or an alarmed set of
fire stairs. It was an intensive-care area, and it was where Kristen,
the Beta casualty, was being kept.
He zipped a magnetic card through the reader on the door and entered
the air lock. The lab was maintained under positive pressure to keep
out the slightest hint of any kind of contaminant. It was as sterile as
a silicon chip factory.
The room was dominated by a string of black slate workbenches, then
rows and rows of metal shelves with tissue- containing vials of a
highly volatile solvent cocktail he had engineered especially for this
project, along with a computer network and a huge autoclave and several
electron microscopes.
He walked in and greeted his research team. He'd managed to keep the
core group that had been closest to him at Stanford, four people who,
he believed, were among the finest medical minds in the country. They
were the renowned molecular biologist David Hopkins, Ph.D., the
strikingly beautiful and widely published endocrinologist Debra
Connolly, M.D., and two younger staffers, a couple who'd met and
married at his Stanford lab, Ed and Beth Sparks, both Ph.D.'s who'd
done their postdoc under him. They all were here now in the wilds of
northern New Jersey because they knew they were making medical history.
David was waiting, his long shaggy forelock down over his brow as
always. But his eyes told it all.
"Karl, Bartlett's blood work from yesterday just got faxed up from the
lab at Princeton. His enzyme level has increased another three point
seven percent."
"Damn." It was happening for sure. "Did you run--"
"The computer simulation? A one-standard-deviation estimate is that
he's going to go critical sometime between seventeen and nineteen
days."
"The Syndrome." Van de Vliet sighed.
"Just like Kristen."
"She faked us out. There were no side effects for weeks." Van de Vliet
shook his head sadly as he set his handheld Palm computer onto a side
table. Later he would transfer all the day's patient data into the
laboratory's server, the Hewlett- Packard they all affectionately
called the Mothership. Then he began taking off his white coat.
"Bartlett looks to be inevitable now." David exhaled in impotent
despair. The frustration and the tension were getting to everybody.
They all knew what was at stake. "It's in two and a half weeks, give or
take."
What had supposedly been a cosmetic procedure had gone horribly awry.
Van de Vliet wondered if it wasn't the ultimate vengeance of the quest
for something you shouldn't have.
"His AB blood type is so rare. If we'd just kept a sample before the
procedure, we'd have something to work with now," Van de Vliet said
sadly. "We still might be able to culture some antibodies."
He hadn't told his research team yet about the other possible option--
using somebody else as an AB blood-type incubator.
His last-ditch idea was to find a patient with a blood type of AB
positive and introduce a small quantity of the special Beta telomerase
enzyme into them. The theory was that this might induce their body to
produce compatible antibodies, which could then be extracted and
cultured in the laboratory. If a sufficient quantity could be produced
they could be injected into Bartlett and hopefully arrest the enzyme's
pattern of entering the host's bloodstream and metastasizing into the
more complex form that brought on the Syndrome. And if it did work,
then there might even be some way to adapt the procedure to Kristen.
"Karl, if Cambridge Pharmaceuticals finds out about the Beta fiasco,
how's it going to affect--"
"How do you think it's going to affect the sale? If this gets out,
there'll be no sale. To anybody. Bartlett will be ruined, and Gerex
along with him. That's everybody here, in case you're counting." He
turned and exited the lab, pushing pensively through the air lock, and
then he walked slowly toward his office, collecting his thoughts. He
was just passing the elevator when it opened.
_Sunday, April 5
8:47 A.M.
_
Winston Bartlett looked up to see Van de Vliet as he stepped off the
elevator, and the sight heartened him as always. The Dutchman was a
genius. If anyone could solve this damned mess, surely he was the one.
"First thing, Karl, how is she now?"
"I think you'd better go down and see for yourself," Van de Vliet said
slowly. "As I told you on the phone, she still comes and goes. I think
it's getting worse."
Bartlett felt a chill run through him. He had once cared for this woman
as much as he was capable of caring for anybody, and what had happened
was a damned shame. All he had intended was to give her something
special, something no man had ever given a woman before.
"Will she know who I am? She still did yesterday."
"It depends," Van de Vliet replied. "Yesterday afternoon she was fully
lucid, but then earlier this morning I got the impression she thinks
she's in a different place and time. If I had to guess, I'd say she's
regressing chronologically. I suppose that's logical, though nothing
about this makes any sense."
Bartlett was following him back through the air lock and
into the laboratory. The intensive-care area below was reachable only
by a special elevator at the rear of the lab.
All these once-cocky people, Bartlett thought, were now scared to
death. Van de Vliet and his research team might actually be criminally
liable if the right prosecutor got hold of the case. At the very least
they'd be facing an ethics fiasco.
But I'm the one who's about to be destroyed. In every sense.
It had all started when Karl Van de Vliet confided in him that there
was an adjunct procedure arising out of stem cell research that might,
might, offer the possibility of a radical new cosmetic breakthrough.
Just a possibility. He called it the Beta, since it was highly
experimental. He also wasn't sure it was reproducible. But he had
inadvertently discovered it while testing the telomerase enzyme on his
own skin over a decade ago.
At the time he was experimenting with topical treatments for pigment
abnormalities, but the particular telomerase enzyme he was working with
had had the unexpected effect of changing the texture of his skin,
softening it and removing wrinkles, a change that subsequently seemed
permanent.
The idea had lain dormant while they were preparing for the clinical
trials. But then Bartlett's _petite amie_, the cable-TV personality
Kristen Starr, had had a career crisis that she blamed on aging, and he
came up with the idea of having her undergo the skin procedure.
In a mistake with unforeseen ramifications, she had then been made an
official part of the NIH clinical trials. After she had gone for over a
month without any side effects, Bartlett had elected to undergo the
procedure himself.
Then it began in Kristen--what David had solemnly named the Syndrome.
Van de Vliet had immediately (and illegally) terminated her from the
clinical trials, removing her from the NIH database. She was now being
kept on the floor below, in the subbasement intensive-care area.
As they stepped onto the elevator to go down, Bartlett found himself
wondering how many of the staff here were aware of the real extent of
the crisis. Van de Vliet had said that only three of the nurses knew
about Kristen and the Syndrome. Fortunately, they all were trustworthy.
Two had even been with him back at Stanford. They would never talk.
But what about the rest? They'd all fawned over Kristen, starstruck by
her celebrity, and they'd spill the beans in a heartbeat if any of them
found out. The story would be everywhere from Variety to the "Page Six"
gossip column. It would certainly mean the financial ruin of Bartlett
Medical Devices. If Gerex went under, everything else went with it.
On the other hand, he thought ruefully, what does it matter? If I end
up like her, I won't even know it happened.
"W.B., the telomerase enzyme is completely out of control in her now,"
Van de Vliet continued. "First it metastasized through her skin and
into her blood. Then it began directing its own synthesis. I've tried
everything I know to arrest it, but nothing has worked. I still have a
faint hope, though. If we can make some headway on your own situation .
. ." He paused and his voice trailed off. "In the meantime, though, I
think it would definitely be wise to move her to another location.
There are too many people here. The risk is enormous. Word is bound to
get out sooner or later. You must have someplace . . ."
"Of course." Bartlett nodded. "I'd rather have her in the city and
closer to me anyway. But let me see if I can talk to her first. I need
to try to make her understand."
Though it's probably too late for that, he told himself.
They stepped off the elevator and entered a high-security area, a long
hallway illuminated only with fluorescent bulbs. Using a magnetic card
as a key, Bartlett opened the first door they came to. As always, he
was dismayed by the sight.
For a moment he just stood looking at the thirty-two- year-old woman
sitting up in a hospital bed, mutely watching a flickering TV screen
showing the Cartoon Network. He had truly cared for her, perhaps even
loved her for a time.
Then he walked over. "Kristy, honey, how're you feeling?"
She stared at him blankly. Kristen had been a vivacious blue-eyed
blonde who'd had her own showbiz gossip show on the E! channel till it
was canceled during a scheduling shake-up six months earlier. She had a
nervous breakdown, declaring to Bartlett that her show had been
canceled because she looked like a crone.
He'd told her it wasn't true, but if she was so distraught about her
appearance, then maybe there was something he could do for her. Van de
Vliet had once mentioned an experimental skin procedure. . . .
Bartlett turned back to Van de Vliet, feeling the horror sinking in.
"Karl, goddamit, we've got to reverse this."
"Let's talk outside," Van de Vliet said.
Bartlett kissed Kristen's forehead in preparation for leaving. Her
lifeless blue eyes flickered something. He thought it was a flash of
some old anger.
Who could blame her? he told himself. But back then, who knew?
He'd wanted to give her a gift like none other. Not quite the Fountain
of Youth, but maybe a cosmetic version. Her skin would begin to
constantly renew itself.
And he'd been right. The promise of having her skin rejuvenated was
just what she'd needed to get her self-confidence back.
For more than a month the miracle seemed to be working, and there were
no side effects. Her skin was becoming noticeably softer and more
supple. She was elated.
Screw NIH trials and the FDA, he then decided. It was working for
Kristen. By God he would try it himself. He wasn't getting any younger.
But no sooner had he had the procedure too than Kristen started
evidencing side effects. First it was little things, like lapses in
short-term memory. Next, as it got progressively worse, she could no
longer remember why she was at the institute. Then she couldn't recall
her name, where she lived. And now . . .
Could it be that God can't be cheated? And when it's tried, God brings
down a terrible vengeance.
When they were outside in the hallway, he said, "I have a place on Park
Avenue that's empty. At the moment. We used to spend weekends there and
I can arrange for a full-time nursing staff, all of it." He paused.
"Has anybody called here about her lately?"
"Just her mother, Katherine, who's getting pretty frantic."
"The woman is unbalanced. Certifiable. God help us if--"
"I told her to see what she could find out from Kristen's publicist."
"Good." Bartlett had told Kristen's midtown publicity agent, the nosy
Arlene of Guys and Dolls, Inc., that Kristen had gone to a private spa
in New Mexico to rethink her career and didn't want to be disturbed.
She desired complete solitude. Any communication with her would have to
be handled through his office.
He looked at Van de Vliet. "Karl, tell me how bad it is for me now."
"For you?" He hesitated. This was the question he'd been dreading. "The
telomerase numbers from yesterday's blood sample are not encouraging.
As I told you, your topical enzyme application has metastasized into
your bloodstream and started to replicate, just like it did in Kristen.
We're seeing a process known as 'engraftment.' These special cells have
learned to mimic any cell they come near. They become the tissue that
those cells comprise and begin replacing the healthy tissue with new.
In Kristen's case, we think it's now entered her brain and it seems to
be supplanting her memory tissue with blanks. The same side effect
could eventually evolve in you."
That doesn't begin to describe the real horror, Bartlett thought. It's
too impossible to imagine.
"The only thing left is to find some way to cause your body to reject
the enzyme," Van de Vliet said. "I'm optimistic that we might be able
to grow some telomerase antibodies in another patient with your blood
type, then culture enough of them to stop the Syndrome in its tracks.
It's worth a try. Frankly, I can't think of anything else. But your
blood type is AB, which is extremely rare. Also, the problem is that
we'd possibly be putting that other person at severe risk too."
"Let's go back up to the lab," Bartlett said. "That idea of yours--
Hampton thinks he's got somebody. A woman, in her late thirties." He
put his hand on Van de Vliet's shoulder. "We're going to get her on
board however we have to."