Aphrodite (36 page)

Manwaring didn’t say a word. Helen Roag reached over to him, touched his knee. He looked up at her and she nodded. Her eyes turned sad, deeply sad, and she nodded again. Manwaring patted her hand, turned to face Justin and Deena. “I’m a married man who cheats on his wife,” he began. “Nothing else that you think is true is even remotely true.”

31

Douglas Kransten was a bona fide visionary, Frank Manwaring said. That fact was indisputable. Almost everything else about his life could most definitely be disputed. But to understand what was going on, everything had to start with Doug Kransten.

He grew up in pre-Revolutionary Cuba. His father was American, his mother Cuban. His father, a lawyer, went down to Cuba to work for an American oil company. He wound up running the company and, knowing the money to be made in the island paradise, eventually left to become a real estate developer. The Kranstens lived the life of privileged aristocrats down there. Their splendid home was in the Miramar section of Havana, and they owned a country plantation forty miles down the coast near Trinidad. Then Castro came to power. Both homes were taken away. Kransten’s father was imprisoned and then killed in an uprising. Kransten and his mother escaped to Florida, leaving behind every possession they owned. They spent three months in Miami, but Kransten couldn’t stand it there. He didn’t like being a member of the Cuban ghetto. He felt as if he had far more American blood in him, so he left his mother behind and went farther north. He settled in Georgia and started over, penniless. He was twenty-four years old.

In Atlanta, he landed a job at a pharmacy as a clerk. Fascinated by the business, he went to school, got his license, and became a pharmacist. Several years after that he went to work for Maxwell Enterprises, a small pharmaceutical company, as a sales trainee. Within seven years he was president of the company.

When he made his ascension to become head of Maxwell, Doug Kransten looked around and saw the future. What he saw was a baby-boom generation that was young and fit and spirited. They were marching in the streets and doing drugs and defying every mode of accepted fashion. And they were getting instant gratification—sexually, politically, financially. What Kransten also saw, as he looked toward the end of the century, was that these baby boomers would age. They would eventually become a dominant financial power in the societal structure and they would want the same things they wanted when they were young. They were used to instant gratification, this generation, and Kransten didn’t believe age would alter that. If anything, it would intensify that urge.

He ordered the scientists working for Maxwell—its name would soon change to Kransten International—to spend their time developing pharmaceutical products that would feed into this generation’s desire for youth and pleasure. They did. They began to develop drugs that would improve sexual gratification in the elderly. By the mid-nineties they had a pill that gave previously impotent men erections. Three years after the pill was introduced on the market, it generated net sales of $600 million per year—and Wall Street research showed that they had managed to tap into only approximately seven percent of the potential market. Over the years, the company made hundreds of millions of dollars easing arthritic pain with anti-inflammatories and pills that claimed to aid in cartilage regeneration. Their research department worked on creating a generic pain-relief pill. The marketing department decided to target it especially to golfers. They spent years building up brand-name recognition, knowing that all the young tennis players would one day turn to the more sedentary sport in droves—and reach for the pill whose name had been drilled into their brains via commercials and billboards. Fortunes were made with weight-loss and hair-growth products. As early as the mid-seventies, Kransten, the company, had become a corporate force to be reckoned with. By the end of the twentieth century they were a dominant global economic power.

Kransten, the man, was also a force. And he became more of one when his life changed drastically in 1970. That was when he fell in love.

Doug Kransten was thirty-six years old and Louise Marshall was twenty-eight. He was living in a house very much like the one he remembered in Havana, only this one was in the exclusive Buckhead section of Atlanta. Louise was from a small town in Mississippi. She was lovely, the very vision of a blond cheerleader, which was, in fact, what she had been all through school. Even by the time she graduated from Ole Miss, Louise did not care one whit about politics or the underprivileged or the rumblings of dissension that were starting to sweep the country. She cared about cheerleading and staying beautiful. And not just for herself. She wanted the whole world to be beautiful. So that’s what she set out to accomplish.

Like Kransten, she began in sales, for a door-to-door cosmetics company. It didn’t take her long to move into the home office in Nashville, Tennessee. She became head of Sales, then head of Sales and Marketing, and then she was made president. The company was bought by a larger cosmetics firm, based in Atlanta, and Louise was brought along for the ride. By the time she met Kransten, she was running the larger company and
Time
magazine was writing about her as the most powerful woman executive in the country under the age of forty. When she met Douglas Kransten, it was the perfect merger. She spent their first two dates telling him about her vision for beautifying the world. He spent the next two dates explaining that his mission was to keep America young. Four months later, they were married.

As early as 1970, Kransten had steered his company to become one of the first of its kind to turn its energies toward genetic engineering. They were at the forefront, too, in the extraordinary competition to map the human genome. But while others thought that the gold rush would be in the storage and sale of genomic information, Kransten knew, very early on, that it wasn’t the information that was of value. Kransten staked his fortune on what he knew best: pharmaceuticals. He gambled his future on the practical applications that were now possible with the genomic miracle. And his gamble proved correct. By the mid-1980s Kransten was the third largest pharmaceutical company in the world. He had managed to buy Louise Marshall’s company and they merged philosophies, products, and bank accounts. They were worth several billion dollars.

In 1986, the U.S. economy was starting to fail. At the same time, KranMar, as the new company was now called, and several other of the top pharmaceutical and research companies were spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the attempt to eradicate disease. They all knew that the ultimate goal was a cure for cancer. If their research could provide that, there were hundreds of billions of dollars to be made.

In September of 1986, Doug Kransten and two other pharmaceutical titans, Ronald Mayberry, CEO of MayDay, Inc., and Patrick Arnold, chairman of Selwick International, were called to Washington, D.C. There were several people high up in the administration, not the president or the vice-president, but people who made it clear that they were representing the views of both elected officials. It was explained to Kransten, Mayberry, and Arnold that the government was extremely worried about their companies’ activities. They were developing products and drugs that could very possibly extend people’s lives another ten, twenty, even thirty years. With the developments that were certain to come in stem-cell research and the final mapping of the genome, it was not inconceivable that men and women would routinely live to be a hundred and twenty years old. The pharmaceutical executives agreed that it was certainly possible, but they didn’t see it happening in the immediate future. The government officials stated their position a little more clearly: It was not to happen at all. Not now, not in the immediate future, not in any future that was foreseeable.

The executives were stunned. And they demanded an explanation.

They were given one. And it was simple and obvious: The world economy could not handle it.

If the population kept exploding and people’s lives were extended, the U.S. government—all governments, in fact—could not afford to keep its infrastructure functioning. The Social Security system, which was based on the premise that each generation, as it aged, would be supported by the next working generation, could not possibly survive. It was already at the point where the post–baby boomer generation, the so-called Gen X, would be working harder and harder—and longer and longer—to support the huge throngs of nonworking elderly among the boomers. We were already near the breaking point. Further medical breakthroughs would bankrupt the country and the rest of the world.

The three CEOs understood the problem. They also understood that such an agreement was antithetical to the entire capitalistic system. Not to mention their dedication to science.

A deal was made. Science went by the wayside, but capitalism was triumphant.

The companies—along with seven other pharmaceutical companies that, over the following twelve-month period, were brought into the bargain—were allowed to continue with their research and development. But there were specified limits. Cosmetic products could be developed—fat reducers and antiwrinkle creams—and even certain drugs and medicines could be elaborated upon. Sex enhancers would be worth billions, and the companies were encouraged to strike out in that area. In exchange for these limits, certain allowances would be made. FDA restrictions would be relaxed. Products would be let through that might not have been allowed before. They would have the opportunity to test products on a wide-ranging—and unsuspecting—public. There was a lot of money to be made if normal regulations were eased or even erased altogether.

A lot of money.

There was one other catch, of course: This arrangement had to be secret. Absolutely, one hundred percent hidden from the public. Yes, people cared about the economy. But if word got out that the administration—any administration—was bartering with the length of life itself, well, it went without saying what would happen. It would be very difficult for any politician to win an election if it were known that he was lopping twenty years off the lives of his constituents.

The deal was done.

And it continued for years.

From one administration to the next. It didn’t matter which party; they were all politicians. They could all see the future and the same political dangers. It was a matter of their own survival.

Brewster Ford was the link, Manwaring explained. His financial acumen and his ability to interpret the world economy were legendary and near infallible. His agenda was never political, which was why he was trusted by both parties. His focus was strictly, unrelentingly, on the economic picture—past, present, and future. When Ford spoke about money, the whole world listened.

Some administrations were easier to convince than others, Manwaring said. Some were cynical and receptive to anything that benefited big business, no matter the consequences. Some expressed horror at the deal but overcame their moral indignation when the political consequences became so clear. Some presidents were more detail oriented and more involved in policy decisions than others. Some didn’t want to know the specifics. One insisted on an elaborate, private presentation from Ford. But the previous three presidents had ultimately capitulated. Politics took a backseat when it came to preserving their own positions of power.

The current administration was easy. Manwaring believed that the president had no idea about the bond between the pharmaceutical companies and the government. But it didn’t matter. There had, over the past several years, been a tremendous swell against science from the religious right. Even Darwinism was under attack in several states. The president tended to share these antediluvian beliefs but, more important than embracing and spreading core philosophies, he wanted the vote from that constituency, many of whom had previously become disenfranchised from the party. His advisers—those who were aware of the backroom dealing—only had to steer him in the direction his instincts were already leading him. The president basically killed off stem-cell research in America without even being aware that he was continuing the fifteen-year-old contract. He simply was allowed to believe that he was doing the moral and politically expedient thing. There was no problem keeping the arrangement going.

And then two things occurred.

First, he, Manwaring, was named secretary of Health and Human Services. He was an old friend of this president and he liked him very much, even if he did not always share the man’s black-and-white view of the world.

Several months after he was approved by Congress, Manwaring was asked to come to a meeting at the White House. There he met with the president’s chief of staff and Brewster Ford. To his surprise, his predecessor—a liberal, from the other party—was also present. As was Chase Welles, the new head of the Food and Drug Administration. At this meeting, the arrangement with the pharmaceutical companies was explained to him and to Welles. Ford laid out the entire potentially devastating scenario. Welles seemed to have no problem with any of it. But it disturbed Manwaring. His predecessor as secretary saw his resistance and, in answer to one of Manwaring’s questions about the real necessity for the pact, said, “Necessary? Here’s how necessary this is. Forget about the government trying to
ban
cigarettes. Pretty soon we’ll have to make smoking obligatory, just so we can kill off a few billion people.”

Manwaring was deeply troubled, morally and politically, by the implications of what he heard. But he accepted it. He understood that he was a crucial piece in this puzzle because so many of his decisions, so much of his work with the FDA, would be directly affected by what he was hearing. He weighed the pros and cons, listened to the arguments— all from people he respected and trusted—and he decided that he could live with such an arrangement. He decided that he was dealing with two evils, but one was definitely greater and more damaging to the world as a whole.

But things changed.

Accepting something in theory was quite different from accepting it in practice. The FDA, led by Chase Welles, approved several drugs and supplements that caused severe adverse effects. Several deaths, yes, but also many recorded cases of liver damage and heart failure. An anti-depressant, released by MayDay, drove eleven people to suicide over a three-month period. A drug that was widely used in the treatment of breast cancer, released by Selwick, damaged kidneys and caused strokes. Still, Manwaring told Justin and Deena, he remained silent. The logic, he kept telling himself, was the same that applied during wartime. It was acceptable to sacrifice the few to save the majority.