The Immortality Factor

 

 

 

 

 

THE
IMMORTALITY FACTOR

 

 

 

Tor Books by Ben Bova

 

 

 

 

BEN BOVA

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

 

THE IMMORTALITY FACTOR

 

Copyright © 2009 by Ben Bova

 

All rights reserved.

 

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

 

www.tor-forge.com

 

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Bova, Ben, 1932–

  The immortality factor / Ben Bova.—1st ed.

      p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-0525-1

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-0525-9

1. Stem cells—Research—Fiction.  2. Brothers—Fiction.  3. Immortality—Fiction.  4. Medical fiction.  I. Title.

  PS3552.O84I46 2009

   813'.54—dc22

2008046454

 

First Edition: April 2009

 

Printed in the United States of America

 

0    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

 

 

 

 

 

In memory of James Blish,
who had faith in me

 

 

 

 

 

When a conjecture inspires new hopes or creates new fears, action is indicated. There is an important asymmetry between hope, which leads to actions which will test its basis, and fear, which leads to restriction of options frequently preventing any attempt at [testing]. As we know only too well, many of our hopes do not survive their tests.
However, fears accumulate untested.
Our inventory of untested fears has always made humanity disastrously vulnerable to thought control. Independent science's greatest triumph was the reduction of that vulnerability. [Italics added]

—ARTHUR KANTROWITZ

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, 1994

 

Now it is a characteristic of such intellectuals that they see no incongruity in moving from their own discipline, where they are acknowledged masters, to public affairs, where they might be supposed to have no more right to a hearing than anyone else. Indeed they always claim that their special knowledge gives them valuable insights.

—PAUL JOHNSON

INTELLECTUALS

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is not a science fiction novel, let that be understood from the outset.

Although I am known primarily as a science fiction author, the book you hold in your hands is a contemporary novel. It is set in the here and now. Its major characters are scientists, the kind of men and women who are working today in laboratories around the world. It is the entire novel as I originally wrote it more than a decade ago.

When this novel was first published, in 1996 under the title
Brothers,
a major section of the story was excised at the rather insistent suggestion of the book's editor. This edition has restored that deletion, so that now the entire story is available for you to read.

In the mid-1990s, the scientific research being done by this novel's leading characters was futuristic. The idea of regenerating the cells of your body so that you could repair organs damaged by disease or injury, regrow a heart or kidney or limb, seemed little short of fantastic. But in the intervening dozen years such research has progressed to the point where it is the stuff of news headlines.

Much of this research involves stem cells, those human cells that can develop into any and all the other hundred trillion cells of the human body. Many objections have been raised against using fetal stem cells on the religious or moral grounds that a human fetus is destroyed in order to harvest its stem cells. Even the President of the United States has expressed qualms about “destroying life to create life.”

But as one of the characters in this novel expresses, scientists are smart
enough to find ways to produce stem cells without using fetuses. Yet the objections—religious, moral, political—still continue. It will take time, and a great deal of patience, before the fears generated by this striking new capability in the minds of the ignorant and intolerant are eased or forgotten altogether.

Even in this age of striking scientific advances and ever-accelerating technological breakthroughs, there are remarkably few novels about scientists. Most of the literary community—writers, editors, academics, critics—are sadly ignorant of modern science. And almost always, ignorance breeds fear and even contempt.

Yet science and its offspring technologies are the driving forces in our modern world. There is hardly an issue before us—be it stem cell research, energy, the environment, the economy, education, war—that does not involve science and technology at its very heart. To be ignorant of science is dangerous in today's world. It means that others are making the crucial decisions in your life, and the lives of your children.

Thus this novel. I am trying to depict scientists as I have known them, after spending most of my adult life working with them in one capacity or another. But this novel is about far more than scientific research. It is, at heart, a novel that deals with the human reactions to new knowledge, new understandings, new capabilities.

To me, scientific research is the most human thing that humans do. The drive to understand the world in which we live, and to change it to better suit our needs, is uniquely human. Yet there are dark forces of fear and ignorance that oppose this search for understanding.

Such conflict offers the novelist a truly fascinating setting for examining the human experience. Whether this novel does so successfully is for you to determine.

 

T
he concept of a science court was originated by Dr. Arthur Kantrowitz, of Dartmouth College, a man with whom I was privileged to work for many years when he was director of the Avco Everett Research Laboratory in Massachusetts.

Much of the technical information in this novel has been graciously provided by Dr. Kenneth Jon Rose, Dr. Martha Davila-Rose, Dr. Glen P. Wilson, William Cuthbert, and Lionel Berson. I have, of course, taken a novelist's liberties with the information they so kindly provided, so any shortcomings or mistakes of fact are my fault, not theirs.

 

B
EN
B
OVA
    
Naples, Florida    
December 2007
    

 

 

 

 

 

THE
IMMORTALITY FACTOR

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
he crowd surging along the barriers that blocked off the Capitol steps was on the verge of turning ugly. It was much larger than the Capitol Police had anticipated and growing bigger by the minute. At first it had been orderly, well organized, mostly women of various ages led by earnest young men in dark suits and narrow ties who shouted their directions through electric bullhorns. Their permits were all in order and they patiently submitted to searches by the special antiterrorism squad and their bomb-sniffing dogs.

The placards they carried were professionally printed in red, white, and blue.

 

NO MONSTERS!

DON'T INTERFERE WITH GOD'S WORK
STEM CELL RESEARCH KILLS BABIES
MARSHAK IS A BABY KILLER

 

But now a different sort of crowd was pouring in, men and women, older for the most part, lots of gray hair and bald heads, many in wheelchairs. They
were being searched, too, before being allowed across the broad parking area in front of the Capitol building. They had only a few placards among them, many of them hand-lettered.

 

DON'T CONDEMN ME FOR LIFE TO THIS WHEELCHAIR
I NEED A NEW HEART
MY BABY IS DYING. PLEASE HELP ME!

 

The demonstrators marched up and down the parking area outside the Capitol steps, chanting slogans and counterslogans.

“Marshak does the devil's work!”

“Marshak is a gift from God!”

“Marshak . . . Marshak . . . Mar-
shak
 . . . Mar-
shak
!”

Now TV news vans were pulling up, like sharks drawn to blood, camera crews focusing on the placards and the marching, chanting, shouting, red-faced demonstrators.

The sky overhead was a clear summer blue, although the morning traffic had already raised a smoggy haze on the streets. Security choppers buzzed overhead; no news media helicopters were allowed near the Capitol. A hot, muggy July morning in the nation's capital; it would have been a slow Monday, news-wise, except for the demonstration. Knots of picketers began to cluster around each of the camera crews, yelling out their slogans and waggling their placards.